Weekly 🔥 20: Why might your startup fail?
Welcome to another edition of our new newsletter! You’ll receive the best practical startup advice straight to your inbox every week.
In this week’s edition, we share:
- Reasons why startups fail (and how to fix it)
- What it’s really like to have your startup fall apart
- The Elon takeover in tweets
Let’s do this.
Why startups fail, and how to fix it
As founder of six startups, advisor to founders, and a startup strategist at IMD (#1 ranked business school), Boris Manhart has seen many mistakes being made and have made many himself. He compiled a scary list, and offers some solutions, including:
- Too much emphasis on building a great product — Use a data-driven approach and test your value proposition properly before building a product.
- A lack of leadership — Set clear, achievable goals together with the team. Goals ensure you’re running in the same direction instead of being busy like a bag of fleas while achieving nothing.
- Losing focus of what really matters — Having a clear strategy in place helps to say NO by agreeing and focusing on goals and priorities.
- Taking the wrong shortcuts — Get help from someone who can keep you on the right track. This can be a person (advisor) or an organization, for example, an accelerator.
👉 Go deeper into these lessons and more: Why Startups Really Fail, and How To Fix It
Don’t hide in shame from your startup failure
“When I stepped on stage at Demo Day to pitch our company to hundreds of investors, I had never felt so confident. And then everything fell apart.” Lauren Kay shared one of the best startup stories you’ll read on Medium, opening up about failure, shame and the lessons found within:
- Startup failures are far more common than they appear — Close to 90% of startups fail. We just don’t hear about the failures nearly as often, and fall victim to survivorship bias.
- People only want you to fail if they themselves are unhappy — People look for other’s to fail to validate their own life decisions because they wish they had the bravery to chase after their own dreams.
- Stop being unnecessarily harsh on your past self — The difference between massive failure and becoming one of the world’s youngest billionaires doesn’t always look that different at the beginning. You can only do the best you can with the experience you have.
- And most importantly, don’t let shame hold you back from doing what you love.
👉 Jump into the full story here: My Startup Failed Six Years Ago. I’ve Been Hiding from My Shame Ever Since.
Seizing The Untapped Global Potential Of The Blockchain — Learn from Joseph Dallago, the CoFounder of Rain
From $10k to $175 MILLION: Entrepreneurship through diversity — Learn from Henri Pierre-Jacques, the CoFounder of Harlem Capital
Meet the Entrepreneur Who’s Helped Launch 1000 Companies and Counting — Learn from Julian Weisser, the CoFounder of On Deck
