
Lessons from a Failed Tech Startup - swimorsinka
https://thinkfaster.co/2016/02/7-lessons-from-a-failed-tech-startup/
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trjordan
> Lesson 7: Letting Your Startup Rule Your Self Esteem Is Dangerous

Seems obvious, but there's a reason it happens so often. If you live and
breath your startup, you're better prepared to take on opportunities. Even if
you're only at your desk "working" for 8-10 hours a day, you can find a lot of
serendipity by talking about it with friends and family. Wait, you know
somebody who could be a customer? Wait, you made money on your last job and
want to invest? Wait, you want to work with us? It's easy to get into a mode
where you're forever pitching, networking, and being your company, because
there are real benefits.

That said, I've talked to a weirdly high number of people who had a kid while
founding a company. Their tongue-in-cheek logic: "This is something that's
obviously more important than my company. If I'm going to have my self-esteem
wrapped up in anything external, it's better to be my child than my company.
My business may fail, but I will not fail to raise this kid."

Me, I got a dog. It's working out!

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Or, younger people tend to be the ones that create startups. Younger people
are the ones who have kids. Simply correlation.

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mschenkel
I found this to be a great article and can identify very closely with it. I
created a webservice back in 2010. Fortunately I am still operating, although
certainly not "killing it". At least not enough to go full time.

Lesson 1. Sales and Marketing. So true. I think every entrepreneur greatly
underestimates sales and renvenue growth. It's easy to create "top-down"
market share spreadsheets and imagine the opportunities. It just never works
that way. I am starting to learn that Sales is a major part of any company.
People tend to think that just because there are fewer and fewer brick and
mortar stores, and face to face meetings for that matter, that sales isn't an
integral a part of a company.

Lesson 2. Indeed money is important. But at the same time how necessary is it
for a lot of what Silicon Valley is producing these days. Hardware and
development tools are the cheapest they have ever been. You certainly don't
need a ton of venture backing to create a web service. That is the approach I
am taking.

Lesson 3. With my web service I never created spreadsheets with forecasted
user growth. But at the same time can say growth never really took off the way
I had hoped. More important to me is year over year growth.

Lesson 4. I am still running this as a sole founder... Anyone out there
interested in sales/marketing?

Lesson 5. Great point. Always a difficult decision knowing what features to
add. More and more I add features and have the requesting customer at least
partially fund the development of it. And more often than not don't release
them as a "public" features. Sometimes you have to resort to "consultingware"
until your fully self-serve web serivce takes off on its own.

Lesson 6. Indeed. Never be afraid to reach out to people who sign up for your
service and ask them more. Stackoverflow is a great site to "find peoples
pain".

Lesson 7. Yes - you always have to keep your chin up, especially on days where
you feel

It would be interesting if Ross could share some indicators on his revenue. If
not, other metrics like how long it took to get the first sale, etc.

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gamechangr
Sales is pretty important.

I read an article where Peter Thiel said that most startups fail because of
difficulty in Sales and distribution.

I read over and over again the value of Sales and the need for a founder to
focus on "the business side", but then I still marginalize the role of sales.

I'm I broken or do we all do that???

~~~
WJW
A lot of startups are founded by programmers, who know a lot about programming
but not much about sales. This makes them able to see all the upcoming
problems in the technical bits of the company, but not the upcoming problems
in sales. Most effort is then spent on the technical side because "that's
where the problems are."

Kind of related to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

~~~
jorgecurio
> This makes them able to see all the upcoming problems in the technical bits
> of the company, but not the upcoming problems in sales. Most effort is then
> spent on the technical side because "that's where the problems are."

ugh. this is 100% me. spent 6 years working on a hard problem. Why? Because
ironically people wouldn't pay large sums of money for it and I figured that
if I made it 1000% more innovative than the market I'd surely justify the
price.

I sometimes look back and see how fucking naive I was. I'm a totally different
mentality now. It's figuring out how to get paid and making sure you are able
to CHARGE people for it. You just need to get to the absolute MVP. If it's
something nobody has seen before then you don't even need to build it. Just
try to sell the god damn thing before you even build it. However, if there are
already established markets and competitors you can't do it without risking
looking like a snake oil salesman but what this is the problem of many
engineers, we view making money as evil and negative because we devalue our
work, we just don't see the business value and so highly possible we end up
working for free at some point our careers.

For example:

Marketer: Our software that will boost your sales by 50%.

Developer: It just scrapes data from other companies and resells you public
data. You can find it on github.com

VP of Sales: Shut the fuck up.

Anyhow, I can't stress enough. Startup is 80% people and 20% coding. I've
learned my fucking lesson the hard way.

~~~
gamechangr
"I can't stress enough. Startup is 80% people and 20% coding."

Agreed. I have recently come to that revelation :)

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austinhulak
Google Cache:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZcdIAx...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:ZcdIAx0jJIAJ:https://thinkfaster.co/2016/02/7-lessons-
from-a-failed-tech-startup/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

------
Johnie
This post completely resonated with me as a former Googler making the leap
into startup founder. It's been drinking from a firehose learning what it
takes to get a product off the ground. What I've found is that the
entrepreneur community is extremely supportive of each other.

For other Xoogler Entrepreneurs out there, a couple of us have started a
Xooglerpreneur community with over 600+ Xoogler/Googler entrepreneurs. The
group has been hosting monthly tech talks, founders lunches, and other
networking events. We have active local chapters in LA and NYC with additional
groups growing in Chicago and London.

There is an active Slack channel and the group is organizing an Xooglerpreneur
Demo Day later this year as well as setting up an Xoogler Angel Fund.

Sign up here: [http://www.xooglerpreneur.com](http://www.xooglerpreneur.com)

~~~
peter_l_downs
Sorry, what do you call yourselves again? Didn't quite catch that.

~~~
supercoder
It's quite clever actually , it's a combination of X for 'ex' and then ...

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jorgecurio
I think my lesson was

"Don't go off to the races, solving difficult problems for people who won't
pay for it"

and

"To us its a bunch of tables and CRUD generated on top of it. To them, its
whether or not theres a free plan."

and

"Recognize when there is a poor market fit and CHANGE the situation. Falling
in love with your own creation tends to blind you."

gg startups, hello drudgery

~~~
dbcurtis
Yes, there isn't much money in solving non-problems. Instead, find people in
pain, and sell them band-aids.

In the 1980's I worked for an Electronic Design Automation startup (during the
go-go years for EDA). Our CEO said: "If you asked customers to give a letter
grade to their current EDA tools, most would give a "D" or "F". If we can get
a "C" we will do great."

He was very right. People in pain open their wallets easily, even for a stop-
gap solution. That gives you money to do the solution that eventually gets
graded "B" and even comes to define "A" if all goes well.

~~~
jorgecurio
Is my product a vitamin or a pain-killer? Excellent question.

~~~
dbcurtis
I like that question. Keeping with the health metaphor, it forced me to think
up this: "Hunt like a shark, act like an ER surgeon." Go where the customers
are losing the most blood, then when you get there get them patched up and
stable by the end of your shift. Eh... needs work. Another forgettable quote
from the half-bakery.

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seibelj
I just have a lower risk tolerance than a lot of people. I am totally down
with creating something new, I just refuse to leave a job that pays the bills
to do it. If you work 40-50 hours a week at your real job, that still leaves
10-50 hours per week to work on your own thing, depending on how driven you
are, how much stuff you scheduled that week, etc. Startups are so risky that
it's way better to reduce your risk any way possible.

Of course, if you go the VC funded route and want to be huge, then go for
glory and quit your job. But if you want to build a smaller, steadier side
business that you grow over a longer time, don't quit your day job.

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rpgmaker
> Who knows where that drive comes from, but I know that many people have it,
> just like I do.

Ego. Nothing wrong with it as long as it's kept in check but let's not pretend
we don't know where the drive comes from.

~~~
swimorsinka
Author here: and I agree. I just didn't want it to turn into a big spiritual
discussion :).

~~~
rpgmaker
I understand. Thanks for sharing your experience btw, I found it valuable.

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kearneyandy
This was an interesting read in particular to contrast with other startup
letters. The focus in the first point on sales and other roles is interesting
because I've noticed before these posts focusing on the product (such as
[http://playbook.samaltman.com/](http://playbook.samaltman.com/)). The idea
that the sales and business will come naturally seems to stem from this kind
of advice. It's clear that there needs to be some kind of balance that is
usually not talked about.

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LyndsySimon
> At least I didn’t go into debt. I can’t imagine the stress of founders who
> start by living off credit cards. I further can’t imagine the stress of
> people trying to support a family while starting a company.

I can't relate to this at all - there must be a _tiny_ portion of
entrepreneurs that can. I've been blessed to be in a position where I've never
(as an adult) been hopelessly poor, but I've absolutely been in a place where
I've worried that I'd have enough money to last until pay day. I've been in a
position where I've sold anything I could think of to have enough money to buy
food, diapers, or enough fuel to get to work and back for the rest of the
week.

------
known
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.

