The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - The Diigo Meta page

• 24 Aug 16
  

  domenicosolazzo

  mistakes

• 06 Feb 15
  

  Jordan Goldman

  In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question.

  start-up tips

• 10 Jan 15
  

  Geoff Daily

  om

• 09 Jan 15
  

  Ana Domb

  entrepreneurship_design

• 06 Nov 14
  

  takashi wu
  • negating
  • mystified
  • lumbers
  • 7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
  • expedient
  • onerous

  4 more annotations...

• 31 Oct 14
  

  Llew Roberts
  • 
    
    

    Want to start a startup? Get funded by Y Combinator.      October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should. [1] In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So
• 09 Sep 14
  

  midmarketplace_

  entrepreneurial failure economy growth startup entrepreneurship

• 08 Aug 14
  

  Abhinav Mittal

  startup entrepreneurship mistakes

  • A related problem (since it tends to be done by bad programmers) is choosing the wrong platform. For example, I think a lot of startups during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based applications on Windows. Hotmail was still running on FreeBSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because Windows couldn't handle the load. If Hotmail's founders had chosen to use Windows, they would have been swamped.
    
• 17 Jun 14
  

  nirajagarwal
• 02 Apr 14
  

  samwitteveen
  • Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition.
• 02 Mar 14
  

  Fahed Bizzari
• 22 Jan 14
  

  teju_sanghavi
  • Perhaps there's a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own.
  • You can of course build something for users other than yourself. We did. But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous territory.
  • We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype. This gives you maximum flexibility.
  • We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.
  • We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get.
  • Who cares if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time.
  • The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.
  • Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth  (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money.
  • It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It's just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.

  7 more annotations...

• 21 Dec 13
  

  azaslavsky

  startup

  • I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list, because nearly all the founders I know are programmers. This is not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone bad, but it's not going to kill the company. In a pinch they can do whatever's required themselves.
    
• 21 Nov 13
  

  Rita Zerrizuela
  • If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating.
  • It's easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldn't than always to remember to do something you should.
  • In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. If you make something users want, you'll probably be fine, whatever else you do or don't do. And if you don't make something users want, then you're dead, whatever else you do or don't do. So really this is a list of 18 things that cause startups not to make something users want.
  • 1. Single Founder
    
  • What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.
    
    But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.
  • The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder.
  • 2. Bad Location
    
    Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After that there's not much.
  • It's an interesting question why cities  become startup hubs, but the reason startups prosper in them is probably the same as it is for any industry: that's where the experts are. Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business.
  • 3. Marginal Niche
    
    Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common problem: choosing a small, obscure niche in the hope of avoiding competition.
  • If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face that. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.
  • Your unconscious won't even let you think of grand ideas. So the solution may be to think about ideas without involving yourself. What would be a great idea for someone else to do as a startup?
  • 4. Derivative Idea
    
    Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing company. That's one source of ideas, but not the best. If you look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in imitation of some other startup. Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.
  • It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally.
  • Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them.  [2] What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?
  • 5. Obstinacy
    
    In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them.
  • Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.
    
    So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended
  • You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives.
  • Switching to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Is there some kind of external test you can use? One is to ask whether the ideas represent some kind of progression. If in each new idea you're able to re-use most of what you built for the previous ones, then you're probably in a process that converges. Whereas if you keep restarting from scratch, that's a bad sign.
  • If you're thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it's probably a good bet.
  • 6. Hiring Bad Programmers
    
    
  • when I think about what killed most of the startups in the e-commerce business back in the 90s, it was bad programmers.
  • business guys can't tell which are the good programmers.
  • the business guys choose people they think are good programmers (it says here on his resume that he's a Microsoft Certified Developer) but who aren't.
  • This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company, but without the advantages.
    
  • 7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
    
    A related problem (since it tends to be done by bad programmers) is choosing the wrong platform.
  • Platform is a vague word. It could mean an operating system, or a programming language, or a "framework" built on top of a programming language. It implies something that both supports and limits, like the foundation of a house.
  • How do you pick the right platforms? The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose.
  • 8. Slowness in Launching
    
    
  • One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work.
  • The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.
  • 9. Launching Too Early
    
  • it is possible to launch too fast. The danger here is that you ruin your reputation. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if it's no good they may never come back.
  • We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.
  • Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful.
  • The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.
  • 10. Having No Specific User in Mind
    
    You can't build things users like without understanding them.
  • perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own.
  • if you're trying to solve problems you don't understand, you're hosed.
  • You can of course build something for users other than yourself. We did. But you should realize you're stepping into dangerous territory. You're flying on instruments, in effect, so you should (a) consciously shift gears, instead of assuming you can rely on your intuitions as you ordinarily would, and (b) look at the instruments.
    
    In this case the instruments are the users.
  • When designing for other people you have to be empirical. You can no longer guess what will work; you have to find users and measure their responses.
  • you have to be able to talk some specific ones into using what you're making. If you can't, you're on the wrong track.
  • 11. Raising Too Little Money
    
    Most successful startups take funding at some point. Like having more than one founder, it seems a good bet statistically.
  • Every startup that isn't profitable (meaning nearly all of them, initially) has a certain amount of time left before the money runs out and they have to stop. This is sometimes referred to as runway, as in "How much runway do you have left?"
  • you have some control over both how much you spend and what the next step is. We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype. This gives you maximum flexibility.
  • 12. Spending Too Much
    
    
  • The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people. This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last longer.
  • We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.
  • 13. Raising Too Much Money
    
    
  • The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work.
  • Perhaps more dangerously, once you take a lot of money it gets harder to change direction.
  • The more people you have, the more you stay pointed in the same direction.
    
  • Another drawback of large investments is the time they take. The time required to raise money grows with the amount. [7] When the amount rises into the millions, investors get very cautious.
  • VCs never quite say yes or no; they just engage you in an apparently endless conversation.
  • We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get. If you get an offer from a reputable firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms, just take it and get on with building the company.
  • Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time.
  • 14. Poor Investor Management
    
    As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn't ignore them, because they may have useful insights. But neither should you let them run the company. That's supposed to be your job.
  • Pissing off investors by ignoring them is probably less dangerous than caving in to them.
  • If the founders know what they're doing, it's better to have half their attention focused on the product than the full attention of investors who don't.
    
  • So long as you seem to be advancing rapidly, most investors will leave you alone. But things don't always go smoothly in startups. Investors have made trouble even for the most successful companies.
  • 15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
    
    When I said at the beginning that if you make something users want, you'll be fine, you may have noticed I didn't mention anything about having the right business model. That's not because making money is unimportant.
  • The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.
  • Because making something people want is so much harder than making money from it, you should leave business models for later, just as you'd leave some trivial but messy feature for version 2. In version 1, solve the core problem. And the core problem in a startup is how to create wealth  (= how much people want something x the number who want it), not how to convert that wealth into money.
  • The companies that win are the ones that put users first.
  • It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It's just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.
  • 16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
    
  • There's nothing like users for convincing acquirers.
  • No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and use that to grow a user base. Then they'll pay big time.
  • If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some. It's unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding.
  • If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can't just hack. At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.
  • 17. Fights Between Founders
    
    Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave.
  • now we advise founders to vest so there will be an orderly way for people to quit.
  • Most of the disputes I've seen between founders could have been avoided if they'd been more careful about who they started a company with. Most disputes are not due to the situation but the people. Which means they're inevitable.
  • Don't suppress misgivings. It's much easier to fix problems before the company is started than after.
  • The people are the most important ingredient in a startup, so don't compromise there.
  • 18. A Half-Hearted Effort
    
    The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.
  • I'd guess that many of these would-be founders may not have the kind of determination it takes to start a company, and that in the back of their minds, they know it. The reason they don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a bad investment.
  • Most startups fail because they don't make something people want, and the reason most don't is that they don't try hard enough.
  • most startups that could succeed fail because the founders don't devote their whole efforts to them.
  • The biggest mistake you can make is not to try hard enough.
  • [1] This is not a complete list of the causes of failure, just those you can control. There are also several you can't, notably ineptitude and bad luck.
  • startup founders tend to be at the leading edge of technology, so problems they face are probably especially valuable.
  • [5] You should take more than you think you'll need, maybe 50% to 100% more, because software takes longer to write and deals longer to close than you expect.
  • the danger of chasing large investments is not just that they take a long time. That's the best case. The real danger is that you'll expend a lot of time and get nothing.
  • [8] Some VCs will offer you an artificially low valuation to see if you have the balls to ask for more.

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• 22 Sep 13
  

  Dustin Huang
  • Where did they get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.
  • It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally
  • perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own.
  • The reason they don't invest more time in their startup is that they know it's a bad investment. [12]

  2 more annotations...

• 07 Aug 13
  

  Kate Yemelyanov

  marketing management

• 01 Aug 13
  

  hp_yana
  • Want to start
  • ber 200
  • n the Q &
  • ave you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.
    
    What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.
    
    But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.
    
    The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder.
  • Standards are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you're doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business. Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost startups in Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but it's clear they do from the number of startups per capita in each.
  • Startups make all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch. Most are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday life. There's something that needs to happen first. Maybe. But if the software were 100% finished and ready to launch at the push of a button, would they still be waiting?
    
    One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it's released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.
    
    Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too many different things; excessive perfectionism. Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.
  • The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people. This bites you twice: in addition to increasing your costs, it slows you down—so money that's getting consumed faster has to last longer. Most hackers understand why that happens; Fred Brooks explained it in The Mythical Man-Month.
  • Don't suppress misgivings. It's much easier to fix problems before the company is started than after. So don't include your housemate in your startup because he'd feel left out otherwise. Don't start a company with someone you dislike because they have some skill you need and you worry you won't find anyone else. The people are the most important ingredient in a startup, so don't compromise there.

  6 more annotations...

• 19 Jul 13
  

  Breno Brito

  startup entrepreneurship startups management development advice erros mistakes

• 05 Jun 13
  

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• 20 May 13
  

  carlosjavier

  product vision startup mistakes good

• 15 Mar 13
  

  qza_bg

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• 11 Jan 13
  

  Andrei Stoica
• 26 Nov 12
  

  eisokant

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• 18 Oct 12
  

  Del Blanco

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• 29 Sep 12
  

  pushkalcodes

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• 24 Sep 12
  

  Konstantinos

  "In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly."

  essays startups Paul Graham

• 19 Aug 12
  

  piotrkalanski

  startup

• 09 Aug 12
  

  sessoms

  business entrepreneurship startup Big Bet

• 26 May 12
  

  Sequoia Taylor
• 08 May 12
  

  Vaughan Rouesnel
  • The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.
• 27 Mar 12
  

  harry palmer

  ss startups advice paulgraham ian

  • 9. Launching Too Early
    
    Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more startups than launching too fast, but it is possible to launch too fast. The danger here is that you ruin your reputation. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if it's no good they may never come back.
    
    So what's the minimum you need to launch? We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.
    
    This is the same approach I (and many other programmers) use for writing software. Think about the overall goal, then start by writing the smallest subset of it that does anything useful. If it's a subset, you'll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case you won't be wasting your time. But more likely you'll find that implementing a working subset is both good for morale and helps you see more clearly what the rest should do.
    
    The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.
• 22 Feb 12
  

  Softcopy Softcopy

  Business_Mistakes

• 08 Jan 12
  

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• 07 Dec 11
  

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• 23 Nov 11
  

  Bastien Marot

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  • We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that's both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.
• 29 Oct 11
  

  sam cohen
  • It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer, Google because Larry and Sergey couldn't find stuff online, Hotmail because Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldn't exchange email at work
• 01 Oct 11
  

  krishnarc3

  startups

• 28 Sep 11
  

  Jamie Thomson

  business startups management

• 23 Sep 11
  

  andresote
  • When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.
• 23 Aug 11
  

  vaichidrewar

  18 mistakes that kill startups startups advice startup entrepreneurship management development

• 09 Aug 11
  

  Navid Samandari

  startup entrepreneurship paulgraham Paul graham advice vc management development

• 13 Jul 11
  

  Bibiana Nunes

  startups

  • The companies that win are the ones that put users first. Google, for example. They made search work, then worried about how to make money from it. And yet some startup founders still think it's irresponsible not to focus on the business model from the beginning. They're often encouraged in this by investors whose experience comes from less malleable industries.
    
    It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It's just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.
• 10 Jul 11
  

  Jose Luis de la Rosa

  entrepreneurship startups advice

• 

  golloween

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• 20 Jun 11
  

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• 17 Jun 11
  

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• 07 Jun 11
  

  Ed Murray

  If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a ... But as Larry and Sergey found, there's not much of a market for ideas. ...

• 06 May 11
  

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• 07 Apr 11
  

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• 17 Jan 11
  

  Sangwon Kim

  So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them. [2] What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?
  

• 17 Dec 10
  

  Donny Kurnia

  18 kill mistakes startups

• 06 Dec 10
  

  Justin Mares

  so instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company

  grahm startup ycombinator imported

• 27 Nov 10
  

  Mike King

  startup review

  • So don't get too attached to your original plan, because it's probably wrong. Most successful startups end up doing something different than they originally intended—often so different that it doesn't even seem like the same company. You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.
  • One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it's released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.
  • The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don't expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.
  • We advise founders who go on to seek VC money to take the first reasonable deal they get. If you get an offer from a reputable firm at a reasonable valuation with no unusually onerous terms, just take it and get on with building the company. [8] Who cares if you could get a 30% better deal elsewhere? Economically, startups are an all-or-nothing game. Bargain-hunting among investors is a waste of time.
  • As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn't ignore them, because they may have useful insights.
  • Fights between founders are surprisingly common. About 20% of the startups we've funded have had a founder leave. It happens so often that we've reversed our attitude to vesting. We still don't require it, but now we advise founders to vest so there will be an orderly way for people to quit.
  • Statistically, if you want to avoid failure, it would seem like the most important thing is to quit your day job. Most founders of failed startups don't quit their day jobs, and most founders of successful ones do. If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.
    

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• 09 Nov 10
  

  peter iliev

  entrepreneurship startup web2.0

• 04 Nov 10
  

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  business_startup

• 03 Nov 10
  

  Nicolas Bottarini

  business entrepreneurship tips management

• 

  miss puffy

  startup

• 27 Oct 10
  

  gzmask
• 30 Sep 10
  

  Giannis Kosmas

  startup business management delicious

• 19 Sep 10
  

  Tara Hunt

  startups delicious

• 

  "1. Single Founder
  
  Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.
  
  What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That's pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.
  
  But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.
  
  The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks "I can't let my friends down." This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it's missing when there's just one founder."

• 

  Kurt Heinrich

  startup startups

• 14 Aug 10
  

  Michal Šimonfy

  saved

• 06 Aug 10
  

  Yudith Z

  business entrepreneurship tips

• 

  Babar Tareen

  startups failure reasons

• 20 Jul 10
  

  GL RG

  entrepreneurship startup

• 15 Jul 10
  

  Giovanni Lofrumento

  startup

• 07 Jul 10
  

  jose miguel

  business tips entrepreneurship

• 15 Apr 10
  

  entrepreneurship startups

• 01 Mar 10
  

  Neha Dixit

  startup

• 21 Feb 10
  

  Krzysztof Kajkowski

  start-up business tips from-delicious

• 18 Jan 10
  

  María Pérez de Arrilucea

  business startups advice mistakes article tips

• 

  Robert Redl
  • Single Founder
  • Bad Location
  • Marginal Niche
  • Derivative Idea
  • Obstinacy
  • Hiring Bad Programmers
  • Choosing the Wrong Platform
  • Slowness in Launching
  • Launching Too Early
  • Having No Specific User in Mind
  • Raising Too Little Money
    
  • Spending Too Much
  • Raising Too Much Money
  • Poor Investor Management
  • Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
  • Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
  • Fights Between Founders
  • A Half-Hearted Effort
  • This is not a complete list of the causes of failure, just those you can control. There are also several you can't, notably ineptitude and bad luck.

  17 more annotations...

• 15 Jan 10
  

  jose joao

  reference

• 15 Dec 09
  

  Matthew Boatman

  startup business entrepreneurship tips startups management entrepreneur toread paulgraham

• 03 Dec 09
  

  adelein rodriguez

  todo startup_advise

• 30 Nov 09
  

  Tony Pearson

  Windows platform FreeBSD success startups

• 07 Oct 09
  

  roychristian

  startup entreprise erreurs échecs succès fromdelicious

• 04 Oct 09
  

  Corey Stewart

  business startup strategy

• 16 Sep 09
  

  Brett Bolkowy

  startup business entrepreneurship tips startups paulgraham management entrepreneur

• 14 Sep 09
  

  ilarranaga
• 18 Jun 09
  

  Vincent Tsao

  startup paulgraham advice

• 02 Jun 09
  

  clementi1832

  startup startups entrepreneurship software development business toread strategy

• 01 Jun 09
  

  Leonardo Rodrigues

  business tips software development web2.0 startups entrepreneur entrepreneurship

• 31 Mar 09
  

  dobbelap
• 20 Mar 09
  

  erik robertson

  next_biz

• 03 Mar 09
  

  The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

  business geek code finance professionalism project management software development

• 20 Feb 09
  

  Andy L

  business startup

• 04 Nov 08
  

  Jim Coulter

  Is about IT start-ups, but very interesting, because IT
  projects are like product development projects (burning cash until
  development completed, etc)

  B-SYOB

• 17 Oct 08
  

  michelerallo

  work technology software management startups strategy tips paulgraham

• 15 Oct 08
  

  Nicholas Tolson

  startups entrepreneurship via:mento.info

• 17 Sep 08
  

  m k

  startup

• 11 Sep 08
  

  pmelendres

  business

• 05 Sep 08
  

  Andy Breeding

  startups SCS

• 04 Sep 08
  

  Márcio Francisco

  startups empreendedorismo entrepreneurship business startup

• 04 Apr 08
  

  S Jones

  Brilliant, insightful list of rules for software startups: How to hire, deal w/ VCs, when to launch, etc.

  paul.graham startups _delicious

• 01 Mar 08
  

  Leslie Fishlock
• 14 Feb 08
  

  Dan Erez

  Useful

• 

  Martin Lacher
  • In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want.

Page Comments

• 
  Shannon Holman on 2006-12-03
  In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want.

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