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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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Lakshmi
Two biggest mistakes - insufficient problem hypothesis validation and poor mentor-mentee values fit.
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@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..
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
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.
Not releasing until all planned features are completed. For https://watermark.ink I built a complete visual editor for custom templates and most my users hated it and said its confusing.. I thought its not worth wasting time in customer support, so sadly I have to completely remove templates feature (this feature took 50% of total dev time). Must have gone to market early and got this feedback.
@prakis Oh really wow I would have thought myself that a template feature would be what users wanted
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
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.
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.
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
OH GOD, so many mistakes. Overpaying employees and not negotiating influencer contracts.
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.
Waiting for around 6 months for US registration when we could have started off with an Indian Company.
Doing more customer research early on and having more conversations with customers, investors, partners, and advisors. The more interactions I've had the more data I gather.
There are too many, but if I look at the recent times, not buying Dogecoin on time.
@chris_jansen1 Haha I had dogecoin at 1 cent and then I sold it at 10 cents 😅
@chris_jansen1 @richardfliu Oh what you gonna say for the people who bought it at 60 cents and waiting now