Time to stop
I've reached my stop-loss (one year) and even two month passed my deadline. When I set out to this journey I decided to give it a year before I quit. Success meant either getting a big user base or getting a seed investment. Now I have to face the hard facts that even though I gave it two more months it just didn’t happen.
The important thing now (and thanks to my wife for pointing that out) is to reach the right conclusions and learn for what I did or should have done.
So here is why I think I failed:
1. Finding the right partner – When I wanted to look for a partner I thought it would be almost impossible to find one. I am a developer, all my friends are developers, where am I going to find someone that understands business? As it turns out I was wrong about everything. It is the other way around. There are lots of business oriented people looking to join a startup and very few technical people. Finding a partner would have been easy if only I had tried.
2. Joining the wrong partner – as it turned out I joined the wrong partner. She was an old friend and also a programmer but I had a feeling she will be a good CEO. Wrong again. Lack of dedication and business skills caused delays, anxiety and deteriorating motivation. we were bad for each other. When I finally asked her to step aside she agreed but demanded to stay with 25% (no investor would agree to that). Five month after we decided to break up we are still fighting. Needless to say we are not friends anymore.
3. Not having a founders agreement – all that happened in the last section could have been avoided if we only had a founders agreement.
4. Not deciding to break up sooner – easy to say, hard to do but I should have done it.
5. Not facing the facts/deducing what we wanted – when we released our first version no one seemed to be interested in it. So instead of pivoting hard we decided that it was because people didn’t understand the potential. What we should have deducted from this is that people don’t really need what we offer and that we should change direction. In the end we spent another 8 month working on the same product only to realize there is no market for it.
6. Iterating slowly – after we released our first version and decided that people didn’t understand it we did some user testing and pointed out what we think is wrong with it. Instead of making a quick iteration and releasing a new version in a couple of weeks we made a huge iteration that lasted 8 month.
7. Not listening to advisors – we met with a lot of people and consulted with a lot of people from the industry. Many of them told us we were going the wrong way. We didn’t listen.
8. Working from home – if you can do it that usually means you are single. We were stupid to try and should have found an office. We did get accepted to a few programs that offered us a co-working space. That was great.
9. Didn’t put order into our work – we were unorganized. Even though we tried to use project management tools we didn’t have a work plan, milestones or budget planning and we missed our deadlines all the time.
10. Not making sure your significant other understands what he/she needs to do – make sure that your spouse knows he or she will see much less of you and that they will have more work at home.
11. Measure everything – we didn’t have enough data on our users. That is part of the reason we misinterpreted our results.
12. Start fundraising too late – unless you have a market validation (millions of users or 10 big clients or any other mean of validation) you are basically raising with a presentation. Don’t try to get the perfect product (it helps but less than you think). Try to get market validation and address a huge market. You don’t need to spend a year of R&D for that. Fundraising takes a couple of month and you can always come back after you have a product if that is what they require. Not many VCs/angels will close the door completely just because you came with a presentation and not a prototype.
13. Losing my life routines – stopped playing the guitar, stopped working out regularly. Even though there is less time find the time to do it or it will hurt your motivation.
14. Going to meetups – you don’t have time to attend all the meetups you want to attend. Choose only those that help you get more information or network with the right people.
15. Not managing our outsourcing – when you outsource something give them a timetable and insist on the deadlines. Try e-mailing them every three days to check on their progress. We didn’t do that at first and we got months of delays and bad code. We also lost a lot of money because we didn’t track their progress.
16. Outsource – never the less we should have outsourced the less important stuff and got thing done quicker. We had the money for it but didn’t use it until it was too late.
17. Didn’t set a hard deadline for stopping – I missed the deadline in two month. That shouldn’t have happened. If I didn’t allow myself to miss the deadline maybe I would have worked harder and made better decisions.
18. Didn’t make sure my spouse knew I appreciate what she has to go through – my wife didn’t go on vacation in two years and we almost stopped going out entirely. A word of appreciation would have gone a long way here.
19. Failed to build a balanced team – two programmers is not a balanced team. One bizdev, one product and one techy is a balanced team.
20. Didn’t research on investors before we met with them – one of the VCs we met told us that we do exactly what another company they invested in did but with less features. Even though they were wrong about that we should have checked their portfolio.
21. Built too many features into our first version – it is not the time that we wasted but the lack of focus that led us to miss what the users really need. We should have focused our MVP on the key feature and remove all the other features.
22. Didn’t register patents – even though we could and got budget for it we didn’t do it. It doesn’t cost that much to get a provisional patent and it really helps with investors.
23. Didn’t look for the right people to help – I spent a few month developing the algorithm before deciding to turn to a professor for help. Should have done it much sooner.
24. Ignored the numbers – if had just done the calculations I would have found out that it will cost us thousands of dollars to keep our servers up. That doesn’t help with investors and cost us some more money.
25. Kept servers running even though we didn’t have traffic – I honestly don’t know why.
26. Built it and they didn’t come – should have built a really simple MVP in three month even before I left my job to get some validation. I just jumped in and started building and building. I could have had a working product in January instead of June. Don't mind the small bugs and the little things. Just get it out. You'll figure out the little thing later.
27. Didn’t manage my time and tasks – read getting things done or use any other method but manage your personal tasks. It will help you clear your mind and focus on your work.
28. Didn’t read the lean startup – should have.
29. Didn’t learn from mistakes – hence the post.
30. Didn’t spend enough time on the product – don’t start building before you have a general idea how the product is going to look like and after you consulted with someone (for instance an intended user) on how it is supposed to look.
In spite of all the above here is what I did right:
1. Had a great presentation and practiced it almost daily until it was perfect – we managed to get people interested by telling a good story and talking fluently and passionately on the product. Though it looked easy, we practiced a lot.
2. Joined a co-working space – sitting with other entrepreneurs was a great experience and we learned a lot just by being with other people. We joined the junction and had great meetings with people and a lot of support.
3. We dedicated all of our time for the project – we quit our jobs and put all of our effort into it.
4. We used ruby on rails and cloud services – using ruby or python is great for fast prototyping. We had a working app pretty fast because we had the right tools.
5. We used a lot of low priced and open-source resources – bought a design template for a few dollars, used all the open source stuff we could get and managed to build something that looks incredible very quickly and with minimal effort.
6. We had shirts printed – should have been earlier but it really helps to draw the eyes of the right people when you are at conventions (one t-shirt per person is enough).
7. I found the right partner – The next partner I found was a very experienced business development specialist and cool guy – he really helped me realize we don’t have a market.
8. We tried getting money from everywhere we could – office of chief scientist, Microsoft AppCampus and every other grant possible got a request from us. We got some decent amounts of money for it that helped us at first.
9. I never missed a chance to learn more – more about developing a startup, more about cloud computing, more about ruby on rails. There is so much I've learned and it was the best part.
10. Didn’t lose hope – even though I got to the conclusion we shouldn’t continue I didn’t break even when things were really tough.
11. I came out a better entrepreneur than I came in.
It was a bumpy ride but I am already waiting for the next one.
אין תגובות:
הוסף רשומת תגובה