I built 30 startups in 20 years.
VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C.
All mistakes I regret making:
1. Doing consumer apps.
The Failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery.
2. Raising VC money.
I felt like Marc Zuckerberg when we raised the first round. All journalists interviewing us. Felt like a dream.
Eventually, most of these startups failed by being funded too early.
3. Hiring too early.
Previously, startups took pride in large teams - a key sign of growth back then.
Founders should do most of the work until PMF.
Employees and contractors won’t have enough love and passion for your project.
4. Ignoring SEO.
None of the people in my network did SEO. We all thought it was something too late, and we kept postponing it forever.
5. Ignoring content marketing.
Never took blogging seriously. Big mistake.
6. Social Media Marketing.
This is my biggest regret. I started using twitter just a year ago. Got to 20k followers now. What if I started 20 years ago? Could I have 1M followers now? I think so.
7. Skipping idea validation.
I’d always assume for the audience. Anticipate what they need. It almost never turned out to be true.
My best projects were those I thought will fail and failed projects had my highest hopes at the start.
8. Hiring managers.
I haven’t yet seen any useful manager in a startup.
They might be useful for corporations, but for startups, I should have hired only doers.
9. Chasing Investors.
For every startup, I’d spend 40% of my time fundraising.
I’d succeed in most of the cases, but at what cost?
I haven’t done a single outreach to investors in 2 years, but I get VCs knocking my doors, because I have good traction and they search for such projects daily.
10. Hiring specialized of developers.
There is nothing less efficient than a team of specialized developers for a startup.
Today I have 1 fullstack dev doing 5x more progress on a project than a team of 12 back then.
Avoid “teams” at all costs.
11. Hiring people I don’t wanna hug.
My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. If you don’t wanna hug the person, it means you dislike them on a chemical/animal level.
12. Betting on partners.
I have partnered up with large billion-dollar corporations many times with different startups.
They promise huge stuff, millions of users, but end up just wasting your time, destroying focus, shifting priorities, making you spend zillions on ramping up security and compliance, and eventually bringing in no users/money.
13. Shiny objects.
I fell for crypt0 hype. Got super rich, then lost it all.
Years wasted. Almost got depressed by seeing how scammy and greedy humans can be, even my own partners.
14. Holding on a bad project for too long.
I kept believing in projects after years of no traction.
I thought that one day, something magical would happen, and things would go up. It was just a waste of time.
15. Went to tech conferences.
It's a total waste of time.
Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation.
16. Scrum is a Scam.
If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat in sync on goals and plans.
17. Outsourced development & marketing.
The vendors were good, but the outcome was not good.
Startups are so difficult that there is almost no chance someone from outside can do a good job for them.
18. Started with a free tier in b2b.
Free projects attracted the totally wrong crowd, who gave feedback that was only relevant to please the rest of the “free” crowd. However, “paid” users turn out to be very different and have different needs.
A few times, I started with no free version and had no sales, so later, I added a free version. But this was a mistake, too. If nobody wants to pay for my product, I have to fix it or find another audience for it.
19. Code from scratch.
My team would spend the first 3 months coding basic things like auth, admin panel, cruds and etc.
It was a huge waste of time.
The moment I started using boilerplates, the speed went up 10x.
20. Spent little time with my family & friends.
I worked way too much. Didn’t take holidays at all.
It was very destructive to my creativity. Once I started having some off, I became way more creative.
Quality >Quantity.
That’s it.
I share my experience daily on twitter.com/johnrushx
See all my projects here
Top comments (26)
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.)