The first sign someone is no longer committed in seeing a project through: starting another major project. The moment you have a more attractive side project, the more likely it is you won't go all out to keep the older project going forward. All project creators will recognize this, the tempation is universal. Sad, because a lot of ambitious projects tend to require multi-year commitment to get anywhere. You have to persevere through long spells of uninspiring growth and tedious work with almost any project.

One reason why I have never gone through with crowd funding: you have to be incredibly sure you are going to stick with something and see it through. Because when you abandon something it creates a lot of guilt. Sometimes abandoning a project is the right decision, but it's better to do that without having taken on backers or investers. The guilt would really get to me.

This is one reason why I admire the Pods team so much. They were in it for the long haul. Between 1.x and 2.x it seemed like there wasn't much going on. And today they have their own dedicated Pods camp with Pods 3.0 on the horizon. Its amazing work. What a loss it would have been if it had been abandoned somewhere along the way.

I can't tell from Pressgram what the true reasons were, just like it was hard to tell as an outsider why WP Daily really ceased, or why the Standard Theme closed up (all of which were promising and impressive ventures). It takes a lot of guts and effort to make things, I just hope that the next project doesn't suffer a premature ending before it gets a chance to mature.