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What's the biggest mistake you've made as a founder?
This sounds silly but when I launched my first startup 5 years ago, we didn't put in a vesting schedule 😅
Wanted to see what others have done but also things we know to avoid in the future!
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@prakis Oh really wow I would have thought myself that a template feature would be what users wanted
I should have hired a mentor who would force me to think more clearly about our startup and hold me accountable. Or join a preacceleration program. I think we would grow much faster.
@artem_smirnov A mentor is to facilitate, IMO nothing should be force especially for a founder.. What I see is you wanted someone to communicate with, so a matching communication style will help with achieving goals..
@artem_smirnov I've done that, am doing that. I'm having to rethink because I'm self-funding and this is expensive expensive. But she helped me re-pivot and if she holds me accountable (which is a big deal) - which she has - then I need to maybe just eat it and live with it. I was literally re-thinking the investment this morning. It's painful because "intangibles" like "clarifies", "calms", "synthesizes" is not lines of code or bugs killed, newsletters written, or instagram posts.
Hiring lawyers on a retainer before launching a product, lol. Sharing this here so no-one would do same stupid thing I did when I was starting.
Two biggest mistakes - Thinking about opportunities too long before execution. If executing, waiting too long with talking to potential customers in an early stage phase.
One big one - we tried to unnecessarily re-invent the wheel too many times, like designing our own onboarding flow and trying to define a new category. Learned over time that copying incumbents is part of the startup process, you have to pick what to innovate selectively in order to be able to spotlight those differentiators without getting lost in the details.
@daniel_kyne That's a great tip on copying incumbents and then picking out what to innovate selectively
- Scaling too soon...
- Not taking enough time for customer development
- Not listening to mentors' advice
Underestimating how expensive less-than-ideal product-market fit is when dealing with government institutions.
Biggest mistake I made was misreading the market and having tunnel vision on a future customer base that didn’t exist rather than focusing on the customer base that did exist and was happily using the product already.
When I was a founder, I focused too much on technical solution and building stuff without putting effort on marketing or customer research. I don’t have that startup anymore 🙂
@eisabai Aw that's sad to hear but yeah marketing and customer research is super important!
Procrastinating. It has always been a huge issue for me, and has lead to some great ideas never being pursued.
@influxes I know how you feel. Been there, its quite a pain and I have lost quite a lot because of that alone.
@angelina_magr I was excited for them to be a reality. But I was not excited about the pains of building them. So I procrastinated.
I think the ones which cost me the most time and cash were:
1. didn't make market/idea validation with the clients, before start the work. (I just had the assumptions)
2. Lack of a mentor.
but it's hard to avoid that when you are a 1st-time founder. You want to launch asap, you think you have the best idea in the world, and so on.. :D
@adrian_topka Haha 100% - it seems like market/idea validation is a common theme
My biggest mistake is actually trying to Avoid mistakes by applying a specific framework. (lean ... )
Mistakes might be very different depends on products type.
Sometimes trying to release as soon as possible can get you troubles
but sometimes you have to release asap and go further to reach potential customers.
Not Trying AB testing outbound vs inbound marketing for software based product.
@ifinnaoui Some good points! I think finding the fine line between releasing early and taking too long comes with experience haha
Definitively develop and develop product which not reach our target. Now, we find our PMF and we develop features with our customer ;)
Prioritisation. The initial goals for the startup should be to get the direction right in terms of product, market, possible users etc before throttling on execution and tech-related challenges. Going about the process without a hypothesis resulted in panic and random dart-throwing as a strategy.
Co-founder/ Important people breakup. When I know somebody for years and think that we can be business partners, it turns out that it is all illusion. I would be brutally honest to myself as a solo founder rather having fancy people on board.
@emmanguyen Yeah I acutally ran into this problem with one of my friends. Realised we're really great as friends but terrible as a co-founder partner (she's more of a corporat person).
@richardfliu Startup game is starting from scratch. Not simply copy & paste solution from one place and put it to another market. The corp/ big org is well-designed process - Doing well in those does not mean you will thrive in startup.
@richardfliu we just didn't see eye to eye in terms of execution.. My strategy was different from theirs and the communication style was a mismatch when discussing disagreements. Of course I understand this on postmortem.. I did not have this clarity when I was caught up in action.
@prateek_mathur mentors and advisors are not the same... I was bootstrapped, never took investor money... startups are about communities too..
Biggest mistake was get a technical co-founder who had stopped coding in his career a long time ago. He may not be needed to code, but he is the final bastion if all code breaks down, (and it inevitably did)
With our current product, we would have put more effort into building a community before building the product itself.
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