I don't know about "torturous chaos", but there is certainly a point early in the life of any business where a) any silver linings are accompanied by big voluminous clouds and b) many well-meaning people tell you to cut your losses (+) and take the job at Google instead. I've gone through that three times.

+ : n.b. They'll say this even if you have no losses.

It's also probably true that, for probably any value of X less than maybe 5 years, there is a business who had a graph substantially identical to mine for day 1 through X and then decided on X to throw in the towel.