How much time should be given to a start up to succeed?
If after 2 years your site does grow just a little, but stays around 1,000 daily users, would you call it quits?
With stagnation - don't call it quits, find out what your users want and give it to them. Completely redesign your product if you need to.
2) Does this site provide that for you?
3) If it provides some but not all of your needs/wants, could you continue running it on the side while you start a new project?
1000 users is pretty good, in my opinion. They could help you morph your startup into something better. But don't give up on the startup, just change it around a little.
If you're spending all your time nursing a site that just isn't gaining traction, there are other ideas that you could be pursuing that could gain traction and make you more money.
From "why not to start a startup":
"If you start a startup that succeeds, it's going to consume at least three or four years. (If it fails, you'll be done a lot quicker.)"
I'd say that's accurate. If you're not going to make it you'll know within a year or two. But don't expect instant success.
If after 2 years your site does grow just a little, but stays around 1,000 daily users, would you call it quits?
What were you expecting 2 years ago? Are your expected users still out there for you or did they all go to Facebook in the meantime?
1. Is it a big hill after all - your customers might want something else. If it is not a big hill then figure out what a big hill is and reorient-realign-refactor.
2. If 1.is true then figure out that your value proposition solves that big problem or not. For this you can sit with a target customer and figure that out. If your value proposition is not good enough then figure out what could be a good value proposition.
3. If you are convinced that it is a good value proposition then it is just a question of how you deliver it to the customer. And the most important thing is that you have to be convinced whether it is a good value proposition or not - and if you are then hang in there for as long as it takes and figure out a delivery method.
Having said that, I think the only time you need to call it quits is when you want to - and if you not want then there should be a way to make it fly, you just need to figure out how.
..just my two cents
One important thing to keep in mind: Don't repeat the same actions and expect different results. Two years is plenty of time to know that what you're doing isn't working.
Also...1,000 daily visitors is practically comatose for a site that isn't selling something. An ad-supported site needs hundreds of thousands or millions of visits per day to make you rich.
It takes the same amount of effort to do something which is tiny than to do something big. Leave this behind, so something different and huge - you have valuable experience now. You have to decide is this worth the effort?
"You're going to bust your ass, no matter what. You might as well bust your ass for $10 million, instead of $10,000."
That's stuck with me. If you aren't working on a huge opportunity, then you're probably selling yourself too cheap. The thing I've been surprised to find is that no matter how small a market is, you'll have competitors and you'll be dividing up the spoils. You might as well work in a field that is huge, so that the percentage of the market you can capitalize on equals millions rather than thousands in revenues.
If after 2 years, your kid still isn't walking, would you quit trying to teach him?
Zygotes killed by contraception are similar. Very few people consider a single-celled zygote a human.
The child analogy isn't perfect. You can't just dump a child like you can dump a bad startup. I agree that many people underestimate how much you have to commit to your startup, but you there probably is a scenario in which it would be wise to give up. It's a lot easier to think of a scenario like this for a startup (pets.com) than it is for a kid (...?...).
The timeframes are different. 2 years is not that much time compared to the time it takes to raise a kid. But 2 years is a long time for a startup.
If the site is selling something, then 1000 a day can be a good start. A one man shop selling some sort of digital goods could do very well with that many visitors.