41–50 of 51 posts
The literally felt they could exit with a patent and a prototype that none of the remaining people understood.
The engineer spent 3 months cleaning up previous bad engineering decisions, and spent another year making the product strong enough to be used as a test system.
Then they did a round of funding, but paying that engineer was not where the money was going to go.
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%?
A lot of it is luck and executing on the roadmap and pivot if the feature fails. 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?
You answered your own question. Are they smart enough to make a solid plan and execute it? Are they smart enough to not miss a beat when their solid plan inevitably goes off the rails? Is the leadership humble enough to behave like this? Are they confident enough to be transparent about it? These are my personal metrics. There is no predicting the future, so I assess how the leadership handles making mistakes. The rest is just market statistics.
- Relied on legacy systems built by large, entrenched companies
- No consideration given to interchange fees that nearly guaranteed operating at a loss
- Repeatedly burned clients by drastically over-promising, delivering late, then abandoning support beyond minor bugfixes
- Poor project management (more interested in tweaking JIRA than answering critical questions)
- No product ownership
- Refusal to build MVPs or prototypes to prove concepts were feasible before trying to turn them into finished products
- Extreme lack of focus
The company still exists because keep having to get money from more and more questionable sources (most recent round came from an investor who is wanted by the Chinese government for corruption). Assuming they continue to operate, I wouldn't be surprised if they got raided and shut down for one financial crime or another.
The majority owners felt that it wasn’t important to keep the only person who knew the product employed. The literally felt they could exit with a patent and a prototype that none of the remaining people understood. The engineer spent 3 months cleaning up previous bad engineering decisions, and spent another year making the product strong enough to be used as a test system. Then they did a round of funding, but payin…
The second time there were different issues (and I was not alone). Product-wise we focused on the wrong thing. We tried to mostly build something which was already provided from our competitors (just improve it) and did not focus on something more original first which could have given us an edge. Financially we invested into the wrong things early on, even we did not need them yet (like marketing tooling). In the end we were simply out of fuel (money).
Third time is a charm and I am currently involved in a few businesses (most of them not even started yet) beside a full-time job. It looks like my current problem is that I want to do many things at the same time, so will have to reduce what to focus on soon.
https://www.amazon.com/Destroy-Tech-Startup-Easy-Steps/dp/09...
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…
This is consistent with my observation that 80% of startups fail due to a bloated MVP [1] [1] https://bloatedmvp.com
The startup was just me and one other guy. He went on to become a priest. That fits his personality perfectly based on how quick he was to forgive me.