A year and a half into our first startup, I can see why determination (or should I go out on a limb and say downright stubbornness) is so highly rated. We buil

A year and a half into our first startup, I can see why determination (or should I go out on a limb and say downright stubbornness) is so highly rated. We built a decent product in roughly 6 months, and began engaging with enterprise customers. 6 frustrating months of trade shows / cold calls / presentations later, we had a couple of potential customers but things seemed way too stagnant; their intent to purchase just wasn't apparent. We were running low on cash and the first visible cracks in our patience were emerging, but we stayed put. And that's probably because we've known each other for over 5 years and each of us didn't want to let the others in the team down. And then suddenly a month later we received our first purchase order. Okay, it wasn't exactly sudden - we'd followed up a million times with the client and iterated on the product each and every time. But nothing else had changed, we hadn't done anything significantly different in that one month. And that had us convinced that patience can be a real virtue. We've not exactly dug ourselves out of a hole yet, but we're getting there (with several promising leads in the pipeline) and more importantly, a repeat order as well as a testimonial from our first customer. EDIT: Just in case you thought the story above was manufactured, here's the a link to the testimonial [PDF] http://creativeriot.com/resources/[Enpower]%20CoreLogic%20-%20Case%20study.pdf http://creativeriot.com/resources/[Enpower]%20CoreLogic%20-%...