Cut Your Losses

Knowing when and how to cut your losses is a skill.

When you've been working on a project for months or years, quitting doesn't feel like a viable option.

There are two components when I think about it.

The first is not wanting to feel like a quitter.

For years I started and ended projects dozens of times.

When I first started learning how to code, I jumped between three different languages within a month, and then wondered why nothing was making sense.

When I finally got out of that trap, I never wanted to fall back in.

That leads to the second component — sunk cost.

If you've poured hundreds or thousands of hours of effort along with money into a project, quitting feels like burning all of that on fire.

The sunk cost fallacy is called a fallacy for a reason.

Calling it quits when you see the writing on the wall will save you more time and money down the line.

But the fallacy also assumes you go back to where you started.

If you're building a project, there are hundreds of things you learned along the way.

Knowledge is the only currency that can't be taken away from you.

When you quit strategically, not just when things get hard, you can take what you learned in project 1 to move 10x faster in project 2.

You'll be faster at making decisions and recognize where you fell short previously.

All of that is to say, I'm indefinitely pausing work on my current project (Creator Kiwi) to focus on something I'm much more excited about.

This 6-month process has taught me more than any one book, course, or degree ever could.

I might write a longer letter in the future explaining the decision (reply if you care to see that), but it comes down to not being focused on a single use case.

The product started with a solution and then tried to reverse-engineer good problems to solve.

Marketing in this condition feels like driving blind.

In all honesty, I started this project because I wanted to finally ship something.

There’s no better way to learn how to ship than to do it yourself.

I'll talk about what's next in the future, but I hope this was helpful if you're currently trying to build something cool.

Thanks for reading, have a great week.

Cole