When to quit?
Reflecting on what I should do with my stagnating startup.
And those who urge entrepreneurs to never give up? Charlatans. Sometimes you have to give up. Sometimes knowing when to give up, when to try something else, is genius. Giving up doesn’t mean stopping.
Don’t ever stop - Phil Knight, Shoe Dog
More than ever before, I’m approaching the point in my business journey where I must decide whether to quit or keep on with EnVsion. It’s certainly not the most comfortable junction to be going through, but it’s one I must take nonetheless.
There are many reasons why I consider quitting, many of which are arising at similar times.
Business not growing
Firstly, the business isn’t growing much. Revenues aren’t growing much. This means we are not winning.
All other factors aside, this may be the biggest contributor to my decision, because winning solves almost everything. And if we’re not winning, all our other problems are exacerbated.
Co-founder leaving
My co-founder has also recently decided not to continue the adventure, so I’m a de-facto solo-founder from now on. I’m thankful for his contributions and understand his decision. He has also recently become a father and has a busy full-time job too. We had a good run and I’m proud of what we managed to do with the scarce resources we have.
It was already hard trying to bootstrap this company with the two of us only. It’s certainly going to be harder with me only officially at the helm of this ship.
High cloud costs
One other factor that is weighing me down is the cost of running this business. Our Amazon Web Services bill is high for our stage at a bit less than ~$500/month. It was much higher before. Fortunately, in the last 12 months I’ve managed to bring down our cloud costs by a factor of 3x by doing some Herculean works on cloud infra and other optimisations. Yet the costs are still too high for a bootstrapped early stage business that doesn’t have AWS credits anymore (note to self - always go for the $25K credits for 2 years instead of $100K credits for 1 year).
I also don’t think it’s worth moving all the code and infrastructure to another Cloud provider. This is because AWS seem to offer the best services for video transcoding among its competitors. I’m also not ready nor willing to spend months of toil doing a cloud port where my efforts should instead be spent on business offense, that is more direct sales and significant product improvements.
Are we solving a real, urgent pain?
Additionally, I wonder whether we are solving a searing pain. Maybe we are but the issue lies in our position or marketing? I don’t have the full answer at this stage.
A few of our users are engaged and use the product often. Some others seem to randomly sign up and either never upload a video or just upload a single video and disappear into the ether. I’ve tried reaching out to them to find out more about them and and their use case, but few have responded.
From next week I will start an outbound email campaign to try to find out more about the viability of our product offering. It’s about time I did more founder-led sales.
Potential opportunity cost
Finally there is an opportunity cost associated wth sticking it out with EnVsion where greater and more successful endeavours could be realised once I freed myself of the shackles of my currently stagnating startup.
Harkening back to history, it is said that at some point Pyrrhus, the warrior king from Epirus, was presented with two crucial options. On the one hand he was “invited“ to invade Syracuse, thus freeing the Sicilian town from the Carthaginian yoke. On the other hand he could persevere with his ongoing strife against Rome, which was a formidable adversary at the time. Pyrrhus decided to conduct a difficult new campaign by going to Syracuse in Sicily instead of continuing to face the Romans. Over there he won many battles in an inconclusive struggle, but had to eventually withdraw from Syracuse. This meant he never achieved his broader strategic goals of completely removing Carthaginian influence from Syracuse and establishing a solid base to further support his conquest of territories in the Mediterranean. This failed expedition further weakened him in future struggles against the Romans and at home in Greece too.
But what if Pyrrhus had decided to focus on bettering Rome on the battlefield, and eventually won? He could have met a much more illustrious fate had he succeeded in this campaign; Roman history would be Pyrrhus history now.
In the same vein (without all the physical fighting and killing), I must decide whether to persevere this EnVsion campaign or take on a new challenge that could - or could not - culminate in a notable business success. The grass may not be greener elsewhere, but I may also be further sinking into business quicksands should I stay on with EnVsion.
What to do?
Most of these elements are telling me I should quit. But I’m not quitting yet. You see, I am very stubborn and have a stupidly high tolerance for pain.
Still, how do I know it’s time to quit? I’m not sure I can fully know, but I have to follow what my intuition says. Some say I must follow my heart.
What does my heart tell me?
It tells me that I still have some learning to do with EnVsion. While it may not lead to the successful outcome I desire, I must stick around for a few extra rounds of this game and play some of my final cards over the summer.
After the play is done I can decide what the path forward should be. This means that by the end of the summer, I will decide whether to move on or stay on.