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Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

failory.com

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Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#11

Post by toast0 »

samspenc wrote: post #3

This 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.

Tech barely matters. If nobody wants your product, the right tech is a mock-up.

If people want your product, but you can't deliver because of tech, that might be promising enough to get funding for a better team. The dependency on a 3rd party product that's pulled seems real and dangerous though; you can't have security if you're built on something you don't control and can't replace under pressure.

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#12

Post by goatherders »

My experience consulting for many startups is that what is called "Value add" is a real problem at more than 2 or 3% of startups. The momentum of the status quo is really strong and only gets stronger the larger your target company. For example, getting a 5 person company with 4 engineers to try your new Dev tool is an order of magnitude easier than a company 10x that size which is an order of magnitude easier than a company 2x THAT size.

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#13

Post by pontus »

These retrospective analyses, while intriguing to read, should be taken as more descriptive than prescriptive.

When you talk to someone who actually succeeded at something, they'll talk about platitudes like working hard, product market fit, iterating, listening to customers, raising a lot of money or not raising too much money, and so on. Many people go so far as to try to emulate the behaviors of their "hero" (Jobs, Gates, Page/Brin, Zuck, ...), but that's a fools errand.

In a similar way, these types of postmortems should not be taken as prescriptive. They too are full of platitudes.

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#14

Post by ttul »

Are these really "mistakes" or are they just the random process of value discovery, which naturally involves a lot of failures. Finding product-market fit is not something you can engineer with perfect foresight. You raise money, you build something, and then you have a limited time to see whether your hypothesis about the market was correct. Often, if not most of the time, you fail to get the fit you need in order to succeed.

There are definitely execution failures, but in my experience spanning 20 years, I have seen far more failures that are really just failed experiments rather than execution failures. A half-decent team can get product-market fit; once you're there, attracting the people who won't fuck up the next phase is relatively easy. If you don't have product-market fit, no amount of genius will save your company.

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#15

Post by ska »

disease wrote: post #7
capnorange wrote: post #2

weird 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 f…

  but if I did I would view every single step...
To a first approximation, everyone knows this and at least tells themselves it is what they are doing.

The real problem is that is hard. In the vast majority of cases, much harder than the tech & engineering you are doing.

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#18

Post by stephenhess »

RobinUS2 wrote: post #17

Where should the primary responsibility for product market fit lie within a startup? E.g. product owner, CTO, CEO, .. ?

CEO is the primary but everyone in a startup needs to take responsibility for this. The core goal of a startup is to discover a "scalable and repeatable" business model.

https://steveblank.com/2010/01/25/whats-a-startup-first-prin...

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#19

Post by vishnugupta »

samspenc wrote: post #3

This 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.

Amazon is littered with awesome tech that took 2-3 years to build and launch but failed because there was no market for it. I worked on one such product, a micro payments web service.

It took me a while to realize that that’s just how Amazon operates. Carry out experiments all the time, most fail, but the ones who click take off spectacularly. As Bezos says, don’t take Hail Mary bet. Take smaller bets all the time.

Re: Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

#20

Post by onion2k »

RobinUS2 wrote: post #17

Where should the primary responsibility for product market fit lie within a startup? E.g. product owner, CTO, CEO, .. ?

CEO. The product owner should be finding what the customer needs, but as soon as you have more than one customer you'll have antagonistic pressures on what to implement next. It's up to the CEO to make the decision which customer needs to actually fulfil (with information and input from everyone else). It's up to the CTO to make those decisions happen in a way that doesn't stop the company doing more things in the future.
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