I built 30 startups in 20 years.
VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C.
All mistakes I regret making:
1. Doing consumer apps.
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Great write up. Pretty solid. My take:
I've learned to hire from the top down. Hire managers who are doers, not doers without managers. This is true whether a startup or an enterprise. Hire pure doers under them, organically (only as the need presents itself). In my engineering orgs, everyone is a doer, including me. Pure managers are for huge tech companies.
I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Scrum isn't a scam, it just isn't one-size-fits-all. It's an idea developed by a handful of people and lapped up by the masses because it is, in fact, better than less structured processes before it. However, Scrum acts like all ideals are achievable by all teams. One such ideal is self-organized collaboration. The fact is, delegation beats collaboration every time (further underscoring the need for strong leader-doers). I did a whole write up about this: dev.to/horaceshmorace/scrum-was-a-....
100% true. The problem is that most boilerplates are crap. You can get from 0-1 with any team hacking on any open source crap. 1 is always sloppy. Find leaders who, afterwards, know how to get you from 1-100. And really good ones will have their own boilerplates.
One thing missing here is finding the right markets. Totally get it, it's the secret sauce. I read "The Mom Test", which paraphrased said, "treat any social interaction as a market research opportunity. Never pitch an 'idea'; just drill down on what ails people; have they spent money on a full or even partial solution? Have they even researched a solution? If the latter (especially) is 'no', it's not a 'real' problem, just a gripe."
Have I followed any of this, myself? Absolutely not. But that's mostly out of fear of doing 'wrong'. Curious to hear OP's thoughts (and anyone else's!)
good one
More interesting: what did you do right?
some things. Maybe 10%.
Please do share 😀
Nah, that just builds confirmation bias
Even if it is easy to read and keep those point in our mind, it requires practice to become better in all those topics, that's a life long experimentation! Human needs to fail in order to really learn.
Thank you John for those valuable insights.
Even though the opinion is personal, Scrum is NOT a Scam.
Kinda hard to believe this when the only difference is two letters 👀
Those are just mere letters and it doesn't relate at all.
Wait...
Is that supposed to be a joke? 😅
Great post
These are general good points even for non startups, I have never had a startup but make sense ...
That's 🔥
Love people with the "talk is cheap show me the code, less BS please" mentality.
Thanks for your points!
How long does it take from Idea to MVP?
And how easy was it for you to adapt to user needs?
i spend 30 to 90 days on MVP.
then adapt it daily or weekly
How often have you used no/low code solutions?
How often have you used custom Software development?
How long did it take to implement features and were they exactly as you would wanted them?
What do you mean by "1. Doing consumer apps.
The Failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery."?
consumer apps have 100x higher failure rate compared to b2b.
In b2b you can build lifestyle biz that makes 20k a month.
In b2b it's usually either huge or nothing. since you most likely will be giving it away for free to most of the users and monetize it all properly later, when you reach millions of users. most will never reach millions of users, so most will fail.
This is quit helpful for me, thanks! I will soon start my startup... once I understand how to register one in my country.
Great post
Great post! I really took some points from these. I can relate to most...😊
Valuable insights 🔥
Useful information, thank you for sharing!
If you have an interest, I think you'd greatly enjoy the book Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings: The Rise and Fall of Sierra On-Line by Ken Williams.
The book is actually by Ken Williams, not ghost written. He needed something to do during COVID lockdown.
Ken's book was not what I was expecting. What it delivered was better. And very personal. (I was expecting something along the lines of the book Apple Confidential, which is also an excellent book.)
Thank you for posting this, posts like this made me dodge many bullets, of course I still fail in some things, but you're preventing so much suffering for young people :)
I'm pretty sure I have Bingo. Great article 💪💪