When is your startup a failure?

I think it depends on why you wanted to do a startup and what your goals were.
The reality is most startups will fail - they won't go public, they will run out of money, the founders lose hope and stop working on it.

If you set realistic goals for yourself - that make sense to you that's what I think is most important. The reason why is only you know what you want - no one else does - even though they think they do.

So even if you stop working on your startup and switch to something else as long as you learned, took the risk and maybe are able to leverage something in the future I would never view it as a failure.

NO MORE NEW STUFF. Concentrate on the stuff you have lined up right now. There's so much potential there already.

You don't know that. Sometimes stubbornly being tied to your current projects that are simply not getting traction is stopping you from succeeding. I'd say adopt a middle ground: give yourself a set amount of time for an idea to get "traction," however you want to define it. If you don't get traction by then, move on, ditch the idea. Life is too short to work on things that don't work.

For me, that amount of time is 6 months. So from the time I get the idea and validate it to the time I code it up and try to get my first few customers, if I don't see "traction" by then, I'm dropping it and moving on.

Your startup is dead when you die. Great essay on this. http://www.paulgraham.com/badeconomy.html

If you just don't die, then your startup is never dead.

Hey Yannick. We are asking ourselves similar questions. For us, it's about validation. There is so much we could build but starting just with that really simple MVP (minimum viable product) and really working hard to understand the value that what you're building genuinely creates for your users is key. If what you're making doesn't add any value to your customers then they probably wont pay for it. This assumes that fee paying customers are what you want but there are other ways to celebrate success that aren't necessarily commercial I guess. If what you're building doesn't add value then I would argue it is at that point time to move on! Maybe we say then that your success was understanding when the idea failed (not that you failed, just the idea). Thoughts?