Misapplied kill criteria

Former professional poker player Annie Duke has become something of an advocate for quitting. Starting from her foundation in poker, she observes that the most successful professional poker players fold much more often than the amateurs and are therefore able to get ahead faster by quitting. She then applies this principle across lots of situations with stories ranging from bad relationships to climbing Mount Everest.

The Mount Everest example is a good illustration of her concept of "kill criteria." The crux of this concept is that you should plan before you get into the heat of the moment and decide ahead of time under what conditions you will quit and save your energy/resources for another day. In the context of a Mount Everest summit they have set turnaround times, where if you have not reached the summit by then, you should turn back to camp or risk much higher risk of death.

In most situations, I think this is good advice, as there is a natural bias against quitting that keeps us from cutting losses before it is too late. However, in startup culture lately, I think the bias is starting to turn in the other direction which makes it easy to misapply this principle. Currently the idea is in vogue, especially among the Indie Hacker crowd, to execute lots of small startup ideas and be very fast to kill anything that doesn't get quick traction.

On the surface, this may seem like it fits well with Annie's ideas, but I think it's very easy to take her concept too far. Often in business, you are learning as you go, so the "kill criteria" you set up before you know much about your project might not be very relevant once you progress. Also, getting traction is not linear, it often comes in viral peaks and valleys, so it's hard to say when you've given it everything you have in terms of marketing. And anyway, as long as you are making enough money to live off of and are learning new things about your space, shouldn't that be enough to keep going? If you are really and truly putting in disciplined work over time, you will uncover something that grows into a big idea - just as long as you don't kill it too quickly.