Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
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Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#2> No way it would be an investment that would give investors a 10x return.
I think this kind of expectations ruin good business ideas.
A thing like Dinnr may have worked well if run for years, not just tested out for 18 months. It may have not produced a 10x return, but it may have been enough for four people to live on and, maybe, then expand to another city and have four other people live working at Dinnr 2.
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#3Funny, I just bumped into a startup[0] that seems to do the same thing, and looks like it received some funding[1]...
I wonder how well these guys are going to do.
[0] http://signup.marleyspoon.com/ - it's operational in germany at https://www.marleyspoon.de/
[1] $1.5M Seed according to https://angel.co/marley-spoon/
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#4Thanks for writing it up. Processing what went wrong will lead you to better opportunities up ahead.
Interesting though on #5: "As one of my first investors later told me, you must have developers on your core team in the same room."
I think this is never the guess and am surprised when some startups take their devs offshore.
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#5Thanks for writing it up. Processing what went wrong will lead you to better opportunities up ahead. Interesting though on #5: "As one of my first investors later told me, you must have developers on your core team in the same room." I think this is never the guess and am surprised when some startups take their devs offshore.
I'm not the blog author, I just saw this and thought it was an interesting story to share.
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#6So why is plated doing so well?
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#7What's an online supermarket?
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#8Thanks for sharing this! I appreciated how candid you were. I'm sure a lot of startup founders are taking a look at what they're building right now to look for the same patterns.
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#9So why is plated doing so well?
Why don't you go out and do the research, find out if Plated is, actually, doing so well, and then come back with some actual findings, rather than a flippant dismissal of this article?
Re: Lessons I learned from the failure of my first startup, Dinnr
#10"Having such detailed feedback wouldn’t require diving into the data, but having someone spend an hour stress-testing my thinking and assumptions would have been gold dust and could have prevented a lot of effort wasted."
Hrm... I get asked (on occasion) to do this sort of 'stress test' on someone's idea - and usually they don't want to hear the negatives anyway. Sometimes it can morph a not-great idea in to a better/great one, but sometimes the reality is "this should be dropped". I wonder if the author had actually received some of that hyper-critical thinking on dinnr earlier, and the feedback was "this is bad, don't do it", if he'd still pressed on or not.