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Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

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Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#81

Post by mlevental »

keithnz wrote: post #47
mlevental wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you think the new cofounder will substantially change your ability to have 5 successful pilots in the next 3 months? substantially? hard to tell. he is hungry, and smart enough (from what i can tell), but he's no magician (who is anyway?). >Are you excited about the space? no. we are not building tesla-spacex-oculus. it would be very hard to be excited about b2b tradeshows. i am excited about potentially building…

why do you think the market is there?

tradeshows are 500B global market.

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#82

Post by gerdesj »

I've just read nearly all posts here and I think that HN has done you proud. There is loads of good advice here and very little noise. You have enough loot left for three salaries for one year at $30,000 and some loose change.

You might be able to do something else eg: basic "IT" if you have people willing to give it a go an a few technicians on the staff. If money comes in then who cares where it comes from. Basic IT services are very easy to sell. Yes it is boring but you'd be surprised how it leads on. My little company has some customers that you will have heard of, and you are not from around here. We are boring and I wouldn't have it any other way 8)

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#83

Post by adventured »

kofejnik wrote: post #61
hhw3h wrote: post #21

Jason Lemkin recommends giving it 24 months to start a B2B SaaS. B2B SaaS is a long road despite the big splashes sometimes seen like Slack or Intercom. https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-... Also watch the CEO of Segment talk about their journey to product market fit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6pl5GG8RQ4

if it takes 24 months, how do you convince investors to fund those 24 months of searching, before you can show any meaningful numbers?

The same way it has always worked if you're going to exist on an investor's money: reputation and qualifications. A bit of luck helps as well.

Reputation of course involves things such as your past work experience, your past VC experience, past outcomes, who you've networked with that might refer you to an investor, and so on. This is largely about what you've done and how it forms the opinion of others.

Qualifications is what skills you possess, what you've accomplished, your education, your personal history, etc. This deeply ties into reputation. You can claim to be the greatest programmer ever, that's going to be incredibly difficult to verify for most venture capitalists, most basically won't bother attempting to verify it: they're going to judge you by reputation, partially in tandem with your claims.

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#84

Post by gattafrettolosa »

gerdesj wrote: post #82

I've just read nearly all posts here and I think that HN has done you proud. There is loads of good advice here and very little noise. You have enough loot left for three salaries for one year at $30,000 and some loose change. You might be able to do something else eg: basic "IT" if you have people willing to give it a go an a few technicians on the staff. If money comes in then who cares where it comes from. Basic I…

How did you find clients with a boring company? I love "boring" stuff btw, I feel like I helped more people doing boring stuff (tech support, simple automation) than the "hip" stuff

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#87

Post by andreshb »

If the investors were fully aware this is at risk and they backed you because of the team and not the product/market then I'd use the remaining cash to build something else where you are the first customer and start over. Reduce the team to just the co-founders, 100k is still a lot of money for a team of two or three and you can probably afford one or two more experiments.

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#88

Post by hhw3h »

threeseed wrote: post #34
hhw3h wrote: post #21

Jason Lemkin recommends giving it 24 months to start a B2B SaaS. B2B SaaS is a long road despite the big splashes sometimes seen like Slack or Intercom. https://www.saastr.com/if-youre-going-to-do-a-saas-start-up-... Also watch the CEO of Segment talk about their journey to product market fit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6pl5GG8RQ4

Slack was developed internally for years at Tiny Speck before being released. So they aren't like most startups who generally start their 24 month period with a lengthy period of product development.

great point. So in fact Slack's superficially meteoric rise was prefixed by a long incubation period within Tiny Speck. So if you shift the timeline to when the precursor internal version of Slack was developed it supports the point of most B2B SaaS companies needing 24 months to prove real traction.

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#89

Post by goatherders »

I dont mean to sound insensitive but why did you raise money without "product market fit?" I hate the phrase but accept its use. 220k for an idea without a sales or go to market strategy strikes me as terribly tragic. And based on the details you've shared, most of the burn was on people costs. So you had an idea, raised money, hired people...and NONE of them were full time sales?

Return the money. Take a vacation. Get up off the mat in due time. But NEVER ever start paying people (or yourself, most important) without a clear path to revenue.

Re: Ask HN: My startup has basically failed. What now?

#90

Post by _9ijd »

I’ve been in a similar position as you. I’ve spent the last 8 years building a b2b company. It’s a hard long road. I can hear the unspoken panic in your writing. It feels like you are flailing around and giving up already. You really need to analyze the reason you guys are failing without all the emotion if possible. You say that you didn’t learn anything valuable. That is absolutely not true. Think back to why you thought this was a good idea in the first place. Think about all the lessons learned with your failures. You actually got people to do some pilots. Making money is freakin hard. Ignore the prsssure from investors for a moment. They knew they could lose their money. You need to personally decide if you keep going or do something else. I can promise you it won’t get any easier though if you stay in the startup world.
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