Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
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Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#2Great insights, thanks for sharing, Sergio.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#3This is such a great article, thanks
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#4Very nice article Sergio.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#5This 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 selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.
2) His advice about starting with 1 anchor client for a SaaS, expanding to 10 via expenditure of shoe leather, and then starting to worry about scalable approaches to customer acquisition is very, very good. (I don't know if I definitely would endorse the "An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead." That would turn on a lot of things, including how serious that company was about actually buying the thing. There is a world of difference between "I would buy a Widget from you" and "I commit to accepting delivery of a Widget from you, where a Widget broadly does X, my timeframe is Y, and your payment will be $Z." I'd be looking for a letter of intent or a check as a filter for seriousness following that Skype call before making a bet-the-business decision on it, personally, but I obviously don't know the specifics of what was said.)
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#6This 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…
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 something like "I should have looked for more X prospects that would pay for what they wanted, get their money and then build that".
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#7Lesson N+1: Hacker News can break your blog's webserver. That's one you only learn through experience.
[ETA: which is sad, because I want to read it!]
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#8This 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 the team feeling like they are dead weight, and meanwhile real priorities aren't getting dealt with.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#9Lesson N+1: Hacker News can break your blog's webserver. That's one you only learn through experience. [ETA: which is sad, because I want to read it!]
Damn Bluehost, hehe. I wish I knew how to fix it, but a few refreshes seems to go through.
Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue
#10This 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…
> 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 selling to build a company which will live or die based on your sales ability.
But I think "selling" the product to a developer is a difficult sell: harder than selling a product which exists and solves a pain point to a company who has money and is looking to solve their pain point.
If "selling" means getting the developer to work for no cash (only e.g. equity). A good developer has a job, and has lots of job offers, all offering them real money now. I'm not sure it'd be possible to persuade most of them to work for no cash.