Hitting the wall

There comes a point when your motivation for something dies.

We all need people behind us, encouraging us in what we do. I've certainly had my ups and downs over the last 10 months. Hitting many dips and overcoming them. I read Seth Godin's The Dip a while ago. It's a great little book about recognising when to quit and when to hang in there. Should I quit? What should I quit?

I feel as if I've come to a point where something has to change. Perhaps that means quitting something. I've been battling hard and this website still hasn't been released. Yesterday I finished a large new feature and still had the feeling that this site didn't have enough features to be useful and wasn't easy enough for novice users. I suppose I am a harsh self-critic. I don't want to put something out there which makes me and my new company look bad.

I've got lots of options.

1. Continue as normal.
I can rule this out straight away. I've done this for the last 10 months and I still haven't released this web app.

2. Quit. Find a job.
Perhaps a little extreme. Although I'm running low on funds (I'm funding this business out of my own pocket), I don't want to get a "proper" job until absolutely necessary. Also I feel potential interviewers might be a little concerned with my record if I do this.

3. Quit. Do freelance work.
I could earn some money by doing contract work again. Like #2. I feel as if I can leave this as a back-up option after trying #3. or #4.

4. Release the website now.
What's the worst that could happen? People get annoyed with site, publicly criticise it and never come back.
What's the best possible outcome? People actually like the application and are willing to provide helpful feedback.

Even if I do release the site now, I won't earn any money from it. I still need to code a payment system. I still think its several man-months away from being a tool worth paying for. My biggest concern is that the site (currently) attempts to do too much and achieves very little. I'm confident that if my site is implemented very well, it can earn a lot of money. A lot of features are required and required to work well to encourage users to use my web application rather than desktop equivalent software.

5. Release a small useful utility

I have done a lot of coding in the last 10 months. Some of which would make a very handy little application. Perhaps one worth paying for. I know this since I've been contacted several times about some buggy open source code I contributed that does a similar thing.

If I do not allow any feature creep from this little application it might be possible to release it in under a week.


Are there any other options? What would you do?