How do you know whether it's time to move on or keep going?

This is a perennial dilemma for any founder who finds themselves with a stagnating idea/product:

Move on or keep on trudging?

Problem is you never really know if you're not doing things right, or if you're not doing the right things, or something in between.

It takes acumen (basically a fancy way of saying educated guesswork) to tell the difference.

There are broadly 3 possibilities here:

1. You're on a dead-end. This market isn't going to work out, isn't profitable enough to sustain a growing business, or it flat-out doesn't exist. It doesn't matter how smart, resourceful, innovative, hardworking, persistent you are, this will never work out due to factors out of your control. You can't create a market out of thin air, not as an indie hacker at least. You can be Elon Musk, and you'll still fail (Elon Musk wouldn't work on stuff without a market though).

Verdict: move on

2. There's light at the end of the tunnel. But you don't have what it takes to clear off the obstacles standing in your way to make your first sale or compete with incumbents (every sale seems to be an uphill battle). Maybe you don't have the skills or resources to tackle it, or maybe it takes something out of you that you're not willing to concede (e.g. work 60 hours a week, sell on the phone/do live demos, build a team, raise VC, move countries, etc. etc.). Just like what Kevin Spacey said in Horrible Bosses 2, it's not that nothing can be done, it's just that there's nothing you can do.

I myself was personally here in 2019, when I tried to sell a payments solution in the healthcare space as an indie hacker. I learned that I just didn't have it in me to be a product engineer and B2B salesman at the same time.

This is why founder-market fit is so important. There are so many profitable software markets out there, but the markets that fit your personality type, passion, resources, skill level, circumstances, etc. as a solo bootstrapped founder are a lot more limited. Some things just aren't yours for the taking.

Verdict: move on

3. There's light at the end of the tunnel. You're seeing micro-traction, people are at least signing up and they seem to be using your product and giving you feedback. You might have even gotten your first 10 paying customers, but somehow growth has stalled or your churns are catching up fast with you. If you're in this predicament, your #1 priority is to try everything in rapid succession until it all fails -- fix up your product, improve your UI/UX, speed up your site, fill in feature gaps, improve your onboarding, improve your landing page, try new marketing channels, change up your business model, change your pricing, change your positioning, etc. etc. Keep running growth experiments until your runway no longer allows you to and double down on whatever bears even a little fruit.

If you haven't tried everything in your power to overturn your present fate, you don't deserve to move on. It's not easy AT ALL to grab a tiger by the tail, and, if you have grabbed one, and it seems to be slipping out of your grasp, it's clearly wiser to grasp tighter than to totally let it go and hunt for another tiger all over again!

For example, I was stuck at $500 MRR for months in mid-2020 for Zlappo, but the thing that finally worked for me that 5x my MRR within the next few months was -- believe it or not -- partnering with a Twitter influencer with 200k followers.

I would have never in a million years guessed that that was the lever of growth that I needed to create an inflection point in my MRR.

You just need to keep throwing spaghetti at the wall (prudently of course, spaghetti is expensive 😅) and see what sticks.

Verdict: keep on trudging

But why is moving on so hard!?

Because of sunk-cost fallacy.

Psychologically, we badly want our past efforts to count for something, otherwise the cognitive dissonance would be too much to bear:

You mean I did all that for nothing!? That makes me the dumbest idiot in the world, doesn't it... If I'm so dumb, how can I be a successful entrepreneur? Oh no, woe is me... I'm going to be a 9-5 wage cuck for life, trapped forever in corporate drudgery...

And the self-doubt goes on and on...

Yes, it was all for nothing, believe it or not.

I find the best thing to do in those situations is to just cope, i.e. instruct your internal PR department to convince yourself that you've "lEaRnEd a LoT" from that experience.

In truth, what you actually learned is simply what wouldn't work.

You still have zero idea of what would work, you just now know, it ain't whatever you've been doing.

Hardly helpful, is it?

Plus you never know, if you switch idea or pivot, you might encounter the exact same problem again.

If you're struggling to have a consistent lead flow or fighting churn now or even getting your first sale now, who's to say you won't have the same problem with your new idea?

Hell, you might introduce new variables and thus new problems that you didn't have with your previous idea.

It's a total black box -- you have no idea how it will turn out if you suddenly switch gears halfway through and go through the whole pain of starting from scratch.

I guess if you're at $0 MRR, you have nothing to lose, but if you're at $5k MRR, $2k MRR, or even $1k MRR, you should definitely err on the side of persevering instead of giving up.

Pour conclure -- Look at traction + time spent

At the risk of stating the obvious, I believe traction should be the key determining factor in deciding whether to move on or keep on trudging.

If you're seeing some traction, keep at it.

If you're seeing little to no traction, abandon it.

I find it helpful to set for yourself a deadline for getting initial traction.

I like to count from launch (not from first line of code), because that's when people start having access to your product and telling you what they really think about it.

And if what you're working on is worth a damn, you're acting upon feedback, and you're constantly promoting it day and night, you shouldn't take more than 3 months to land your first paying customer.

If you can't convince someone to pay within the first 3 months of your existence, I wouldn't be optimistic at all about the next 3 months.

This is why it's key to shorten the loop by not spending too long on your MVP.

If your MVP would take more than a month to build, my honest opinion is: forget about it, find another idea that would allow you to get validation as soon as possible.

Pricing is also key here, though I find it less of a concern with indie hackers.

From my own experience, I was so desperate for my first sale for Zlappo that I felt I underpriced it at $10/mo when I launched, but I've since revised my pricing to more accurately reflect the massive value that I've added since my launch.

I hope this post has been helpful, if you have any feedback or ideas or experiences with this, definitely do share so we can all learn from one another.

Cheerio!