Ask HN: How do I shutdown a project my users love?

https://starterpack.live/

CMU has a yearly Carnival which was this weekend, so I chose to launch it then. In our first day, we penetrated about 50% of all undergrads, and we are getting good use. My idea is simple and seems effective.

Except I messed up and launched too quickly since the semester is already soon over, and launching next fall would've been oppurtune. This is not the right time to expand to other schools since summer is coming. I should've started with another market.

Further, I'm poor! I've had a horrible response from investors (can't beat incumbents, doesn't scale, solo-founder, part-time, have to find product market fit for each community, Reddit can just copy). I grew up sporadically homeless and my family is still financially troubled, so I will be working remotely at my internship and at my family restaurant until 11pm everyday this summer. It is so frustrating.

For the CMU starterpack, I am making a daily Wordle-like puzzle, updating the fence, moderating, and adding new features. However, even as more CMU students use it, I want to discontinue it as I realize this will be more prohibitive come summer than beneficial.

How do I gracefully shutdown so that I may revive the project next school year?

A social network is a community, a home for people. If you kill it now then that's it, it's over, dead, finished, finito, you won't be able to revive it because you killed all your users trust.

Hand it over to your active users or keep it going, and forget about investing, just ask for donations from your users, that will keep you going and you'll get more than you thought possible, not everything needs to be FB/Reddit scale.