Ask HN: Crashed founders, what was the point of failure?

Looking back, the venture was doomed from the beginning. I think it was due to a lack of structure:

* No daily routines to take care of my physical & mental health (working 0-16 hrs a day on 3 coffees is not good haha)

* No systems in place to socialize (sometimes I'd go weeks without talking to friends)

* No clear weekly/monthly goals. I would operate on 1-2 day sprints and constantly change the product roadmap & distribution strategy

* No clear distribution strategy. I kind of just did whatever came to mind

* No focus on generating income. I wanted to build cool shit that impressed people > building something of value and asking people for money in return

That period of my life was pretty dark and depressing, but a period I'm glad I went through. In the end I learned how to code (which has 2x'd my income potential) and I learned a ton about product & business.

I'm going to go for it again, and when I do I plan on putting a much bigger emphasis on taking care of my physical & mental health, as well committing to 1-2 month plans (instead of changing plans every 1-2 days)

Anecdotally, I've experienced the small business/enterprise dilemma from the inside. Working for some companies perpetually struggling to make payroll and others looking for useful ways to spend more of the money flowing in.

It seems like instead of ignoring small businesses, one could group view the owners as consumer, with similar scale and prove considerations.

I like the idea of 10x better mousetraps. It's not no, it's just a high bar.

Interesting enough that the successful exit was because of astute cap table management. The founder was very ruthless about managing the cap table and negotiating to maintain a huge amount of equity, which turned into a fairly good exit for the founders / execs / early engineers despite a relatively low acquisition price. And the reason the acquisition happened at all was for IP rather than customers, so I guess even without strong product / market fit a successful exit can still be accomplished if the founder is clever.