Mistakes you guys made when starting your startups

When I was younger I use to focus a lot more on the peripheral parts of running a business while not doing the work to get the actual business going. So stuff like worrying about a name, having the best design for a website, business cards, incorporation, etc. I've spent a few thousand dollars on incorporating businesses that never had a single client. I've spent hundreds on logos for sites that never launched.

All these things made me feel like I was doing business and was being productive because look I have a company now, I have a great name, my logo is amazing...what was I selling again?

When I say younger I don't mean that much younger either I was late 20's before I finally stopped making these mistakes regularly and even now I'll occasionally do it with a logo I don't need or a theme from wrapbootstrap that is no better than the other 20 I already own from there and are not currently using.

• focussing on shit that does not matter in the early stages of a new business
• not talking to customers enough
• building a product instead of a business
• thinking about marketing too late
• spending money to easy and on the wrong things
• getting over-confident after some early success
• selling the business too early
• spending months building an "MVP" without involving a single customer
• charging too little
• going too long without paying myself a salary
• probably a good 100 or so more :)

Probably waited too long before we started building an email list and grow the community around the brand.

Now, after we have been in business for 4 months open to the public and a year in product development before that - it would have been much better if we had started to collect emails from Day 1. Here's what we do: https://weardulo.com

Some great comments from others here! The one mistake I've made in the past was not asking for people's money soon enough. Getting that first sale is a great indicator that you have something others value. It's easy to get lost in the details (logo, ui, etc.). If your goal is to build a lasting business, you need to focus on building value.

Here's one specific one: Thinking you'll always be able to move as fast as you can in the beginning.

When you first start building software and don't have any users yet, you can write and ship things so incredibly quickly that it makes you think things will always be that way. So you don't bother to plan for the future very much and you don't mind releasing something half-done because you know you can just do another quick release later to improve it. And you don't mind spending time on a feature that helps partially solve a problem even if it isn't a longterm solution.

Fast forward a couple years when you have tons of customers, a big database, more infrastructure to support, never-ending support tickets, hiring goals, people management, more software features, etc.

You just can't write & ship software as fast as you used to. For every change you make, you have to think about how it affects existing customers. Does this break any workflows? How do we migrate customer data into the new design and how long will that take? Is this new API going to be backwards compatible?

The list goes on and on. Basically, your businesses' success also means that it's harder to continue to move as quickly as upfront.

My advice isn't to spend tons of time planning everything perfectly from day 1 or to delay shipping until you have the perfect product, but it is this:

Recognize that your early days without many users is a very special time that should not be wasted. Make sure you're spending your time on the most important things because this type of speed is hard to get later. Often it's better to punt a non-truly-critical problem for later (to be tackled when it can be done properly) rather than trying to do a crappy version that will be harder to migrate away from later.

• over thinking and discussing small decisions instead of just moving forward and correcting course on the way (wanted to get everything right and perfect from the beginning)
• expecting too much from "partnerships" with other startups (most deals turned out to just fall trough or have zero impact results)
• not thinking trough the technical debt which is created for every feature (with a broad stack of backend + web + iOS + Android)
• not going the "extra mile" for key customers / suppliers which would have been mission critical to convince (= not drving out and meeting them in person to build a relationship)

Mine are somewhat classic:

• not firing fast enough
• picking a "hype stack" instead of old "boring" well-documented and well-tested technologies
• building everything at once instead of MVP with a couple of features

I spent too much time doing front end even when clearly i was not good at it (i thought i will finish something i hate or find very hard first ), finally i ended up just buying a ready made template and
modifying it. saves time and effort to focus on real customer needs.

I also took a lot of time before i started showing the product to others. its important to continuously show/share new features with customers to get early feedback

not talking to customer. talk to at least one customer weekly (criminal if not doing).

avoid burnouts, don't try and build a perfect product. just ship it, fix only if people complaint about it (another validation the customer want that particular feature ).

the whole process of growing of business is a process to making mistakes and learning from each one of them. So always keep looking for things you are doing wrong and just focus on that problem.

• Not doing enough market research
• Taking too long to build the MVP before talking to real potential customers
• Over-engingeering for scale too quickly
• Not letting people know what we were working on (we had friends sign up for competitor products because they didn't even know we had a solution. Ouch)
• Making it "Request Access" instead of "Sign up for trial" (too much friction for signup)
• Wasting time on things that didn't matter
• Not enough marketing

I've created a lot of startups and have fallen many times in the Product/Software trap... Focusing too much on the product and not on validating if it's of real value to your potential customers.

Some great points mentioned here, let me tell you the screwups I made as a first-time founder, with no technical background or a technical co-founder.

1. Have your technical documentation- This is the ultimate document for a non-tech founder, maybe even for a tech founder. You should have this made before writing the first line of code, charted out with the hurdles, time to develop, any other tech difficulties, etc.. And yes, never do this without a technical person (I wonder how you could do it otherwise)

2. Hire a senior member/tech lead as your first employee- Yes, we were blinded by the notion that 'oh, this is just an android app, 2 junior devs with 1 yr experience could easily build this.' Hell no! These guys were 'less experienced' Android-only people, not experienced in backend, design, front-end, etc.. Always hire the tech-lead, then let him/her take the decisions for who he/she wants on their team, from interviewing to assigning tasks; it's your job to interview for culture but not for tech. (We had an external 'technical' family friend do the interviewing for us)

3. Only hire people who really care about this- I mean, it may be tough, but the upside is unparalleled!

4. Never let being liked get in the way of being respected- Classic mistake! If you do not feel something is right, be stern, speak it out; do not care about the judgement. As Ben Horowitz says: If you are being liked and not being effective, you will not be liked in the long run. But if you are being effective and not being liked, you will be liked in the long run because you were effective.

That's just my 2 cents. Thanks :)

For me the biggest mistake is actually being too much in control / trying to be perfect. I realised being too much in control is a byproduct of lack of focus. Sometimes it's better to launch early / or delegate to someone who is not as good as you to do the job (at least at the beginning) rather than controlling everything.

• Trying to think of a cool name. Go with the simplest, clearest name you can think of that conveys what you do.
• Going for elegant solutions when coding, they're time sinks and almost never work as expected. When solving a tough code problem always go for the simplest solution (you know what it is you just don't want to do it :p)

Great thread!

My biggest error in past was to build without thinking about customer acquisition.