throwaway16185

Saw these threads rise and fall a couple times. Just wanted to run another one.

$$$, TYPE OF COMPANY, # YRS EXPERIENCE

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$85,000. Fortune 500 company. 2 years experience.

Hey guys, throwaway here for obvious reasons.

I have been bootstrapping a media sharing startup while working full-time for the past 1.5 years. Recently in June, it was getting so what I believe to be a lot traffic and growing. Growing 30%/mo since January, we hit a high of 250,000 uniques/mo in July.

My co-founder and I quit our jobs to work on it full time, and to grow it out, but now after the summer the site traffic has declined. It seems I quit my job when it "peaked", maybe this site was a passing fad? This month I only got 167,000 uniques -- a 35% drop.

So here I am. I'm not sure what to do. Should I shelf it, or take this as a sign and just give up? I told myself I'd try one more month to turn the traffic again towards a positive track, but I'm running out of savings and running out of ideas on how to turn the traffic.

I guess what I'm looking for is advice from those in my situation before -- did you shelf your project, or just keep working on it? I want to keep working on it, but I also want to make sure my reality is in check and that I'm not deluded by my own hope for it to grow bigger. How do you know when to quit?