Happy to, although I wish I had used the word "define". Let's say that you wake up one day obsessed with the idea that since GitHub made programming better, a

Happy to, although I wish I had used the word "define". Let's say that you wake up one day obsessed with the idea that since GitHub made programming better, a GitHub for datasets is definitely something that data people want and need. Of course, they just don't know it, yet. After you get together with your cofounders and decide that you're really going to quit your jobs and do the startup thing... this is when you should define what success looks like and what failure looks like, and start the clock. You might say that your first success milestone could be 25 paying customers in three months. Maybe that's a lot, maybe that's too little. 25 is more than 0 and less than 100. You want to set a target that will make you sweat a bit, but not be impossible. A set of conditions where you can go to whoever gave you seed capital and say, look: It's working! You might say that your failure milestone would be not getting 1 customer in the first month, after you put together a cool presentation or demo video. It might be that you only get 80 users signed up, and only 2 of those users ever engaged beyond the first screen. It could be that after three months, <1% of your beta users transitioned to a paid plan - even though that plan is discounted 60% for the first two years. And then stick to those criteria and those dates. Don't move the goalposts more than once. Give yourself a bit of slack if you didn't calibrate well out of the gate, but cut that shit out if you find yourself self-funding an idea that has failed to find even a humble audience of true believers who are willing to pay for it and tell their friends without you having to ask. There's a term for this: putting good money after bad. HTH