I just love the brutal honesty expressed compactly. Full of useful information for all startup-founders. I'm sure many are currently making the exact same mistakes.
Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
51–60 of 161 posts
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm in a hurry and didn't read the article - but on 1, developers are far from normal consumers or businesses, consider far different things reasonable and interesting and are a totally different "sell" - much as founders themselves are far different from normal employees and simply can't be judged on the same basis. I don't think your point 1 is valid at all. (Likewise, just because you can convince a developer, doe…
Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. Selling the things you believe in to people that really need it is easy. Selling people mediocre products they don't need and probably can't afford, that is actually difficult. If anything convincing a developer to take your money (assuming you have any) to write code should be orders of magnitude easier than convincing a client to give you money for something that does…
Almost anyone can sell anything to anyone, if the bargaining space is unrestrained.
"Would you work for me for a billion dollars a year and six months holiday?" Lots of people are going to say yes.
But are they the people you want? Do you have those sorts of resources to throw around? What about other perks of working with you to fill in the intermediate space?
Extreme example, granted. But the point is that there are things you can't solve, at least not in an immediately relevant sense, just by throwing money at them. Getting a developer's probably relatively easy. Getting one you'd want; at a price you can afford... knowing next to nothing about the technical area of the business yourself?
That may still be easier than selling something that doesn't exist, but it's not clear that it's orders of magnitude easier.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#53I don't understand people's (not necessarily the OPs)utter obsession with philosophies. Especially in the startup world when being adaptive and surviving is key.
Lean Startup, great book, decent ideas, not the religion that it's become. I'm sick of hearing, hey do this the lean way and it'll "significantly improve" how well you do, after all it's the blueprint for success. Personally, I don't buy into that. Here's my view of success in reality: do whatever works (that's legal & up to your moral standards), be opportunistic and get lucky (yes, hard work and measuring metrics alone don't do crap).
MVP and idea validation are great concepts & helpful common language. In hindsight all "successful" startups seem to have a "pattern", but in all seriousness, there isn't a friggin algorithm for success in startups, otherwise algorithms would've replaced entrepreneurs a long time ago. (Although selling success patterns & software based on such to wantreprenuers is a great idea)
I'm sorry the Sergio's experience happened. It's easy force cause and effect onto a narrative. It very well could have been that the developer Sregio met was at a point in his life where he really just wanted to build something great and did end up building the awesomest thing. Instead of trying to dissect the reasons his startup failed, had luck been a little more favorable, we might be trying to analyze how it became a huge success.
Bottom line, my heartfelt congratulations to Sergio on being successful at stepping up, despite the risks and having a crack at it. If you had never stepped up and we all gave in to our negative biases and overanalyzed the crap out of everything before we started we'd still be polishing stone wheels.
I know how shitty it feels. But remember, hindsight is 20-20 and cause and effect should really be cause+luck and effect. Hope you're a better entrepreneur and will be back in the game soon.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#54Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#55A business person trying to start a tech startup.... It's like a business person looking for musicians to start a band. This is beyond ridiculous. Either bring some skill to the table or go create a "business startup" and stop polluting the industry with yet another failed idea and even worse a "post mortem" of why it failed. PS: This includes Marketing, Managers as well as the Business peanut gallery.
I'm not sure if that's a good analogy for your point. The success of a band often requires more than people that can play music well together
The Beatles had Brian Epstein for example (aka The Fifth Beatle)
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#56I made all of those mistakes, and also learnt the hard way. Great post.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#57A business person trying to start a tech startup.... It's like a business person looking for musicians to start a band. This is beyond ridiculous. Either bring some skill to the table or go create a "business startup" and stop polluting the industry with yet another failed idea and even worse a "post mortem" of why it failed. PS: This includes Marketing, Managers as well as the Business peanut gallery.
I love the Monkees.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
In fact I am learning how to program, so I agree with your points - but I don't think it is for every one. There is plenty of space for non tech founders. BUT I do believe it is easier if you do know how to code.
"There is plenty of space for non tech founders." In the tech startup ecosystem, I don't think there is that much space for founders that don't want to code. Saying "I want to start a tech startup but I don't want to code" is as ridiculous as saying "I want to sell horses but I don't know anything about them and I certainly don't want to have to learn anything about them". It's possible, but you're gonna have a hard…
Brilliant analogy.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are absolutely right on both comments! And additional comments: 1) I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". 2) Absolutely agree. When I say "I should build that", in fact what I wanted to say was…
>>I am not a developer, but I believe having an idea -> finding a developer is the wrong flow. It should be like this: 1. Have the idea. 2. Get customers who give you real money to build this idea. 3. Get a developer by telling "I already have paying customers". Actually, I disagree. Even if you're not a developer, you should still strive to learn enough development such that you can push out the first version of the…
If the founder is a developer, yes, I totally agree. But for business person, no, I don't. Just like OOP programming, I think a team needs to be comprised of unique committed talented professionals that can do their own job very good: marketing, sales, social networking, programming, designing, business managing, legal, etc. (skills might overlap).
Even if you are Jack of all trades, you won't have the time to execute all the tasks well on your own. If the developer looks down on you because you don't know how to code, then that is not your ideal candidate or your business or talent is not convincing enough.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#60This is a fantastic writeup (and like nearly all worthwhile writing on the subject, I don't necessarily agree with all of it). Two elaborations: 1) General advice to non-technical founders, not specific to this post: If sales is one of your primary skill sets, and you cannot sell one developer on working for you, you may want to have a brief heart-to-heart with yourself on whether you are sufficiently skilled at sell…
It's also useful to remember that until you have an actual product, the company really does not need a sales person, because there is nothing to sell. A startup does need a lot of things besides a developer, like customer development. But customer development is not the same as straight sales! I have seen some teams flame out because there's a sales person there with nothing to sell feeling useless, and the rest of t…
> But customer development is not the same as straight sales!
The point of the article, what caused my last failure, what almost everyone that bootstraps a business, and most of the ones that received investiment will tell you is that this phrase is wrong. At least in the context of growing companies (not mature companies in mature markets), if you separate the two concepts, you are dead.
And that means your sales force should never do just straight sales, and you must hire accordingly.
The worst part, I knew (at least in theory) it from the beginning. Not talking to customers is very attractive to developers. But don't mind, it didn't hurt much.