5 ways to kill a startup
Lessons learned from the slow death of our startup
A few years ago, we decided to build an ambitious product to automate user interface testing by using AI and Machine Learning. We worked tirelessly to bring this vision to life and learned a ton along the way. Unfortunately, we became yet another statistic by simply running out of money. In hindsight, this probably could have been avoided by making better decisions with what to build and living the “move fast and break things” mantra. I could belabor the many missteps that were made or moments of hope that seemingly arrived out of nowhere. I don’t think that would be helpful. Instead, I’m going to go over the lessons learned at the end that will hopefully help you avoid the same mistakes we made.
Talk to your users early and often
It’s a common misconception that we know what users want to be based on just a couple of short conversations. We definitely fell victim to this mentality, and as a result, we ended up spending far too much time focusing on what we thought users wanted instead of just asking them. Once we started speaking with users weekly, it became much easier to prioritize work based on what users actually cared about. Unfortunately, we learned this lesson a little too late.
Don’t wait to release
The desire to reach perfection before showing off your hard work is a natural part of being human. Our ego gets in the way and tells us this is the right way to go. Unfortunately, our ego is a liar. If you want to create something people want, then you need to be willing to show your solution off to the people you are hoping will ultimately pay for it even if the solution seems half-baked. We spent a lot of time playing the what-if game. What if users hit this edge case? What if users notice it’s not perfect? What if, what if, what if. The reality was no one cared. In fact, hardly anyone even used our product, and those that did were happy to be patient as we made the solution better based on their feedback.
Don’t go crazy with marketing
There’s a lot of chatter about the importance of marketing and how you’ll never reach your market without it. This is bullshit. Don’t worry if your messaging is perfect or which channels you should pursue. In the end, you’ll spend way too much time thinking about how to find users and not enough time actually finding them. In all likelihood, your first users will be a group of people that you met through your network or cold outreach. Some tactics worked better than others, but generally, anything you have to pay for isn’t worth the cost in the early days.
Be ruthlessly selective with your time
As a founder, the most valuable thing you have is time. You’re responsible for everything, coding, sales, accounting, taking out the garbage… Everything! All this stuff ends up requiring more time than you have in a day. It’s up to you to cut through the noise and find the essential tasks that will move the needle. At the end of the day, if whatever you’re doing isn’t improving some part of your business, then it’s a waste of time.
Be decisive and hold strong opinions loosely
The problem with an early-stage startup is that you will never have more than 60% of the info for any given decision and making the right decisions with this level of uncertainty is incredibly hard. The ego gets in the way and makes you worry about if you’re making the wrong decisions. In reality, it’s better to make the wrong choice and course correct when you get more information than to get stuck in a cycle of analysis paralysis. We were definitely a little slow on the uptake, but ultimately we learned that often the missing 40% of the info only came to us after making a decision and asking our users if it was the right decision. The fear of making the wrong decision was holding us back because, in the end, the only wrong decisions were the ones we didn’t make.
Wrapping up
I hope this helps you in your startup journey. I’m definitely not the first to write down these lessons and surely won’t be the last. It’s a difficult journey, and most startups don’t make it anyways, so be bold, be decisive, and don’t waste time doing anything that your users aren’t intensely interested in.
