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5 reasons why I failed with my startup even before launching it

Raagavi Krishnan 1 Stories

Monday August 14, 2017 , 4 min Read

A few years back, when I doing my masters I had co-founded an online mentoring platform for students. I thought having a very good idea is enough to become an entrepreneur, but I was wrong. It demanded more from me which I was not aware of.

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But mistakes you make in the ideation phase may lead to your startup failure even before you launch. Here are the reasons why I think I failed even before I launched my startup.

1. Focusing on More than One Idea

Once I have decided to become an entrepreneur, many ideas pouring in my mind. Every idea that crossed my mind looked like a billion dollar business, and I wanted to try everything.

That’s the costliest mistake I made. I thought of working on two ideas, and any one of them would become very successful. There are very few people like Elon Musk became successful at this. Focus on one idea that you love and give your 100%.

2. The Disease Called Perfection

When my startup is out, I want that to be the best and perfect. We never satisfied with the product we built. We kept on improving that never comes out for the people to test. The first version of any product sucks. By that time I have not heard of lean startup concept. Then I understood “Perfection is not the destination; it is a continuous journey.”

Launch your product to the market and learn from your customer’s feedback and make the changes according to it. Satisfy your customers. Focus on the functionality, not on the interface. You need not see every turn before you start your journey.

3. Friends as Co founder

I had a co-founder who is also interested also fell in love with the idea. And we thought having more co-founder will help us to share the burden of capital etc. We approached our close friends, and they got interested in joining our team but they were not passionate about the idea which we are doing. All they wanted to do business and they never brought the right skills on the table.

The lessons we learned: Don’t bring your friend as co-founder if he is not passionate about your idea and not bring the right skill set to complete you.

4. Not Having Mentor

You might be going through a lot of terrible situation in the journey of startup. But as people say you need to be in the hand of someone who could guide you and support when you commit mistakes.

We have not found (tried) to get a mentor. We thought we would become successful then we will approach some mentor and thought then only they will respect us. If we have approached, any mentor in the inception stage of our idea, we could have saved it.

5. Timing

While we take six months to launch nothing, there were few other companies those started with same or more like the similar idea of what we were working on. This will happen when you don’t materialize your idea very soon.

Once you have finalized idea, don’t take a long time to research and other stuff. Make sure you launch an initial product or idea validation or at least you can try to collecting email id of your potential customers.

Timing is necessary for startup if you delay there might be more competitors enter the market. The early you launch your product in the market, the sooner you can learn about the industry.