
Ask HN: Founders, how open are you to talking about mistakes you have made? - torn-fm
I personally despise the &#x27;Do these 10 things and you&#x27;ll be a successful entrepreneur&#x27; type articles, but I do really enjoy and learn from reading about Founders whom I admire and talk about mistakes they&#x27;ve made and lessons they&#x27;ve learnt. For me, I feel like I trust the words from someone better when they’re humble about something and are qualified to give advice on something – because they’ve made that mistake already and learnt from it.<p>So my question(s) to any founders here – would you be happy to talk about an event or a mistake that you learn from and offer advice to others just starting out? Would you have benefited from this before you started out?<p>Disclaimer: I&#x27;ve started working on a site to host exactly this, but thought I should actually do a bit of market research rather than assuming founders would open up.
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mindcrime
I'm pretty open, although we still haven't achieved any success yet... very
possibly because of the mistakes I've made! So probably there's no reason
anybody would care about anything I have to say.

Anyway, I'd say the single biggest mistake I've made over the years is being
to quick to ignore the customer development process, and start building stuff
without getting enough feedback from prospective customers. I've spent too
much time "heads down" writing code and not enough out in the field talking to
people.

Second, and related, mistake has been being too ambitious from a product
standpoint. Or to flip it around, _not_ being focused enough. That is, I've
been too quick to start adding more _features_ to the product(s), as opposed
to taking a hyper-focused approach, picking a subset of features to truly
_finish_ , including all "fit and polish" stuff. So far "fit and polish" isn't
something we've been very good at.

Another decision that I don't consider a mistake, but which is arguably
contestable, is choosing to go the bootstrapped / self-funded approach,
instead of going out and pursuing outside money. I'm happy with this, but it
has meant continually being pretty resource constrained. We can't yet, for
example, hire employees. So all the work is done by the founders, all of whom
still work a day-job so far. You could argue that if we had raised some money,
we could have moved a lot faster. OTOH, you could at least speculate that if
we'd raised some money, we'd be out of business now. The way things are,
unless one of the founders dies or quits, we're almost 100% certain to not go
out of business. We can manage this burn rate almost indefinitely. The onus on
us now is to get out there, engage with prospects, and get something out the
door that somebody will pay for.

That said, I think we're close, especially with this neuralobjects.com thing.

