I’ve found rejecting the tendency to reduce people to narratives so incredibly important with our children.
Whether their latest choice has been probably good or probably bad, keeping those choices as something they did rather than something they are keeps the future open for them.
Almost anything smaller than a breadbox. I’m not trying to be flippant, but those are better starting conditions than I had for the moderately profitable craft kit or outdoor product manufacturing businesses I’ve run. Inventory is more likely to constrain your space than equipment, and power supply is more likely to constrain your equipment than budget.
Something I’ve found helpful: imagine you were starting from scratch today. Is this still THE problem you would want to work on? If not, move on. You’re right that 6 mo is not a lot in the grand scheme of things. Sunk costs suck, but there’s no getting them back.
If it’s still a good problem, then maybe your cofounder is right and the solution you were working on won’t solve it. If he’s the tech guy and you’re the business guy, I would assume you’ve done more of the talking to customers, but maybe there’s a tech challenge he sees. Worth investigating.
Strongly suggest against getting wrapped up in cofounder conflicts - that definitely doesn’t solve a problem.
If this is THE problem you want to work on, and you think your solution was headed in the right direction, modern no-code tools like Bubble make developing an MVP doable for a nontechnical founder. Depending on exactly what you’re building, something even simpler like a newsletter or some Google Forms integrations can do it.
Join a makerspace if you live near a substantial one. Mine (Protohaven in Pittsburgh) has both a CNC mill and a Morgan injection molder (a rare small injection molder good for 100s of parts), which is a nice way of exploring some tech before buying it. Even more valuable are the people who hang out at these places, who have probably done the things you’re considering.
For those looking for more support (or criticism) for this way of thinking, the reasoning behind the priority view is quite similar to John Rawls’ arguments that people would adopt a maximin (making the least good outcome as good as possible) strategy when behind the “veil of ignorance” (imagining setting up a society in which you don’t know how advantaged or disadvantaged you’ll be). Here’s more: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/original-position/
I’ve found http://ui-patterns.com/patterns to be particularly useful. The patterns both show you how others solve common design problems, and give you the vocabulary to meaningfully talk and find additional information about them.
Let’s say ads will always make more money (I have no reason to believe they won’t), and that’s required to be the dominant search engine because the web is big and expensive to organize.
I’d bet there’s some way to characterize what I and others liked about the earlier web and create a search engine that just worries about that stuff. I’d pay $9/mo for whatever 1/3 of Google’s spend per user would get me. That’s not to say this thing would “beat” Google, but it could profitably exist.
I think Google was “better” from a users point of view in 2005 because it wasn’t that good at selling ads yet. I still remember the epiphany of the first time I used Google in 1999. It was amazing.
I’ve thought the same about pre-ad Twitter and Facebook.
Early on, startups with free services look a lot like non-profits and just maximize user benefit to grow. The problem is they’re not non-profits, and have to make money at some point. That has tended to mean ads.
I’d easily pay, say, $9/mo to have access to an ad-free search engine that made me feel the way 1999 Google did.
Whether their latest choice has been probably good or probably bad, keeping those choices as something they did rather than something they are keeps the future open for them.