3 Lessons From Our "Failures" at Startup (Part I)

Lessons Learned After One Year of Founding the Company and Being Interviewed by Top Accelerators, such as Y Combinator, PearX, ERA. We are the lucky ones, but also the miserable ones. We got invited to the interview by those top accelerators/investors including Y Combinator, PearX, and Entrepreneur Roundtable Accelerator (ERA), but got rejected by all of them afterward. We started two cool AI projects together in the last year but decided to put them on hold for a while (maybe later we will pick them up again). These projects remained unpublished, buried in our GitHub directories for a long time, but the lessons we learned from them are invaluable. We love all of them as we love our kids. 1️⃣ Lesson 1: Less is More Probably you've heard about this thousands of times, feeling like a cliché. But here we want to share some very painful lessons we learned from past failures. This may not apply to all startups, especially hard-tech businesses making cool things, so we only talk about our case as a consumer-facing product. During our first product, we made something which was to use AI to create a virtual space, and we also wanted to shape it into a developer platform inviting many developers to develop AI tools for creating virtual space. It sounds very confusing, right? Yes, it does. During our interview with the founder of Twitch, OpenAI’s Interim CEO Emmet Shear at Y Combinator, he asked one simple question that none of us could answer. “YouTube’s fundamental unit is a video, Twitter’s fundamental unit is a message post, so how about yours?” And we got rejected, and the reason was the same as you imagined: he did not understand what we were doing. We then realized how important it was to keep our ideas as simple as possible because at the end of the day, as a consumer-facing product, we need to talk. We need to talk with many stakeholders, including our users, investors, and also our team. How could we expect our users to explain our product to their friends by saying, "I found something really cool, it's a developer platform for inviting developers to develop AI tools for creating virtual spaces." That just wouldn't work. We are living in an era where people may have limited attention, so we would keep our product as simple as enough to make our users easily understand and use it. Because at the end of the day, we need to talk. Talking with many people. I personally love one sentence said by our marketing executive Roman, “In the design field, if you don’t know what is a good feature to be added, then start by removing one.” * If people are interested in this kind of topic, I would share the other two lessons learned so far since I don't want to overwhelm our community. Thanks!