This is How Many Startup Businesses Fail in the First Year (+Survival Tips)

54collective.vc

27 points by makerdiety 4 days ago


cultofmetatron - 2 days ago

on year 7 of my startup and profitable. I'd like to add a few things.

1. look for a boring problem that needs solving. related to the product market fit. a lot of founders are trying to build a sexy solution to a problem that no one has.

2. Sales is half the equation!. you can have the best engineering team in the world but it means nothing if you dont have good sales. and good sales people don't just get sales. they are the first point of contact for your prospective customers. Empower them to get feedback and ideas for how to evolve your product. half of our features at my startup are things we never would have thought of until our sales guys kept telling us how many restaurants were requesting the feature.

jonathanstrange - 2 days ago

Okay, I got it. If I want to make a successful startup, I simply just need to get an insane amount of funding and develop a great product based on detailed market research that fits the market and solves an actual problem. I also should find a way to actually sell a product in order to avoid negative cash flow problems.

This reminds me a bit of the main reason why restaurant businesses fail according to some TV shows I've watched: They have a lousy cook.

jonwinstanley - 2 days ago

This article must be pretty great to make it to the front page while messing about with how scrolling works

:-)

- a day ago
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mnky9800n - 2 days ago

I had never heard of dead day but this from the description on their webpage:

>> ABOUT THE GAME Dive into a fantasy NFT game where survival meets strategy and humor. Battle zombies, beasts, build bases, and earn real rewards in a magical world that challenges your wits and rewards your adventures. Every quest is a step towards mastery and monetization in this enchanting realm.

Why can’t games just be games? Do I really need to monetise every aspect of my life? Should hacker news give me a fraction of a penny for every view of every bullshit comment I make on the website? Should I get a dollar every time I conquer the world in civ4? I’m not against the makers of this game. I’m wondering why every part of every life seems to be on the direction of commoditisation. Who wants this life and why?

i_dont_know_ - 2 days ago

"In the first year" is a good and well-needed qualifier for such analysis.

Oftentimes we fall into the trap of defining a business success as "forever", anything short of that is deemed a failure. I think such views make the industry look far bleaker than it actually is.

Even by their standards, I'm not sure that 'running a business that did well for 10 years' should count as a fail in the same way that 'couldn't even figure out a business plan' should.

aitchnyu - 2 days ago

Do code quality and architecture astronauts matter? If I were a VC, I would set up an automated code quality monitor and bring human consultants. I saw Indian startups copy paste code in Lambda web editor without any VCS, critical code which can be touched by one person who may have left, buggy half baked ORMS/frameworks, URL params that allow anybody to access anything etc. They enable territorial people, reward yes men, leave you vulnerable to hacking etc.

- a day ago
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jacknews - a day ago

Reason #0: Your website has a weird override to basic scrolling and what looks like a tracking marker, so users immediately GTFO of there.

Don't override basic UI controls.

Thankfully there's reader mode.

- a day ago
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