About six months ago, me and two of my friends (we work at the same company) decided to go and start a startup. Since we didn't have funding, we figured we'd keep our day jobs, build the website, get a few users, and then quit and work on the company full time. The initial plan was for me to do the programming/technical stuff, one of my friends to handle getting funding and the other to handle marketing/getting users.
I've built a pretty decent site (in my humble opinion), but I think my friends want to abandon the project. They've floated the idea (several times) of just scrapping all my current code and starting over, they don't propose new features anymore, they haven't gotten around to getting the paperwork to form the company since they said they would (in June) and they say now they might never do it, etc., etc.
I only put a few months of full-time equivalent work into the company, so it's not the end of the world if it fails, but this sort of thing seems to keep happening to me. When I was in college, I did some research with a professor and he never got around to helping me with the write-up and publishing. I wrote a long article for a magazine last year, sent it in to the editor, they said it was very nice and then ignored it. I did part an earlier web application four years ago, but my co-workers never launched it. How can I avoid this sort of failure?