> Going away at this moment sounds like an irrational choice, but I was one I had to take, I had to place myself and my peace of mind ahead of anything else.
I can relate to this. No, I didn't leave my startup. I've worked with three startups altogether, including one of my own, which started off with a co-founder back in 2012. In the not-my-own ones, I was once the founding engineer, and once the fourth engineering hire.
Why didn't I leave my own bootstrapped startup despite the amount of pressure, chaos, uncertainty, and pain, all of which were setting in at the same time? Not to mention immense difficulties in dealing with co-founders and all the social pressures (home life, relationships, real day job at a fortune 500) and burning hard-earned cash to keep the thing running in the face of uncertainty and the very real likeliness of failure.
Why I nearly did walk out:
- Extremely unpleasant co-founder. Unsociable, condescending, biased - for instance I'm quite sure he perceived me as being worth less than himself because I had no wife and kids situation going on. Treating me as employee despite having equal shares in the company.
- No VC capital or outside funding. The expectation of having close to 0 in the bank account once the pay-day happens from the "real" job (and rent+bills have already been covered) sucked really, really much.
A few things spring to mind as to why I did not walk out:
- Luck. We seemed to have the right timing. There were almost no products on the market which attempted to solve the problem the way we did. There was a tremendous interest in our product, but we just couldn't get any significant number of people to convert, despite seemingly offering the right product.
- Having listened to feedback and tweaking the product (most notably the pricing/business model), we managed to achieve decent market capture (it took almost 3 years from) and that came mostly as a result of persisting through the cash-burn, listening to and evaluating all customer feedback, and iterating on many aspects of the product dozens of time. Fixing broken things and solving weird edge-cases which weren't weird in retrospect pointed to the fact that we were simply inexperienced. We still pressed on and sought to break through this barrier of having no freaking clue about this emerging market.
- The real break was the actual realisation of the for-reals breakeven. It changed the game - the point at which no money needed to leave our personal bank accounts to pay for cloud services, domains, tax accountants, templates, logos, you name it, was one of the greatest feelings ever. At point-breakeven the whole thing went from a "somewhat successful side-project which has been draining our personal bank accounts" to a project which could potentially provide enduring sustenance, and we might be able to take it further. At that point it became all the more compelling to press on.