Why Startups are hard

It's been a year since I started up. Have not found success but learned a lot.

• No amount of initial meetings, theories, assumptions or even prospects etc. will predict success. You might know your first 10 customers, it is getting the next set that is hard
• Competition can be tough, especially if they have a better brand. If you have no competition, it is harder, you have to educate the market.
• The time when you are selling, and users have a problem may not align. Until the users have a problem, they don't want your solution. A lot more on this in a future blog.
• Product market fit is ever evolving, thus there never actually is a fit.
• The world moves forward at breakneck speed
  • if you don't, competition will beat you
  • If your customers don't, you are stuck with a reducing set of bad customers
  • If your prospects don't, you are set to fail, they are being blind to the change and will regret it
• Since the world is moving forward, the past does not matter.
  • Your old feature is no longer the best, someone made it a hygiene factor and built more things. With that in mind, don't build features for the sake of building feature. The next feature rarely a "silver bullet"
  • Your old growth channel won't work forever
  • Your old revenue engines are today's brakes. They might hold you back from great things (e.g Windows, QWERTY Blackberry)
• Ego takes the oxygen out of the room. Each small win for a startup breeds someone's ego

The best part of a doing a startup is the pace of learning. I have spent the last 3 weeks learning Swift while building the iOS app for Odiocast. Abhishek, on the other hand, is on the road to be a Full Stack Gandalf

Photo by Jimmy Chang on Unsplash