Startup mistakes: Lessons from failed startups

Random process of value discovery?

This is entitled Software developers assuming they can jump into a completely different domain and instantly succeed. Sales? Fundraising? Business development? Operations? Logistics? Recruiting? Psh those losers make half of what I make I can do all their jobs at once no problem!

Oh wait this is hard and I’m not good at it I’m going to wonderful journey my butt back to a cushy ad company.

Note that following the lean startup method does not itself guarantee success. I know at least a half dozen founders who have followed the Lean Startup method (several of whom were actually in Steve Blank's class at Berkeley), and in all cases the result of their 100 interviews was "Welp, nobody wants that product." Which I guess is preferable to investing 3 years and $15M in venture capital into it, but it also doesn't get you any closer to a successful startup. (When I followed the Lean Startup method myself, it was actually worse - our 100 interviews said "Yes, we definitely want it", we built it, and then nobody used it. At least I took every engineering shortcut possible to build & validate it quickly and didn't waste time making it bulletproof before people tried it out.)

Also interestingly, a large number of gigantic corporations today did not follow the Lean Startup method, and arguably weren't trying to found a startup at all. Apple, Google, Facebook, E-bay, Dropbox, AirBnB - they were founded because their founders were curious and trying to scratch their own itch, and it turned out lots of other people had that itch too.

If I had to distill lessons learned from about a decade in startups (7.5 years founding ones of my own and 2.5 years working for other people), it'd be "Trust my emotions more, be curious, and quit trying to found a damn startup." The problem is that you need to judge new ideas emotionally rather than rationally, but when you have the "I'm going to build something awesome and get totally rich" mentality, it distorts all your emotions. Better to get rich by working in finance or for a FAANG, reserve some time on the side to explore, and only set out on your own when there's something incredibly exciting on the table.

You also dont see this mentioned that often, but failed attempts can be key factors of success to the successfull ones that comes later.

Therefore, we should be less intolerant with failure and understand that it forms some sort of a ladder where the failed attempts are steps that lead to the successful ones.

I miss this sort of "tech archeology", and i think that the status-quo of tech would do a greate service to us all if they aknowledged the failed attempts more, as this would give more incentives to people to take risks on innovation, knowing that even if they fail, their efforts would be remembered as it would lead to something that worked fine, with a couple of tunings.

There are a lot of bold and bright people that did amazing things that may (or may not) lead to big things, but that face the cruel reality of not being remembered because they are not the success case.

Because in the end, we are only able to succed when we embrace failure and stop being afraid of it, knowing that even if we fail, it might be key to success if not ours, from others that can pick it up from where we stopped.

I've heard marketing used with this definition. It's actually really common - most marketing textbooks and classes will start from the premise that the goal of marketing is to identify a market and better serve it, and then work forward from it.

That said - I don't think marketing is a good goal for a startup, for the reasons enumerated here [1]. Basically, you can visualize the roles in a company like this:

                Concrete   |   Abstract
   -----------------------------------------
   Tech      | Programming |  Architecture
   Customers |   Sales     |   Marketing
   Employees |  Managers   |     HR
  

And in a startup, you don't want anything to be abstract, because there's too much room for error just getting the concrete stuff right. Everything in the right-hand column belongs in a big company, with millions of users and thousands of employees, because they deal with emergent phenomena that happens when you're huge. If you're thinking in those terms you'll get crushed by the big companies that actually do have all those resources, so startups need to focus on small niches that can grow.

[1] https://genius.com/Jessica-livingston-why-startups-need-to-f...

> You raise money, you build something, and then you have a limited time to see whether your hypothesis about the market was correct.

Or, you get to know an industry, see a need, design a solution, bounce your ideas off people in the industry, do some mock-ups to get some initial acceptance of the idea, ask if they'd pay for it, and if/when all that comes together, then start to build. If you cannot build it with your available resources, maybe look for some funding.