How Niteo founders spent $980,000 on a failed SaaS project

It seems they ignored this red flag:

All of this resulted in revenue being slow. Really slow. It took us 16 months after launch to get to $5k MRR. In our succesful project, we started with $5k MRR.

While I agree with many of the conclusions, I don't agree with this:

We don’t jump into projects anymore. We’ve been discussing multiple new ideas this year, but we let them sit for weeks. I build the wireframes and write the basic idea analysis and publish it for everyone to comment on. We then revisit it every few months and see if the idea still makes sense and if we have any new insights.

You can just make a simple landing page and test this ideas instead of letting everyone comment on it.

Wow, this is brutal..."As entrepreneurs, we’re usually optimistic in our outlook and that pushed me further than I should have let it." The difficulty is, a lot of the time, as an entrepreneur you often have to work on things even though you know that statistically the odds of success are against you. But, if you're not optimistic, if you're realistic then you'll end up doing nothing. Because what's the point? There's no guarantee it'll work out. So, I really empathize with this story. Yes, they let their optimism push them too far (into, arguably, blind arrogance). But they only know this in hindsight...when you're in the moment, how do you know if you're being too optimistic...what are the signs?

Interesting post. Thanks for the share.

Running out of money is the number one reason that all businesses fail. And looking for product-market fit (aka trying to build that perfect product) is the reason why most startups run out of money. Wrote a post about this that I shared not too long ago on here about how a startup called Quest went through nearly $2 million in funding doing this.

Reality is you don't need a product to grow. Companies like HubSpot grew massively with what the founder himself called a not so great product. Still built a massively passionate customer base and grew to over $20 million in revenue before they needed to fix the product (at which point they had the money to do it).

Marketing first. Product second.

It will save you money, time and a lot of heartache.

You don`t need to wait so long to validate ideas. you can build a short, involving survey on Typeform, Metasurvey or Hotjar and share via Reddit / Twitter and Validate your idea or wireframes

• put just a few questions to keep the completion rate high.
• better use binary questions Like / Disclike or Choose answer questions
• put mockups / sketches to survey

My hope in bitcoin is renewed after a recovery expert named Jim whom I hired after a sim-swap hack was carried out on my device leaving my coinbase account vulnerable. My coinbase was accessed and crypto moved outside to an external wallet. JimFundsRecovery @ Consultant dot Com simply pursued my case with a local police report I made/ some required info and was able to recover 95% for me in a 2 weeks long recovery process.

"For us to be fixing issues that WordPress caused did get us goodwill by a specific customer, but that would not be scalable, nor does it actually make our product better. In other words, the initial enthusiastic feedback was for our support work, not the product or where it was going."

That blog isn't very convincing in terms of "lessons learned." For one - if people liked the level of support that their company offers around the product, then make that a central differentiation point. Focus on building great support team around the product, gaining customers trust, and growing the business that way. Some businesses have higher hurdles; growth takes much longer - especially with enterprises and gaining trust of customers to move their businesses onto your platform.