ritwikt

1. You have not failed in life 2. The tone of the post seems like you have emotionally accepted that your current endeavor has failed and you are looking for external validation - but lets keep that aside for a moment -- Are you getting pull from customers about what you are building ? Is it growing at say >10% monthly rate? If not and your energy is running out .. Take a deep breath be pragmatic and think where do you want to leave an impact

It could be in the current area or another one and it is for you to decide. Hope this helps

Have been on similar boat and started my own ~7 mos back. Here are couple of points: 1. Be prepared for your savings to Last >1yr, unless you can get seed funding now 2. Is your gf/spouse ready for this 3. A start-up will not eat into your somewhat of social life, unless you want it to. IMHO I would say please hold on to it. You need that support. 4. PG talks about the weekend project thing .. didn't work for me coz they just loose steam 5. For the leaving NOW decision I would also consider if you have someone with somewhat of complementary skills ready to jump ship, If not I will spend the next 6 months finding that person and then quit [together]

Would be nice to know why RabbitMQ/ZeroMQ didn't fit the bill [scale/speed?] -- I can somewhat understand the not relying on SQS but then there is anyways a reliance on EC2 right ?

In plain english can one explain whats broken with iMap/current email and how Inbox fixes it ? I m missing something sure here

Please get a legal counsel and fire the CTO. At this early stage trust and respect is the only glue and he seems to have none for you at least.

The point to discuss not really looking for a perfect answer :)