161–170 of 453 posts
I am towards the end of wrapping my startup. There were 3 main failure reasons - a. could not build a good team, b. co-founder was not 100% committed, c. picked target market in the geography which I was new to. Although it was my home country, the way to do business and lack of professional network became hindrance.
Well, it didn't completely fail yet. It's still going 13 years after I left, actually. But part of the struggles were brought on by my mistake with a military customer that probably cost us the contract. This was back at the beginning of the Iraq war. Our main contact told me the US should attack France, as they weren't supporting the invasion. I made the mistake of saying I was glad he was executing policy, not maki…
Even though I did all the software, I had only around an 8% stake in the company at the time.
The person in question decided we needed to “perfect” our product before taking it to market. She had us working 12 additional months and since we did not have “enough tests over the new features yet” she cancelled the 550 orders and gave the contracts to one of our competitors. At that moment I and the 2 electrical engineers in the team left the company and they ran out of money and close 6 month later.
Lesson learned: Big-corp CEOs don’t make for good startup CEOs 99% of the time.
I started a consumer robotics company with no more than a software and hobbyist robotics background. The grand plan was to sell furry robot pets and we got as far as the prototype stage and a demo at Maker Faire. After that we hit a huge wall. There is essentially no path from hobbyist, off the shelf components to a real product. After that company died I joined a real robotics startup with some seriously talented fo…
But we were just too early. The robot didn't even need to be very autonomous, shared autonomy was part of the plan (fake it till you make it and honest about it :-) ). I controlled the robot from the other side of the (small) country to give people their teddy bears and TV remotes etc.
Problem was that we tried to do our hardware completely by ourselves, whereas nowadays there are several options for mobile manipulator robots that look good enough to put in a home. We spent more time getting the robot to work than on useful applications (we had dozens of activities of daily live a robot could support). And even the getting our robot to work could be done more efficiency (in hindsight). We should have used e.g. an EtherCAT motor controller instead of writing of doing it all ourselves on a micro-controller.
We didn't progress enough quickly enough for our investors and subsidizers and ran out of money.
A another great lesson was this though: when you hear talk about robots in care, the complaint I get a lot is that that is sad for the clients, because they don't get someone to talk to (but a robot) and they will get lonely. That turns out not entirely the case. A lot of disabled clients told me they don't want to talk to the care-givers all that much, they just want their drink/toilet break/pen they dropped etc. They have friends and family and don't feel lonely. The complaint about loneliness is coming from the care-givers. For elderly people, it may be different though, but I found that very interesting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Partially I agree. On the other hand there are alot of cases of smaller companies not paying social security and health insurz for there employees in Germany despite having universal health care.
That sounds... kind of weird, especially the "a lot of cases" part. If you have an official company with official employees (and if either is not true, then well, everything's illegal anyway and your employees are not really employees) the health insurance will be on your toes quite quickly to pay your stuff (as I've experienced firsthand). The only thing I can think about is having all your staff as unpaid/underpaid…
Skipping on social security seema to be easier and more common than health care. Health care usually are insurance companies, so any missing payments are likely to be flagged. But atill it is possible to skip for a couple of months.
Social security is wired by the company to the authorities, and they usually take lknger to catch up. Ultimately these cases are found out amd prosecuted.
The main point being, even with universal health care cash stripped or just companies still find ways to not pay up.
I would have to dig a little deeper for some concrete examples and details. Just let me know if it is of any interest.
Why it was failed :
1. For sales and marketing, I hired my brother who was an MBA and things did not go well at work. He was not giving enough attention and dedication as product required in its initial phase and I was not able to push him hard because of personal relationships. He was about to get married too so he was under pressure to get a fulltime job. 2. Few people were ready to join my organization and they were ready to invest some money too but I was always afraid to give them equity of the company in return. I was in believing that I can run the company from profit I was earning from selling packages. 3. I was not prepared for the scenario when the product is ready to go to the next level.
I learned :
1. I should trust people more and give them chance to involve. 2. Personal relations should stay away when there is work involved. 3. Seed funding could be helpful to give the product a better shape.
Note: product(http://www.legalisor.com) is still running but I am not much active with its development.
On my first startup right after university, we were doing an IoT device (hardware + software), our MVP was good enough to make a couple of sales amounting to 550 consumers. At that point the board decided the best way to grow was to bring in “adult supervision” aka a seasoned CEO to run the company. Even though I did all the software, I had only around an 8% stake in the company at the time. The person in question de…
Possible lesson: Don't piss off the staff in an early stage startup.
Edit: spelling
Our startup failed because my business partner wanted to just be the "idea guy" who designed the screens, while having me code it and do all the heavy work. Initially, this was going to be a 50/50 split, but after working on it almost full time for about 6 months, I ran out of money. He had a pretty big savings account and came from a well-off family, so he agreed to front me basically just enough to cover my rent wh…
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 hated the very idea of selling something that is not finished so I never validated the product with customers. How could I explain to them how revolutionary will the product be? The only way was to show them. Like the first iPhone.
In fact, I didn't like the "talking to customers" part at all, so I focused on coding visionary product that will sell itself. Everybody liked it but nobody needed it.