What's the biggest mistake you've made as a founder?
Richard Fang
103 replies
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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Daniel Kyne@daniel_kyne
OpinionX
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.
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95Travel Kit
@daniel_kyne That's a great tip on copying incumbents and then picking out what to innovate selectively
Prototypr
the biggest mistake I made was the biggest lesson. That sounds nice, but I rather not have had this lesson 😅
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.
OH GOD, so many mistakes. Overpaying employees and not negotiating influencer contracts.
- Scaling too soon...
- Not taking enough time for customer development
- Not listening to mentors' advice
Sebora.ai
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.
95Travel Kit
@ifinnaoui Some good points! I think finding the fine line between releasing early and taking too long comes with experience haha
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.
95Travel Kit
Get Intro
Didnt have a waiting list for launch.
being once a co-founder in digital agency, I've made a mistake of hiring first, scaling up later. You should scale up the team after you've scaled up the monthly revenue, not backwards — otherwise, you will get too many expenses with low income at the very beginning and this is a risk of burying a good concept (that's what practically happened then)
LLC Toolkit
Hiring lawyers on a retainer before launching a product, lol. Sharing this here so no-one would do same stupid thing I did when I was starting.
just being the founder of 1 thing at a time, instead of multiple things ;)
With our current product, we would have put more effort into building a community before building the product itself.
Prioritisation. The initial goals for the startup should be to get the direction right in terms of product, market, possible users etc before throttling on execution and tech-related challenges. Going about the process without a hypothesis resulted in panic and random dart-throwing as a strategy.
Two biggest mistakes - insufficient problem hypothesis validation and poor mentor-mentee values fit.
95Travel Kit
@gogloballakshmi What happened with your mentor - mentee part?
@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.
@gogloballakshmi Was this an advisor presented to you by your investors?
@prateek_mathur mentors and advisors are not the same... I was bootstrapped, never took investor money... startups are about communities too..
95Travel Kit
@gogloballakshmi Ah that sucks :/
Didn't build a audience before launch.
I founded a startup that grew to nearly $50M/year but was ultimately sold in liquidation. So many things look like mistakes in hindsight. One recurring mistake I think back on - we had more than one very credible chance to merge with strategic partners along our ten year path. Each time we were the ones that called it off. We thought we could win alone. I didn’t appreciate the value of scale and what more access to talent and capital could have meant over time. Judgment calls and bets end up looking like mistakes when they don’t pan out. The mistake wasn’t in making a call. You have to make bets, and sometimes really big ones. The mistake was a level of overconfidence that kept us from being intellectually honest when we were presented with major alternatives.
Underestimating how expensive less-than-ideal product-market fit is when dealing with government institutions.
The co-founder problem....indirectly became a solo founder with no mentor....mayday!
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
95Travel Kit
@adrian_topka Haha 100% - it seems like market/idea validation is a common theme
Submarine.me
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.