Starting a
business is difficult. Launching a startup is even more challenging. Aside from
facing challenge of attempting to build a company from the ground up, many
entrepreneurs have little prior experience in the business world. Even when
they have an incredibly awesome idea, complex problems arise, such as managing
the young enterprise, handling finances and hiring employees on a budget.
Due to a
lack of experience, many startups endure the misfortune of failure -- if they
launch at all. Be sure to not add to their tales of disaster. Here are
15 startup mistakes to avoid at all cost:
1.
Single
Founder – as
a single founder you have almost zero chance of getting funding from
Paul Graham. Why? It’s not a coincidence, he says, that founders who
succeeded did so as a team of at least two.
2.
Bad
Location – you
can change everything about a house but its location. Likewise, if your startup
is in a bad location, you can’t change the nature of that location. It’s easier
to move the startup. Where to? Silicon Valley.
3.
Hiring
Bad Programmers – knowing a good programmer from a bad one often takes being
a good one yourself, or having a trusted one on your team. Exceptional
programmers are always in short supply. So the odds are stacked up against
hiring good ones.
4.
Choosing
the Wrong Platform – how fast you can scale will determine whether your startup lives
or dies once you get traction. On the wrong platform scalability will be the
bottleneck. And users often don’t wait for you to figure it out.
5.
Slowness
in Launching – before you actually launch you are in the dark about
whether your startup should even exist. The longer you delay the launch the
more you delay getting the answer. If you are afraid to know what the answer
is, you might want to ask yourself why.
6.
Launching
Too Early – launch
too early, though, and you may be completely unprepared to handle your growth,
or worse yet to present a usable product.
7.
Having
No Specific User in Mind – somewhere someone will for sure be interested in your
product, you just don’t know who yet? Sounds like those people may not exist.
Be sure to check.
8.
Raising
Too Little Money – you get what you spend on. With too little money you may
not be able to flesh out your product in to its full potential.
9.
Spending
Too Much – spending too much before you grew enough to have the numbers to
raise the next round, and you are out of cash, which often spells the end.
10.
Raising
Too Much Money – raising too much will likely make you feel like a huge
success even before you made anything useful. At the end of the day it’s users,
not investors, you want to impress the most.
11.
Poor
Investor Management – if the choice is between making investors happy or making
your users happy, always choose the users. If the user is happy your investors
will make money eventually.
12.
Sacrificing
Users to (Supposed) Profit – you can always make money later. This however, cannot be
said about making users happy. You need to make something they want now.
13.
Not
Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty – you can’t solve all your
problems with coding. Businesses are built on relationships. Go out and meet
those people.
14.
Fights
Between Founders – founder conflict is too common. Founders being ambitious people
are almost bound to disagree.
15.
A
Half-Hearted Effort – a lack of determination to see the startup through to the
end is not rare. If you feel like you have other options in life than building
your startup, you will probably mentally hang on to them.
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