While I respect your desire not to use YCombinator to shill your company, you've got something that apparently is facing some growth problems. Why not at least include a URL, or description of your product to help us gague whether it's got legs? It feels like you're still keeping your product in the stealth mode, but at the same time complaining that it's not getting any traction. It's not clear to me how you expect something to take off if the company's only employee refuses to also serve as your PR person.
Perhaps b/c if his potential customers google him and find that he was recently thinking about abandoning the business altogether, they'll be even less inclined to buy from him?
People here generally do not take offense at linking to companies/sites/products/stuff we've built. Why should we? It's only 'shilling' if it's pushing it where it's not appropriate. Otherwise, we like to link to the stuff we've done - we're proud of it, by and large. In any case I strongly agree that having something to look at would be useful.
I think the mix is about right where we have it. I don't want to see more submissions shilling products. If you find out something interesting in the course of building your product or growing your business, please tell us about it. If you put a link in your profile, those who are interested will follow.
In my view that's appropriate "shilling" on this site.
Unfortunately, I strongly suspect it wouldn't be in the company's best interest to associate it with a post about possibly "giving up". Business customers already perceive the product as a risk (or the OP said) and uncovering a topic about it on Google where they can see the founder in tough financial situations won't excite customers one bit.
