Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 453 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#21
post #15

They thought I would be just another brazilian and join their corporate corruption scheme against a major hospital here in southern brazil. The main guy, a PhD in Physics from a top university in europe (but a retard IRL), will be cleaning sewers until death comes. True story. edit: i was the founder and they were clients in a bootstrapping program involving a top 10 tech giant and a hospital

> will be cleaning sewers until death comes.

What does this mean? Is this a prison punishment?

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#22

I was an early engineer at a startup that failed for a somewhat unique reason with an important overarching learning. We built a software platform that intended to automate the job of market researchers. Those researchers we hoped to replace ended up finding the tool itself useful. Since the platform didn't replace the employees, our pricing model fell short. In the end, we found success by hiring our own market rese…

What was the name of the product/service if you don't mind me asking?

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#24
The startup failed because so much time was spent consulting to bring in revenue to pay meager wages, and not enough time was spent on building product.

If you're going to fund your company with consulting, make sure you have a very strict rule about how much time you spend consulting. At the end of the day, you need to build product.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#25
I worked on two that failed, one because of Napster-Induced Hysteria ("nobody will ever make money with online music!") and the other because we were myopic enough to think Orkut might bury us. Those were days, right?

From the first one I learned two things that are probably still applicable today, and from the second I learned one big thing. In order:

1. If people from outside the tech world end up controlling your software startup, that indicates you are doomed. Pretending otherwise will just make it worse.

2. Great teams are incredibly rare, and if you have the good fortune to be part of one you should really try to keep it together for the next challenge. (We dissipated so hard it was ridiculous... one went into motorcycles, one got a PhD, two floated back to Europe, one became a bartender...)

3. If the founders can not convincingly dogfood their own product, you are doubly doomed. I remember sitting at a table with founders while they tried to think of things they could maybe do with The Product we'd just spent months building, and feeling the rats of doom nibbling at my toes. It had not occurred to me that this was a possibility. Engineers: vet your founders!

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#26
post #15

They thought I would be just another brazilian and join their corporate corruption scheme against a major hospital here in southern brazil. The main guy, a PhD in Physics from a top university in europe (but a retard IRL), will be cleaning sewers until death comes. True story. edit: i was the founder and they were clients in a bootstrapping program involving a top 10 tech giant and a hospital

"my startup failed because I hired a snitch"

good thing the laws against unpaid interns, hiring discrimination, and interview homework all have toothless penalties

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#27
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 did) by figuring stuff out for yourself through talking with customers, but not having that person makes things 1000 times harder. Apart from having to spend a lot of time learning the domain, you also miss out on low hanging fruit initial customers / advisors who an industry cofounder would be able to acquire through their network.

#2 This is related to the first point above, but if you can, try to get angel funding from someone from the industry. Our angel was able to put us in touch with several industry players and regulators who were incredibly helpful.

#3 Before you start any venture, you need to sit down with your co-founders and explicitly agree on what the mission of the company is, what everyone's expectations and desires are, and what everyone's responsibilities will be. Take a decent amount of time to do this, put it in writing, and have everyone sign it. In my company we had three people with the title co-founder, all of whom had different ideas about what being a co-founder meant. One co-founder really wanted to be an advisor and never did any work, another co-founder really wanted to just be CTO and didn't really want to deal with non-technical matters, and I was left doing most of the day to day work. We also had 3 different opinions on risk tolerance and persistence. If you can map things out beforehand then you can hold people to your agreement when they aren't pulling their weight.

#4 Be flexible with your team. We had an initial product idea that didn't work out and we needed to pivot. Unfortunately the team that was a decent fit for the first space was not the right team for the second space. Don't be afraid to be honest about what the new requirements are and to let people go if you are still in the early stages and some people can no longer add value.

#5 If a vendor, advisor, or other entity says they will do something for free for you, it means they won't do it. We had 3 entities offer us free services because we were early stage and none of them actually did real work when push came to shove. Demand solid contracts from your vendors and demand to pay them.

#6 Hold off on incorporating until you have to. I spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with incorporation bullshit, tax bullshit, and compliance bullshit when we didn't even have a product and were still doing early stage work. Don't do this. Wait until you are at least ready to start development before you incorporate.

#7 Very few ideas are truly unique. A bunch of people probably failed at what you are about to try to do in the past. Do your research and figure out why they failed. Perhaps even try to reach out to them. I would gladly talk to anyone that asked me for advice or information on the state of the industry / product space.

#8 Get an accountant. There is SO MUCH TAX BULLSHIT and you don't want to be dealing with it yourself.

Ultimately we got unlucky in that our primary venture was in a space that was undergoing tremendous regulatory upheaval which made our product irrelevant, but given the nature of our team and circumstances, I'm not sure we would have had success even had the space not changed rapidly.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#28
post #15

They thought I would be just another brazilian and join their corporate corruption scheme against a major hospital here in southern brazil. The main guy, a PhD in Physics from a top university in europe (but a retard IRL), will be cleaning sewers until death comes. True story. edit: i was the founder and they were clients in a bootstrapping program involving a top 10 tech giant and a hospital

> will be cleaning sewers until death comes. What does this mean? Is this a prison punishment?

"out-of-court settlement", let's say, for when rule of law does not exist.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#29
post #15

They thought I would be just another brazilian and join their corporate corruption scheme against a major hospital here in southern brazil. The main guy, a PhD in Physics from a top university in europe (but a retard IRL), will be cleaning sewers until death comes. True story. edit: i was the founder and they were clients in a bootstrapping program involving a top 10 tech giant and a hospital

"my startup failed because I hired a snitch" good thing the laws against unpaid interns, hiring discrimination, and interview homework all have toothless penalties

What are you talking about? I was the founder/CEO.

Re: Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

#30
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

^ this is real talk. Big companies love to be behind on AP for a variety of reasons, among them: - Their own 'highly matrixed' organizational structure makes it near impossible to find 'the correct person' to talk to about accounting issues, let alone get a straight answer out of them - so chasing these issues down becomes a huge drag on your time and energy and you may very well just give up after a while - Past-due…

A lot of this is probably true, but it's really to your benefit to understand, as a businessperson, that this is generally how large clients expect to conduct business. You can fight it and even establish better payment terms, but it isn't always worth it. It's usually cheaper just to build a business that is resilient to late payments. Over the last 15 years or so, a lot of my best customers have been super-late pay…

No doubt about it. An effect of the behavior set I describe above [and I was only describing them -- I've been on both ends of that phone call over the years] is that in these relationships, the established payment terms are kind of irrelevant to the way things actually play out.
Post reply on HN