"Here's what makes this particularly dangerous: "Don't give up" is really, really useful advice-until a certain point. After that, it becomes extremely dangerous. And the problem is that, as a founder, you do not know where that point is. You only ever know where that point was in retrospect, and even then, things are complex. Things are highly codependent, interdependent. So you don't even know what caused that point to appear in your journey."
"It takes a couple years after you stop a business, sell a business, or grow a business and become successful-it takes a long while for you to figure out why things happened the way they did. Because a lot of the reasons for success or failure are not even intrinsic to your project. They're mostly part of the market, or part of technological advancement, or the actions of competitors-or the inaction of your competitors."
Insisting 'Don't give up' uses founder resilience for the wrong reasons and can be dangerous when continued past a critical point. Persistence is valuable up to a point, after which it can harm outcomes because founders cannot know that tipping point in real time. Many causes of success or failure are external: market shifts, technological progress, competitor actions or inaction, and other interdependent forces. Because causal factors are complex and codependent, retrospective understanding rarely reveals which actions mattered in the moment. Paddle.com handles merchant-of-record tasks—taxes, currencies, declined transactions, and card updates—so founders can focus on product and competitors.
Read at The Bootstrapped Founder
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