141–150 of 453 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fucking with cartels is expensive and stressful. Armored cars and armed security are nice and all, but being in a situation that necessitates riding in an armored car and armed security detail is not really fun.
Legal marijuana business?
Our uninsured CEO/cofounder developed a chronic illness and embezzled cash from us to pay his massive medical bills. Killed our runway, which we only found out after we hired an accountant to look into our books and find wenhad an empty gas tank. Since this was still at the f&f funding stage, none of us had the heart to go after him for it.
Wow. That's a great reason to advocate for universal health care in the US, because it lets people work for a more risky startup without having to worry about that particular risk!
We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…
We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…
I was a co-founder at a SaaS health startup that ultimately failed because our team imploded. I learned a variety of very useful lessons from our failure. #1 If you do not have strong domain expertise in your target market, your co-founder must. If none of your co-founders have strong domain expertise, you are in for a world of pain. It's possible to succeed without someone from the industry onboard (and we almost di…
We seemed (well no one knows for sure) to have the best data available (it was an analytics product) over our competitors, but didn't earn enough money with it. I can't blame our sales department as I have zero ideas how to even sell sliced bread, but our customers regularly said they liked our data better than what they got from the competition.
We did spend months improving our tech and even had stuff like geo-based load balancing, multi-DC failover, and a lot more. We prepared for a lot more customers and traffic than we needed to handle in the end. Some of it was warranted, but especially improving our data/algorithms even further was absolutely wasted time. We went from like 90% professional setup to 95%, and went from 99% good algorithms to 99.5% good algorithms, but we should have added more fancy dashboards and better UX. Admittedly, many customers just logged in and grabbed a CSV export, they paid for the data. But a not insignicant amount of customers also said the competition's presentation was a lot better. We never had a dedicated front end person with real design chops (not just being a JS developer), we should have hired one or two.
We also held on too long to old features/products that weren't the current focus but spread our resources too thin. We weren't enough developers/SREs for the workload, that means we either moved too slow or stuff got postponed.
I think we also never fully made the switch from "we'll do some customizations for customers to get them to fully make a commitment" to "this is the SaaS offering, take it or leave", but maybe the market space was also too small for that. It was B2B and the customers weren't something like Small businesses, where you have thousands.
Things that 100% did not matter: permanent overtime, too much vacation time We were a German startup acting within German work conditions, e.g. 40h were the norm (sure there were exceptions when something exploded), we had paid oncall and if you didn't sleep the whole night then you just handed over in the morning and went to sleep.
TLDR: Lack of focus on a single product, not selling to enough customers, did not perform step to lower-maintenance SaaS (worked too much like an agency)
I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…
This is a classic cash flow problem in business. Any very simple (usually free) “start a business” course from local government in the UK will cover this. I went on such a course and they explicitly talked, in detail, about this issue. They flagged it as a major cause of business failure.
Point being not to criticise the parent but to emphasise that startups are not different from any other businesses when it comes the basics like cash flow. Something that really stands out in the startup world is how little regard is given to the simple everyday business issues that business advisors the world over teach about every day. Anyone starting a tech business should do a simple course on business basics, in this example it could literally have saved the startup for an investment of a few hours.
Learned a lot in laser scanning and improved my programming skills tremendously (was CTO and main IT guy after finishing university).
Unfortunately PCs were not so fast as today and there was no help like today with all those APIs available, but only 2 major libraries that helped me to achieve the MVP: OpenCV and PointcloudLibrary.
We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes. With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases! Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We ne…
I wrote a great software library for specific web development problems back in the dotcom boom. I learned a few things, much of you hear already but is worth repeating : * The MVP thing is real. I had a competitor that regularly released simple things that barely worked - while I continued to polished my project. By the time I'd finished the competitors stuff was all over the internet few a year or two and no one was…
It’s better to write software to solve real problems - not software problems. Quoteworthy.