I'm CTO of a cool Startup. We got investments, a cool product that everybody said "Whoohoo" when we showed what we can do with it. But we never sold it...(its free but we never did marketing)<p>We don't have money anymore and didn't pay our employees the last month. The CEO fails to convince investors or buyers.<p>What do you advice?
I think that decision is a very personal one, and only you can make it. With that being said, here are a few points that should (perhaps) inform your decision:<p>1. How much institutional support (and energy) is there to get the paid version shipped? Is everyone else burnt out and jumping ship, or could you realistically stay the course and get that product out the door?<p>2. Even if you shipped the paid version, would the revenue be enough to cover the burn rate? It looks like you guys raised 3 million over the course of the past year, and burned through it (correct me if I have that wrong, just getting the data from your Angellist page). At that burn rate, your premium version (at your stated price of $5 per user per month) would need to onboard roughly 50,000 paid users to be at the break-even point (though probably more than that since your costs would go up). Is onboarding than many users feasible?<p>If you can ship the premium version and onboard a ton of users all before the rest of the team throws up their hands...maybe you should go for it; give it one last college try.
No paying customers, no cash reserves, no investors/buyers lined up: you're done!<p>Your mission now, (based on your skills & expertise)-- identify someone who you can help and will pay you for your services. You can make this "pivot" either individually or as a group. Put your heads together as the sales & biz dev team. Get out there, start asking people what projects they might need help on. Do it now!
WOw, your customer list is impressive(looking at your homepage).. Apple, Starbucks, etc... If you can sell to those companies, why do you have trouble selling to other businesses? is it more of an entreprise product rather than consumer, and you're not charging enuff?
i would check out the talks by patio11 he has some good insights to monitization, optionally: fire ceo, build another product, quit, dont work for a place that doesnt have a business plan/monitization strategy, sell it to another company on flippa