We Rewrote Everything in $Hotlang, and Our Startup Still Failed (2020)
docs.google.com
docs.google.com
- not once thinking about the customer but only the technology (technology is a means to the end of generating revenue, not the end itself)
- wasting time rewriting if it's not critical to the customer (sure, it will be 1.2x faster each time but that doesn't matter if no one uses your product)
- overengineering in the beginning with microservices etc and only talking to developers, again, not customers
- focusing too much on hiring and not enough on what they were actually hiring for
- spending 10 hour days with no weekends
- thinking launching is only a one-time thing while even YC says to consider launching again and again [0]
- thinking marketing consists solely of launching whereas marketing encompasses a much wider range, with cold calls, cold emails, SEO, content marketing, etc being critical parts of getting customers
- writing a big v2 that no one uses, again
- shutting down the startup with an Our Incredible Journey post [1]
- and of course, not learning the lessons of failure. This comment by SwellJoe on HN is truly one of the best I've read on here regarding this [2]
It is truly astounding to look at the ratio of things wrong to word count this article satirizes, it seems straight out of a Mike Judge / Silicon Valley show playbook. Given the current VC funding and economic climate however, I doubt many future startups will continue to operate this way, but I will probably be proven wrong nearly immediately after making this comment.
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/library/6i-how-to-launch-again-a...