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Comment by mhartl | Hacker News Reader

I'd add "know when to quit". Determination by itself is great, but sometimes the right thing to do is to abandon your current startup and work on something else. How do you know when to quit? Unfortunately, there's no formula for that. (My tendency, if anything, is to quit too late.)

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I think knowing when to quit is like predicting the stock market. Many extremely successful companies were in positions where they should've quit but didn't, and then ended up successful because they managed to pivot correctly (either by pure luck or good observations).

Means you shouldn't worry if you messed up if you didn't 'quit at the right time', but you should be more concerned if you acted rationally and took an objective view on everything, and most importantly took the time to judge how your company/startup is doing and how you can improve it.

When is it better to quit then to pivot? Seems like with pivoting you are able to make better use of your experience then if you quit and start something completely new.

I can't say in general, but I can share my own experience. I did a YC startup, struggled, quit, and made the Rails Tutorial (which has gone extremely well). There wasn't any way to pivot from the startup to the tutorial; they are completely different kinds of businesses. Among other things, my startup had a cofounder and investors (i.e., YC), whereas the Rails Tutorial is a solo enterprise. Developing an intuition for when to shut things down and move onto something new is an invaluable skill, one I'm only beginning to master.

How do you do marketing for Rails Tutorial? is it mostly search organic traffic? paid traffic? word of mouth?

Inbound links, organic search, and word-of-mouth are the main methods. I experimented with AdWords, but the conversion rate wasn't good enough, and I was too lazy to try to improve it.

From what I read, it seems like there's always a time to quit. She kept pivoting, changing, adapting, etc until she hit it right. Do you know when she should quit?

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