If:
you ever worked in any of those “fast paced”, “dynamic” start-ups, like they say in those job descriptions,
you have ever been in a position where your job is to accept, request changes to, or reject what other people pitch to you,
you learned the hard way, when you finally decided to stop investing in whatever you’d been doing for so long that wasn’t going anywhere, and wished you had stopped when you first thought about it,
you probably already know how heavily emotions are involved in making these calls, even when we are not aware of it.
We are humans. Wherever we are, emotions are there, even in most professional setups. Before I say anything about how to fight those emotions or denial, let’s understand why we are like this in the first place.
“I’ve already spent so much time on this”
Do you have that friend who has been in the same relationship for way too long, and the only reason for that is they’ve invested in that relationship, and the longer they stay, the harder it gets to leave because they’ve stayed so long, they need a bigger excuse to leave? And if they ever manage to leave, they say, “I could have left the first moment I thought about it”, and that moment is usually at the very beginning of that relationship?
Have you ever waited for a bus way too long, when there’s obviously something wrong, but the longer you waited, the harder it got to leave because what if it comes right after you leave? You waited that long!
Ever made a bad financial decision that you should have exited a long time ago, but thinking about the money you lost so far gives you unrealistic hopes about how it might turn around in the future?
Yes, I love analogies.
The more we invest in something, whatever it is, time, money, care, the more attached we become to it, and it feels like all the things we’ve invested so far are going to waste. It’s called the sunk cost fallacy.
“But it’s mine”
The second thing is, when it’s ours, when we do it ourselves, we tend to perceive its worth as much higher than we would the same thing made by someone else.
“All one’s geese are swans.”
- English proverb
If you’d like to deep dive into this specific topic, I explained in detail in one of my previous articles, Let’s stop reinventing the wheel, how the “IKEA effect” works on us and other similar strategies some companies use to make us feel invested in something they offer.
It’s no different when it comes to our ideas and whatever we build around them, in other words, our babies.
How you let it go
Remind yourself that staying just because of the cost you’ve already invested will only burn more resources.
You could have been on the last tram instead of waiting for that bus when you first noticed something was wrong. Now you have to take a taxi.
Stop worrying too much about what you already lost. Focus on how being stuck there might be blocking you from pursuing other opportunities.
You’re wasting your own time when you could actually be working on your next best idea. And of course, that friend of yours and their partner might both be missing the chance to meet the love of their lives because they stay in the legacy relationship only because “they’ve been together so long”.
Never ever blame your customers.
This is a road that goes nowhere. “But they don’t understand, they just have to click here and do this and that.” Yes, sure, but they don’t and won’t, and that’s what matters. It’s on us to understand what they need or enjoy. If they don’t, we fix it.
Don’t get feedback from your close circle, like your friends or family.
There might be some exceptions where you believe you’ve built an exceptionally professional relationship with them. But other than that, they are terrible to take advice from. Not because they are bad people, it’s quite the opposite: good intentions. They are afraid of hurting you, or even if it’s not their concern, they will have a similar bias to what you have.
Own it.
I don’t know how many times I’ve witnessed people keep going because they were afraid to be the person who failed a business or a project. As much as it doesn’t feel obvious when we’re in that situation, here is the fact. Letting a product fail is better than wasting your time trying to keep a dead one alive. And by this, I am not talking about profit or loss. Your product can have high potential while you’re still running at a loss. It can take time. This is for when you realize that your users or customers are not engaging with what you offered in the way you assumed.
Build that muscle. Launch fast, pivot, kill.
In time, you’ll start noticing patterns in a few weeks instead of spending years. The only way to understand is to make users “touch” your product as soon as possible and iterate from there quickly.
Stop taking your product’s fate too personally.
A cliché yet amazing piece of advice I keep reminding myself of. Failing a product or a feature is not about your level of intelligence or entrepreneurship skills. Almost everyone who built and launched something successful failed at least one idea before that, and will fail again in the future.
Remember, every “wrong” product is a new learning experience that you will use in your next “right” product.