In a nutshell this is why my startup failed I was too eager to build a startup for the sake of building a startup.
On the other hand, I am happy that I tried and failed quickly. For this journey and the investment to have some value or to be worth something, I put down a post-mortem series to summarize things I have learnt along theway.
Note: This post-mortem is written with 100% honesty based on all the late nights of retro that Ive done thousands of times between my tossing and turning. It is mostly for me to reflect upon my experience of building a startup, and hopefully some readers would benefit from thistoo.
There is no way to cover everything that Ive learnt during my startup in a single post, so it is a series. Below is the outline of the post-mortem, which are the things that affected the startup progress the most. Some of these with links to its post that detailed the mistakes Ive made, the lessons I learnt from it, and some resources Ive gathered for thattopic.
Four Mistakes I Made That Impacted The StartupProgress
- Falling in love with an idea tooquickly
- No match quality between myself and my startuptopic
- Didnt have/ gather the rightteam
- Looking for funding withouttraction
Other Things ILearned
(or things that had more mental impact on me than actually affecting the startup progress)
- Understand the motivations of people who work for/with you. Including my report and potential co-founders
- The best way to learn to be a great product manager/consultant for a startup, is to try building yourown
- Not being afraid of failing in experiments in life is a goodthing!
Why I Wanted To Build AStartup?
Part of it might be the influences by my family, my parents had their success between 80s and 90s (but then we went horribly broke). Another motivation may be because I have been building products for different companies (mostly startups), which made me think I could do this for myself too. Regardless, I always wanted to build a startup, and I am never short ofideas.
I dont know about you, but when I think of an exciting idea, I talk about it to everyone I know and lose sleep over it??thoughts whirling around my head??and it feels like I could see all the possibilities derived from an idea to when the idea takes shape, the features implemented, the team working together to build the product, how much the users would love it, and soon.
Short Background Story Of The StartupAhgain
This idea started in Nov. 2020 where the UK was in a strict lockdown, and most of us were working from home. I caught myself in the shower thinking about my sex life, I thought about how awkward it was when I tried to share my fantasy with Klaas (I am pretty sure he feels the same). And how cool itd be if we can just sync our fantasies without talking about them and some form of erotica could be automatically generated based on what welike.
I lost my sleep that night and just got so excited about the idea (just for the record, nothing naughty), is it going to be like all the other wellness apps? or can I make it conversational and interactive with just voice commands? If Im going to make a voice based app, how advanced would the voice AI need to be so it wouldnt be a turn off because the fantasy sounds robotic like Alexa orSiri?
Over the next few days, I dumped all these thoughts on Klaas, something I do whenever I have a new idea. Then we crunch through the logic of the idea. This time I felt like I answered all the questions he threw back at me, which doesnt happen for every idea I had. And I took it as a positive sign that this product and business model would work. Weeee!
