Here’s what happens when you don’t have the right startup team

If you own an iPhone, you may have heard the name Vitoto before.
Vitoto was a startup that was founded nearly a decade ago. Their goal was to create the ultimate collaborative video app for the iPhone.

Riding the tech explosion wave, Vitoto got decent media exposure and was able to quickly raise a seed round. Things looked promising.

Then they failed spectacularly.

It only took 3 months for the founding team to officially close its doors.

As any entrepreneur will tell you, there’s never just one reason that leads to failure. Or success for that matter.

But here it was quite apparent that their main issue was around what I consider to be the most crucial element of success for any startup: people.

The team they built simply wasn’t equipped to deliver this product - as founder Vinay Patankar explained in the startup post-mortem he published:

“We had a great team, don’t get me wrong, but there were some key elements in the structure that lead to the inevitable demise of Vitoto.

The two key factors were:

We had a team that was too experienced for the budget.

We had not invested in a User Experience/Design specialist.

The team never properly sat down and brainstormed the UX. Quick decisions were made to get the MVP out the door and these had serious impacts on how the product was received by customers.

The product was not getting the traction needed nor could we get the viral loop to work, this made the product unappealing to investors.”

Had Vinay invested some of his limited resources in a Product specialist, this story could’ve ended differently.

Or not, if there was a talent dept somewhere else in the project.

People make or break startups. Period.

So it was not a surprise that my conversations with successful founders for our Startup Journey Interview Series have surfaced a trend around the topic.

So today I wanted to share six lessons on building a startup team I’ve heard in those conversations (with a couple of bonus ones thrown in for good measure).

You can check them out here.

Hopefully, this will help you avoid a situation like Vinay’s.