I wrote something similar today, only I called it "When the Sh-t Hits the Fan with Your Startup": http://www.erica.biz/2013/startup/ http://www.erica.biz/2013/s

I wrote something similar today, only I called it "When the Sh-t Hits the Fan with Your Startup": http://www.erica.biz/2013/startup/ http://www.erica.biz/2013/startup/ In the post, I wrote: I firmly believe no outside problem (running out of money; struggling to pay bills) can’t be fixed by looking inside yourself and becoming a better, stronger person. That may sound sort of cheesy and "self-help-y", but for me it was transformative. I had to have internal confidence before I could project confidence externally. In order to have that internal confidence, for me, it involved rethinking absolutely everything about our startup, from our name to our customer demographic to our value proposition. (I go into detail on what happened and how we re-thought our startup in my blog post.) Once I rethought everything, I found a deep well of internal confidence, and we went from "teetering on the brink" to raising another $175,000 from outside seed investors quickly (some of whom had been sitting on the fence for months), and then applying to and getting into Techstars' first Austin class as well. External problems like lack of money or investors saying "no" are often reflections of your own internal doubts or lack of confidence. As PG said, it's not fixed by bravado, but by going deep inside yourself and rethinking your assumptions. Why are you doing this? Of all the things you could be doing, is this the #1 thing that drives you every single day of your life? Once you fix your internal issues, the external issues resolve themselves. However, this lesson may be something you have to experience to believe (as I did.)