Ask HN: Why did your startup fail and what did you learn?

I come from a coal mining region. For over a 100 years there has only been one mine in the area, a big mine. There is plenty of coal in the surrounding areas. This is Africa. An uncle of mine had the idea that we start a mine. He invited about 20 of us, all related. We started putting aside money to register a company, pay a geologist to prospect for the coal and get mining permit to mine the coal. We all contributed money on a monthly basis. All paper work is done in the capital city so we used to send the oldest uncle in the group to go process the paperwork. He had worked in government before and he was older. In my culture you respect old(er) people.

To cut a long story short we successfully registered the company, got a geologist to confirm there was indeed coal and got a mining license from the government. We then signed a contract with a sub contractor to come and mine. When the share certificates came instead of owing 5% I ownwed 0.00086% of the mine. Yes there were 3 zeros before the 86. Our elder the uncle we had sent to do the paperwork basically screwed all of us, including the uncle who originally came up with the idea.

Lessions 1. Never use your cultural beliefs in business. Stick to contracts. 2. Don't just trust family.

I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating that AR with them.

The lesson is never trust the size of a company as sufficient reasoning that they can and will pay their bills.

On my first startup right after university, we were doing an IoT device (hardware + software), our MVP was good enough to make a couple of sales amounting to 550 consumers. At that point the board decided the best way to grow was to bring in “adult supervision” aka a seasoned CEO to run the company.

Even though I did all the software, I had only around an 8% stake in the company at the time.

The person in question decided we needed to “perfect” our product before taking it to market. She had us working 12 additional months and since we did not have “enough tests over the new features yet” she cancelled the 550 orders and gave the contracts to one of our competitors. At that moment I and the 2 electrical engineers in the team left the company and they ran out of money and close 6 month later.

Lesson learned: Big-corp CEOs don’t make for good startup CEOs 99% of the time.

I started a consumer robotics company with no more than a software and hobbyist robotics background. The grand plan was to sell furry robot pets and we got as far as the prototype stage and a demo at Maker Faire. After that we hit a huge wall. There is essentially no path from hobbyist, off the shelf components to a real product.

After that company died I joined a real robotics startup with some seriously talented founders. They had already built out several robots and had the core skills (mechanical engineering, software engineering, electrical eng, and controls) to design and build a working robot. More importantly though they knew the process to make a robot real which involves personal contacts at custom component suppliers, the right outfit to do engineering review, how to raise enough money to get the kind of runway hardware needs. And on and on.

Moral of the story, you can't fake hardware. Get experienced people on board from day one or your going to flounder and most likely die.

The basic gist is that I was arrogant and negligent.

I started a company to leverage an order taking and customer management system I’d built for a friend’s b2b outside sales company. Before, they were managing everything with excel spreadsheets on a shared drive and it was a mess. After, everything was in a php application that could set up a recurring credit card transaction within a few clicks. It used AJAX (in 2004, before responsive forms took off) to take different form inputs.

I rode that one client pony for too long. Managed to get a second client, but I hadn’t worked out a good pricing strategy. I needed to offer the program publicly, but we were too busy doing feature development for our two clients to develop features for multi tenant. I was bad at the administrative aspects of running the company, so I inadvertently ran up a bunch of bills. I wasn’t keeping my sales funnel full or dedicating much time to finding new clients and calling on them. The whole thing went crashing down when my clients decided that they didn’t want to have 100% dependence on my company anymore and per our contract paid a one time lump sum for a copy of the software. Still wasn’t enough to fill the holes the bills had left.

I could have been SalesForce if I hadn’t been an arrogant 24 year old who couldn’t learn from other people, but instead I ended up in about $50k of personal debt.

I wrote a great software library for specific web development problems back in the dotcom boom.

I learned a few things, much of you hear already but is worth repeating :

* The MVP thing is real. I had a competitor that regularly released simple things that barely worked - while I continued to polished my project. By the time I'd finished the competitors stuff was all over the internet few a year or two and no one was really interested in my product. Plus by then the dotcom boom was pretty much starting to bust - I was way too late.

* Developing software is the easy part. I figured when I was done people would be lining up which is of course naive. Selling and support is harder and takes more time and effort than writing code.

* Writing software for developers sucks. No one wants to pay for anything as there is usually a cheaper way of doing it. The exceptions being big firms that really don't like small independents. Its better to write software to solve real problems - not software problems.

I was an early engineer at a startup that failed for a somewhat unique reason with an important overarching learning.

We built a software platform that intended to automate the job of market researchers. Those researchers we hoped to replace ended up finding the tool itself useful. Since the platform didn't replace the employees, our pricing model fell short. In the end, we found success by hiring our own market researchers and effectively pivoting into a software-driven consultancy. Profitability came slow and steady.

After months of profitable growth, things changed on a dime. Our lead investor effectively unseated the CEO one day, and made the statement that we were doubling down on the original SaaS vision. Within a month our 100 person company had been reduced to around 60. The now-unneeded consulting staff were recipients of strategic layoffs. Revenue dropped overnight.

The morale of the company also fell off a cliff. The C's lost their ability to cheer up the team and the senior staff saw the holes in the boat and promptly abandoned ship. The company folded about 1.5 years later for a fraction of the initial investment.

My learning in all of this: the tales you hear about the "bad VC"s are occasionally very real. Make sure when bringing on investors that they align philosophically with your founders' vision. Make sure that philosophy is deeper than "we want to make that cash". Great investors i've worked with since can be an immeasurable resource in so many ways. It is absolutely critical that founders be excellent in their courting of valued investors. Similarly, they must be ruthless in their rejection of the bad ones, however sweet the check may appear.

CEO would disappear for months at a time, with the promise of returning with capital. We never really knew where he went, and he wouldn’t let anyone else talk to investors (including me, who was CTO). Eventually he stopped paying us, but promised that the money was just tied up in the parent company set up in the caymans.

After 2 months of not paying myself or any other employees, the COO and I drainked the remainder of the US account and paid out as much of what was owed as we could to the employees before helping them find jobs elsewhere. I didn’t get any of the money I was owed and was facing pretty bad debt, but the experience was enough of a resume boost that I didn’t have a problem making it up in my signing bonus.

What I learned is that a title doesn’t grant you any control, and that if someone can’t be transparent with their inner circle of friends and colleagues (in this case cofounders), then they have no business leading a company.

Also leaned to not fuck with the cartels.

I've had two startups "fail" for unusually clear reasons:

Startup #1: too hard to believe it could be big. Widely loved consumer website we tried to fund with angel/VC money, and it was too implausible it could ever be a $1b+ company. We needed a non-VC strategy to fund that business but didn't realize that - ran out of gas.

Startup #2: found PMF, business-model fit, high-growth, and had an amazing team. Blown up by a nightmare original founder (I was part of re-founding an existing business) and poor corporate governance. The original founder blew up a Series A and re-cap after the team new team made the company actually work.

What I learned from both is how finicky startups are and why conventional wisdom exists. The more you try to re-invent things that aren't core to the business or fit a square peg into a round hole, the more chances to fail you create.

Don't try to get 1000 things right. Try to get 1 thing right and rely on the wisdom of others to get the other things "close enough" to right to attract talent, capital, time, and attention to the 1 thing you did get right.

I built an app for kids that created a family currency where kids would pick the chores they wanted to do each day, earn points based upon the difficulty of the chores, and then those points could be redeemed for real-life rewards that they also chose - hosting friends for a sleep-over, a fishing trip with Dad, learn a new card game with Mom, screen time, etc.

The problem came with the marketing. When I did my due diligence before building the app, it seemed cost per click for ads was around 20 cents per click. 20 cents * 2% conversion rate = $10 cost to acquire customer. My lowball avg. lifetime value of a customer was $18 if customers stayed for 3 months on average. $10 / $18 seemed like a decent ratio, and if I could get the conversion rate up or the churn rate down, it could be a good ratio.

So I set out to build the app, which took about a year and half. But, when I finished the app and went to launch my marketing campaign, I was shocked when I saw the cost per click had skyrocketed to $2 per click, meaning my cost to acquire a customer was $100 with an average lifetime value of $18. My backup marketing plans were content marketing based, with a networking campaign with Mommy bloggers, but this takes a lot more time to scale your customer base than blasting out an ad campaign. This caused me run out of runway with my cash timeline, and so the startup failed.

I learned that its important to not get too heads-down coding your product - its important to review your growth strategy every few months while you build your product, because things can come up that can dramatically affect the speed at which you can grow, and that can jeopardize the whole operation. In my case, if I had noticed the ad costs climbing, I could have started networking with more people earlier, doing more content marketing pre-launch, and slowly increasing the size of my waiting list, or evaluating alternative marketing plans before my runway got so small at the end.

10 years ago I built an almost amazing business that schools, universities, teachers and students could use to build elearning and web apps. Think Square Space + Moodle + Udemy.

Heres a demo if you're interested https://vimeo.com/2221065 The demo doesn't show much of the learning management features but they were also complete.

But the app had memory leaks and I didn't have the cash to pay expensive engineers to fix them. For months and months I tried to fix the problems myself until finally I was given the choice of giving up my business or my wife.

I don't regret choosing my family because we had another daughter before the marriage ended and she wouldn't be alive if I chose to continue with my business instead.

I learned ...

1. I should never have given up. If you don't give up you can't fail. 2. I shouldn't have believed my mentor who said there wasn't a market for my product. A company entered the same market and now they are worth over $1bn. Listen to other people but have faith in yourself. 3. Be careful to choose the right technology. I chose Plone/Zope/Python the same stack that was used by CIA. I thought I was very smart about that but I didn't realise that specialists in this tech would be so difficult and expensive to hire. 4. Don't blame anybody. In the end it was my choice to give up. 5. Everything is as it is meant to be.

I worked on two that failed, one because of Napster-Induced Hysteria ("nobody will ever make money with online music!") and the other because we were myopic enough to think Orkut might bury us. Those were days, right?

From the first one I learned two things that are probably still applicable today, and from the second I learned one big thing. In order:

1. If people from outside the tech world end up controlling your software startup, that indicates you are doomed. Pretending otherwise will just make it worse.

2. Great teams are incredibly rare, and if you have the good fortune to be part of one you should really try to keep it together for the next challenge. (We dissipated so hard it was ridiculous... one went into motorcycles, one got a PhD, two floated back to Europe, one became a bartender...)

3. If the founders can not convincingly dogfood their own product, you are doubly doomed. I remember sitting at a table with founders while they tried to think of things they could maybe do with The Product we'd just spent months building, and feeling the rats of doom nibbling at my toes. It had not occurred to me that this was a possibility. Engineers: vet your founders!

We wanted to create a routing app for bikes, which would take in consideration cliffs, dangerous streets and the likes.

With our internal team, we’ve managed to create a killer backend that would do all the hard routing stuff without issues. It was better than Google Maps in most cases!

Now, we just needed the app. We used all our money to pay a third party contractor to make the app, and they failed miserably. We never received a working prototype. We ran out of gas.

The backend still exists, in case anyone wants to give the app a shot. I might release the backend as open source. Ping me if this interests you.

My first startup failed because I had no idea what I was doing. I started an online vacation rental site, similar to vacationrentals.com vrbo, homeaway etc... I was getting traction and had people list their rentals on my site but I failed to collect any revenue. The thought was, build it, offer it for free to grow it and then charge. Well, I built it (wasting way too much money on an original solution when existing solutions could have done just fine), people came (after I bent over backwards trying to onboard them), but time sucked me dry and I was not able to sustain the "business" any longer. Looking back, I did just about everything wrong.

Lack of leadership, we had a general idea of what we wanted but it was never defined. We wanted Shopify, years before they came along, 2001. But we never defined the product because no one took leadership of the product and business.

Bad programming, (me) had just finished college and thought I could lead a team of programmers because I had done an ok prototype that was actually working at a small scale. Given that specs were being defined on the fly then the programming was a mess. To scale it, we brought in programmers hoping it would help but they mostly sat around because we didn't know what we were building. Also, we got subpar programmers because they were cheap. One guy managed to BS his way into a paycheck for 5 months without ever programming a line of code. After he was fired, I found out that that was his specialty, getting hired and getting fired a few months later.

We could not meet deadlines, we could not meet self-defined deadlines so the investor's money stopped.

A lot of useless infighting due to egos, we could not figure out the business but we sure found ways to fight and argue.

I wish we would have been more willing to learn as opposed to being so arrogant by thinking we knew everything. I use it as a warning every time I think I know everything and it brings me back to reality. We lasted 2.5 years. We should have closed shop at 3 months.

Well, it didn't completely fail yet. It's still going 13 years after I left, actually. But part of the struggles were brought on by my mistake with a military customer that probably cost us the contract.

This was back at the beginning of the Iraq war. Our main contact told me the US should attack France, as they weren't supporting the invasion. I made the mistake of saying I was glad he was executing policy, not making it.

Oops. They started migrating to another product. Oh well.

Lesson is, if you're going to object to what a customer thinks, do it when its your own company. It's not really fair to make such a choose for everybody at your company. Kind of self indulgent, actually.

And people are entitled to their opinions and my mouthing off didn't change anything. An exercise in futility that only cost us.

So far a few:

1) Don't spend money and time on things you don't need or will need earliest in a few months from now.

2) Regardless if you have a brand-new idea for a product or try to improve an existing product/process, you need to validate first that you follow the right path. I think a light-weight solution like the idea behing the Design Sprint (http://www.gv.com/sprint/) is a good option. Don't go off and try to build an MVP. You will waste time and money (again). Even for a simple and functional MVP you will need spend lots of time to build a frame around it.

3) If you intend to improve something existing in an industry, come up with something unique about your product first (compared to your competitors). This will help you to get initial traction. Again, you need to validate this particular unique feature before you start building.

My previous startup endeavours failed all because we/I did not follow those rules.

One time we were mostly building away because we thought we know the industry (worked many years in the same space before) and had a lot of wrong assumptions. This combined with wrong spending behavior made everything fail very quickly in the end. From the outside we just copied our competitors and even our product was superior and looked better and gave part of our business customers a much better experience, we did not attract enough customers (as in users), because there was no obvious reason for them to use us vs our competition.

In another attempt I just got too deep into the tech and totally lost focus on what I was actually trying to solve. Lots of wasted time (except for experience).

For me:

- I didn't work hard enough.

- I didn't have any previous success or experience.

- I was starting it in a second language I didn't speak well enough.

- I was on my own and had no one to turn to for emotional support.

It's all too easy to read the startup blogs and think "Gee, I should be doing that!" but when the rubber hits the road it's much more difficult than I ever imagined. Lesson learned.

I was part of a start-up that still exists but it seems to be stagnating. i left due to the founders having almost nothing in common except for making money.

The site is like squarespace but for local shops and businesses. The founders met on an airplane and thought they can make a business. So you had the business CEO with no technical background living in X country and the ruthless CTO with his team in Y country.

I left ship when the CTO cleaned out the bank account and disappeared. The Y country never extradite their citizens or charges them for any international crimes so he got off scott free while the CEO had to "use" his car insurance to get money to keep the business afloat and pay the out-sourced developers. (He set his car on fire to get a payout)

Edit: I guess the lesson is that the founders need a vision and co-operation to make it work. These two basically had a common goal of making money of a fad. Back then the latest craze was to become a market place for other businesses ie. JustEat, SquareSpace etc.

Another would be that the core team better stick together. The founders were separated by hundreds of miles. The business side was in EU while the CTO and the devs where not. This caused communication issues, planning problems and of course money.

I left because of money too I guess. After working 6 months on a "paid" internship which was 50 eu a week I was offered a contract that would give me 0.5% equity, no raise and force me to work full time AND when doing my final year college thesis to be based for something the company can use.

If your business's revenue is based on B2B service sales with an extensive client educational sales process with regular renewals and varying client contacts, assume you will need built-in re-education salesperson time costs of renewals factored into the price set for your services. Don't assume clients will recognize the purpose and value of your on going services and renew automatically without proof and convincing all over again. Otherwise, your client re-education sales overhead will kill your profit margins.

After 4 years of excellent growth my partner and I had enough income to support one person full-time. Both of us were programmers, the company was a side gig for us. When his dad was laid off from his job, we hired him to handle the day-to-day of the company, which was mostly turn-key at that point.

He did a bad job, drove the company into the ground, and we couldn't fire him without major personal issues, so we let the company die. I divested myself before things got really bad, but it was so sad to watch all that work and potential go up in flames.

We should have fired him anyway, but that's how you learn.

The gist: I wouldn’t try to sell SaaS/software to individuals.

My business-oriented startups have been successful. My consumer-oriented one wasn’t (at least as a business), because I thought that people would be willing to pay some amount to save time or get more done. Turns out that even if a user states that an app saves them hours per month, the vast, vast majority won’t spend any amount of their own money for it.

The product got users - some who used it hundreds of times per month - but even among those who said they loved it, they used it constantly, and it saved them hours, very few would pay even ~$35/year.

People are fairly good at valuing other people’s time (as businesses do every day). People are unbelievably awful at valuing their (our!) own time. That’s not anyone’s fault, it’s human nature.

This only comes out as a revealed preference, that is, by asking a happy active user to pay, not asking whether they would pay.

Almost every “consumer” company actually makes most of their revenue from businesses. The exceptions that don’t have millions of free users - like 1Password when it was licensed software and FastMail in its early days - are exactly that: exceptions. Most remain fairly small until or unless they start serving businesses too.

Asking individuals to spend their own money on a software/Web product (rather than a physical object or music/video content) is next to impossible and I wouldn’t do that again. Sell to businesses or find another revenue stream.

I've learned a few recurring lessons from several start-ups failures. My favorites -

Aggressively pursue the simplest version of your idea/product/service. As a very general rule, once you begin building, try to remove more features than you add from the draft concept, until you get to launch. Get rid of ballast, be ruthless with yourself about whether you really need a given feature or aspect of the product. If the dropped features make sense, you can add them back in later, assuming customers actually want them.

Narrowly focus on knocking over that first bowling pin. Do not target too large or wide of a market to begin with. I made variations of this mistake with my first two start-ups. Focus narrow, narrow/small enough to capture a market or substantial market share, then try to knock down more pins. Chris Dixon has an eloquent explanation of this concept (which I borrowed the bowling pin analogy from). [1] Peter Thiel also has various good elaborations of the concept in his book and talks he has given.

Have a customer - ideally multiple - before you build the product. It's the easiest and fastest way to validate that there is some kind of market there before investing your time. Even better if you can get them to put money on the line ahead of launch. It's repeated over and over again, and it's worthy of the reptition, make sure you're really solving a problem that people have.

[1] http://cdixon.org/2010/08/21/the-bowling-pin-strategy/

I wrote a detailed and (to me) heartbreaking account of this two years ago. The article went viral and kind of freaked me out, but I think the advice is as good as ever.

https://medium.com/startup-lesson-learned/why-i-turned-down-...

Once I turned around a startup from about to go under to s profitable one. We restructured every piece of the value chain, but not without resistance from the founder/owner. Every suggestion I made was met with “I tried it and it did not work.” In reality she did not try, she intended but backed off when the other party pushed back.

In essence we took control over cash by: 1. raising prices significantly 2. Introducing differentiated product and two tiered pricing 3. Switched product production from prepaid to 45 days AP. ..... N. Restructured relationship with distributors

All these actions produced huge negative working capital. Instead of financing operations at an insane % rate, which technically was killing the business the company paid off all the debts and was spewing cash.

Cash Is King

Our uninsured CEO/cofounder developed a chronic illness and embezzled cash from us to pay his massive medical bills.

Killed our runway, which we only found out after we hired an accountant to look into our books and find wenhad an empty gas tank. Since this was still at the f&f funding stage, none of us had the heart to go after him for it.

The most valuable lesson I had from the companies I ran/run is that both sales and getting investment are both volume plays. If am a technical guy and I used to be that even more than I am now; I thought people who could do sales were deeply magical creatures. But every time we had a 'super sales' (usually co-founder because of the 'super' part), the super wore off and turned into no sales which killed or downsized companies eventually. I only fairly recently found out that it is just a matter of meeting as many people as you can and having as many sales pitches as you can. Investors the same thing, although that depends a bit more on the phase and the business than the sales.

My story is rather typical. I have built something visionary that everybody liked but nobody needed.

I hated the very idea of selling something that is not finished so I never validated the product with customers. How could I explain to them how revolutionary will the product be? The only way was to show them. Like the first iPhone.

In fact, I didn't like the "talking to customers" part at all, so I focused on coding visionary product that will sell itself. Everybody liked it but nobody needed it.

Our startup failed because my business partner wanted to just be the "idea guy" who designed the screens, while having me code it and do all the heavy work. Initially, this was going to be a 50/50 split, but after working on it almost full time for about 6 months, I ran out of money.

He had a pretty big savings account and came from a well-off family, so he agreed to front me basically just enough to cover my rent while I worked on the app. We agreed that since he wasn't really contributing much as far as manpower or hours logged, he could help justify his stake in the ownership by contributing monetarily.

After a couple of more months, we had a working, functioning app that was about 80% finished, but we started to butt heads on some ideas and he claimed he was frustrated by the fact that the app wasn't completely finished (even though we had changed scope and redesigned the entire app no less than three times).

He used this as an excuse to renege on our initial 50/50 split idea. Instead of honoring our deal, he opted to claim complete ownership and write me out of the picture.

Another way someone could look at it: He saw the app was starting to come along and was getting actual beta users, and he got $dollar$ signs in his eyes and decided to be greedy.

Both he and I were young and naive at the time, and the whole project had essentially been built on a handshake deal, because we didn't want to spend 10 grand on lawyers and paperwork before we even had a product worth anything.

I had spent a year working on an app, barely making ends meet and living off of credit cards, but because I was trusting and naive, he was basically able to screw me over and walk away with everything. His name was on more of the paperwork and he was the primary signer on the bank account. I could have fought it, but at that point I didn't have the energy or the desire to even work with him any more.

The joke is on him, though. Without me around to actually write the code, he never did manage to finish the last 20% of the app, and here we are almost 10 years later. After all that, he never managed to get the app out of beta, and he never made a penny off it.

The end lesson I learned: Don't invest time and energy in an idea or a partnership if you aren't willing to spend the money up front to lock down the legal aspect, because by the time you have enough traction and money to lock it down, it will be too late!

Money and greed corrupts people. Period. When someone has the possibility of millions of dollars suddenly seem like a real possibility to them, you might be surprised by just how quickly they turn on you!

The startup failed because so much time was spent consulting to bring in revenue to pay meager wages, and not enough time was spent on building product.

If you're going to fund your company with consulting, make sure you have a very strict rule about how much time you spend consulting. At the end of the day, you need to build product.

I built a SaaS company, offering marketplace infrastructure to people who wanted to start online marketplace businesses.

Turns out, although tackling the technical side of building a marketplace is not that easy, it is perfectly doable. The real challenge is getting people to use such marketplaces. It takes a lot of non-technical effort to build a marketplace. There's the obvious chicken-egg problem for most marketplaces. It is solvable, but usually requires a lot of capital to attract a lot of people, or the founder should have some sort of secret (being already established as an offline commissioner in a market, having the right connections, having a following and so on) so it is not easy to compete with them.

2 things I learned irrelevant to the business are these:

1) Looking back, I've made some serious mistakes, but I had no idea that these were mistakes at the time. Therefore, I must be making all kinds of mistakes today, which will only become apparent in the future, and that is actually a bit worrisome.

2) Prior to this, I've not experienced 'being a failure' in any sort of activity so strong, and it is not a good feeling.

Our founder raised $25 million on a prototype that showed zero product-market fit after launch. You probably know what company I'm talking about :)

Too early with a ML product back in '08, people were not ready to believe such a thing was possible: basically a working VFX pipeline for what are now called "deep fakes", but I targeted inserting consumers into brand advertising TV commercials and music videos. First people simply could not grasp the concept, then they did not believe it was possible, and then because I wrote it alone and had no team VCs and partners and other potential collaborators felt working with "my company" was too risky. People want to see a team, not just one guy and an automated media pipeline. You need a team and an organization to be taken seriously, no matter how great one's technology happens to be. I did have two freelancers helping with the web site, but the entire media digital double creation and VFX pipeline was written by just me, and that is perceived as too risky. Here we are 10 years later, and still no one has done automated consumer inserting into still and video advertising. I still have my working pipeline...

We were too early regarding the technology (doing 3d real time reconstruction of inner rooms using laser scanner - 2011), without even owning a laser scanner (price tag: $30000). We got to rent one for some hours ($2000/4hours) to get some samples but they were too few to draw a generic, working algorithm. With the samples it worked well, but we didn't get the opportunity to move further, then we ran out of money (funded by a University Program, from the money we bought computers, office stuff and travels) pretty soon, because none looked pretty interested in the product. 3 years later, other technologies reached the market and it was 'successful', even though I don't see any disruption until today.

Learned a lot in laser scanning and improved my programming skills tremendously (was CTO and main IT guy after finishing university).

Unfortunately PCs were not so fast as today and there was no help like today with all those APIs available, but only 2 major libraries that helped me to achieve the MVP: OpenCV and PointcloudLibrary.

My startup failed because I was too secretive. I though I had a great idea and always worried that somebody would copy it. I spent 4 years working on my idea only to find out that nobody was interested in what I was doing. Now my mentality completely changed. I will be flattered if someone even bothers to copy my idea. At least that means I am doing something right.

Lack of clear leadership.

Two founders - friends. Thought we could work every decision out democratically. Didn't turn out that way - used to fight about almost everything until each of us tried to force our way. And we had enough - that kind of stuff will drain the energy out of you.

If it's not working, kill it. Your time is worth too much to waste.

I am towards the end of wrapping my startup. There were 3 main failure reasons -

a. could not build a good team,

b. co-founder was not 100% committed,

c. picked target market in the geography which I was new to. Although it was my home country, the way to do business and lack of professional network became hindrance.

Because hardware is hard. Because product/artistic vision isn't the skillset same as marketing/sales. Because angel investors and founders had irreconcilable differences.

(Also because 95% of the functionality of the ~$60BOM hardware we spent 12-18 months getting into manufacture could be replicated with new components with a BOM of around $10 by the time we had the product in our hands...)

Startup #1: I was trying to build a location analysis tool after seeing some crappy software being used at work and charging us a crap ton of money for it. Roped my friend but also found someone completely random based on skill set. The dynamics of the team didn’t work out and we didn’t fully align on which direction to go. We also didn’t have access to the data we needed and we might have also gone after the wrong customer segment. We had ZERO experience in commercial real estate and we quickly found out that whilst our tool is useful, it’s not something the industry cares too much when it came to making deals (read nice-to-have but not hair on fire problem)

Startup #2: Born out of my own frustration with startup #1, decided to try and scratch my own itch with CRM software. At this point, it’s just me as my partners all went back to their full time jobs. Money was good and they have families. CRM is hell competitive and even more so with HubSpot in it. Everyone I spoke with had so many needs and I wasn’t able to focus on something pressing. Worked with a startup to build out a roadmap but they were not 100% invested in the product and was just trying to help.

Startup #3: Off the back of a trip to Hong Kong, I came across a very useful concept of having a mobile phone in your hotel. Tried to replicate it but met many roadblocks in terms of getting contacts, scalability of the idea within North America.

Going on startup #4 now, this looks to be a lot more promising after incorporating everything I’ve learned from the previous failed items: - Tech is the least important issue. Usually, you can build the tech. It’s figuring out whether people need it that’s key

- Contacts, network and communication can be quite powerful. Having people who know the domain space in helps to become a great sounding board.

- Go deep with knowledge. Being a startup, you need to have some form of credibility for people to trust you and your company. Previously I had high level expertise but nothing deep enough that says I know the problems you’re solving, mr. customer. Of course you can build up that knowledge but that will take time

- Time is the most precious component. Focus on what matters, validate and think about the tech and optimisation after

For 2 startups -

For first one, got ditched by the other founders. Lesson learnt, make sure everything is in black.

For Second one - Support, you may have the best product ever and the best implementation team on this side of planet, but the customer support is paramount. We gained too many customers too quickly and our support was stretched thin, hiring new employees to train them on an exotic platform was not easy. Also learnt that product simplification is the key to product design and success. Also, a lot of other reasons, but these were the prime one.

It was well worth the time and would give it another shot someday.

Edit : added some more text

Right out of school, another person and I had a startup building a managed VoIP solution.

We didn't start selling early enough, and underestimated the amount of time closing our first sale would take. That lead to my business partner taking another job to make ends meet, and not able to meet obligations to our company. Since he was managing the relationships and I was doing the tech, I basically was left trying to manage the relationships from scratch, many of whom weren't interested anymore. I very quickly ran out of money before we could sign a contract.

Lessons (probably too many to list): 1. B2B sales is a lot harder than the tech. Make sure you have the runway to compensate for learning how to sell. 2. Make sure your business partner(s) are as committed as you are. 3. Don't use your own money, or at least have multiple sources of income. 4. Have a good advisor. I feel like if I had someone I could have asked questions to, I would have been more successful, or never would have taken the risk. 5. Probably most importantly, don't look at it as a failure, but a learning experience. I was pretty depressed when everything came crashing down, but I learned later that it was a valuable experience that put me ahead of a lot of other people just due to the sheer amount of work it was.

I started RestBackup, a backup service for small business databases.

I coded 6 months before talking to customers. When I finally talked with them, I learned that I built mostly the wrong thing. I spent half a year changing my product to fit their needs. I could have saved about 6 months by talking with people first.

Then I used the wrong sales strategy. I focused on cold emailing, snail mail, and cold calling, which was demoralizing. The pressure of impending failure was too much. I lost nearly all motivation and productivity. After another half year, I ran out of money and gave up. I could have succeeded at sales by consulting with an experienced salesperson in the industry. They would have told me to find out how my target customers buy products like mine: they buy whatever their local IT services company recommends. Then I would have focused my sales effort on the local IT services companies and probably gotten enough sales to take off.

Now it's 5 years later and I'm trying again, with a new business. Wish me luck! :)

TLDR: 1. Talk to potential customers before building anything. 2. When stuck, seek advice from experienced people.

As an engineer what I learnt was that commercialization is the most important factor and that its difficult/near impossible to sell without strong branding, marketing and networking. I now work for a multi-billion dollar company, the product I developed is superior to theirs in almost every regard. What they have is an amazing marketing team.

I was part of a startup in the mid 2000s that wanted to make it easy to shop for homes using your mobile phone. We used j2me and actually got the app installed on a few phones. I wrote up a small white paper on j2me: http://www.mooreds.com/midp/midp.html

I believe the startup failed because it wasn't anyone's first priority. Every one of the four founders had a day job, even though we all had double digit ownership percentages. I don't recall if we even knew enough to have the stock vest.

So the tech folks worked on the product on weekends and I don't know how much the sales and marketing folks worked.

There were also issues with marketing, distribution and the fact the mobile ecosystem wasn't quite there which made the app painful to use, but I think it might have worked had we been all in (or even one of us had).

RIP homesonphones.com

I took a year doing something I had planned would take 6 months. I was inexperienced, I shipped a product that had a very niche market. I got on the PS4 appstore and the algorithm just took me down, way down. Pricing was also screwed up in 60 odd countries for the first month with no control of mine. RIP.

I think the most important one was people say one thing and do another. This is true both from the sales perspective and a user experience/user testing perspective. Here are a few examples

- People wanted cheaper mobile app analytics, but they wanted a brand they could trust - People wanted a lot of insights, but they would never understand most of the charts

On the whole, products which are used during firefighting are are hard products to sell and differentiate on. Google/Fb/Amazon could build a product with 10% of the feature coverage and yet own the market.

I recently wrote a bunch of things I learned here -> https://ravivyas.com/2018/09/03/mistakes-to-avoid-when-scali...

Hired a guy who do politics rather than coding. He destroyed the whole culture. When I ask why we are not firing the guy, CTO know about it but can't fire him.

- Two main clients did not pay bills on time, causing me to run out of runway. Getting them to pay became the single most important issue, and after they finally did, I was stuck with a 2.5 month backlog, two important clients who couldn't be trusted to pay on time, and a broken spirit.

- Created a b2b app, spend too much time on making it work great, not nearly enough time/effort on marketing it. Found that the people who could understand the technical superiority were not our target market, but just people who estimate technical superiority from marketing. Couldn't and wouldn't compete on that. Then we landed a big client who paid us handsomely to lose our focus and turned us into a non-scalable consultancy business which we sold for an almost symbolic value.

- Used networking to get together a team of 5 researchers/engineers in a hot field. Found funding prospects, but only on the condition that they pay us (slightly below market average), but the equity would be in the single digits (even for me). So this blew up, and a few months later the most promising researchers got jobs at FAMG. I think most $$ potential was lost here (would have been an easy acqui-hire).

Learned:

- The cheaper the price, the cheaper the customers. I took pride in offering great customer service, but spend hours looking into issues for 15$ accounts (would have been cheaper to fire them).

- The smaller the startup, the lower you are prioritized come pay-day. Would be more aggressive in collections/SLA.

- It is not how good your product is, it is how much people are willing to spend for it (how good they perceive it to be). Non-technical people are easier convinced by a sales call, than an impressive demo.

- Learned how to deal with financial stress and to keep a good sleep/workout schedule, else my output drops way too low.

- 15% equity of 0$ is 0$, but you also can't expect the really good people to work for your startup without any potential upside or throwing them a bone. Strike while the iron is hot.

The app was essentially what Slack does today. It was built to compete with Campfire and Hipchat (the new kid on the block) and the mission of the product was to be the most extensible group chat application.

Within a month we had paying customers. We didn't know how to grow the user base as neither my co-founder nor myself knew how to do marketing. After a few months of just adding features we tried finding investors and eventually had to do consulting to pay our bills.

At that point we had an acquisition offer that was way lower than what could have been. Because we were consulting and the product was going nowhere we sold it. It was overall a great experience but the software ended up dying in the hands of the acquirer as they could not find a way to market it either.

We launched our startup right at the end of the dotcom boom. We were trying to do meta-searches against Alta Vista (mostly) and a few other, doing what was a very primitive network search similar to what FB does, only specialized to things like scientific papers. The first product was trying to help academics and scientists find conferences to attend based on their common interests.

But before we got very far, the dotcom bust hit and investor cash dried up. My partner went back to his day job, and I went back and finished my degree.

Lessons learned: market fluctuations can and will kill you. Have an exit strategy. Don't rely on a single coder (me, in this case) especially one who is young and immature. But definitely do it, you won't regret it.

#26 on this ugly list

https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/2012/10/the-50-worst-int...

I got stuck.

The more important a project is to me, the more stuck I get.

When I am stuck I do not do sales, I do not talk to mentors, I feel sorry for myself, i procrastinate.

Why it failed: Getting an office that can't be paid off with low income from startup. Learning: Don't get an office.

My startup didn't fail. But my initial projects failed. Project 1. I started a commercial version of Wikipedia back in 1990. Just the computer hardware and software section. I hated starting there. But that's what I knew. And that's the reason I started the project in the first place. It was harder to get info about computers back then. You had magazines (and user groups I guess). I wasn't sure of my computer programming skills. So I used an off the shelf database management system. Long story short. The DBMS didn't scale. It had a GUI front end. And as the project went along. Any change became exponentially longer. Small insignificant changes started taking an hour, then two, and finally 2 whole days to make a small change. (I was so mad I wrote my own DBMS. And since it didn't have all the bells and whistles, it was lightning quick. And changes were mere compiles that took 4-11 minutes.) I should have stress tested the commercial DBMS I bought, at the start. I just assumed I was paying a lot of money for it. It would work. There's much more that I don't have time for. I should have sought funding, I shouldn't have worked on my end of the project alone (I thought it would be in business's self-interest to provide content and update the info. At the start about 15% did. Which in retrospect was decent.), ... I should have started the startup earlier in life. My aging parents became my primary concern.

2 Years ago I started a product to provide a marketplace for lawyers(http://www.legalisor.com). People can search and hire best Lawyers & Advocates in India(mainly in NCR ). I started this as a side project first and I did all the coding and market research part.

Why it was failed :

1. For sales and marketing, I hired my brother who was an MBA and things did not go well at work. He was not giving enough attention and dedication as product required in its initial phase and I was not able to push him hard because of personal relationships. He was about to get married too so he was under pressure to get a fulltime job. 2. Few people were ready to join my organization and they were ready to invest some money too but I was always afraid to give them equity of the company in return. I was in believing that I can run the company from profit I was earning from selling packages. 3. I was not prepared for the scenario when the product is ready to go to the next level.

I learned :

1. I should trust people more and give them chance to involve. 2. Personal relations should stay away when there is work involved. 3. Seed funding could be helpful to give the product a better shape.

Note: product(http://www.legalisor.com) is still running but I am not much active with its development.

Posting anon. My startup failed when my backstabbing co-founder struck a side-deal with our biggest customer to essentially "sell" our IP via consulting directly to them. We were easily acquihire material which would have possibly netted us single-digit millions, but instead my co-founder took the bird in hand and "cashed out" all our internal secrets.

As I learned, lawsuits are expensive and you have to prove things that you may not be able to "prove."

Very relevant: https://www.failory.com/

"Interviews With Startup Owners, Learn From Their Failures"

Bootstrapped a fitness app (Bruiserfit - https://bruiserfit.com/) with a friend based on my own measurable high-intensity physical training workouts. We built the first version not really knowing what we were doing, slapped AdWords on it, but users never came. We couldn't get past the activation phase - the initial product wasn't intuitive and compelling people to workout is challenging. Over the past couple years we've iterated on the user experience to an adequate state, but we still lack retention. It seems like the format is still confusing for beginners and that most people simply don't want to train themselves to do tough, fast bodyweight workouts.

On the technical side, we used Rails 5 and followed the Thoughtbot playbook. But neither of us were very experienced in native development, which prevented us from offering many of the bells and whistles that other market offerings provide. If I had to do it all over again I would probably give it a shot with React + Firebase.

Like others have said here, democratically running an equally shared company with friends sounds better on paper than it is. Different personal beliefs and approaches often lead to deadlock. Communication is essential to avoiding resentment. It gets easier with practice, but there was still too much to juggle for us and not enough time, know-how, and motivation.

We still casually hack at the project on the side. My cofounder and his wife swear having the project on his resume landed him his current and very comfy gig. I'm still waiting to see if anything beyond the experience itself comes out of it for me.

Because you’ve done something similar three times before in different categories doesn’t mean you’ve found a market.

Solutions shouldn’t search for problems.

Identify market fit without investing tremendous time and energy. If you have to contort yourself then you haven’t found it.

CEO should sell the product vision above all.

Hire people who are smarter than you, hard working and honest. At any sense of dishonesty or questionable behavior, show them the door.

Know when you’re done and cut bait ASAP.

We were on an incubator where the staff were insistent that all the start-ups be 'high-growth' rather than work towards simply surviving, as an initial goal. This meant the projects were pushed to being ambitious to the point of farce...The other two in my team started trying to appeal to this 'high growth' mentality by just making absurd claims about what the technology would be able to do (without anything actually existing yet) and I was the CTO, so I got a bit annoyed by this and eventually just had to start saying 'look this is totally ridiculous now'. They said they didn't want to work with me if I wasn't willing to do it. I just said I can't do it so there's no point. I went to work at a consultancy for a bit and now I'm a research associate at a university. I have no idea what happened to the business in the end. I guess they just slowly died without proper tech staff.

Discovering patterns from chaotic datasets, albeit via Graph Theory techniques (instead of ML) for populating a knowledge graph. e.g., find commonalities among documents, such as a single occurrence of a common phrase in each that connects otherwise obscure papers.

This technique is well suited for datasets with insufficient features for machine learning...

Initial tech focus was on finding commonalities within a set of documents, such as by crawling all links on first 10 pages of Google search via their CSE API. Next search optionally increases the pool.

Initial business focus was for marketers, who not only know their pain but are willing to pay to make that pain go away.

Nothing unique about the market... but with Lean Interviews and with 100% hit rate for interest among the 40 highly qualified leads, it seemed like a simple matter of assembling various bits that we had each previously built.

Lessons learned:

Even if a long-time friend commits to joining, has the financial means to contribute several months, owes you the personal favour to do so, etc., etc.-- Don't bank on that.

Like a perfect storm, I had multiple friends who previously committed to assisting, then each suddenly experienced extenuating circumstances preventing them from joining. One would have been our NLP lead-- ouch!

More mundane lessons learned captured in articles:

https://play.org/articles/new-entrepreneur-checklist

https://play.org/articles/introduction-to-natural-language-p... (i.e., unlearning misconceptions about "synonyms" to fully deployed with spaCy.io)

One I joined failed due to:

1 - Inability to convert unpaid customers to paid. (And a focus on the wrong vanity metrics)

2 - Poor analytics which caused number 1. (The AI didn’t work)

3 - Weak governance. (Too much money too early, and a paradoxically bad founder/funder relationship)

4 - Excessivr nepotism, side projects and conflicts of interest.

This gave me a checklist to look for in companies I subsequently interviewed at.

There is one and one only reason why companies go out of business: they run out of cash.

Many a situation may lead to this, but lack of cash is the reason. When Leaman Brothers when under, the company had half-a-trillion dollars in assets but it could not convert these assets fast enough into cash to continue its operations.

My first startup failed because of doubt I had in the product and because of poor coordination with my co-founder.

My finance co-founder and I wanted to make an IoT device for kitchens. I made a prototype with 3D printed parts and an Arduino. My co-founder was going to market and seek investors. While working on the prototype I found out that there were tremendous numbers of edge cases that would make a marketable product far too complex and my co-founder didn't do the things he said he was going to do. So I stopped working on it and me and my co-founder mutually decided to end the project after completing the first prototype.

Two lessons I learned was to make sure to find a co-founder you know can deliver on their promises and to work on something you're really passionate about, not just something you think will make you money.

It failed because I was an idiot who thought he knew it all. It also failed because my co-founders were my best friends so the "partnering" wasn't based on skills or what you bring to the table, but rather the fact of us being friends. And finally I've fought my incubator/accelerator who were idiots enough to fight me back and it was almost a bullying tournament, I'm glad we solved that and everyone carried on with their lives.

I've learned a lot, to listen more and to choose wisely, not to spend any money before knowing what it will return to the company and also not to over promise. If I have to do it all over again I would but with the mindset of "I want to change my self first" before thinking about changing the world.

I made a small startup while backpacking. It was called backpackbud. Contained list of hostels, tips, things to do etc

Maintinaing it was pain, backpackers are cheap and I didn’t make any money. It died.

Then I started bewolo.com with some friends. Those friends brought in their friends and I was the only technical guy. My shares were <10% and I had little social life while building it. It was around travel space. Think airbnb for things to do. I got burnt out. Working for a big company and building a startup at some time is really hard. I got burnt and left. Other founders couldn’t run it and it died eventually.

Startups are hard. We only hear about the successes and big IPOs and think I can do it too.

I’m probably going to do it again but this time, try to go full time for at-least an year.

My last failure was an idea so terrible and provocative it had to get some kind of traction. Never failed to get a "that's brilliant," laugh, but required more finesse to get people to follow through.

Burned some bridges, but really, who wants flammable bridges anyway.

- Founder gave up, went bush for weeks at a time, and I (the "right hand man") had no experience managing staff let alone running a company without the founder. We wasted tonnes of money on staff that I couldn't adequately manage or train which resulted in huge technical debt on almost every feature.

- I should have opened my mouth 6-12 months earlier and put my foot down regarding my own capabilities. Also, hiring great programmers is really hard.

I'm still trying to work out how to get co-workers and staff to come ask me questions when they need to, I'm unsure if it's because I'm not approachable (I always try to be!) or if they don't recognise that they need to ask a question.

We tried to set up a small startup of 3 people with the goal of offering a service for social bot detection, reporting and (eventually) removal. The assumption was that they are an annoyance and might be a danger to the public opinion and to brand reputation. We started on Twitter for our MVP. We failed to generate interest in it and it turned out that social bots are actually mostly marketing tools by ad agencies to promote their customer's product. Their goal is to make a topic trending, so that real people start noticing it. There is a strong business case for social bots. We should have created some Social bot toolkits, that would have probably worked much better...

Q: Why did your startup fail?

A: Brilliant beloved and trusting visionary founder just didn't have a functioning crazy person detector (which was fortunately why he hired me), but he also unfortunately hired a self-proclaimed "Serial Hacktreprenuer" (I shit you not) as a "game finance expert", who failed to do his job raising money, and whose bizarre behavior and "volatile and erratic work habits" led to battling lawsuits and the failure of the company, who claimed the founder "tried to push him out of the company and committed an "atrocity" by trying to take away" his equity, who called the dispute a "genocide", and who then threatened to publish an "exposé documentary" by tweeting: “Looking for PR professionals to build awareness for “THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT WILL”, an exposé documentary, releasing on YouTube 6/2012.”

But they eventually settled the lawsuits, and Will issued a statement officially thanking him for his "tenacious execution" of the company (insert capital punishment joke here), so he never followed through on that threat.

Q: What did you learn?

A: I learned to program iOS and Unity3D, and to stay out of company politics, and to listen to my bullshit detector.

https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/16/will-wright-hivemind/

https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/03/game-pioneer-will-wrights...

https://venturebeat.com/2012/11/01/simcity-pioneer-will-wrig...

http://gamingsession.taterunino.net/2012/06/03/will-wrights-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiveMind

Not my startup but worked for one until they pivoted. We had a photographer platform (https://picr.com) competing with Thumbtack (except our photographers were to be paid higher instead of a bid to the bottom.

Everything seemed right. We had the right market (Portland, OR), with a beautiful design and great customer experience. We managed to get roughly 100 photographers on board but the customers never came. After a year or so, Picr ended up pivoting to more of a photographer platform than a AirBnb/Thumbtack alternative. Most of the team was let go and only a few devs stayed.

Lesson learned: Building a two sided market is hard.

Market penetration. We had an always-on collaboration tool for distributed groups. All anybody knows is conference tools, and even the customers that signed up for our product would have a session average time of 1 hour. The product was intended to be always-on, not started and stopped for meetings.

Anyway we figured it took 2 days of requiring the team to keep the product running, before folks 'got it' and began to use the features fluidly. After that they'd take off. But that's way, way too long a trial and almost nobody would stick it out. Our few successes came from enterprise customers that could control what was running on the team's devices.

I was a co-founder at a SaaS health startup that ultimately failed because our team imploded. I learned a variety of very useful lessons from our failure.

#1 If you do not have strong domain expertise in your target market, your co-founder must. If none of your co-founders have strong domain expertise, you are in for a world of pain. It's possible to succeed without someone from the industry onboard (and we almost did) by figuring stuff out for yourself through talking with customers, but not having that person makes things 1000 times harder. Apart from having to spend a lot of time learning the domain, you also miss out on low hanging fruit initial customers / advisors who an industry cofounder would be able to acquire through their network.

#2 This is related to the first point above, but if you can, try to get angel funding from someone from the industry. Our angel was able to put us in touch with several industry players and regulators who were incredibly helpful.

#3 Before you start any venture, you need to sit down with your co-founders and explicitly agree on what the mission of the company is, what everyone's expectations and desires are, and what everyone's responsibilities will be. Take a decent amount of time to do this, put it in writing, and have everyone sign it. In my company we had three people with the title co-founder, all of whom had different ideas about what being a co-founder meant. One co-founder really wanted to be an advisor and never did any work, another co-founder really wanted to just be CTO and didn't really want to deal with non-technical matters, and I was left doing most of the day to day work. We also had 3 different opinions on risk tolerance and persistence. If you can map things out beforehand then you can hold people to your agreement when they aren't pulling their weight.

#4 Be flexible with your team. We had an initial product idea that didn't work out and we needed to pivot. Unfortunately the team that was a decent fit for the first space was not the right team for the second space. Don't be afraid to be honest about what the new requirements are and to let people go if you are still in the early stages and some people can no longer add value.

#5 If a vendor, advisor, or other entity says they will do something for free for you, it means they won't do it. We had 3 entities offer us free services because we were early stage and none of them actually did real work when push came to shove. Demand solid contracts from your vendors and demand to pay them.

#6 Hold off on incorporating until you have to. I spent an inordinate amount of time dealing with incorporation bullshit, tax bullshit, and compliance bullshit when we didn't even have a product and were still doing early stage work. Don't do this. Wait until you are at least ready to start development before you incorporate.

#7 Very few ideas are truly unique. A bunch of people probably failed at what you are about to try to do in the past. Do your research and figure out why they failed. Perhaps even try to reach out to them. I would gladly talk to anyone that asked me for advice or information on the state of the industry / product space.

#8 Get an accountant. There is SO MUCH TAX BULLSHIT and you don't want to be dealing with it yourself.

Ultimately we got unlucky in that our primary venture was in a space that was undergoing tremendous regulatory upheaval which made our product irrelevant, but given the nature of our team and circumstances, I'm not sure we would have had success even had the space not changed rapidly.

I partnered with a much larger company to profit from an existing sales structure and their technical infrastucture. To me it seems like -- due to their size -- they wanted to cut a larger piece of the cake for themselves, so negotiations about the details didn't really come to an end. They started to create and sell the product on their own with lots of stolen concept details. I am glad they failed. My lesson is to bootstrap and implement fast. Don't worry if sales are not exploding. However, check if sales are pointing upwards and finance is under control.

I basically learned that failing a startup is similar to dealing with end-of-life care - we all make the same mistakes so in a weird way, I think the best way to learn from this experience is to read Atul Gawande's book Being Mortal. It'll put things in perspective.

Here's the post I wrote, hope it helps folks: https://medium.com/startup-grind/startup-mortality-what-end-...

Never start a business offering/selling to rational customers.

I know for most that's obvious for most but apparently not me. :<

Randy's law 248: At the heart of most successful businesses is an irrational consumer.

I started a Wordpress consultancy with a couple of friends. The idea was to eventually transition into a proper design agency that can also code.

One friend was part-time and did only design because he didn't know how to code. The other friend never did any work at all so I ended up having to do almost everything, which wasn't really that much anyway since we only had a handful of customers.

Eventually one of those customers led to a full time gig so I shut the whole thing down.

There were many lessons but the main lesson was that you cannot rely on a person's word.

In 2011 we launched Birthday Dollar, a Facebook app that let users send and receive small gifts of money and gift cards through the platform. We watched usage tic up day after day and felt momentum grow.

Then Facebook announced they had acquired Karma, a gifting company, and planned to integrate them into Facebook as Facebook Gifts.

I immediately pulled the plug on Birthday Dollar, processed the last transaction and shut the whole thing down.

What did I learn? I learned that there's no shame in surrendering without a fight.

It's hard to tell the exceptions from the rules.

Many people would say, e.g. don't deal with large companies because they will drag you along, eat your revenue and then not commit to a sale 12 months later. You will also find plenty of companies who will say that 1 big customer was their route to some early cash and success.

The bottom line with any business success is the CEO/executive team understanding how to take a high level view of the company and fix anything that isn't working!

You learn the old business cliché that the old business clichés are true.

It would be interesting to see a list of clichés tabulated with the number of failures.

We built an app that let people pay for goods and services (in the real world) with their smartphone, we grew fast, raised, built a product our users loved. Then... contactless payment (and later Apple Pay) came along and killed us. Lots of other stuff happened along the way, but with the benefit of a few years' hindsight - this is basically what happened.

I started a location-based Q&A social app. A Twitter-like quora app as per location. The idea was well received early adoption, and user retention couldn't be achieved. Learnings were that (1) there was no niche it was a very horizontal platform and people did not know what to best use it for (2) Lack of trust between strangers to answer queries

Failed because my co-founders weren't committed and I didn't care enough about the idea to attempt to pursue it on my own. Learned that having good committed co-founders is critical if you'd like to have them at all. Also learned that starting a business in an industry you have no experience in is incredibly hard.

It's not about the best tech.

We seemed (well no one knows for sure) to have the best data available (it was an analytics product) over our competitors, but didn't earn enough money with it. I can't blame our sales department as I have zero ideas how to even sell sliced bread, but our customers regularly said they liked our data better than what they got from the competition.

We did spend months improving our tech and even had stuff like geo-based load balancing, multi-DC failover, and a lot more. We prepared for a lot more customers and traffic than we needed to handle in the end. Some of it was warranted, but especially improving our data/algorithms even further was absolutely wasted time. We went from like 90% professional setup to 95%, and went from 99% good algorithms to 99.5% good algorithms, but we should have added more fancy dashboards and better UX. Admittedly, many customers just logged in and grabbed a CSV export, they paid for the data. But a not insignicant amount of customers also said the competition's presentation was a lot better. We never had a dedicated front end person with real design chops (not just being a JS developer), we should have hired one or two.

We also held on too long to old features/products that weren't the current focus but spread our resources too thin. We weren't enough developers/SREs for the workload, that means we either moved too slow or stuff got postponed.

I think we also never fully made the switch from "we'll do some customizations for customers to get them to fully make a commitment" to "this is the SaaS offering, take it or leave", but maybe the market space was also too small for that. It was B2B and the customers weren't something like Small businesses, where you have thousands.

Things that 100% did not matter: permanent overtime, too much vacation time We were a German startup acting within German work conditions, e.g. 40h were the norm (sure there were exceptions when something exploded), we had paid oncall and if you didn't sleep the whole night then you just handed over in the morning and went to sleep.

TLDR: Lack of focus on a single product, not selling to enough customers, did not perform step to lower-maintenance SaaS (worked too much like an agency)

- Co-founders didn't have enough domain expertise - Poor execution on our mission which allowed peoples personal side interests to pull tech and development in every which way - Many other reasons

What did I learn: Strong leadership = Strong execution If you can't communicate you can't create.

Try to sell the product before spending the time to build it. Sell the dream, then build it.

A person is not necessarily dumb because their start- up failed. For me: 1. Improperly defined market. 2. Did no consistent marketing- marketed to a broad group for one month then quit. 3. Lost interest in the business idea- boredom!

So far I've had at least 4 failed side projects/startups, and one mildly successful product (so far).

Back in 2014 I tried to build a product recommendation service based on Reddit subreddits, where I would make money from Amazon referrals. I actually got to the front page of Reddit and Hacker News, but Amazon rejected my referral application, because apparently they don't approve any websites that have a grid layout of products (too similar to amazon.com.) I retried a few times but still couldn't get it approved, so shut the website down.

My first attempt at cofounding startup was a social network for skateboarders: http://hdwr.co. It wasn't a great idea but our team was pretty amazing. We set up a lunch with Tony Hawk (although nothing came of that), and were in talks with The Berrics (a big skateboarding brand) about a partnership, but couldn't work out a deal. In the end we didn't have enough users or growth, and after a few years everyone got bored and we shut it down. Never made a single dollar.

I had an idea for a mobile game that I thought would be fun: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/boops-boops-swoops/id1128234... It had an "AR" mode, a few years before that became a big thing. Anyway, I executed poorly and the game sucked. It just wasn't very fun, and I didn't make any sales. I learned that I'm not very good at making games, and even good games are a lottery ticket.

Second game: https://sudoblock.com I had a lot of fun building SudoBlock, and it was really good to learn React Native. It was awesome to build a single app that could run on Android, iOS, Windows, and web. I posted it on Reddit and tried some other marketing things, and I earned a total of $30 from in-app purchases. I learned that I'm still not very good at making games. I think the execution was a tiny bit better than my earlier game, but still pretty bad. And the game just wasn't very fun or addictive. If I ever do another game, I should probably hire a designer. But I probably won't, because I enjoy doing everything myself, even if it sucks. And maybe I'll get better at it eventually.

My current project is FormAPI (https://formapi.io), which is a B2B SaaS service that I've bootstrapped. I launched about 11 months ago, and I'm not really comfortable with disclosing the revenue, but it's doing really well. I'm excited to keep working on it for the next few years and seeing what happens.

Started a company with a close-ish family member who also had a prestigious full time job in the sector we were in.

He promised meetings with execs and experts in the sector, and expert advice. We split equity 50/50. After three months, we had an MVP that customers loved, a contract with a large client, and several interested angels.

Unfortunately the co-founder hadn't delivered on anything (all business meetings were from cold calls, I had to learn all domain expertise on my own, my co-founder was spending no time at all on the company and kept promising to do things that he didn't end up doing).

After trying to get him to execute what he said he would do with a positive attitude for three months, he called me and told me he "didn't want me to make him feel like he wasn't doing enough". If he was a stranger I would have found a way to kick him out. But to preserve family relationships we killed the company.

TLDR: people in your family with great jobs don't make for good co-founders

Burnout

Choose cofounders carefully, understand the platform dynamics of your industry, don't discount models that experts and the in-crowd look down upon (solo founder, bootstrapping, etc.)

We didn't get enough clients. Step 1-100 is sales, the technology is pretty much irrelevant. you are a sales person first and foremost and a developer sometimes.

They thought I would be just another brazilian and join their corporate corruption scheme against a major hospital here in southern brazil.

The main guy, a PhD in Physics from a top university in europe (but a retard IRL), will be cleaning sewers until death comes.

True story.

edit: i was the founder and they were clients in a bootstrapping program involving a top 10 tech giant and a hospital

TL;DR: We were way too ahead of our time.

Back in 2010 I joined the founding team to build a crowd-sourced video editing platform with the goal of getting people to edit their countless hours of home movie footage into short clips they will actually watch instead of them sit on a tape or hard drive somewhere.

We built the whole platform, had the economics all worked out. Did a number of innovative things like connect to a royalty free music API, and Dropbox's API before that was ever released to the public.

In the end it failed because the average consumer did not have fast enough internet in 2010. Most people simply could not upload their files to us, even after we implemented a dropbox integration. Gigs of video files just took too long and people lost interest.

In hindsight, we should have seen that coming and started out by partnering with a digitization service that could handle various formats like tapes, and we should have also done some form of shipping raw media so that consumers wouldn't have to upload files to us. I think we would have succeeded in that case.

TL,DR, my main takeaways are: - it's all about the team (what every VC will tell you) - don't start a company with friends you haven't already worked with and really tested - first mover advantage won't help if you move straight into a wall

It's really all about the humans. I started a UAV company with some friends about 12 years ago, and we had a very ambitious initial project: an amphibious drone. I had gone to work right after graduating, while my friends had studied some more, so that when we started the company, with my 2 years of work experience, I was the most experienced one around. Needless to say, the original plan didn't work, and it was all about the team not being good enough.

We raised over a million, paid ourselves shit salaries (ie less than minimum wage), and managed to survive 3 years. After year two, a couple of the co-founders were given the boot for gross negligence (burning over 100k through sending the wrong plans to production..), and a pivot happened. It started working, then an accident happened and no money was left to recover from it.

It could seem that a bit more money could have saved the day, as in the third year we finally were onto something which we could do and for which there was a market fit. But the pivot only happened because the team changed. The remaining members of the team, notably the flight test / composite manufacturing team, were very competent, but I suspect they were just spent after 3 years of startup purgatory. So, when it seemed like we might survive a bit longer, they decided to just kill any such possibility and finally be able to walk away. The other co-founder that was left let it happen and just folded, going so far as to forbid me in writing to try anything further to sell our assets or save the company.

It was very hard realizing that my co-founder friends, some of whom I thought of as brothers, had behaved the way they did. It is heartbreaking to see people you trust be negligent and ruin the efforts made by others, and betray the trust of the people who had trusted a bunch of 20-somethings with a big pile of money.

I'm not blameless either. I should have reacted much earlier to the lack of professional standards of some of my colleagues, and either left or asked for them to leave. Friendship made me blind, and way too trusting. I should also have tried to raise more money when we pivoted, and focused a little less on product and business development, but I couldn't see that at the time.

I've worked for two startups that failed in entirely different ways.

Startup A: We built custom analysis software, a 1.5 million line-of-code C++ codebase with 2 major products.

Head count: 20

Reasons we failed (IMHO) - in order of importance

1) Heavily saddled with tech debt. 1.5 million lines of C++ code is not an asset. When we started Web technologies were simply not able to provide the kind of functionality we were offering. So we kept doubling down on the thick-client software. When the web finally started to catch up, we had the wrong skill sets in the wrong places to pivot the tech without rebooting the entire company. We hit a weird technology gap where thick client software was on the way out, but web tech wasn't quite up to par for most of our existence. Near the end it web tech stacks were probably good enough, but we ended up going down the wrong path.

2) When we did try to start over with a clean code-base our tech skills couldn't move to the kind of technology that was becoming fashionable in enterprises. So we built another desktop client very quickly in C#. It worked well, but it was like selling a different kind of horse in the age of the car.

3) Absolutely terrible sales staff. I learned more about how important sales teams are from this ride than from any other experience. Nearly 90% of the sales came from word of mouth, and the rest from a couple of us tech guys bird dogging it out on the street. 4 successive sales guys produced $0 of sales over 6 years. To make matters worse, none of them were ever able to gain enough proficiency with the software to sell it themselves, they always had to pull along a "sales engineer" to demo. Total mess, and it's made me pay much more attention to corporate sales apparati over the years.

4) Funding funding funding. Our total VC investment was too small, and our executive team too inexperienced to realize this. We easily needed 10-20x the investment to make it work, hire good staff, pivot to better tech stacks and approach the market correctly. When we started the VCs claimed that we'd be the next unicorn, the money never added up to make that claim makes sense.

Result: I rode the ship down because I was learning so much on the way. The people were good to work with so it made it worth it. Everybody ended up in good jobs elsewhere and we're almost all in senior or executive positions, applying the lessons we learned.

Startup B: Web-based analysis software (I can learn!)

Head Count: 60

1) Absolutely dishonest, immature, corporate leadership who couldn't work together to operate an elevator. Treated key employees like garbage and ignored the rest. It was like middle-school.

2) The bad behavior extended to customers, who were often put against each other by the CEO in a web of deceit. Hard to explain, but very bad behavior.

3) Tech looked awesome, the back-end was rubbish because the engineering team was incredibly poorly run. I mean like builds completely breaking every day, completely unscalable critical architecture components, senior engineers insisting pet projects be included.

Result: I fled like a deer stampede in a wildfire. The company closed shop not too long after I left and the CEO and some of the senior C-level staff have disappeared from the face of the Earth. If they're doing something, it's not public in any way these days.

I could write a freaking book on it.

working alone get a team

My own startup about five years ago (I've worked at several others, all different types of failures):

Running out of money. We were bootstrapped, and the style of work we were doing had some decent capital costs. We failed for a "bargain" (less than 7K), but we had cut to the bone and deeper while trying that. Side jobs to make rent just increased stress and distracted from the business.

Why did we run out of money?

Focused on engineering instead of sales and marketing. Manually spinning up servers would've been the right thing to do--since we instead were both technical we solved technical problems and kinda missed the people side of things. It was real and hard work, but it was not work that was relevant to making sales.

After we ran out of money, why didn't we keep at it?

Stress blocked further work. Too much stress led to neither founder being able to even think about the company and its business without severe anxiety. Times were dark and bad.

~

I learned that you want to prioritize the money funnel over literally every other thing that you as an engineer think matters. Coffee is for closers.

I learned to try out only with other people's money. Don't put your rent and basic living on the line for an idea if you aren't comfortable with what that can entail.

Probably most importantly, I learned that the glorification of the startup lifestyle is a lie perpetuated by people seeking to make money from it at all levels. Nowadays, even the glorification of failure and celebration of mental health seems to be by people looking to advertise their businesses, cure-alls, or just get internet famous.

It's rotten to its bloody core, and unlike finance doesn't even pay well.

Our founder went off the rails and developed a substance habit.

It got so bad that he was taking money from company account paying for drugs. Eventually arrested, lawsuits followed and now he's sitting in jail. Just a genius that couldn't control himself...

- Poor leadership (me). Inability to align team on a common goal (!), inability to communicate clearly about plans, etc.

I learned that I'm not the leader I thought I was.

- Canadian business. Means US B2B enterprise checks get stopped at the border for 3 weeks while they 'investigate'. Makes your last mile enterprise sale that much harder. Investors are conservative. Wanted $5-10k MRR before considering angel-level investment, no go until then. Harder to compete against Valley companies.

I learned get the revenue first anyway, the days of bootstrap a free service until funding are harder and harder to come by. Revenue first.

- Problem we were solving was harder than expected (barometer data to weather forecasts). Main product was going to be a weather model but we never made it that far. Data quantity, quality control and user retention were bigger problems preventing us from executing to success. This leads to running out of money.

I learned that hard problems are hard. Your startup doesn't have as many advantages as it thinks it does if the incumbents can copy/do better than you with your "hard problem" solution or if you take too long to build your real MVP.

- Team skills were not right to solve our problems. After company founding and initial pivots we were not left with founders and staff that could solve the problems we now had to solve.

I learned to be careful starting a company with your friends. And that pivoting can have risks like a lack of skill required to complete the pivot.

- Probably the final item would be despair. When things get bad there is almost no way to come back because you've lost the trust of the people who were holding up your fragile startup to begin with.

I learned to know when to quit before driving things into the ground and taking your team with you.

- One more item: If you can catch it before you start a startup, it's a good idea to really make sure your hobby project shouldn't just stay a hobby project. Maybe it has some organic growth and media attention - but that doesn't mean it should be a startup.

I learned to keep my job and my hobby separate. I'm employed with a day job now and I can do phone weather experiments in my free time with a hobby [1], not trying to shoehorn some idea of a startup into an otherwise neat and successful hobby.

[1] Labelling photos of the sky as a training dataset into machine learning classifiers for auto-labelling of weather data in photos is a hobby - not a startup: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...

I used to work at a multi-national and got fired. I always wanted to try freelancing but didn't have the courage to leave a well paying full-time job and take the risk. This gave me that opportunity and I went ahead to started a productized content-as-a-service http://contentiskey.co which offers unlimited content for $250/mo Right now am busy searching for customers, you can join me

I wrote a rigid system. Investor fatigue.