

Ask HN: What are some important "failure" lessons learned while doing your startup? - fiaz

The benefits of failure are often overlooked and we sometimes forget that "failure" is part of moving you toward success.<p>Please feel free to share any lessons learned from any ambitious undertaking.
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coglethorpe
It turns out that my problems with the startup had nothing to do with the
technology and quite a bit to do with human and business factors.

What I learned:

1\. Get a partner you can count on.

2\. Don't take side jobs while doing a startup. Eliminate any distractions you
can. If you can afford to ditch your day job, all the better.

3\. Research and choose your niche carefully.

Looking back on my (first) startup attempt, I'm amazed at how much I got done
on so little time and sleep. For "extra cash" I took a side project that ended
up being a huge drain of my time and energy. The money is nice, but the
development on the startup slowed to a crawl. I don't think there's a startup
that can handle that kind of neglect.

To make matters worse, I ended up having to handle a lot of work because my
partner, while showing enthusiasm early on, produced little after we began.
I'm not complaining, he and I remain best friends, but I just don't think he
knew what he was getting into. :-) If you get a partner, make sure they are as
committed as you are. I've heard vesting gives people motivation, or at least
a way to drop partners who aren't earning their shares.

We chose a niche that had low barriers to entry. The down side of that is
there were hundreds of players in the market we were after. If we had more
time and resources, we could have given it a better shot, as we did have some
success in spite of the competition, but it would have been a hard climb.

We had a second phase to grow from our entry, but it turns out that would have
been heavily time and money intensive, far too much so for our market. Knowing
that up front might have steered our plan to another area.

So the startup ended. I'm fine with it, actually, and I'm so glad I gave it a
shot. I've learned so much in such a short time and it's helped me on my day
job. It will also help me with my next startup. :-)

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haasted
I'll add to the "partner warning". It's incredibly important to pick the right
people!

I worked at a startup where one of the two partners was really good during the
"garage phase", i.e. just two guys hacking away on a prototype. When the
company grew, and developers were added to help out, it turned out that he was
completely unable to grow into the role of development lead. Instead, he just
stayed in his corner, grudgingly handing out assignments, never resolving
discussions between developers etc. Never having even simple design
discussions resolved, can really wear down a team.

It's also important to have a great seed engineer, who will be in charge of
creating the company's software development culture (Mentioned at
[http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-
things...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-
smart.html)).

In the company mentioned above, the software development culture never got
beyond the garage state; There were no design documents or meetings, no
continuous integration, no quality assurance, no code reviews.... All things
that the partner could / should have introduced into the development culture.

The side-effects of this was a scarily buggy product, developers not being on
the same page about central concepts of the product, design not being
implemented uniformly between developers etc.

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wallflower
I have read thousands of News.YC comments - and _your_ story about failure is
one of the best in my opinion: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413>

~~~
fiaz
_Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!_

OK, part of the motivation is to learn from those with more recent experience
and within the context of a startup.

Another part of the motivation is to highlight the importance of failure to
two close friends of mine who have undergone the shutdown of their own
businesses at the same time.

It's sometimes tough to trudge onto something with a fresh spirit when your
expectations (evil little things) are squashed.

~~~
wallflower
You're a good friend. Some of these are pretty good stories, and I think just
hanging out and talking to your friends (dare to delve into feelings) might be
better for them (maybe avoiding the pep talk).

------
azharcs
One of the biggest lessons i have learned is you need a very good and
dedicated partners. You will find lot of people who want to be partners who
will stay with you during good times but go away when times get tougher. Find
people who believe in Not giving up and who can work hard. The other part of
Start Up failure is people look down upon you and start giving you advice. In
some instances you might be even branded a Loser for failing. You always have
to be very sure of what you are doing and be very confident. If you don't
believe in yourself, others won't too.

------
auston
I never had my own "startup" per se, but I did start a web business right out
of high school, what I learned from that:

1\. _Don't give up easily._ I had like 5k in revenue per month out of the gate
and I shut it down... which leads me too...

2\. _Manage your money well._ I mostly couldn't manage the business by myself,
handling SEO, SEM & Other affiliated tasks, while packing/shipping orders,
developing and paying quarterly sales tax, properly writing things off...
which leads me too...

3\. _Find a good co-founder_ , but really truly, no matter what, be able to
rely on that person and let them be able to really rely on you.

------
cmos
A friend and I were talking about how scotch is made. We know nothing about
scotch except that a popular kind is aged for 10 years before being bottled
and sold.

So, in theory, it would take 10 years before you knew if it was a good batch
or not. You might be able to tell sooner, but you'd have to know what it
should taste like before it's 'ready'. This can only come from experience.

So we deduced that it would be very difficult to start a business of making
scotch if it took 10 years to know if we got it right, with no prior
experience.

Then my friend added "also, how could you run a company that doesn't make
money for 10 years?" to which we burst out laughing, as my company hasn't made
money in 10 years. We've made money for periods of time, and had our ups and
downs, but overall we have lost more than we made.

But this year we should make a bunch. We've branched out of our core
competency and added products that widen our market that we can sell to our
existing customers and leverage off our brand name. We've gotten a lot smarter
about how we do business. It just took longer than I thought. At least if I
was starting a scotch business I'd have known that it would take 10 years
ahead of time.

In my business I'm often meeting rather successful, wealthy people as they are
our end customer. One of them recently said to me: "It took me 20 years to
become an overnight success".

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alex_c
Technically not a "failure" lesson, but the most universal thing I've learned
so far: there is a LOT of startup advice out there, some of it contradictory,
which makes sense when you read it... but you don't TRULY understand until you
experience it. Which in some cases might be too late :p

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tstegart
Know when to quit. Sometimes the business just isn't there, but you're in
denial. In the end you just run yourself into the ground and it take a long,
long time to recover.

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ca98am79
I have learned that it isn't success that really brings happiness - it is the
process of getting to success. And that same process sometimes leads to
"failure."

------
edw519
Be careful not to each too much of your own dog food.

Almost every time I ever built anything, I thought, "I can build a tool to
build it next time."

Be careful. The next thing you know, you could be spending all your time
building tools for yourself and forgetting who the _user_ really is.

