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On Giving Up

One of my recent posts on X gained some traction. The title was ‘Indiehacking is difficult.’

In case you’re unfamiliar with the term, indie hacking refers to independent entrepreneurial pursuits. Traditionally, the term is for the individual but nowadays ‘indie hacking’ can be interchangeably used for independent bootstrapped startups too.

No investment from outside. No concrete support from the outside. It’s just you doing everything to create and run a business from scratch.

I’m an indie hacker myself and I mostly post with #indiehackers and #buildinpublic on X.

Back to the post. I end with these words:

Today, I have decided to write about when you SHOULD give up. When I say “Never Give Up”, I refer to consistency and perseverance. Qualities that you need to succeed in any field.

This does not mean that if you start doing something you keep doing it until you either achieve something great or destroy yourself in the process.

You need to give up to never give up.

Sounds absurd?

Think about it. Imagine you want to break a long-distance running record and you also have a bad smoking addiction. Wouldn’t you need to give up smoking to achieve such a goal? (Please ignore any extreme cases.)

In the particular context of solopreneurship or indie hacking or small startups, I consider three paths when I feel stuck with a project:

• Adapt: If you aren’t getting paying customers or are experiencing heavy churn on a well-validated problem, there’s probably something wrong with the state of your solution. You need to iterate and improve on this solution. The solution itself might not be the problem in this situation either. You might be getting the wrong message across through your copy which might be failing to reach the right target audience. User feedback is important in this case for quicker iterations.

• Pivot: This is the back-to-the-drawing board strategy. If you’re unable to solve a validated problem even after multiple adaptations or iterations, it’s time to completely rethink the solution. Keep the insights that you’ve gathered during the iterations duly noted and build a new solution using them.

• Abandon: If you’ve gone through multiple adaptations and pivots and still cannot gain traction, it is time to give up. There has to be something wrong with the problem, your solution, or the market. It’s important to abandon a wrong idea at the right time. Don’t let failure consume you and affect other aspects of your life too.

It’s essential to differentiate between giving up too soon and clinging to a lost cause. While quitting on your beloved idea can be difficult, it opens up new opportunities and gives back your time and energy.

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