11–20 of 42 posts
Never waste time pursuing Indian VC's.
Could you elaborate on this?
Thus screwing the whole notion of Venture Capital. Indian VC's act more like a Private Equity Firm than a VC in a traditional sense.
* have at least 10 customers willing to buy my service when it's done. During the time of development they would commit to spend time with me validating my product hypothesis.
* prepare spec for a _REAL_ mvp.
* clearly _describe_ problem that I'm trying to solve. (now I know that it takes multiple iterations to achieve this - most importantly discussing the problem with your future customers)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you elaborate on this?
Apparently Indian VC's do not believe in taking risks. It's very rare of them to invest in companies which are not making money. Thus screwing the whole notion of Venture Capital. Indian VC's act more like a Private Equity Firm than a VC in a traditional sense.
Anyways, for me it was:
* not doing customer development at the very beginning
* concentrating on technology instead of customers
* not taking into account market forces
* not taking into account my economic environment (Eastern Europe != California), reading too many SV blogs
* not starting the company when I was younger (started at 27, should have started at 25)
I think not concentrating on customers is a common mistake, which could be avoided if for example the book "Four steps to Epiphany" would come up more often, and people would read it before spending 6 months writing code =)
http://www.amazon.com/Four-Steps-Epiphany-Steven-Blank/dp/09...
EDIT:
I actually think reading lists like this is not that helpful, at least it wasn't for me. A technical person doens't even know what customer development is. What's technology, it's different in different contexts. What are market forces in your segment, you probably don't even know when you're starting out.
I would recommend to talk to a friend who has started a business and has experienced the realities. I have been on the advice-giving end of such a conversation a couple of days ago, and it was shocking to see my mistakes (mostly wishful thinking and lack of ecomomic realities) repeated in my good friends line of thinking. I spent a whole night (8 hours) telling him my insights, it was pretty shocking for him, several times he walked out and then came back, but I was only telling him what I learned the last 2 years. In the end it was a good deal for him.
2. Not addressing a universal consumer market.
3. Extrapolating too far and pivoting unnecessarily.
4. Not focusing on the bare minimum of features.
5. Not keeping things simple.
6. Not having a big "Fordian" vision (read Ford's autobiography).
7. Not getting prospective customers to cover development cost.
8. Focusing too much on "talking about culture" rather than culture itself which is values plus action.
9. Not pushing employees enough.
10. Not insisting on timeliness (being "before time" not "on time") or outcomes enough.
11. Worrying.
12. Not working a fixed 8 hours a day (max 40 hours per week).
13. Not exercising consistently.
Needless to say in spite of these, the outcome so far has been good, but if I were to advise someone, I would mention the above.
Note I'm not talking about a "marketing launch", but a launch where your product gets in front of early adopters.
I was doing stuff I found interesting even though it wasn't what my customers were asking for, and in doing so I've left a lot of money on the table.
This is being corrected now, my users have been screaming for me to add advertising for a while (strange, huh) and I'd been against it because I didn't think it was important and because I thought I had more pressing things to do (adding new features).
But in the area I'm in (highly loyal niche community) most of the users are involved in cottage industries of their own and want the advertising to not only help ensure the sustainability of the community but also to give their products exposure and a springboard. Likewise users of the site have been asking for adverts so that they have a kind of slow beacon showing what new stuff has emerged that they might've missed in the ebb and flow of fast moving conversation.
So the lesson I've learned is to quit holding an anti-advert bias and to listen to the users more. They really want adverts and they really want to give me money, and I should really let them do the latter ASAP.
Another one would be to make larger pivots faster.
I started the company to own the pet project and to use that to fund what I feel are larger more complex things. However, the pet project has £3k revenue per month with almost no effort (maybe a couple of hours per week), clearly it's the one with traction and I should be behind that 100% instead of mostly ignoring it. There's so much I could still do with the pet project and haven't been doing because I've been researching more complex things... this is dumb of me in the short term as I could be building the pet project into the main entity and sustaining a proper income from it.
Both of these lessons lead to the same thing: Quit being blind about your realities. Stubbornness to only do the things you want to do, without listening to your users and customers, may be stopping you from actually do what you can do.
1) We knew far less than their average investment, which led to us experiencing more and faster improvement from the same help (while remaining worse than experienced founders, I would imagine).
2) We really weren't ready for the momentum funding put behind us. We had a business model that could support the founding team (we had broken even bootstrapping for the past year) but with the money comes the compulsion to hire and so on. It also put our focus on sales and revenue instead of learning, which caused some short term optimisation (eg. "Let's polish this product we suspect has no future so we can sell it now").
So raising that round was a mistake in terms of that particular business, but it taught me things that are hard to learn without taking investment and, more importantly, convinced me that startups really, truly, honestly do have distinct stages of growth that you can't force your way through.