Should you kill your project or keep going?
The five signals that tell you which one it is.
Start the quiz →What this quiz explores
Persistence and stubbornness look identical from the inside, which is why this decision is so hard to make alone. This quiz locates you on what the external evidence says about the project, and on what your reasons for continuing are made of. Those two produce four different answers, and only one of them is stop.
How it works
The quiz has 4 possible results. Each answer option was written to lean toward one of them.
Your result is the one your answers pointed to most often. Skipped questions, and the occasional answer that does not lean toward any result, are not counted.
Alongside the result you see your answer profile: the share of your answers that pointed to each result. Close percentages mean you sit between two results, which is common.
Four honest answers
The Bored Builder
The thing works and you don't want it anymore, which is a real answer even though it isn't the one you expected.
There are users, there's revenue, someone would complain if it disappeared. What's missing is you. You're maintaining rather than building, you're already thinking about the next idea, and the good news that arrived last month didn't move you at all. That last detail is the clearest signal in the set, because motivation problems and traction problems look nothing alike once you separate them. The trap is treating boredom as a verdict on the project. It isn't. Plenty of businesses worth having are boring to run, and killing a working thing because the building phase ended is an expensive way to solve a personal problem. The other trap is the pattern: if you've done this before, the next project will reach the same phase in eighteen months. Separate you from it before you decide. The options are wider than continue or stop: hand the operating work to someone else and stay involved lightly, sell it to someone who wants a working business, or put it into deliberate maintenance mode with a few hours a month while you start the next thing. All three keep the value you built. Shutting it down out of restlessness is the only option that destroys it.
The Sunk Cost Carrier
You're continuing because of what you've already spent, and the spending is the one input that shouldn't count.
The evidence has been thin for a while. Growth is flat, users are hard to get on a call, and you've tried the obvious things more than once. What's keeping you here is the years, the money, and above all the public statements, since you've been telling people it's going well for long enough that stopping now feels like a confession. Meanwhile the runway is thin and the anxiety is doing real damage. The trap is well documented and it doesn't care that you know about it: past investment feels like a reason to continue when the only question that matters is what the next six months are likely to produce. Note also that founders in this position rarely lack information. They lack a way to stop that doesn't feel like failing in public. Set a date and a condition, this week, and write both down. Pick the single clearest measure of demand, name the number that would justify continuing, and give it a specific deadline no more than a quarter out. Tell one person outside the situation, because a private deadline moves and a witnessed one doesn't. And know that shutting something down cleanly, with users told honestly, is a well-regarded thing to have done rather than something you'll have to explain away.
The Signal Holder
It's small, it's slow, and it's real, and the main risk is that you stop just before the compounding shows up.
Something is working. A small number of people use it intensely, they complain in specific ways, revenue grew again this quarter, and you still enjoy the work. The numbers are modest enough that you keep apologizing for them, which is usually a mistake in judgment rather than a fact about the business, since most durable companies looked unimpressive for much longer than the retellings suggest.
The Wrong Vehicle
The insight is right and the thing you built around it isn't, and those are separable in a way that's easy to miss.
Something is happening, but not where you aimed. Users keep asking for the adjacent thing, the side feature has more life in it than the product, and the people you've talked to keep pointing at the same misfit. You're frustrated and still interested, which is a specific combination, and it usually means the problem is real while the shape you wrapped around it is wrong. The trap is defending the build. Months of work create an attachment to the current form, so the natural move is to explain to users why the thing they're asking for is really the thing you made. Founders lose a year here regularly. The opposite failure is throwing everything out, when most of what you've learned about the customer transfers directly. Make the change explicitly rather than drifting into it. Write down the insight in one sentence, separate from the product, and then design the smallest possible test of the new shape, aiming for weeks rather than a rebuild. Take it to the users who've been asking, since they've told you what they want and are the cheapest validation available. Keep the customer knowledge, the relationships, and the insight. Let the rest go without ceremony.
What this quiz can’t tell you
- It does not know your income, debts, taxes, dependents or goals, and any real decision turns on those.
- It sorts you by how you answered a set of general questions. It is not a financial plan and it is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold anything.
- Markets and personal circumstances change. A result that fits today may not fit next year.
Read more about how our quizzes are created, including how scoring works and what we do and do not claim.