Deciding to end your Start Up = Quitter

There is perseverance and than there is just straight out denial. Its hard deciding which one you want to use to get by a problem, and I have a problem. I am a co-founder of a start up that created a hardware product. Our hardware product is pretty awesome with mechanical design no one has seen before but when they do, their reaction is always “how has no one come up with that before?”.

We knew we had something compelling when we started over a year ago. I assembled a team of 5 people, all engineers, and the energy surrounding our start ups was intoxicating. I felt terrified but driven. I couldn’t think of anything better to do than follow my passion for technology and business.

We started with entrepreneurship competitions at our University, and after winning money to get us started and securing a place in our local incubator, we set our sights on getting to market as quickly as possible. We had an amazing prototype, but building a market product was going to require a tremendous amount of work. This product needed the consumer to have full trust in its capability.

We spent our first month dreaming and redesigning the product while searching for funding. The obvious next step for us was an accelerator.We applied to YC and a couple others that we researched. The day we got our YC interview email (as a late applicant) everyone was ecstatic. We packed our bags and grabbed our flights to San Jose. We had 3 days in the valley, and the second day was the interview. Immediately after landing we visited businesses in the area that could be potential customers. We had the hustle and no way could anyone bring us down, that was until we had our interview. The YC interview went by faster than anything I could have imagined, and as we walked out of the room, no one could understand what had happened. We received an email that evening informing us that our product would be a hard sell because of the price. They didn’t think we could ever manufacture our product at a price to be competitive with the alternative. And with that, one of our cofounder quit and we were down to 4.

That did’t stop us. We chose perseverance to deal with the problem. We would prove those software engineers who call themselves investors wrong, really wrong. A few weeks later, with more hustle and knowledge we secured our place in a hardware accelerator and packed our bags to move to a new city.

The next 4 months were the most productive of my life. With nothing but work to focus on, we went from a prototype made in school to an industrial designed beauty of hardware engineering. But we still had one sticky problem. The product was still expensive to manufacture, even though we had brought the cost down significantly. And another issue was in our pace to build something rapidly, we never validated and tested all functionality in the conditions the product would face.

But this is the start up world, and we could make anything happen, so pushing aside the worries as “to do’s”, we persevered and launched a crowdfunding campaign and acted as our own PR firm, contacting reporters and spreading the word.

Then came the double punch to the stomach and face. The media picked up the product and we were receiving an immense amount of interest, but the campaign was moving slowly. People weren’t putting money where their mouths were. At the same time, our team went from 4 to 2. That was the hardest part. Our team was strong, we had been friends for half a decade, but due to personal reasons, 2 of them had decided to move on. That was fine, I understood why and I didn’t want to convince them because we needed everyone to be as passionate as possible. So again, we persevered. The campaign reached its goal but we cancelled because we still had the cost issue to deal with and half the resources to do it with.

This is when I began to realize that we needed to pivot. I began racking my mind for ways to take what we had and slingshot us back onto a path of success. I pitched my ideas and concerns to my cofounder and mentors but received unanimous advice to stick on the current path, and so we hunkered down and began focusing on fixing our problems. We developed the tests to verify the products functionality in different conditions and networked across numerous manufacturers and suppliers, negotiating prices down. This worked to a degree. We refined our electronics and component costs, but manufacturing such a unique product continued to pose a problem. And then when our tests began, the product began failing. 3 months had passed since only 2 of us were left, and things had just become harder than ever.

We rallied however, working out a schedule and plan to tackle the issue. We projected that we could turn things if we brought a couple people on to the team and redesigned the product around the lessons we had learned. It would take a year.

And this is when the question I posed at the beginning hit me. This wasn’t about perseverance anymore. My motivation banks were depleted, and so were my financial ones. I had sacrificed a lot to get here and stopping now for any reason felt wrong. I had only one choice, deny all the issues, they don’t exist and we could make anything happen with more hardwork…..I started reading about all the entrepreneurs that had turned things around in the worst of situations, but I did my self a favor and sat down and analyzed the situation, calculated our timelines and projections and concluded that rationally I should move on.

But business isn’t rational and opportunities are not clear. I know we can’t make the product we have any longer, but pivoting is essentially creating a whole new business. Is that what entrepreneurship is? Is it an relentless push to make something, and it doesn’t matter what you create, just create something so you can be the one running the business.

What do you think?