You mention to not build the website, iOS app, and Android app all at once before getting market fit. Which of the three would you start with to quickly iterate and get feedback? When you mention that you had to often walk into like a scuba shop to try to get a sign on, were people more receptive if you 'had an app for that' already?
I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
11–20 of 229 posts
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#12Anyway, why isn't the main lesson "not doing a travel business in the middle of a pandemic where we are trying to implement world-wide lockdown for the first time in human history" ?
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#13Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#14He spent over half of his money on it as well.
I've had more than one person come to me with their business idea, and they have a terrible website (or app) that they have spent 100, 200, or even 300k on. And it doesn't even work.
If you aren't staring out WITH customers, you either have to code it your damn self, or have a technical co-founder.
It also makes me realize that I'm in the wrong business.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#15The first heading reads “marketplace for last-minute tours and activities”, followed by a paragraph that says “industry where 80% of bookings were still done using pen and paper, months ahead of time” How is something done both “months ahead of time” and “last-minute”?
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#16Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#17You mention to not build the website, iOS app, and Android app all at once before getting market fit. Which of the three would you start with to quickly iterate and get feedback? When you mention that you had to often walk into like a scuba shop to try to get a sign on, were people more receptive if you 'had an app for that' already?
I expect more and more startups to embrace Flutter, it is easily currently the best solution on the market (for 99% of app ideas). Yes native will always be better, but if you are a startup, your focus should be building an MVP and getting to product-market-fit as fast as possible at the lowest cost.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#18I have a very high level of scepticism towards non-technical founders without deep pockets: 1. There's an agility to being able to change things yourself, at 2am if necessary. That's very important to startups. 2. There's a discipline to not accruing unreasonable technical debt of the type that will sink you two years in that you can't expect from someone who doesn't deeply care. 3. Managing devs generally requires u…
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#19What could go wrong?
Add to that not having an original idea and not even willing to test the market-fit beforehand.
Startups are looking everyday more like the stock market: plenty of suckers read y to empty their pocket into a few giants who take all the profit.
Re: I lost $209k of my own money trying to start a business
#20The first heading reads “marketplace for last-minute tours and activities”, followed by a paragraph that says “industry where 80% of bookings were still done using pen and paper, months ahead of time” How is something done both “months ahead of time” and “last-minute”?
Have a sudden urge to have a nicely planned and well-put together weekend in a new cool place? Too much of a hassle to deal with yourself, maybe, but a whole lot nicer if you can just see what someone has packaged for you.