We almost shut the project down. We got talked out of it

In September we opened our expense sheet and saw that next month’s server bill would come out of the money we had put aside for rent.

That evening one of us wrote a long message. About the product being good, about having built more than we expected, but that it was time to be honest: we can’t carry it. Let’s stop before we get into debt. The message took an hour to write.

The answer came five minutes later, in one line: “Launch first, then we decide.”

We were angry for a week. It felt like an hour of honest words deserved more than one line. Then we sat down and finished what we had been putting off for two months. Payments. The website. The sandbox. Everything you cannot launch without.

It didn’t bring in a single dollar. But we learned something else: closing something that is almost ready is harder than paying for a server. When a product is still raw, it is easy to drop. When it works, and you watch the agent answer a customer at night for you, you just can’t do it.