FounderA founder whose product has no steady paying customers yet

When the product has run for months without growing, I want to know whether to persist or change direction, so I do not spend the runway on a path already closed.

Khi sản phẩm chạy nhiều tháng mà không tăng, tôi muốn biết nên kiên trì hay nên đổi hướng, để không tiêu hết vốn vào một hướng đã hết cửa.

Job context

Who: A founder with six to twelve months of runway
When: After two or three flat quarters
Trigger: Another quarter passing with the same numbers
Situation: Persistence and stubbornness look identical from the inside
Constraints: Promises made to investors and the team, and a change of direction is a public admission

Cannot separate persistence from stubbornness
High
Both stories have famous examples to lean on.
Root cause: No falsifying condition was set in advance
Small numbers mean noise beats signal
High
One good week feeds another quarter of hope.
Root cause: At small scale, random variation exceeds the real trend
The team is attached to the current direction
Medium
A change means re-convincing the people who believed the first time.
Root cause: Commitment is built on belief, and belief does not turn quickly
Does not know what to change to
High
Knowing this is wrong does not indicate what is right.
Root cause: The information gathered only speaks about the path already taken
The runway decides instead of judgement
High
By the time change is forced there is not enough left to try the new path.
Root cause: The decision is deferred until it is no longer a choice

A solution is not the same thing as a product — a customer can hire a behaviour or a workaround too.

Quarterly targets
Product
Creates a cadence, and targets can be rewritten after being missed.
An advisory board
Service
The only outsiders willing to say the hard thing, seeing only what they are told.
Write the hypothesis before each quarter
Workaround
Founders build a memory that argues against them.
Talk to customers who left
Behaviour
The most candid source and the least visited.
Benchmark against peers at the same stage
Behaviour
A useful anchor built on companies that survived to be counted.

The person best informed to conclude the path is closed is the one who must publicly admit it.
Why existing solutions fail: The ecosystem celebrates persistence and has no language for stopping well, so a founder has no available story except failure.
Potential opportunity: Writing the stopping condition at the start, when it says nothing about anyone.
There are rituals for starting and for raising; the middle — several flat quarters — has no cadence at all.
Why existing solutions fail: Investors look by funding round and teams by release; nobody owns the question of whether this path is still open in month seven.
Potential opportunity: A hypothesis review tied to remaining runway rather than to funding rounds.