Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

I've been working on a startup for ~9 months (as the technical cofounder) in the event tech space (B2B tradeshows) and I'm pretty sure we've failed to do anything productive (find product/market fit, find a problem/solution fit, learn anything valuable, etc.). We still have ~100k left but the main investors/advisors (from the 220k friends/family/fools round) pretty much feel like it's time to pull the plug. My personal opinion is that that's the most responsible thing to do (return money pro-rata) but there are simultaneous voices (paradoxically same investors) pushing to keep going (continue running pilots, building out the team [we just finally found a bd cofounder], crafting a pitch for a seed round). I don't know what to do since in my understanding we've failed at the most important thing: finding product/market fit. others on the team (advisors) believe that that's not the case and we can keep raising based on negative results.

re pilots: we got 5 pilots (some paying some not) by basically being persistent and doing really really high touch sales. two of them ran this week and they were miserable failures (for every reason from poor marketing/education to last minute catastrophic product failures). absolutely all of the metrics skew heavily towards 0.

i realize i'm being vague and maybe there's not enough detail in the post to give substantive advice but regardless any would be appreciated.

Have you made progress in trying to understand your customers and their problems?

You mentioned that 1 or more customers in the pilot are paid-customers. If someone is paying you, either they are forking out the money in the hope that you're going to solve a problem for them or they are forking over the money for other reasons (ex. as a favor to you or due to past relationship.)

Do you understand why the paid pilot customers were willing to pay you?

Without knowing much about your business, I’ll just say B2B work can be a tough but more importantly long road. So 9 months may not be a long enough timeframe to judge failure.

My B2B startup focused on government clients, and we’re about to close a deal that took 2 years to close. Many times in that period I wanted to quit, but believed it was better to keep moving forward.

Only you know your business and market fit, and if you think it’s run it’s course then fold, otherwise fight a little longer and work with the success you’ve had so far.

Do you think the new cofounder will substantially change your ability to have 5 successful pilots in the next 3 months?

Are you excited about the space? Do you think you are uniquely able to contribute? Do you still think the market is there?

If your answer are no to all or most of the above, it sounds like maybe you should close up shop. I think returning VC money is dumb. Returning friends & family might be worthwhile.

the pilots that signed with us signed because the pain point is real and we did a good job pitching them/they are extraordinarily impressionable. the problem is that a key assumption necessary in actually delivering value turned out to be pretty much false (basically we saw almost no adoption amongst users).