| Serial founder here. Actual Points of Failure 1) First Company: When I realized the business couldn't scale on my expertise and hours alone. I would never be able to bootstrap enough money to hire/train my first employee. I saw myself charging hourly for this highly-specific and difficult work, forever. I packed my bags and literally moved out-of-state to get a fresh start after realizing this. The company was very profitable until the day I stopped answering calls. 2) Next Company: I couldn't find product market fit. It was cool tech, but there was no income after 6 months of work, no customers, and no foreseeable way to monetize the idea without a miracle. Running a simple business plan is difficult enough; there's no reason to think some Rube Goldberg type of business plan is going to work. 3) Next Company: I found product market fit after 6 months. There were paying customers, a scaleable business model, but I had to be careful how I operated and the industry was dangerous. I figured out exactly what I had to do to succeed and made a pretty penny finding product-market fit, but then quit cold-turkey once things were crystal clear this was the product/service direction. Failure is just a step in the learning process. Here are some hard-learned lessons: a) If you build it; nobody will care. If you market it, nobody will care. If you try to give it away for free, nobody will care. EVERYTHING in this world is this difficult. You basically have to sell a commodity that has current demand if you want to get anywhere. If you don't see other businesses that sell your product or service it's because people won't pay for it. b) I hate saying this: you NEED a business partner. If you build the product; the other person needs to talk to customers and sell it. You don't have enough time to handle everything when customers start calling. Forget this grand idea of training a handful of employees and letting your startup bootstrap itself. The person or people you work with need to be as invested as yourself. c) A note on the business partner: This needs to be a very special kind of person. You WILL blow up on each other. You WILL have arguments. You WILL consider walking away from the entire business and them. This kind of person needs to be someone where if this happens; you both understand each other, can call each other an idiot, but you will ALWAYS be able to (eventually) drop the issue or figure out a solution. d) After years of failure it's a little jarring hitting success. All of the sudden you are doubling-down on the business model instead of brainstorming the next pivot. You begin working out sticky scalability issues and operate in partial-failure mode as things start to accelerate and break, while your attention is on the biggest fire. Final advice: become a cockroach. Blow past the end of your runway and keep going. You'll still be alive when you run out of cash, so get creative and keep moving forward. What would you expect it to cost to build a successful company? It takes everything you have to give, for decades. Just keep pivoting. |