[Gurrewe]

There is no difference between knowing when your startup fails compared to when anything else fails (eg. a relationship). It fails when you've lost hope for a future with it. If you don't believe that it's gonna work out, that's the time to stop doing it.

[galfarragem]

Great answer. Something fails when you loose belief in it. If she really believed in it she could ask for credit. The problem is that she doesn't believe in it anymore. Time to move on.

Imagine that you are swimming. In your hand you carry a heavy stone, you believe it is a diamond, but you can't be sure. Time passes, you are getting tired, you can't see land. What do you do?

Some people get so attached to their stuff that they sink with them. Be happy that you are not like this.

[nicholas73]

Stuff it in your shorts so you have another hand to swim with.

[gareth44]

love this comment!

[eloff]

It's not quite that simple, because both in startups and relationships you can lose all hope for a future for a time, recover it at some point and be successful. I would say you've failed when that situation persists for too long - something completely subjective and dependent on your pain threshold.

[solve]

Good, but not good enough. Ask some successful founders if there was ever a time when they felt like all hope was lost. Very few will say never.

[IkmoIkmo]

Didn't downvote but... the issue with this line of thinking is that of sheer numbers.

If you give 100 people a 1% of succeeding, but difficult times in the first years, and they all refuse to give up, after it's all said and done 99 will be depressed, estranged from friends & family, in debt, feeling like a failure etc.

And 1 person will be successful, and he'll do a PandoDaily fireside chat and talk about how he lived on a couch, and racked up creditcard debt, and woke up crying, but that he kept on going and is a billionaire now. And he'll command the majority of the media narrative around startups.

Of course I'm exaggerating to make a point, but the notion that most people fail and don't make it, and probably shouldn't continue after some point is completely true.

It's the same line of thinking that says 'well Bill Gates was a drop out, and so was Zuckerberg etc'. It may say that dropping out is not the end of the world. (similar to how being at a low point in a startup is not the end of said startup).

But it also carries the implication that dropping out is somehow not an issue, or that being at a low point in a startup is just a phase. For the majority of people, dropping out carries consequences, and being at a point where all hope seems lost, is usually rightly so the beginning of the end of your startup.

Expecting endless perseverance by looking at the tiny percentage of hugely successful startups that went through difficult times, ignoring the much bigger number of completely unsuccessful startups that went through difficult times, is probably why people downvote your post.

As the OP doesn't appear to have traction, have any semblance of salary, shifted to do freelance work and didn't provide ideas on how to pivot, I think it's probably time for him or her to put this one in the freezer and try something else.

edit -- weird thought you mentioned getting downvotes. Might be going crazy :)

[jacquesm]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

[solve]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expected_value

If your strategy involves doing something that eliminates your upside potential, while leaving downside potential, then the strategy has negative expected value and is a bad strategy.

If nearly 100% of non-consulting startups go through bad times, but you've chosen the strategy of cutting your losses as soon as you run into bad times, it's fair to estimate that the eliminating the upside potential may have lowered the expected value for that strategy to below 0. Might as well go gamble or just do a fun hobby in that case.

Non-consulting tech startups are particularly rigged against using this strategy of cutting out as soon as things turn bad, because it's typical that founders are forced to take a big loss relative to their alternatives until the very end when the exit happens. The norm is for it to always be financially worse than the more stable alternatives, until eventually maybe it turns good at the end.

[hyperpape]

Sounds like a sunk cost fallacy. The EV of startups could be negative, and probably is.

[solve]

Sounds like? Is it or is it not?

[SimonDawlat]

for some reason the Gates/Zuck drop out references always forget to mention what school they actually dropped out from

[randomdata]

Exactly. Success is a quality of the person, not their education. Thus, in reality, dropping out isn't really going to matter one way or another.

[watmough]

I tend to think of Gates not so much "dropping-out", but pivoting, once he was convinced he could make it with software.

[IkmoIkmo]

Absolutely, he only took a leave of absence (rather than dropping out) to try software, and once that took off in a huge way he actually dropped out.

It's also important to mention he got in at 73, and left late 75 with 2-3 years of education, and that he chose his major (applied math) because there was a rule that you could get into any class with the angle of applying math to it. So he was known then to go to many classes, as he still is to this day (he spends a huge chunk of his time on education, mostly books but also courses).

So yeah not a drop-out in a technical or figurative sense.

[insoluble]

This idea reminds me of the primary premise of a book titled The Halo Effect. It basically goes on to say that glorifying the apparent traits of highly successful companies is a good way to miss the underlying wisdom, if any, in addition to the possibility of just plain good fortune, that allowed the success of said company. Plus, even a person from a successful startup may be unaware or deluded of the true reason for his or her success.

[Mimu]

They may say and think they felt it, however I don't think they would have kept going if they honestly thought no hope at all was there.

[solve]

The lows of startups are far more terrible than you probably think.