Story of two failed startups – Developing in a vacuum never works.
Here is the insightful story of 2 failed startups:
Monitor110: Raised $20mn in 3 rounds, but finally shut shop.
7 deadly sins?
- The lack of a single, “the buck stops here” leader until too late in the game
- No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
- Too much PR, too early
- Too much money
- Not close enough to the customer
- Slow to adapt to market reality
- Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board [More]
Another startup, that bootstrapped for 1.5 years shut down has very practical
advice:
- If your idea starts with “We’re building a platform to.” and you don’t have a billion dollars in capital, find a new idea. Now!
- It’s a marathon, but it’s a marathon made of sprints
- Initial conditions matter. A lot.
- Developing in a vacuum never works.
- Beware of the chicken and the egg – have a product that is useful on its own.
- Prototype any 3rd-party libraries that you’ll be depending upon, before you base your product on them.
- If you’re doing anything other than building your project and getting users, it’s premature.
- The product will take longer than you expect. Design for the long-term.
- People have an incentive not to crush your dreams. Take everything they say with a grain of salt.
- Know your limitations. [More] – via
Following sentence summarizes the nuts and bolts of a possible success:
A lot of this comes down to picking a problem that’s a.) worth addressing and b.) doesn’t require a lot of support code to address it.
Too much money is like too much time; work expands to fill the time allotted, and ways to spend money multiply when abundant financial resources are available. By being simply too good at raising money, it enabled us to perpetuate poor organizational structure and suboptimal strategic decisions.
Your opinion?
About the author - Ashish Sinha is a Startup Mentor/Product Strategy Coach, and the founder/chief editor of pluGGd.in.
He has launched/managed couple of products (consumer as well as enterprise) in US and India, and now consults with startups/small businesses on their product/media strategy. He can be reached at: ashish (at) pluGGd.in [+91 98452 06443]
Hi Ashish,
Visit my blog and read the following post:) , a story of another bootstrapping startup failure.
http://vijay-rayapati.blogspot.com/2008/06/what-we-are-and-what-we-dream-to-be-why.html
Don’t we always say “failure” is a dirty word in India, and thats one of the reasons for lack of entrepreneurial endeavour ?
Yes they may have have failed, but they tried. Lets invite them to write about what they learned, would have done differently, yet applaud them for a dream and the desire and guts to pursue them.
Tho yeah, your points are sure totally worth following. PR – early – is a major sin. Also the part about a lot of minor sprints!
and some startups cash out early.. I know this guy who owns linkedzone ( http://www.linkedzone.com ) . He started only last year and sold it for 50 lakhs just now. He says its enough money for him.
Worth full insight over startups shutting down, even the non-web startups end-up dead and reason- lack of long term planning, poor PR policies and most important lag behind in adapting fast changing technology pace
…let me put it this way more than 50% web startups in India do what US counterparts have done decade ago..still they deceive themselves.. thinking they would be next Twitter or Friendfeed or so
50 lakhs for a stupid portal like that? I guess that’s a bull shit info.
anyways, I see most of the startups just building a tech product and not really a business product (which Ashish subtly pointed out in his last proto post)
well I agree its a stupid portal.. but he has juiced it up real nice.. more than 20k members in quite a short period of time..