I chose to start my own startup than do a job after studies. I haven't recieved any funding but got a good traction. No revenue yet however. I am feeling like I should try it for some more time. How to know when it's time to shut it down or continue working on it?
How can you say you have good traction if you have no revenue? Do you blog in a space adjacent to your product to attract potential customers? Have you built up an email list?
Simple answer: it's time to go get a job when you run out of money.
What are you doing right now to make sure you don't run out of money? (It's also time to go get a job when you don't care enough about your startup to do the hard work required to become profitable)
First at all what time do you have with your company?
Raise a company from the ground is hard, requires a lot of effort and patience. If you are alone you need some diffusion about your product, and make a product good enough to compite with others.
If you have a long time with the startup and you see that not going so well, and you try different things, think about it, why it's not raising? why it's not generating revenue?
If after all you consider you make all the posible, maybe it's nice to go for a full time job and maybe try later.
I depends ... can you still live and do you like it ? I would go on ... if you cannot live anymore and you have no business-plan / founding / partner / ROI in sight you probably should get a part time job to compensate.
And if you find out that you want to do something else I would still take the part time-job (20h) and work on something you love.
Jan Vladimir Mostert
Idea Incubator
A job gives you experience which you sometimes don't get with a startup - co-workers will know stuff which you haven't even touched. So joining the workforce has benefits as well.
Make sure you do your market research to make sure that what you're building is actually relevant. Very often people just start building stuff to solve a problem which doesn't even exist for most people and then they wonder why they can't generate revenue from their startup.
Also, raising funding shouldn't be your goal, your goal should be to build a profitable business. If you're not enjoying what you are doing and not seeing a way to generate income from the startup, move on. If you genuinely believe you can make it and you put in the hours (don't buy into that 4-hour work-week nonsense), you have done your market research and it checked out, you have the right people to make things happen and with some luck, you might just make it.
Finally, nothing stops you from doing a full-time job and working part-time on your startup, that's typically the safest way to go, unless your startup is already profitable or money is not a problem.