A useful, quite clear-eyed document though I think.
Aside, one of the co-founders websites is an unusually broad affair for a young founder:
It's very depressing, but at least I don't work for them. That would square my depression.
They seemingly learned a lot. Unfortunately a lot of what they learnt should have been obvious from the start.
It shouldn’t take two years to figure out you need to speak to your customers and bring in revenue.
I've tried at various points over the past 2 decades and can confirm: trying to sell startup software into the UK (and European) market is much harder than in the US.
Most businesses are not open to buying from an upstart even if the proposition seems attractive. There is a 'safety in numbers' mentality (markedly less so in the UK than in other parts of Western Europe but still much more than in the US).
It makes securing the first 10 customers ever more challenging. It is not a trope I'd say, its just a lesson that keeps being relearnt.
House builders don't seem to have a problem acquiring land and rights to develop it
Indeed there're permission granted for over 1mn yet to be build residential properties in the UK
The problem is UK house builders drip feed houses on to the market to keep their profits up, and slow down building when house prices fall
None of the specific ones, but the general problem of startups that the UK is a poor environment for funding.
Source for million unbuilt homes: https://www.terraquest.co.uk/news-and-insights/more-than-a-m...
It's not sounding like a very simple to resolve problem :(
House builders essentially buy land, get planning, pay a bunch of sub-contractors to slap together a house and then sell it to some poor sap
Saying they build houses is a bit of a misnomer in my view
A simpler planning system would allow smaller developers to operate and they would buy, build and sell as fast as they can.
The reason big developers drip feed is that they have 100 identical houses in the pipeline so they don’t want the price to drop at all, because it affects the price of the houses in the pipeline.
The small developer sells quickly so that the cash is available for their next project.
So they'd expedite things to avoid risk surely? Doesn't make sense
My town has a population of 15000 people, ~250 houses are sold per year and there is a development with permission to build ~400 new homes.
This has never happened once... There are plenty of developments built bigger than that that do t cause a crash
Besides that, they sell plots before they're even built so why are they drip feeding in those cases? You'd be racing to get it built before materials cost rise even more
If house prices fall, or even stagnate, it'll start a chain reaction that leads to recession.
Its basically free economic growth, and UK made it's money largely from empire anyway, so now the empire has largely fallen it's no surprise the country has been cutting public services for nearly 20 years and still isn't breaking even