Why You Shouldn't Give Up on Your Business (Even When You Can't See the Results Yet)
Nobody rings the Nasdaq bell in year one. Six female founders on the quiet, unglamorous middle years, when nothing's working yet and quitting would be the sensible thing, and why those are the years that count.
Some weeks, running your own business feels like shouting into a room where nobody turns around. If you're wondering whether to give up on your business, you're probably not in a dramatic crisis. You're just tired. You've been at this for years now, the revenue is flatter than you hoped, the launch you poured months into sold to a handful of people, and no matter how much you post, the audience barely grows. Somewhere in there, the doubt starts asking the real question: are you building something, or just too stubborn to walk away from something that isn't working?
Before you answer that, read what follows. The six women below all sat in that exact room, some of them for years. What they had wasn't a secret the rest of us don't. It was the willingness to stay in it long after the point most people walk away.
Sara Blakely spent two years being told no before Spanx sold a single unit
Blakely had $5,000 in savings, a communications degree, and no background in fashion or manufacturing. She kept her nine-to-five selling fax machines and spent two years planning Spanx at night, cold-calling hosiery mills and getting turned down again and again. To save the legal fees she couldn't afford, she wrote her own patent from a textbook she found in Barnes & Noble. The yes finally came from a mill owner in Asheboro, North Carolina, who called her back two weeks after turning her down, because his daughters had told him not to let the idea go. Spanx made her the youngest self-made female billionaire on the Forbes list in 2012.
For those two years, Blakely earned nothing from Spanx and had no proof any of it would work. What kept her going was a refusal to read no as a verdict on her. She treated every rejection as information about the factory, not about her idea. That stubbornness was the whole business before the product ever hit a shelf.
Melanie Perkins heard no from more than 100 investors and built Canva anyway
Perkins started Canva out of her mum's living room in Perth, and spent three years being told design software was a solved problem, that Adobe already owned the space, that there was no room for her. She pitched to more than 100 investors and heard no from nearly all of them. Canva is now used by hundreds of millions of people a month, in around 190 countries.
"Someone bigger already does this" ends a lot of businesses before they get going. It shouldn't. There is nearly always room for the version that's simpler, or friendlier, or built for the people the giant couldn't be bothered to serve. Those 100 rejections weren't Perkins failing. They were three years of her sharpening a pitch until it was undeniable.
Jamie Kern Lima was told she was too fat to sell makeup, and carried on regardless
Jamie Kern Lima started IT Cosmetics from her living room in 2008, funding it from savings and going three years without paying herself. The rejections stacked up. QVC turned her down for years, Sephora for six. One male investor told her, to her face, that he didn't think women would buy makeup from someone with her body and her weight. She went home, cried in the car, and kept going.
She didn't hand the decision over to the people who doubted her. When QVC finally gave her a single ten-minute slot, she went on air, took off her own makeup live to show the rosacea her product was designed to cover, and sold around 6,000 units in under 11 minutes. In 2016, L'Oréal bought IT Cosmetics for $1.2 billion. No woman had ever run a L'Oréal brand before. She became the first.
The lesson isn't that she was broke and stuck it out. It's that she refused to let other people's opinions of her become her opinion of herself. The experts who reject you often can't picture something they haven't already seen. That's their limitation, and it doesn't have to be yours.
Whitney Wolfe Herd was pushed out of her own company, then built a bigger one
Wolfe Herd co-founded Tinder and left in 2014 after a difficult exit. She had no intention of building another dating app. Instead of retreating, she took the exact thing that had hurt her and built around it. Bumble, where women make the first move, was designed to fix the dynamic she'd lived through.
In 2021, she rang the Nasdaq bell to take Bumble public, becoming the youngest woman ever to lead a company through an IPO in the US, at 31. She did it visibly pregnant, with her young son on her hip. Her worst professional experience became the blueprint for her best one. The thing that knocked you down this year is sometimes the thing you end up building on.
Reshma Saujani lost a very public election, then found her actual calling
Saujani was a lawyer who, in 2010, became the first Indian-American woman to run for Congress. Every pollster told her she couldn't win. She ran anyway, and she lost badly, 19% to 81%, in full public view. Coming from a family that prized security, a defeat that visible was crushing.
But while campaigning she'd been visiting schools, and she'd noticed something: the computing classes were full of boys and almost no girls. That observation became Girls Who Code, which has since reached hundreds of thousands of girls across the US and beyond. The loss wasn't the end of her ambition. It was the thing that pointed her at the work she was actually meant to do. A failure can clarify what a win never would have.
Anya Hindmarch built a global brand from her dining table, doubt and all
Hindmarch, born in Maldon in Essex, started her accessories business in 1987 by importing leather duffel bags from Italy and sending one to the magazine Harper's & Queen (now Harper's Bazaar UK). That single feature sold 500 bags and started the company. She had no design training. In the early years she sat alone at her dining table, packing boxes and fighting through invoices, wondering what she was doing. She kept going, taught herself to design, and built a brand now sold in more than 50 stores across around 17 countries. She was later made a Dame for her services to fashion.
Someone once told her, "Anya, you must take the emotion out of this." She decided the opposite: her business was built on emotion, and so was her connection to the people who bought from her. If you feel too emotionally invested in your business to be sensible about it, that isn't a weakness to fix. For a lot of founders, it's the actual engine.
What all six of them have in common: they were still standing when it turned
Not one of these women could see where she was heading while she was in it. The years that later became the origin story were, at the time, just years. No proof the effort was buying anything, no sign it would work. Blakely went two years without earning a penny from Spanx. Kern Lima took no salary for three. What looked from outside like failure was just the middle years, the part nobody posts on Instagram.
The difference between them and everyone who gave up isn't talent, and it isn't luck. It's that they were still standing when the thing finally turned. Nobody rings the Nasdaq bell or sells to L'Oréal in year one. They get there because they were still in the game in year seven, when most people had already talked themselves out of it.
And you don't need a grand plan, or nerves of steel, for any of this to be worth it. The first female founder I ever saw was a woman called Dina, who runs a hair salon on Coppins Road in the town I grew up in. She never set out to own a business. She fell into hairdressing, got talked into taking on the lease, and admits she wasn't confident she could do it. She just went year to year, hoping for the best. Twenty-seven years later the salon is still hers, and in 2023 local readers voted it the best in its corner of Essex. Ask her what the real reward has been and she won't say the money or the award. She'll tell you about her 25th anniversary, when more people turned up than she ever expected, and she understood how much she'd come to mean to them. You don't have to feel sure of yourself to build something that lasts. You have to keep showing up, and be good to the people around you.
So should you actually keep going, or not?
Sometimes stopping is the right call, so this isn't a lecture about pushing through no matter what. The real question is what you'd actually be stopping, because it's rarely the whole business.
Changing direction isn't giving up, and neither is resting. Dropping the offer that drains you, letting go of a client who underpays and swallows your whole week, raising your prices, rebuilding a model that's stopped working: none of that is quitting. It's protecting the business from a plan that's grinding you down. Every woman above changed something along the way. Their businesses survived because they changed what surrounded the idea, not the idea itself. (If that's where you are, slowing down might be the strongest move you can make.)
Before you decide anything you can't undo, sit with these.
If money weren't a worry for the next six months, would I still want to stop? Or would I just want to change how I'm working?
What exactly am I tired of? The whole business, or one part of it that's draining me?
Am I judging my day 400 against someone else's day 2,000?
If a founder I admired described my exact situation back to me, what would I tell her to do?
Start-up creation among women hit its highest point on record in 2024, the first time Warwick Business School's long-running GEM UK study had seen the figure that high since it began tracking. Early-stage business activity among women has tripled since 2002. The ones who make it aren't the ones who always felt sure of it. Most of them felt exactly like you do now, wondered whether they were kidding themselves, and kept going anyway.
You started this business for a reason. Don't let one hard week be the thing that ends it. Change what needs changing, and give yourself the chance to still be here when it finally turns.