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My question to the startup experience HN crowd is: What would be the right questions to ask before joining a startup to gauge the success and failure possibilities in the future?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Whereas this may be a common reason for failure, we failed because we were all engineers. Nobody with management/sales experience on the team!
I'd love to hear what an ideal ratio is? Somewhere between 10-25%?
The strength of the leadership and managers is really a key component of how much % is required.
Go niche they said and I did. I also picked real pain point: doing compliance tracking in EU is ridiculous process and it is often called as a biggest burden of wineries.
It turned out that small to mid sized wineries really hate doing paperwork, but they dont like to do it on computer as well. So after four years I found being in limited marked with product that my customers seeing more like necessary evil and with high cost of getting new people converting to core users.
Once they did convert they tend to stay for years (zero churn for customers that make effort to start using it systematically).
I do have some customers and I do keep the doors open, I even do additional development as I see fit, but I dont see bright future for the product. Four years of fulltime work went into building it, but hey thats how it goes.
We built a huge dataset that we thought could be usedfor supply chain management, but the only successful p/m fit was by putting it on the web and putting ads on it. Even when we got to 5 figures/mo in ad revenue, we insisted on a different model. So we ignored the thing that was working in favor of our "vision". Ended up in an acquihire for garbage money.
Congrats! Your startup didn't fail. ;) Seriously, an acquihire for not enough money is sooo much more valuable a story than we lost everything and died...
Apple store changed their terms of service. We were lucky pre-launch and haven't invested too much time. Another startup with 6 people (future competitor?) closed their shop shortly after.
Is this Apple retail store or the App Store?
Oh boy! Which one? Startup #1: we did not recognize the need to bring in the talent we lacked (graphic design). We had an interesting but ugly product in a space where looks were important - had some traction but not nearly enough. Startup #2: we did some market research, got some interest from prospective clients, got excited and started building our MVP before fully validating the requirements. Spent a lot of effor…
Oh boy! Which one? Startup #1: we did not recognize the need to bring in the talent we lacked (graphic design). We had an interesting but ugly product in a space where looks were important - had some traction but not nearly enough. Startup #2: we did some market research, got some interest from prospective clients, got excited and started building our MVP before fully validating the requirements. Spent a lot of effor…
What should be the next step after failing to get traction?