One says, "It doesn't matter". This is for when I get so stressed out, I have trouble doing anything. It helps keep things in perspective.

The other says, "Jabez Wolffe". His guide boat forced him to abandon his swim across the English Channel because they couldn't see through the darkness and fog, and it was too dangerous to continue. What they didn't realize was that they were only 100 yards from shore, but they had no way of knowing.

How far from shore are you?

I would suggest doing whatever you can to find out before making any decision.

You aren't ready, financially, to see through even 1 year of unprofitability. Give up while your credit rating is intact and before you have to fire your friends who might go along with your idea/dream. The market is a disaster for unproven, new offerings that you describe as 'mildly postiive'. Hell for most companies, if you cut a sale -today- you wouldn't be paid until October or later. I'd say that if you give up now you'll have enough time to get a job worth going to work for and get paid in time for your November deadline.

If you shut down now, you can skip a bunch of calender year bs in 2010 and keep it all in 2009. You can stop paying/playing accountant, lawyer, marketer and pr person. You don't have to clean the toilet, do the corp taxes and reporting, ship an mail, vacuum the floor and maintain the copy machine. :-)

Take a really close look and make sure that you're not a hammer looking for a nail, but that you're solving a problem people actually have.

This is very true.

You can measure whether consumer sites have any traction pretty quickly because you can make changes constantly and redeploy daily. With B2B you need to constantly reiterate on what problem your solving and that takes time.

B2B is something that needs to be built up like an old school business, measured in years not months. But the pay off is much higher the consumer sites.

The main reason why is that its difficult to get into companies and find out where the real problems are. Once you build those relationships and find out - then sales will become easier.

I spent a lot of time consulting for, managing projects in and selling into the wholesale banking industry - pretty conservative, slow to change and hard to break into. I found that simplifying both my offering and my message to focus on one or two major points of functionality and pain helped pique interest enough that I could get a decent conversation going, during which I could gently introduce other features and benefits.

In terms of long lead times I would suggest, if it's at all possible for your product or service, offering risk-free trials for a month or two. Manage the install, the maintenance, the training yourself, so the prospect has little or no reason to say no. Once they become users, and assuming your product or service is good, it will be easier to upgrade them to paying status.

A major feature of selling into the B2B space is to know who your buyer is. It is rarely an IT manager. It is rarely an HR manager. It is not always the Operations manager. It is very often, however, the Finance guy. This is not always true, of course, and many people have more or less influence over a given purchasing decision, but you need to know who those people are, what they care about and how to communicate with them in terms they each understand and care about.

To answer your question about how you decide whether to give up, I would advise you to do the above until you are 3-months from zero net worth. At that point, find a paying gig (consultancy, full-time job, whatever you need to do to keep your head above water), then use those three months to go all in on your startup - phone clients and push them hard, phone/email/meet with as many prospects as possible, and push, push, push. If it's going to fail, there is little harm in being harder-nosed / cheekier about the sales process. I would also, in that last 3-month period, look for a buyer for your technology, to at least get some return back on your investment. If, however, you land a contract or two during those three months, you can cancel the paying gig and continue with the startup.

Really good luck, whatever happens! Please do post an update - I think your story will be of interest to pretty much the whole of HN!

With our startup we had a six month financial abyss timeframe, which was doable but risky. So, we spent the last two months pushing out a series of products- we shipped four different things in those two months, with the criteria being 'novel, simple, and potentially profitable in the short term'. Fortunately enough, one of them has taken off on the App Store enough that we're on track to make 2-3k/month with it

Now, 2-3k isn't a lot... except for the little detail that my co-founder and I are living in Budapest! I'm American and he's Hungarian so it was a no-brainer for us, but if you are working on your own, pick a place!

Reduce your costs, and experiment as much as possible.

The worst that can happen is you end up getting a day job.

From your comments in reply to others I assume you are young(ish) with no dependents. That has to be the best situation to start a business in. You talk about perhaps doing this again in the future with another idea, but imagine in that future you are married, you have kids, you have a mortgage. I'm in that position and I can tell you it is a lot lot harder than it is when you have no body depending on you - I can go without for a while, but kids grow, they need new clothes etc. You also get more accustomed to a lifestyle as you get older - which is hard to give up (Thank God I built up a cellar over the last few years because I cannot afford to buy wine now!).

If you've lost faith in your idea or don't see it being a success then cut your losses now, but if you still think you can make it work my advice would be to go for it.

Good luck.

I also started, bootstrapped, in a very competitive B2B space and it took years to get significant traction and comfortable profitability. However, the feedback I received from potential customers made it clear I was addressing an actual market and that, if I could build a product which suited the market I was targeting, I would receive more than enough profit to compensate for the effort I had expended to build the business. I was, I did and it has, but it wasn't easy.

So, my advice to you would be: Be realistic about your business. Examine your chosen market and identify if the customer base and the pricing you have planned would be sufficient to support you within the next six months. If it is, focus laser-sharp on that market and address it in the best way possible. If it isn't, put things on hold, start consulting for a bit or take on a job to build up your reservoir of cash. I can almost guarantee it's going to take a lot longer to build your business to profitability than you have planned, so just assume your savings are gone.

However, companies have a lot of money, and typically they will not be that price sensitive, so there could be a sizable pot of gold once things start moving.

that said, you obviously have a limit on the total time and effort you can put into a day so that might not work if you are already coding 8 hours a day on your product. but if your product is 'pretty good' and you are mostly marketing and waiting to be noticed, it might make a lot of sense to shave some hours off to sell to other people.

You need a source of income! Unless just 1-3 sales will keep you paying your bills for months, you need to start making money outside the business. In the best assumption, your business will not be cashflow positive within six months: few product busineses are.

If you're committed to the idea, they by all means keep growing the business, but you simply can't rely on it as a source of income right now. Get a job, even a part time one, or do consulting.

"When your business is in its infancy, have you to care for it constantly. You expect nothing from it, and have to support it completely. Care for your infant business as you would care for your infant child -- with loving attention, with no expectation of any reward... your infant grows at its own pace; sometimes slowly, sometimes instantly, in a quantum leap. As James Allen says, Be not impatient in delay, but wait as one who understands. Your infant business will soon grow to adolescence."

"The adolescent business can take care of itself, but it certainly can't take care of its owners. In fact, the owners may still need to come in with some additional support if the adolescent stumbles for some reason, maybe because it's trying something unproven or risky or new..."

"If you keep focusing on your dreams, and if you're patient and persistent, your company will grow into maturity and be able to support you and many others abundantly."

In the comments people are doing the math to calculate that you need 2K a month to live on. Whatever the amount is, it is then your job to provide yourself with that income to support yourself, separate from your business. You shouldn't expect or depend on your infant business to provide you with that 2K, because you don't know how long it will take for your business to grow up. That your infant business isn't yet supporting you isn't a reason to give up, it just means that your business hasn't grown up yet.

In http://www.paulgraham.com/relres.html Paul Graham writes: "A couple days ago I finally got being a good startup founder down to two words: relentlessly resourceful."

Being relentlessly resourceful means that you come up with the 2K a month. Get some investors. Do some contracting work. Work nights and weekends. Hold a yard sale. Deliver pizza. Do whatever it takes to make 2K a month, separate from your startup.

Your other question was should you sell your 10K of stocks to support yourself. Because you're in the B2B space, you're doing sales. Dave Ramsey notes that people don't buy from a desperate salesperson. Desperate salespeople smell bad. People buy from relaxed, confident salespeople. So, the answer is, in your particular situation, you should start making the 2K a month to support yourself before you need to sell the 10K of stock. Because, with the 10K in reserve, you won't be feeling desperate, you'll be feeling confident. And with that confidence you'll be able to make sales.

- Angel investors?

- Discounted customers?

- Federal / State loan for small businesses (SBIR)?

- Loan from a Credit Union (lower rates)?

- Even 0% 12 month no interest Credit Cards (make sure you get a job to pay it off after 6 months)

- Micro-lending sites?

The big thing is to present a decisive face to the world. My 'Ross Perot' cost me another two years or so, I think.

As for 'stay or quit,' well, when you are small, it doesn't take much to make a huge difference. That article about me on hn and reddit the other month? that took me from 'breaking even if my time is free' to the point where prgmr.com revenue is greater than my contracting revenue.

Me, I stayed in it for so long in spite of my losses because this is what I like doing, and what I'm good at. Perhaps more importantly, I believe I have a chance of holding my own against the competition.

It sounds like a challenge; run up and meet it head on. Im sure your project has pitched numerous technical challenges at you previously. Now this is a business one. Throw yourself at it the same way as you would with a coding problem and you might find it surprising what you can achieve :)

Also, pay close attention to your mental health. Working alone, under deadline pressure and financial stress can lead to poor decision-making.

You can always get another job but even that takes some time, especially in this market, so keep that in mind.

How much time did it take for you to adopt twitter/google/whatever? Even for trying out free products people take months (you have a product that solves a real problem, but people don't know yet that they have a problem!).

Give it enough time. Learn more about and be good at sales. Be at their face all the time. Be so good that they cannot ignore you.

1. If you absolutely love the idea you've built (like you were born to build this idea) take it to the very end. If you believe this is what your are meant to do then quitting will be a regret you'll never get over. And bankruptcy is bad but it is short lived (relatively).

Essentially, the absolute worst outcome is to stick with it and give up towards the end (which is what I did). Then you've got all the downsides of wasted time/investment and no upside. Quitting early isn't the worst possible outcome because at least you've saved yourself money & time.

I'm a one man show myself and I've experienced the problems described above many times. Even in one case where I was the only bidder who could actually prove with a working prototype that I would be able to realize the rather complex solution, they chose one of the big players who could only provide prettier brochures (btw. they had to shut down the project after burning over 100K).

Furthermore, it is often not easy to enter conservative markets as a new player. Established companies are almost always preferred in such markets.

Therefore, my recommendation would be (it worked well for me): Look for companies that already are doing business in your target industry successfully, try to win them as resellers and become an OEM. This way you can profit from their reputation and you can reduce your marketing/sales efforts, too.

Wow. That's inane. Yes, 'exceptional' is a fine goal, but there are many people doing pretty good by being pretty good.

Godin's books have struck me as little more than collections of pithy but ill-supported aphorisms, where the reader brings more to the book than is actually there. People find what they want to find, to "prove" what they want to believe.

And on the financial part lots of good ideas here and as usual minimize your expenses and find some income (part time, consulting) you can go a long way.

You need to believe in your cause and if you listen to the successful entrepreneurs they will tell you don't give up than you know what you need to do.

First off, 2k a month could be considered frugal depending on area of the world they're living, etc, even for a single person (especially if not living at home or if it's difficult to find roommate situations where they live) when they may have debts, etc.

Also note that number includes further expenses for his business from November to January (at least). And depending on the business, there's no way you can "judge his frugality" on the numbers he's given.

http://sfbay.craigslist.org/sfc/roo/

And there's probably no more expensive/better place to be for startups. There are places that are more expensive, but at that point, you should move to save money. And like I said, you can get by on less and still be in the bay area, if it's important to be there physically.

So I'm not judging his frugality, just saying that from what little we have to go on, it doesn't sound quite right.

Good luck.

  studio apartment, best deal in the city: $1000
  1 burrito per day (or equivalent)         $150
  1 coffee per day                           $45
  2 beers per week                           $30
  health insurance                          $250
  muni pass                                  $45
  cell phone                                 $70
  cable modem                                $50
  stuff like soap toilet paper, laundry      $30
  github                                     $7
  hosted slice                               $40
  subtotal                                 $1717

NYC will cost at least 30% more than this.

It's very easy to spend $2000 living a "cheap" lifestyle. I don't know what I'd cut out here. Aside from coffee and the beer, I don't really do anything a normal adult single male would do. That budget contains no dates, no movies, no restaurants, no books from the book store, etc. If I do any of those things a couple times a month I'm hitting $2K.