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9 signs that your business idea will probably fail

https://dannorris.me/9-signs-that-your-business-idea-will-probably-fail/
submitted this linkon May 4, 2020
  1. 2

    "Don't try to change buying habits" is so key. From Dan's post:

    Can you imagine the gargantuan task of convincing people who have driven petrol cars all their life to no longer buy petrol cars? Can you imagine being a startup car maker and competing against iconic companies that people tie their identities to? Competing against companies who have more than a century of lessons and innovation and brand building to fall back on? That’s what Elon faced when forming Tesla. It takes a special type of crazy person (meant in the most endearing way), to even think something like that would be possible.

  2. 2

    Good to know that i’ll do well :-)

  3. 1

    ooph. someone shared this with me and i thought... huh... so depressing.

    it's not that any of these couldn't be true... but, how would you know? i mean, a business doesn't work until... it does.

    sometimes, all signs point to failure until... they don't. and then, everything kinda makes sense in 20-20 view.

    also, failure / success are deeply personal in nature. failure hurts, yes, but not all types of failure hurt equally for all people. same goes for a lot of these signs.

    i'd also want to stay positive... so much of this is a journey and we can count all the times we've failed or we can count the times we've gotten back up... that number seems to be the same.

    2-cents.

  4. 1

    Great to see this. I've shared Dan's 7-day startup and content machine material here on IH quite a bit. He was very helpful in getting me out of my over-ambitious, under-funded startup of 2017 and into what I'm working on now.

  5. 1

    Indeed a great reminder and a warning to not take entrepreneurship too lightly and follow every random idea that comes to ones mind.

  6. 1

    There are some truth bombs in here. Personally I find it amazing how people try to come up with an idea without really understanding the market, nor being a stakeholder themselves.

    1. 1

      Yeah. It just kills me when I see people doing this. I recently did a customer interview with a founder who's applying machine learning to finance, but he has zero finance background – he's an ML scientist. I was in finance for 14 years and tried to explain how things work. It was so painful to see how little he knew about his target market and how much of an uphill battle he has ahead of him. Maybe he'll get there someday, but I think the odds are severely stacked against him.

  7. 1

    I think I saw this on Twitter somewhere, forgot to bookmark, and missed it. Thanks for sharing it here, Rosie!

    1. 1

      Here to serve :)