66. As a startup CEO, how do you decide whether to keep pushing on with it or admit defeat knowing that most startups fail? Never, ever, ever, never quit if you can get to 10 paying customers (that aren’t your friends, relatives, ex-bosses). Ever. Until the last nickel is gone, until they shut off the power (and even then, you can go to Starbucks). Ever. Because ... no one needs Yet Another Paid Product. No one. If you got 10 paying customers ... you can get 100. You will get 100. At some point. If you don’t quit. And if you get 100 ... 1000 isn’t impossible. There are 6,000,000 businesses in the U.S. alone. Break it up into 10x chunks. One order of magnitude growth. Quit if you never get 10 paying customers within 6, 12, 24, 200 months of launch, and have no ideas about how to tilt to get to 10. But ... product-market fit for paid SaaS products is just so much rarer, and harder than people realize. Don’t quit if you have 10 customers. Find a way. Push through. SAASTR.COM 63