I've been through this at every startup I founded, but managed to pull through in the end - and I'm still hoping this startup won't be any different. I struggl

I've been through this at every startup I founded, but managed to pull through in the end - and I'm still hoping this startup won't be any different. I struggle to imagine if any CEO has not had a tough time like this and felt utterly depressed at least once when things weren't working out. Rather than focus on the depression aspect however, why not discuss what COULD have been done better, and what Rand and other CEOs can learn from this - because ultimately there's an important lesson there besides "depression sucks": - Don't bet your whole business on one product. Products come and go, businesses pivot. Remember how Steve Jobs launched the Mac? He created a separate, small division for the Macintosh to directly compete with the rest of the company (working on Lisa - which wasn't going well actaully). That's genius. He knew Mac is a risky project that could well take much longer than anticipated. He didn't bet the whole house. - Start as small as possible. Moz Analytics was meant to be this giant swiss army knife right? Wrong. MVP lessons still apply. Couldn't you have launched the new brand with a tiny set of core features? Broke it into a modular setup where consumers could pay for features/modules in the future as you develop them? - Iterate. Real artists ship, remember? Agile software development and all that? Doesn't sound like you had clearly defined iterative goals that you were hitting as you went, because then you'd really have an idea for where you are in the software development process. You seemed to have to go on someone's word on this. Instead you should have been producing A product every month with an increasing set of features. That way you could have still launched on time, but with less features. - Review your progress often, and don't loose sight of the grand mission. Being smart doesn't help here - it often makes you stubborn, and I've got the same issue. But sometimes you need to have that thc-truffle, take a step back and think how else you could allocate your resources. Are there some other opportunities that the business can simultaneously pursue with a small set of resources as a backup plan? Are there some major M&A deals that can be done to shuffle things around? Do we need to hire more staff / or let people go who aren't hitting the deadlines? Drastic times call for drastic measures. The biggest issue with depression is that deep inside you still expect things to just get better on their own. And as they don't, you feel worse. Well the bad news is they won't get better on their own. You have to do something about it. - Don't fail to communicate. The value of your business is in its passionate community, not one product. Seems like there are lots of people passionate about SeoMoz. Instead of shutting yourself out due to what appeared to you as a product failure, perhaps you could have engaged the community in the process, help you establish the product roadmap for the features you should be rolling out first, and try to understand why 90k of sign ups failed to try out the product.