If you're pre-revenue for more than six months, without an idea what to do next, the best thing to do would be to shut down and save your time.
Like every startup founder who had invested a lot of sweat, money and time in building something, I stayed adamant like a lioness protecting her cubs. Once I asked them, “Don’t you realize how much efforts I’ve put in building this?”
The person replied, “I do realize. But I don’t give a rat’s ass to it. You were stupid to waste your efforts to build this pile of shit.” (These are the exact words I was told.)
Being pre-revenue meant you preferred growth, but we used it as sugar-coating for the lack of users. Forget exponential growth; ours was just a zigzag line that oscillated among double digit numbers.
Several months had passed, but our zigzag line stayed equally zigzagged. If you are pre-revenue and pre-growth for more than six months, and you have no idea what to do next, the best thing to do would be shut it down and save your time.
If you have more experiments queued up, don’t stop.
These are the lessons that building the wrong things have taught me. (Will they be still called the ‘wrong things’ if I learned something from them?) I still remember wanting to punch people in their face for calling out my products stupid. I certainly was hurt because I built those products with my own hands. But I shouldn’t be expecting an applause for making something that they didn’t want.
I can argue that they could have been a little polite when criticizing but I will not. I have understood that people who have found their path are always busy running on it. They won’t always have time to teach you the lessons in the way you want to learn. The world isn’t a classroom. Also, even if they would have tried to convince me why I was wrong, they would be wasting their time. I would still be fighting to prove them wrong.
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