50 biggest FUCK-UPS of mine | What are yours?

Back when the idea of building my first startup was only in the first stages of development, I heard a lot of mistakes, lessons & advice from people who already were “in the business.”

However, I think I took the notes wrong - sometimes it feels like I did all the don’ts and avoided all the dos. But later, I understood that that’s the process, that some don’ts might seem like the only solution in certain situations, and that all of it is really, really - very individual.

Oh, and also, we had quite a few funny failures that I thought you might enjoy & find relatable.

Here we go 📃:

Giving too much freedom to people we collaborate with resulted in overspending & getting 0 use.
Starting to spend more money after a period of success, which later appeared to be a temporary one, left us with no financial freedom and zero left on marketing.
Trying to bargain from $300 to $50 with an influencer & getting her to write a Twitter post about how presumptuous we are. We were really broke, what can I say? Sorry!
Continuing to post on social media using a strategy called “post anything and however as long as you keep posting.”
At the very beginning, showing a higher number of installs than it actually was, thinking it would seem more legit for our potential users. It did the opposite, obviously.
Sending out travel offers with dog pictures instead of hotel pictures to all of our subscribers. Cute, ain’t it?
Not having ONE CLEAR message we’re sending to our potential customers mistaken them and did not show clear value.
Taking on too many new projects at once and thinking I could manage them all resulted in not coming up with new ideas to grow these products anymore.
Quitting on writing our blog because it didn’t show instant results - the thing is, it’s a long-term thing & now we’re working on SEO all over from nothing again.
Letting a candidate think we're hiring him but then understanding he was not the right fit. We were like: How do we tell him?!
Spending too much time on things that worked for someone but didn’t show any results for us took time which I could have used to experiment more.
Focusing on PPC only as it performed best ended up with us not having a plan B when we had to cut all expenses on it.
Developing one product for 3 months, then launching it & killing it after 3 days of testing. The developers’ team still hates me, I’m sure.
Having only one main contractor for affiliates and relying everything on it left us barefoot when the contract was canceled.
Setting unrealistic goals - we wanted to get 10k users in one month, and we barely got 500, so it made us put our hands down for a while.
Sending 100 emails to EACH of our subscribers because our system got stuck. Spam who?
Trying to do all the things on my own and prove that “it’s my project & I can do it without anyone” initially, and losing the motivation in the long run.
Writing a bunch of blog posts before getting traffic - a lot of work, no use.
Pitching our product to people who no longer work in the publication we’re referring to.
Thinking that once we hit the TOPs at the Apple & Chrome Stores, we would get a constant install flow.
Hiring too many people at once - the best-succeeding product of ours (which is RatePunk) started with me, its co-founder, a designer, a developer & a marketer. That was the best team for a good start.
Killing off our social media because we saw that ads bring more installs and switched our focus there entirely. But what’s a brand without social media?
Booking a closed hotel for our customer. We did solve it in the end & they were not left on the street, but you know…
Calculating the expected influencer CPA based on data from ONLY ONE successful collab resulted in not making the right financial decisions and splashing for no results.
Not prioritizing the fact of not having a proper tracking system & not finding out the source of a huge part of our installs.
Mainly posting on Twitter and not engaging with other accounts - we were uploading a bunch of posts but not growing the audience that would read them.
Trying to adapt the KPIs system to our marketing more than once ended up in us making up a bunch of goals that we didn’t reach and dropped our motivation down.
Sending an email to one of the best-known journalists in the tech industry & calling her the wrong name inside. It resulted in not getting a feature if you’re wondering.
Launching a travel product in the middle of the worldwide pandemic.
Not deciding on our brand voice & communicating differently on every platform resulted in us losing a part of our authenticity.
Believing that we can push this product by not spending anything on marketing.
Picking the mobile version of RatePunk as the main selling point - it didn’t work perfectly & was definitely not the best angle to present it.
Defining our market & target audience as “everyone traveling worldwide” made it more complicated to understand the tactics for approaching it.
Not automatizing our hotel-uploading system on time - we were wasting our human resources on a copy-pasting job that a machine could do.
Making the newsletters mostly about our brand. The number of subscribers dropped because people need informative, entertaining, and helpful content.
Setting advertisements in french for a Spanish audience. What do you mean you don’t understand?
Keeping on investing in micro-influencers after trying it out with more than a few & seeing that it brings only a few installs.
Promoting our website price comparison version when we knew that the data wasn't scrapped entirely correctly there & the prices differed.
Uploading videos on TikTok only using one SIM card. Doing it with SIM cards from different countries helps to reach and try out targeted audiences better.
Not using a bot for very basic emails where quantity wins over quality. Although personalization is priority number 1, so is time.
Sounding too much like an advertisement when trying out platforms like Reddit, Quora, Facebook groups, etc. Not organic copies got us out of many groups.
Explaining our product very abstractly - it’s a quite complicated tool & needs to be presented in detail, step by step.
Reaching out mostly to news publications and not to specific journalists.
Not considering that a mobile browser extension can’t operate on apps - for example, if our user has Booking on their mobile device, RatePunk comparison won’t be available.
Spending too much time on designing some features when the feature itself hadn’t been completely finalized & tested.
Naming “going viral” as our main objective with almost any strategy - brought too much disappointment.
Getting blocked by a travel blogger for referring to her “Hey there”, since, apparently, her name wasn’t “there.” We learn something new every day, don’t we?
Having too high expectations - building a product takes time, energy, nerves and is a PROCESS.
Not having thorough terms & conditions on our website for quite a long time made it complicated for both our users and us.
Thinking that we’re way ahead of our competitors during our peek performance period and missing out on their instant growth.

I guess it would be 100 if I remembered them all. However, as long as this list would be, I’m not regretting any of these: some gave irreplaceable lessons for the future, and others turned into the best memories that make everyone smile.

And what would you name as your biggest fuck up? Let me know I’m not alone 👇