Lessons learned from my failed startup after 2 years, 300 users and 0 revenue

Good article but I would look at this "failure" from a glass half full perspective. You "won" because you've learned valuable lessons you can take to your next idea. I've had many products that have not gained many users in their respective marketplaces but I learned from each and everyone of them. All these experiences has brought me where I am today (CTO of a 45+ employee company). No failures in my past as far as i'm concerned; just lots of self teaching (that you can't get in school).

> ""An Indian company expressed desire to buy something from me other than the thing I was building, so I should have built that instead.""

I may be the minority but I agree with him but on one condition. If this Indian company wanted to pay a small monthly subscription fee for your product I would never have agreed developing "their" ideas. I would have taken their feedback and put in the big pile with all the other feedback I gathered up. But I would have pitched this Indian company a different story, I would have pitched them a professional services contract instead of a product. I did something similar in the past and it worked out very well because in a business money is king. With no money you can't do the things you need to do, like attend conferences to sell your idea, buying adwords, hiring solid developers, paying yourself a salary so you can devote your time to the idea.

In my case the customer was willing to pay ~$10k a month to get what he wanted. We built it for him while building our own product. Once we got big enough and could sustain ourselves without our original customer, I gave the customer away. The developer who maintained the project was interest in taking on the project himself. We came up with a 6 month transition plan, including lots of product/project management help, office space, etc. It was a win/win situation at the end.

Doing this is not for everyone though. There are many days I cursed this customers for taking up the majority of our resources. We had to be very good at differentiating between their requirements and the markets requirements. We weren't perfect at it but it worked out in the end.

I don't understand people's (not necessarily the OPs)utter obsession with philosophies. Especially in the startup world when being adaptive and surviving is key.

Lean Startup, great book, decent ideas, not the religion that it's become. I'm sick of hearing, hey do this the lean way and it'll "significantly improve" how well you do, after all it's the blueprint for success. Personally, I don't buy into that. Here's my view of success in reality: do whatever works (that's legal & up to your moral standards), be opportunistic and get lucky (yes, hard work and measuring metrics alone don't do crap).

MVP and idea validation are great concepts & helpful common language. In hindsight all "successful" startups seem to have a "pattern", but in all seriousness, there isn't a friggin algorithm for success in startups, otherwise algorithms would've replaced entrepreneurs a long time ago. (Although selling success patterns & software based on such to wantreprenuers is a great idea)

I'm sorry the Sergio's experience happened. It's easy force cause and effect onto a narrative. It very well could have been that the developer Sregio met was at a point in his life where he really just wanted to build something great and did end up building the awesomest thing. Instead of trying to dissect the reasons his startup failed, had luck been a little more favorable, we might be trying to analyze how it became a huge success.

Bottom line, my heartfelt congratulations to Sergio on being successful at stepping up, despite the risks and having a crack at it. If you had never stepped up and we all gave in to our negative biases and overanalyzed the crap out of everything before we started we'd still be polishing stone wheels.

I know how shitty it feels. But remember, hindsight is 20-20 and cause and effect should really be cause+luck and effect. Hope you're a better entrepreneur and will be back in the game soon.

Thanks for the write up - It's always better to learn from other people mistakes. I think however you and the most of the other posters miss the most basic problem because they mostly seem not to have tried the site and that is that, to me at any rate, it seems the product is not very good. It seems to be basically a 40 question form with questions like "People in the team know the weaknesses and strengths of other team members." that you mark from 1-10 and is not customizable. Personally I hate that stuff - you spend ages filling the thing out and then when you find the average response is say 7 what do you do then? There's not obvious action. If you had a form with a question saying say "what do you thinks the biggest problem with your team?" and people were able to say anonymously that say "there were four founders without the right experience and only one dev really working" then that would at least be useful. I think before worrying about the market etc you should have tested your system on real teams to see if it actually helped them much. This could have been done with zero or little tech - say either a paper questionnaire or just write your questions in an email and have people email their answers back to you. The fact that 200 people tried the product and none bought does imply a product problem but it if you define your product as trying something to fix team management problems then I think the issue is not that there is no demand for that but that your product does not work in that regard. If it was me and I could code a bit, rather than scrap the thing I think I might try changing it to see if it could be made to work at the team improving level. You could say cut it to say five 0-10 type questions and five "what's the biggest problem?" type questions and then try that with a couple of real teams and see if they found it helpful.

Firstly, the Indian corporation which contacted him, apparently was asking for something totally different. If they were asking about 3 or 4 features that could be added, I don't think that it would be a problem. But the author didn't do anything wrong there. They were looking for a developer probably not a product or not his product whatsoever.

If you accept his argument as true, that he should switch and follow the tide, then you might as well start looking for freelancer developer job.

Awesome quote:

The result of this was that in the end we had to hire a full-time (and paid) developer. So we had zero revenue, 4 co-founders and a paid employee (which was effectively the only one doing real work).

I laughed really hard reading this line. My girlfriend came from next room to make sure I was okay!!! That's awesome, like 4 guys watching a movie, say the 'Social Network', and deciding to do a startup!!!

Jokes apart, I think the author has got it all wrong. There are ten million reasons why a small startup failed. Most of the time is hard to tell exactly why.

But seriously, only people who have proved time and again their ability to deliver a product to the market and are famous for turning ideas into money, are able to struck deals before having a product. And we probably all know them (Jobs, Musk, etc). For the rest of us that's not how things work, I'm sorry to say that he is still getting it all wrong.

In the real world, you can't sell something that doesn't exist, these things happen only on Wall Street.

I want to shine some light on one side problem, scratched here:

The problem today is (out of the perspective of a developer): To many companies rely on just "hire any (cheap) developer" to ramp up the product. I see it all the time: Quality is not asked for, many companies (specially in the web business) just want the cheapest developers. They search for a student (at best), because he is cheap and will just make a small time estimation and an even smaller fixed price offer for the project. The student will happily work overtime that is not covered by the initial estimation.

Than the companies go mad, when either the programmer is running away or the whole project runs into a blind alley (or both at the same time), because the "totally expensive" programmer had not enough experience e.g. with database development and the database structure just lets you shiver. Then the shouting and anger is big: "Damn programmers -- all are liars and lazy!"

What went wrong, stated Uncle Bob correctly in his Blog: http://blog.8thlight.com/uncle-bob/2013/11/19/HoardsOfNovices.html ↗

But the "cheap, cheap!" culture seams to be unstoppable. If you tell people in advance about "quality" and "professionalism", they don't listen or just laugh at you. It seams, all the people just have to find out the hard way -- but I guess, even than most of them will not learn at all.