
Costly Mistakes Made by Startups - CraigUX
https://medium.com/@CraigUXHour/the-top-10-mistakes-made-by-startups-and-how-to-fix-them-5dcf3365068e#.seqgt8lf3
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pavlov
This analogy isn't making a lot of sense:

 _" It’s like they put a sign on a door that said “Free Lemonade” and a bunch
of people came inside… only not that many people are drinking the lemonade…
What’s wrong?? How do we fix it? They ask._

 _" If anyone had bothered to mingle about the room and strike up some
conversations, they might have realized that the majority of people in the
room were diabetics… So they couldn’t drink the lemonade._

 _" They came in the room hoping there would be other drinks… like water… but
left after they couldn’t find any. Had someone learned this information and
grabbed a case of water, the room probably would have stayed full and more
people would have showed up… even without changing the lemonade sign (word of
mouth travels fast)."_

So the diabetics came because of the lemonade sign even though they can't
drink it? And while they're in the room, word of mouth about free water is
spreading outside the room? I'm having a hard time picturing this scene.

I'm not trying to pick on you, just suggesting that this section might be
improved by replacing this confusing story with something more related to the
real world :)

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CraigUX
You're right, it's muddled. I appreciate the feedback!

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yanilkr
Only one Mistake. Reading too much about startups and not actually doing
anything of value.

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CraigUX
This is very true. I actually wouldn't mind adding this to the article.

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jameskegel
First, welcome to the community. Second, adding to the gentleman's comment at
the bottom of this thread, I'm curious what your intentions are with this
community after the pageviews stop. I noticed your account is brand new. Will
you become a new member of the community outside of posting your own content?

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gumby
The other one is being busy "startupping" and not, you know, actually building
your business.

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davmar
Every single point he made is crucial for a startup to succeed. I know - I
spent 14 years bootstrapping my software company (exited last year). I think
this article is excellent.

While ALL his points are valid, I want to differentiate between two specific
points he made.

1\. _" If you’re not talking to your users, then you’re simply guessing at
what they need and want from your business. This is slow suicide."_

2\. The section called "8 — Building Too Much Stuff"

When you talk to your users, you WILL get that feature list one-mile long. If
build that list, you'll end up with a product that doesn't have an opinion.
Your product won't be targeted at anyone specific. Why should a customer pick
you over competitor X?

So, to know what to build, you must talk to your customers and know them. But
you must know yourself as a company - why do you exist? What kind of customers
do you want (size - small/med/enterprise, industry, location if applicable).

For example, define your company as "Performance review software for medium
sized US cities, counties and law enforcement" versus simply saying "We make
performance review software". This helps you determine a focus and know which
customers to target and which features help them.

Further to the "building too much" section, you only need so much to close a
sale. After a while, the new features are great for reducing support or
customer retention (both of which you should be measuring), but build too many
and you risk having a complex product with training costs that are too high
and even more importantly, investing in features that don't help you sell the
next customer. At some point, move on to the next product.

Also a tip, we stopped building lesser-used admin features that required a UI.
UI is hard to maintain and train people (and hard to kill that feature).
Sometimes it's possible to simply have a script you can run that will make
changes to the data model that customers would like to have. When customer
call asking for something, you can offer that solution and have your dev team
run the script.

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tensor
On visual design, if you don't have a visual designer you are simply asking
someone who is not a designer to do it instead. You're fooling yourself if you
think you are somehow not doing it.

Having a designer on board from day one in no way means that you can't
experiment. In fact, a good designer would have told you about many of your
other recommendations such as "user research is important."

I'd replace 9 with "Not taking design seriously."

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CraigUX
I do think design is important. And not just based on opinion, it's documented
well by the nngroup here:([https://www.nngroup.com/articles/halo-
effect](https://www.nngroup.com/articles/halo-effect))

My point was there is a time to dedicate towards visual design and taking
advantage of the positive effect it has, but it's not in an early stage.

But I'm 100% talking about visual design. Polish. Not User Experience design.
I put them in two different categories.

Maybe I should include that if you're resources are limited, get a UX Designer
as opposed to a Visual Designer/Branding person.

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x5n1
The fire soon fire often ideology is stupid advice for anything but a small
startup. The reason it's stupid advice is that you already have a bunch of
people that over time will develop their own politics in the organization, and
they will then exercise power in the organization using that politics. For
instance the developers will figure out ways of working less by overestimating
everything or forcing project managers to do additional work to delay things,
and any new developer that does not get the games that they are playing will
be denied enough information by the lead developer to do his job properly and
will be promptly fired for that. Any new comer that does not adhere to their
politics will be fired. All that this sort of advice does is it maintains
cultures, whether they are positive or negative. Good team players can get
kicked out to maintain the rotten apples or vice verse and often upper
management is clueless to what's actually going on.

