Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
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Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#2weird usage of the term "Marketing" to mean business related(product market fit, competition etc).
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#3This was a surprisingly good read and data-driven.
I found it surprising that the top reason for failure was product-market fit followed by team. I would have thought finance (#3) and tech (#4) would rank higher.
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#4Great article
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#5Good read with some really interesting information, but I don't know that I agree with the way it implies that there's a single, defining reason for failure. All of these things are intertwined - you can't get raise money if you don't have product market fit, and you can't bootstrap things if you aren't bringing in money. Team problems are tied into everything happening in the company. Tech problems are very much related to product market fit.
Like I said - good information, but I guess it's really the pie chart that made me feel like they were oversimplifying things.
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#6This was a surprisingly good read and data-driven. I found it surprising that the top reason for failure was product-market fit followed by team. I would have thought finance (#3) and tech (#4) would rank higher.
I think finance and product-market fit go hand in hand, and it's a question of the founder's perception of which is more important. If you don't have a good product, you won't make any money, so for those startups it really depends whether the founder saw running out of money as the final blow or the fact that the product didn't find its market to be the overarching cause of things.
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#7weird usage of the term "Marketing" to mean business related(product market fit, competition etc).
Event "product market fit" feels like a sugar-coated way to say that no one is interested in purchasing your product.
I don't have a startup, but if I did I would view every single step in the process of creating one, both technical and non-technical, as an opportunity to test the market viability of your product.
I'm honestly surprised at the abundance of non-product-viability issues that were cited as determining factors. Maybe this reality is hard to face?
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#8weird usage of the term "Marketing" to mean business related(product market fit, competition etc).
Yep, that's what marketing is (having studied several subjects in it as part of my business degree back in the 90s).
Marketing is not just a synonym for advertising and promotions, etc.
Marketing is about finding/building/reaching a market for a product. It involves both identifying/creating a market, and identifying/creating a product for that market.
Advertising/promotions is just a small (though expensive) part of it, but it's the part that the world sees, so laypeople can easily think that's all it is.
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#9This was a surprisingly good read and data-driven. I found it surprising that the top reason for failure was product-market fit followed by team. I would have thought finance (#3) and tech (#4) would rank higher.
Customers really don’t seem to be all that picky about tech quality in many cases.
I know a guy who got government SaaS and IoT contracts with little more than the knowledge of PHP for Dummies and Arduino.
“It runs” is more than enough in most cases. You can get by with “it runs 90% of the time” too.
Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups
#10Good read with some really interesting information, but I don't know that I agree with the way it implies that there's a single, defining reason for failure. All of these things are intertwined - you can't get raise money if you don't have product market fit, and you can't bootstrap things if you aren't bringing in money. Team problems are tied into everything happening in the company. Tech problems are very much rel…
Yeah, it’s sampling from a distribution where every company has problems in every one of those spheres they are mentioning, except only one of these issues will be the last one to finally finish the startup.
So it’s more about sampling from what kind of issues are more prevalent in a startup rather than what kind of mistakes they will be making.