| I got a 'real' job. =) My first startup was back in 2002 or so. We were doing a sort-of ebay for contractors. Today, you have similar services like Angie's List but we were creating a marketplace for contractors and sub-contractors to bid on jobs. We had meetings with a large (back-then) communications company, had a functioning and viable product with revenues, and were weeks away from securing a large investment. I'm not mentioning names but you can pretty easily figure it out if you know your early 21st century phone tech combined with the fact we were targeting contractors. In my honest opinion, it was a great idea. The company didn't fail because of a technical issue or bad idea. We failed because of personal issues between myself and the other founder. He decided to pursue other opportunities in his personal life and took most of the equity and product with him. That being said, I would not trade the experience for anything. Lessons learned: 1) Having multiple founders is not a boon. It's much better (for you personally) to be a sole founder and then bring on employees or 'co-founders' after you have the company started. 2) Leave yourself options. I put 110% of myself for over a year into this startup. My total compensation for all of my effort was under 10k. I literally put all of my eggs in that one basket of 'this is going to be a success'. Not having a plan for failure was a huge mistake on my part. This could be as simple as maintaining your contacts while working on your startup or even as complicated as looking for other jobs while working on your startup. 3) Get back to work! Failing does not make you weak, unintelligent, incompetent or anything like that. It simply means your idea and / or execution was not good enough. There's only one way to fix that, get back to work. |