When to kill your startup
ryancarson.com
ryancarson.com
Rejection is tough on everyone. Good sales people do a few things to mitigate this that I've noticed and practiced. One thing is to think of it as a game to expect a certain amount of rejection as part of what you do in advance.
I mean if I told you right now to pick up the phone and call someone and pitch them and there was no outcome and I paid you $20 to do it you probably wouldn't have a fear of doing that. If I told you that I would pay you if they hang up on you $20 but $0 if they don't you probably would all the sudden not be afraid of the hangup, right? It's all a psychological game. Same thing with approaching a girl in a bar.
Second thing though is that some good sales people don't pick up on social cues as well as others. So they don't feel the rejection as much as sensitive people do. If you are cold calling the same micro expressions that might turn a sensitive person into jelly completely escapes many good salespeople. Same with just a voice. It takes time to get over this automatic reaction but it can be done with practice just like anything else. (Although you don't want to turn it off because the same skill is really good for negotiating.)
Three cheers to the significant others that are patient with entrepreneurs and willing to put up with us!
worst case you go back to your 'day job' and grease the wheels/deal with occasional support in the evening or on week-ends. Given that the original batch of customers where personal contacts re-entering the fray to continue to rub shoulders with these kind of people and evangelize the product when you can and makes sense seems like a great idea. Maybe Ryan is more of a go-big-or-go-home guy, but this is probably what I would have done.
The other thing is this. This article is one more illustration of something I tell people when they ask my advice on going into business: "Most businesses that succeed fail first. Be prepared to see failure as a stage on the road to success."
At $1200/month, that ought to be enough to cover basic expenses. If you are interested in making this work, you can always get another job somewhere and kick this back to part-time work, or go after investors, or whatever other options you have. Is the basic income enough to keep it running? Probably.
But even in the end, even here, failure was a stage on the road to success was it not? I guess that shows how many paths there are given perseverance and inspiration.
It's often better to admit defeat and do something new.
Shifting focus fully to other things clearly worked out well for you, and I admire the ballsy decision to do that in spite of the the loss of revenue.
It looks pretty low cost, but we're looking back so bandwidth costs and such might have been high. Still if 80% of it is available as wages that's going to net (I'm guessing after tax+NICs) about £600 per month. A £1200 per month mortgage means he's living in the South East or in a massive mansion (for 2!) in some other part of the country.
I cant see why you couldnt pay a salesperson on results, was the product somehow really low margin??
I bet you would've burnt out if you hadn't and Torbit wouldn't have happened, even if you had the idea or bandwidth for it. I've flirted with the crispy edge of burnout a bunch of times since moving to SF. You haven't really been working hard unless you've at least once seriously considered chucking it all to become a forest ranger, surf instructor or dog walker.
I'm here now, not having fun; but I also rather like eating and having somewhere to sleep ...
For my next product, if it's B2B, I'll make sure to first find an audience, people I'd like to do business with, and then find a product to make (incidentally, that's also the approach advised by Rob Walling and Amy Hoy among others, and it makes lots of sense to me now).
Why not partner with a good salesperson someone who isn't afraid to pick up the phone and make sales calls?
When I hired the last two new guys, I said .2 is a great batting average in baseball. You'll never be close to that in enterprise software. It's a numbers game. Heard those types of speaches all the time in grad school regarding startups and sales.