3 lessons from failure

Three startup lessons that cost me 4 years and $2M to learn:

1.  Don’t overbuild your product.

Or, put another way, you should be amazing at just one thing.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of attempting to match your established competitor feature-for-feature. But, WHEN you release new product features is just as important as WHICH features you release.

It’s important to start small and solve one problem at a time for your customer. Focus on building a few great features, maintaining them, and supporting them with marketing.

2.  If you’re a non-technical founder (building a software company), you better find a technical co-founder.

Here’s the problem: If you don’t have the engineering ability to build the product yourself, you’re going to need to pay someone else to do it in either cash or equity. You have enough equity to find a great co-founder, but you won’t have enough cash to buy an engineer.

It’s an expensive mistake that’s easy to avoid.

3.  Get to revenue and profitability sooner in the lifecycle.

I raised $2M to build my company, RetailMLS, but I didn’t attempt to generate revenue collection until we needed the cash. By then, it was far too late.

There are very few founders who can raise enough cash to build a successful product AND run unprofitably for years. Odds are, that’s not you.

Therefore, as soon as you have a working product, begin pushing sales and generating revenue to de-risk your business.