CommitStrip nails one of the ways of getting into a bad project …
I remember reading an interview with Matt Mullenweg (though can’t seem to find a reference now), where he said that this sort of thing happened with Automattic. People were asking them for commercial support, but they didn’t want to do it, so they started with an insane amount of like $5,000 per month and all of a sudden found themselves with a queue of people outside.
And they were not alone, of course.