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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?

#111

Post by wizardofmysore »

I have worked in a startup which failed, pivoted and now is a billion dollar company.

My main rule of thumb is that if your current problem statement is failing then become bigger, in the sense take up a problem that has even more market demand than the current problem and then add features to your existing solution to solve for the bigger problem. The chances of you landing a customer increases this way.

You have targeted B2B sales-shows think of targeting B2C+B2B shows now. Can your product solve for handling sales shows where consumers go?

Expanding is the key, usually companies contract further and fail, when you expand the chance of getting a customer increases.

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

#112

Post by wizardofmysore »

wizardofmysore wrote: post #111

I have worked in a startup which failed, pivoted and now is a billion dollar company. My main rule of thumb is that if your current problem statement is failing then become bigger, in the sense take up a problem that has even more market demand than the current problem and then add features to your existing solution to solve for the bigger problem. The chances of you landing a customer increases this way. You have ta…

Highlevel features I can think of

From a seller perspective

- contact management - emailing and reminders - text message nudges for customers - showing analytics of previous events - managing previous customers - feedback from previous customers

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

#113

Post by eight_ender »

Maro wrote: post #106

Hi, I had a startup fail after we (I had 1 co-founder) invested ~4 years into it. Some thoughts: A startup failing is not a rational thing. At this time emotions (regret, fear, stress, depression) take over, it's a tough time to handle. If it's tough for you, take comfort in knowing that it's tough for everyone. When I was going through this, I couldn't handle the stress, so it spilled over into my personal life, and…

As someone who worked as a CTO at what I like to call a "zombie" startup I agree with the poster above me, and it hurts just to recollect the history. You can keep this shit up indefinitely. We're in a weird environment where, with enough endurance, a startup, even one with a miserable high touch sales cycle and poor business model, can live month to month like some sort of crime family looking for the next big score.

If you go this route you'll score a contract or two, and you'll think you're growing. You'll hire on a brilliant employee and then fire them a few months later when the money dries up. Your heart will break. Your workload will increase.

You'll start leaning on contractors because FTEs need consistent revenue, and your shit investors insist on offshore labour because they don't know any better. Contractors suck and their code sucks unless supervised, so you'll decide to do it yourself. Your investors will get unhappy and your partner will find another naive low tier investor to buy them out and start the cycle over. Your share in the company will drop each time you do this.

Your counterpart will spend 1/3rd of their time appeasing the investors and the other 2/3rds attempting to be a top shelf B2B sales exec / account manager which they are not. They will get absolutely abused in the sales cycle and concede to shit they shouldn't. You will continue to burn the candle at both ends like a good technical leader in a crisis and then burn out, believing the entire time that technical superiority alone will win the day.

I'm painting a really bleak picture here, but only because I got out after three years of this when I finally realized the nature of the endless cycle of a cockroach startup. The company I worked for is still going, against all odds. Fuck maybe they go forever. I know people who still work there, and from all accounts it's an endless groundhog day of zero growth and pain.

Don't be that startup, if the business model is in peril this early on don't extend the pain, just pull the ripcord and, above all else, try to learn from the experience.

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

#114

Post by PeterisP »

justboxing wrote: post #65
fastball wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that not zero confidence? They built something, sure, but the technical cofounder believes it has very little/no utility. That's telling.

Having confidence in something, and finding out that your target audience doesn't want it, or need it are 2 entirely different things. Per his OP, the technical founder has not explicitly stated whether he believes that the product has zero utility. Rather he's saying that he found out (from data I suppose) that there is no product market fit for it.

Isn't "no product market fit" and "zero utility" pretty much the same thing for a startup? OK, there are things that have some utility for some people but (almost) nobody is willing to pay for that, but for a startup, that's as good as zero utility, if there's no market, then the thing is worthless.

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

#116

Post by djur »

mlevental wrote: post #27
tom_mellior wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a key assumption necessary in actually delivering value turned out to be pretty much false (basically we saw almost no adoption amongst users). I'm leaning out on a limb here, but if this means what I think it means, you have developed some app that tradeshow visitors are asked to install to reap some benefits that don't interest them. If that's kind of what you are doing, pull the plug now. People don't use that k…

you're very close and >People don't use that kind of thing. is exactly one of the key hypotheses that needed validation/falsification. what we are facing now is whether we really falsified it given poor marketing/education on the part of the organizer.

I worked in this market for a long time, and the biggest single problem with making software for conferences is that your users aren't your customers. Furthermore, your customers only have a rough understanding of what the users might want. Event attendees don't tend to provide detailed feedback to organizers.

This is why event apps tend to suck -- they're designed to appeal to people who aren't going to use them. To be successful, you have to actually figure out what users want _and_ convince your customers that you know better than them. This is incredibly difficult.

Also, organizers generally aren't invested in promoting your product. They buy your product in the hope that it will magically make their event more successful. It takes a lot of one-on-one training and coaxing to get most of them to participate. This is an extremely support-heavy market, and thus labor-intensive. Even as a startup, you rapidly end up needing dedicated customer support staff.

Also also, as it seems you discovered, there are a ton of pitfalls with building a product that is intended to be used by large groups of people, all at once, in a time-sensitive context, in a single enclosed environment, on their variously capable mobile phones. That makes failures nearly always catastrophic, and it erodes the average experience as well -- there's always people with some sort of bizarre cheapo phone that breaks in obscure ways, and those people also complain loudly and frequently.

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

#117

Post by rdlecler1 »

anovikov wrote: post #115

This is why i am wondering: why are the very early stage investors giving money in bulk vs feeding the startup some amount every week as long as they all agree it makes sense to keep going?

Because the founder would be spending all of their time reselling the investors every week. I don’t want an entrepreneur spending their weekends looking for jobs on LinkedIn because they had a bad week. You need patient capital to build and iterate to PMF.

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

#118

Post by superplussed »

hoodoof wrote: post #38

>> the main investors/advisors (from the 220k friends/family/fools round) pretty much feel like it's time to pull the plug Given your statement above, there's really no question beyond this point. You promised riches and success to family and friends and it is not currently looking like you will do that, and their message is "stop please before its all gone". Do so. If you still have money and it is from family and f…

Yeah, the "fools" line is an indicator that you are burned out and have lost your belief in the mission. You'd be lying to yourself and others if you continued.

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

#120

Post by anovikov »

rdlecler1 wrote: post #117
anovikov wrote: post #115

This is why i am wondering: why are the very early stage investors giving money in bulk vs feeding the startup some amount every week as long as they all agree it makes sense to keep going?

Because the founder would be spending all of their time reselling the investors every week. I don’t want an entrepreneur spending their weekends looking for jobs on LinkedIn because they had a bad week. You need patient capital to build and iterate to PMF.

That's interesting, so you see convincing someone paying say $10,000 a week as long as he sees progress as good, slowly exchanging it for stock at a set valuation, as harder than shelling out $2M out of the pocket in one bulk amount?

I have experience of the former (well, it was more like $5K in my case) and it wasn't hard at all, i struggle to imagine myself raising $1M at once. $5K a week sounds like too little, but as far as hiring coders go, as i am in East Europe, it's like $10K in West Europe or $20K in the Valley, not insignificant.

Maybe that's just shyness/psychological barrier? I struggle to imagine myself saying someone 'give me a million bucks and we'll build this cool thing and get rich', but asking for 'decent salaries for these good guys and myself, so we don't have to go to Upwork, plus covering our AWS costs' is whole lot easier for me, and it works.

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