I’m just come from from The Dairy Of Failed Starups, their is a lots of learning things which everyone should know and some points which can brings success to you.
Jonathan Tang said on aftermath, “startups are out there, not in your head.“
“Pick a direction and go deep. I tried a couple other ideas after officially folding up, yet never really got into them. If you’re like most entrepreneurs, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by the number of possible things you could be doing. Ignore most of them, andconcentrate only on what you can do better than anyone else.“
On postmortem he said, “So, here’s the collection of lessons learned. I’m going to frame these as advice, but everyone should remember Buchheit’s Law: “Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization”. This is one startup, and not even a successful one at that. There are many ways to succeed, an even more ways to fail, and so there will likely be exceptions to every single one of these rules.“
“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.“
“I was going to title this “Beware the halfhearted effort“, but I think that’ll be misinterpreted. When people hear “halfhearted effort”, they think “Oh, I’ll just work harder.” But there’s a limit to how hard you can push yourself. Programming is a mental activity, and the brain has its own timescale. If you keep thinking to yourself “Must work faster, must work faster,” you’ll just end up slowing yourself down.“
[halfhearted effort: feeling or showing little interest or enthusiasm; "a halfhearted effort"; "gave only lukewarm support to the candidate"]
“The product will take longer than you expect. Design for the long-term. “
Conclusion touched me so much,
“Ultimately, GameClay failed because I gave up. Up until that point, it’s just a startup that has “not yet succeeded”, and so I feel like I should explain why I’m giving up:
- I don’t think I can do this without a cofounder. It’s very, very difficult to wear both the developer and the evangelist hats at the same time: being a developer requires that you be very pessimistic, so you can see and fix all the problems in your design, while being an evangelist requires that you be very optimistic, so others can feed off your passion. I suspect that if I tried to do both, the cost would be my sanity, literally, and that’s not a price I’m willing to pay for the startup. Cofounders also help even out the emotional highs and lows inherent in doing a startup, since you’re rarely in phase.
- I’ve exhausted the pool of potential cofounders I know. Amherst College is not really a hotbed of entrepreneurial types, and most of my friends are now either lawyers, in grad school, or have secure corporate jobs. And I’ve found that you can’t just jump into business with someone: you really need to forge the relationship in a low-stress setting before you subject it to the pressures of a startup.
- We’re moving too slowly. This was a problem at my last employer, where it took 7 years and counting to build their platform. The risk isn’t really competitors; most markets develop far more slowly than you’d think. It’s that the whole technology ecosystem changes over time, which makes your initial design decisions a disadvantage against startups that start fresh. Woe to the companies that started building desktop GUIs in 2002, for example.
- There’s little outside indication that people want what we’re building. When I run it by friends, most find it interesting, but they find it interesting because I’m doing it and I’m their friend and not because they really understand the idea. Also, competitors have been significantly less successful than I thought they would be.“
