Knowing When To Quit Is Just As Important As Knowing When To Keep Going

Sometimes, quitting is the best thing you can do.

In the past, I have held onto ideas far longer than I should have.

My stubbornness expresses itself in persistence. I don’t know when to quit.

This personality trait has served me well, as I truly believe that in any endeavor, the highest probability of success is simply to survive long enough for everyone else to either give up or die.

However, as I’ve gotten older and more mature, I have started to appreciate the other side of the coin. I’ve started to acknowledge that in some cases, the best thing I can do is NOT stay the course, but rather give up on an idea before it costs me any more of my precious time and money.

Here are some projects I’ve recently quit.

1. Your Boulder

YourBoulder.com is a local media site that reports on stories, business news, hiking trails, and other information for the residents of Boulder Colorado.

Out of all the projects, this one hurts the most. The reason is that I truly believe that local media sites are a great business model. They are useful, there is an audience, they are profitable, and they are fun

In the case of YourBoulder, I simply couldn’t maintain it anymore.

It didn’t make sense to spend time on the project when it inherently had a smaller revenue stream than my other projects.

Now, if you’re thinking about starting your own local media site, please don’t let that previous sentence discourage you. Nathan is making a ton of money with his local newsletter From Boise.

But I’m not Nathan. In my case, the time and attention I was spending on YourBoulder was taking away from the time and attention I could be spending on Stodzy and Copyblogger.com.

So as painful as it was, I gave it up.

P.S. - Wanna buy it? Hit me up in the comments? I’ll sell it for cheap. It’s basically an out of the box business that you can start today.

2. Agency Clarity

Agencyclarity.com was the first course I ever made.

I’m really proud of it. For years, I wanted to make a course but I couldn’t get out of my own way. I kept trying to record videos and then would get insecure and stop recording half way through and give up.

In the summer of 2021, Jules and I took a trip to Charleston South Carolina, (mostly because Jules loved the show Southern Charm) and during that trip I busted out my surface and wrote the outline of the course. Then when I got home I recorded the entire course in two days.

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I packaged the course on Podia and I made my first sale on the first day.

All in all I made around $10,000 from the course, which is a success in my opinion. But the truth is the money wasn’t the value, it was the breaking of my limited thinking that I didn’t know the “proper” way to create a product.

To sell the course, I would write articles about how to run an agency, collect email addresses through SEO, and then sell the course through a funnel. It was great.

Since then I’ve made many courses.

However, after a few years it was pretty obvious that trying to do Copyblogger Academy AND Agency Clarity made no sense. So I packed the course inside of Copyblogger Academy and I killed the brand.

3. The Copyblogger Podcast

The podcast is one of the best things I’ve ever done. It created so much value in my life, both for my business but also on a personal level.

However, the time came when I was starting to dread recording the episodes. After a few years, doing interview style podcasts became more of a chore than a privilege. I loved the interviews, but I hated the scheduling, the following up, the post editing, and the constant searching for new guests.

Eventually I got to a point where I didn’t want to do it anymore.

I brought the podcast into my investment with Hey Creator, and now Matt and Tim have taken over the podcast are are crushing it.

It all worked out.

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