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Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

sergioschuler.com

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Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#111

Post by AndrewKemendo »

brickcap wrote: post #106
subbu wrote: post #102

__If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product.__ This advice always seemed like a stretch to me. Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?

"Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?" Isn't kick starter build around that concept? If people think something is looking good and might help them considerably they might be open to pay for developmental costs.

Kickstarter isn't designed for business, but rather it is designed for art in the general sense (which sometimes has business applications), so I don't think Kickstarter is a good example.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#112

Post by sergioschuler »

subbu wrote: post #102

__If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product.__ This advice always seemed like a stretch to me. Does anybody pay for a product that's not ready yet?

Believe it or not, it happens, just look at the cases at the foundation

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#113

Post by kylereeve »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #90

"Since we were 3 business people, we spent all this time into idiot plans, budget forecasts, BUSINESS CARDS, fancy website… all useless things which in the end did not contribute to anything." I've been apart of a lot of startups and this is far and away the best advice. It was a common theme with two startups I worked for during the boom years. One CEO's hubris was stunning. 10 million privately funded and he blew m…

Did you work at Entertainment 720?

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#114

Post by sergioschuler »

usablebytes wrote: post #101

The last para - If there is just one thing you should learn, it is: Just speak to prospects and extract their pain, then sell the painkiller (before building the product). If they are willing to buy, do take their money and invest that money into building the product. Is that really possible? Making someone pay for a product that doesn't yet exist? How can you do that?

Look at http://thefoundation.com/three-students/, those guys do that over and over again.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#115

Post by dennisgorelik »

DanielBMarkham wrote: post #11

There are a lot of things I'm interested in but would not pay for online, but good failed startup stories like this is not one of them. Seriously, if somebody could cull 2 or 3 of these a day and deliver in a weekly or monthly format? It'd be worth a subscription. Thanks for the article!

Why do you need so many failure stories?

One failure story per week should be sufficient to be constantly aware of typical problems.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#116

Post by sergioschuler »

sergioschuler wrote: post #9
etfb wrote: post #7

Lesson 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.

Now the whole Bluehost is down.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#117

Post by cstejerean »

logicallee wrote: post #44
cstejerean wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>Great sales people can sell anything to anyone. If that were true then an inventor could have asked a great sales person to sell an engineer on the idea, and build it. In fact, this isn't true at all, and most innovative ideas are forced to be built by the same person in whose head they are, precisely because it is not true that "great sales people can sell anything to anyone", and some of the best ideas can't be so…

That's because most inventors are not great salespeople and great salespeople are busy printing money to be peddling ideas to developers.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#118

Post by koide »

guilloche wrote: post #107

Questions for peer founders: As a developer and solo founder, I just can not finish a serious project in one year. For example, it took me two years to get version 1 of torapp guilloche designer (www.torapp.info). We did not get consistent/significant customers and need a new product to survive. To evaluate more ideas and to be familiar with respective areas took me another year easily (without deep knowledge in the…

It certainly will depend on the actual product A LOT.

A vector editor is very complex compared to the typical CRUD-based with a little business logic that lots of SaaS products are in the end.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#119

Post by cstejerean »

6d0debc071 wrote: post #52
cstejerean wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

The problem is that most non-technical people with "ideas" don't have money, don't have connections, are not amazing at sales (otherwise they would have both money and connections) and don't even know now they are going to acquire customers.

They might think they are good at sales, but if that was really the case then getting enough money to hire someone to build your prototype is not that hard. Freelancers are everywhere, you can judge them by their portfolio, and getting someone to build you a greenfield project at market rates is not really difficult.

Re: Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

#120

Post by danielweber »

robomartin wrote: post #94
r0h1n wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a non-technical founder (I have an engineering degree on paper, but have never been a practicing developer) who's starting out on his own. I disagree (or maybe, have an alternate viewpoint) with your first observation. I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains. A great business seller may not actually be a great motivational/aspirational seller, and vice versa. So it's wrong, IMHO, to assu…

> I don't think sales skills are completely fungible across domains My experience across a fifteen year business confirms this. Year one I had to sell. As an engineer I was a horrible sales guy. A couple of my dealers took me under their wing and over approximately a year a made notable changes. Years later, as we grew, I had to hire sales people. That's when I learned the lesson. If someone is good about selling pro…

I suspect that there are a lot of stories of salesman candidates coming in the door, saying "I have a huge rolodex, I know a hundred people to whom I can sell this right now," that turned out to be duds. Oh, they spent their time on the phone talking with their old buddies, who occasionally bought one or two as a favor, but it never came through anything close to what you, the non-salesman-founder, were expecting.
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