This was written three years ago.
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3.5 Years… That is the time we dreamt of building something that...
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Thanks for the share Mohammad. It takes much courage to be brutally honest like this. Having gone through the entrepreneurship ride myself, I get how insane it can feel!
Similar to you, I built fast with little experience at the time, and paid the price. I learned a ton about myself, and what is really important to me. The lessons are still paying dividends now, almost 10 years later. No regrets.
Nothing is lost, everything is transformed. Good luck in your journey!
Thank you!
Little bit like reading about my own past (On a smaller scale in terms of employees).
Especially the part about jumping on the newest tech, choosing NoSQL instead of Postgres and the lack of architecture understanding.
One senior dev is crucial for any tech startup, would you agree?
Although they hurt badly, making mistakes is an important part of becoming an entrepreneur. Lick your wounds, come back stronger.
Best of success with your next startup.
Thanks for shared your story, I realized in Hungary I also faced of startup problem like your. But I am is not work as inventor, just graphic designer and developer. But our startup is do same mistakes as you do.
Keep up, and go forward to your the next dream!
Thanks brother
I've worked at three start-ups. The third one my own short-lived start-up.
The first two start-ups followed the valley of death down the path of sink. {See Note#1 below.}
One took about 3 years to fail (and all the devs were laid off), and then a lingering death for another 8 years.
Another took about 2 years to fail — a casualty of the "dot com bubble going bust". Then a fairly short lingering death of about a year before shuttering.
My start-up did not even get to the valley of death, because I accidentally got hired at a big company and that put my one-person start-up on perma-hold.
Note#1. The graph says 90% sink, and 10% swim — I think the reality is 99.9% sink, and 0.1% swim. It's not just start-ups, but likewise skunkworks / incubation projects at a big company have the same failure/success ratio. That's why innovation by acquisition for a company to buy a proven winner in the market is a very valid & viable corporate strategy. (Even for a company with deep pockets, like Microsoft: they shuttered CodePlex and bought GitHub — because GitHub had won the hearts & minds in the marketplace.)
there is no shame to have a step back go back to the drawing board and polish it over and over again.
Keep on going !
Thanks brother
Hi, Mohammad. Thanks for sharing your wide experience with us.
I have a question.
What is the main problem of why your product does not run well enough?
Do you make some analysis of customer behavior?
To some extent, no. We designed features without realizing if the users wanted them or not.
It must have been a really painful memory, but I think it is a really rare opportunity to receive investment and attract customers.
Did those experiences not give you another possibility?
I am not pursuing startups for now. But those experiences sure taught me a lot and helping in my current journey.
I’m really sorry to hear that your venture didn’t go well. I hope you take care of yourself.
Thank you!
I've been there. Not as a startup owner, but as a developer who must refactor garage product developed by "client x wants it to work this way, client y wants just the opposite" rule. That is huge issue for startups - money is so important that they allow clients to blackmail them with feature demands instead of sticking to long term vision.
I remember one function in the code. It was named
dong. With commentonly Wang can make ding-dong. So yeah... We wasted some serious amount of time trying to finddingfunction (failed) or full identity of this customer (also failed) before we carefully tried to remove this logic from code :)But my story has happy end, product was cleaned up and survived on the market for years. I hope your next project will be successful as well.
Thanks for the share Mohammad
Thank you very much for sharing!
Man my old boss should read this
Thanks for sharing!
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