- When to shut it down.
I don't know if you've ever been in a position
where you have a company or a start up
or your project, and it's just not going the way
you think it should go,
and you want to shut it down.
Last week I was in New York and I was talking
to one of my good friends, and he'd been consulting,
that's kind of what he does full time,
and he had this other product that he'd been working on
as kind of some passion, an extension of his consulting.
And it wasn't going anywhere, and he really was
wondering if he should shut it down.
The answer to him, because I was intimately aware
of the progress and the energy he put into it,
I just said hey man, just shut it down.
Focus on the thing that you love doing,
that you're really good at, that you get the value from,
versus being distracted.
So that was an easy one.
But I don't know if you guys know this,
but I've had many projects.
I probably own like 50 domains.
In earnest, probably started another dozen websites
or dot coms, one of them was called secret sender app,
which was an easy way for you to send,
essentially secrets, to other people.
So passwords and stuff, I built that with my friend Jeff.
And Photovino.com which was this really neat iPhone app,
you could take a photo of a wine bottle
and get two bottles shipped to your house in three days.
I know, sounds cool.
Turns out, totally illegal, and probably not
something you guys should try and replicate.
I've started a lot of projects, I call them.
And at some point, I have to decide,
do I pursue it or do I shut it down?
So I want to kind of talk you through that thinking.
But the first area, the first question I ask myself is,
am I passionate about this idea still?
And that is the first filter for really anything,
both starting and continuing, but
am I still passionate about this?
Do I still get excited about the idea?
Cause a lot of times, when you get excited
it's because you're actually not aware of the effort
it's gonna take, or how frustrating it's gonna be
or the challenges, so once you kind of know that
where you've gone through a few iterations
in the product, it's out there,
there's people using it or not using it,
then you can ask yourself, am I truly passionate
about solving this problem,
or if it wasn't just something, I had a good idea
or somebody said it was a good idea
and now you're like, you could care less.
So anyways, if you're not passionate about it, shut it down.
The second thing I would say is,
have you come up with another idea
that seems better than that one?
So you can still be passionate about that one,
and that happens a lot for me,
but is the new idea even better?
Is the new idea, when you think about it, you're like
man, the market's perfect, the timing's great,
or the team that you put together,
maybe a potential co-founder, it's like,
oh, this idea is just perfect.
And the other one is kind of totally unrelated.
If you come up with a better idea and you feel
like that's gonna have a further impact
if you have a strategy of where you want your business
and your life to go and you feel like that is the one
that's gonna allow you to do that, shut it down.
It's tough to do it because it's called sunk cost.
It's all that time and energy invested to really decide
that you're not gonna do it anymore.
That's hard to do.
A lot of people aren't willing to take that sunk cost
and throw it away, but really great entrepreneurs can,
as long as they do it under the right context.
And what you don't want to do is be somebody
who starts a lot of little things and never
actually gets anything done.
What I'm talking about, the passion or better ideas,
these are well vetted out, and it actually brings me
to the third strategy, which is to give it three tries,
three earnest tries, like real shakes at the can.
Whenever I think about a new project I'm working on,
especially when it comes to marketing, I feel like the first
iteration, the first time I do it and I put it
out to the market, that's like
just kind of building the scaffolding.
Everything's there, but it's probably not gonna work
because it's the first time.
I may not get the copyright, I may not set up the ads right,
whatever the reason is,
I can't assume the first time it should just work.
So I always assume three tries.
Same thing for a product.
If you put it out in the market, and then you're like,
ooh, it didn't really work as well.
Let me get some feedback.
You get the feedback from the users, you try it again,
and then it's like, a little bit better, but not really.
Okay, let me learn some more, let me look at the data,
and you give it another third try, truly earnest try,
and it doesn't work out?
Shut it down.
At the end of the day, I feel like some people
have this sense of like, I've got to be tenacious
and resilient and keep going, but if it's not,
if the dog doesn't hunt, then stop hunting.
Save yourself the time, go find a better idea,
go find something you're passionate about.
Maybe you have a friend that's working on a start up
and starting to get traction.
If you think about where you want to end up in your life,
you don't want to be that guy, and you see these folks
on Dragon's Den where they've invested 20 years
of their life and their whole life savings,
and they've gone into the retirement savings,
just because they feel that somehow this has gotta work.
This is the idea.
And everybody in their life is telling them
that it's a bad idea, and they just don't do it.
There's a fine line, but come on.
If everybody's telling you it's not gonna work
and you've given it three really good trys,
call it a day, shut it down.
Those are my suggestions for you.
I'd love if you liked this video so that it could widen
the impact of the views that other people get to see.
Leave me a comment below if you've ever
been in that position or if you have any questions for me.
Again, I started 12 different projects that
never saw the light of day.
I've had to shut them down.
I know from personal experience, it's tough,
but over the years, when you finally figure ones
that work out and you have success,
it makes it so much easier because it allows you to focus.
I want to challenge you guys to live a bigger life
and a bigger business, and I'll see you guys next Monday.