I failed my first startup - Here are some mistakes

Hey everyone ✌️

About a year ago I launched my first startup which was a drag and drop ETL tool. At the time I started working on it, I had finished my bachelors in CS and worked for 1 year at a digital agency. I saved a bit, found myself a part-time gig to sustain myself, and decided to go all in on my startup idea. I was gonna write this down for myself to reflect on what are things that went wrong or could've been done differently but instead I'll just share them here.

1. Cofounder chaos
   One of the first steps I took was finding a cofounder, I made some posts got some calls and eventually found someone. We were both working remotely for months, after a while I decided to break it up because he was still doing a full-time job and he had a family so it was hard to find time. For the 5-6 months following that I used YC's cofounder matching and met some great cofounders but everytime they leave because results are not coming as fast as they hoped and they're not ready to commit. Take this lesson with a grain of salt since we all have different ways of working and interacting with colleagues, but for the lessons were:

• Find someone in your area (go to meetups, networking events, etc.) instead of looking online
• Get all the uncomfortable conversations out of the way asap (equity splits, etc.) even though I knew this, and the people I worked with knew this we seem to keep procrastinating it.
• Clearly define your test periods, and expectations throughout

2. Thinking the idea is validated when it's not
   If you work in startups, it's literally impossible to not know the importance of validation. The problem is it's somewhat subjective, there isn't a magic number you can measure to tell if an idea is validated, it's just talking to users, collecting leads, and then just somehow suming it all up. I had about 100 sign ups to my prelaunch form, talked with some users, maybe 3 were interested and I thought that was it, my mentality was that if no one want to use it I'll just keep pivoting until that changes, which leads me to my next mistake.

3. Pivot, pivot, pivot, crash
   The idea I initially had was something that was really exciting for me, I enjoyed working on it every step of the way. Once I had an MVP I would launch, trying to post everywhere, and message people, get nothing and go back to adding features and pivoting. I pivoted to a point where I had zero motivation to work on it (I basically realized that all the users want is more integrations and as a solo founder it was impossible to stay on top of this, aside from the fact it's the most boring task imaginable). I'm not saying pivots are bad, but don't rely on them as a replacement for validation.

4. Managing expectation and burning out
   I thought getting the first customer would be a breeze. I was working all day spliting my time 50/50 between development and doing cold outreach, at some point I just burned out, I stopped going to the office and went back to working remotely, found myself being more distracted than ever, lazy, and with no motivitation. That burst of energy you get in your first couple of weeks working on your new idea can be decieving so just pace yourself.

5. Desperate AppSumo Launch
   Appsumo is usually a good idea for getting your first users to get feedback and iterate and it served that purpose. The issue with AppSumo is that it's audience's behaviour is very different that what you'd get organically. I had people that bought it without creating an account or even knowing what it does. They're buying it because it's a bargain not because they need it, this just resulted in bad engagement metrics making the exiting process much harder.

These were the top 5 things that came to mind when considering the failure of my first startup, now I'm building my second startup (moonlitplatform.com) and hopefully I don't fuck up as much.🤞

... and good luck to all the first time founders 🫡