I think the "Symptom: you're about to give up too quickly." should also be followed up with "Symptom: you're sticking with an idea that is dead"

if you had 3,000 people come through your site, without a single sale, it's probably a good idea to try something else.

it's very easy to delude yourself into thinking that you are a hockey stick case. "oh yeah, we've had 2 sales @9.99 this month...but remember the hockey stick...a year later, we'll have 5,000 sales a day!"

if you are going to stick with an idea, you need to have consistent sales that are actually increasing. So that there is an indication that someone actually wants the product you have to offer.

personally I take a 3 step approach to this. 1) get actual people to the site and see if it actually converts(2-3000 people is plenty). Once you find out your starting conversion rate(even if it's 1:2000) 2) then your goal is to scale up so you get decent traffic to the site...100-200 people a day at least. 3) then you start optimizing...run a multivariate a/b test every week with 3-4 variations. Discard the crap and keep the better converting ones. Keep doing this every week, and by the end of the year, you'll go through 100+ different variations, and your 1:2000 conversion rate, will most likely be down to 1:50-1:100.

and with a/b tests you have to test EVERYTHING...don't leave anything to chance. You don't know your audience, until you actually test. You have no idea if you'll get more conversions with "buy" "buy now" "get it" "download it" "order" "order today" "give us your money" "stop being an idiot" or "insert coin"...not until you actually test it. For all you know that "stop being an idiot" order button will increase your sales 10 fold.

What I find most interesting is that no matter how many times these points are brought up or given advice... a person who is just starting out will not take these in until experiencing them first hand, almost in a rite of passage way...

I recall doing every single one of these mistakes, and more. But it only truly registers fully when you actually hit them.

It's very easy to fall for some of those, also if you're not a first timer!

Even big, established companies run by visionary or at least very experienced CEOs seem to get some of those wrong at times, especially the 'you build it, they will come' and 'you're about to give up too quickly'.

Wave and N1 for instance with Google.

"You're about to give up quickly" is the hardest thing to judge really. Especially when you're a bootstrapped entrepreneur running out of cash, persistence becomes very tricky.

Would love to hear how fellow bootstrapped HN'ers dealt with such a situation.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say the most important advice you can give someone just starting out, is to just go out and release something.That you are going to make mistakes is almost a given, so why not make them as quickly as possible

A quote my father:

"Most ideas with an NDA attached aren't ones worth hearing."

IP is paper armor for most startups - you're advantages are going to come from things related more to execution than any sort of legal ecosystem.