18 fatal injuries that caused the start-up company to fail

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"Editor's note" Paul Graham is co-founder of the Silicon Valley start-up incubator Y Combinator, the godfather of the American internet community. The article translated today may have been seen by many people 6 years ago, but it is worth reading again for those who are already engaged in entrepreneurship.

In a recent speech, I was asked how to avoid failure, and I realized it was a difficult question to answer. But from another point of view, you can actually say, "If your company avoids all the mistakes that could lead to failure, your company will naturally succeed." ”

Remembering what not to do is far more meaningful than remembering other people's success stories. If you make a list of bugs and successfully avoid them in the process of running the company, you get a successful prescription from a certain point of view. Overall, there is only one reason why a startup fails: What you do is not what the consumer needs. If this is the case, you will die, it is the fact that can not change. In fact, what are the factors that make startups ' products unable to satisfy users? The following list lists the common 18 fatal injuries, and the failure of all startups basically boils down to it.

1 Alone struggle

I don't know if you've noticed that very few successful startups are created by one person. What does a single founder say? At least it implies that people who know you don't agree with what you think. Even if they are wrong, you need a partner to brainstorm and avoid committing stupid acts. In addition, a partner can give you faith support, and a single founder often lacks motivation.

2 location is not right

Not all places are suitable for entrepreneurship, location is very important. Why do startups focus on a city? Because there are a lot of professionals out there, they tend to resonate with what you do and make it easier for you to hire people. In addition, where the surrounding industry is relatively developed, you also have more opportunities to meet peers, for your career to find a good direction.

3 Field too biased

Most of the teams who applied for VCs to Y Combinator made a fatal mistake: the areas of choice were too obscure. It may be a good way to avoid competition, but once they succeed, they will naturally have competitors to join. Many people have great ideas, but in the end they choose a sound plan. Unlike this idea, choosing an entrepreneur in the cold and cold field is more of a subconscious rejection of a big idea. The best way to solve this problem is to think of yourself as someone else's planning officer, not yourself.

4 Lack of innovation

Good startups don't start by imitating others, and existing companies do offer you some ideas, but they are not the best. So do not imitate other companies blindly, you should be in other directions to explore inspiration. In this regard, you should look for unresolved issues and imagine what kind of company can solve the problem. You also need to figure out what consumers are complaining about and what they are expecting.

5 Stubborn

On the road to entrepreneurship, you should stick to your ideas most of the time, but you should follow the laws of nature and avoid arbitrary assumptions. In fact, many startups eventually built the finished product is not the original idea. In the process of entrepreneurship, you should accept a better idea, or even give up the original idea. Of course, frequent change of direction is unlikely to succeed, and one good criterion is whether the new idea represents some kind of progress. If you can use what you've done before, that's the performance of progress. If you want to start over, you have to be careful.

6 Blind

Startups are most afraid of hiring the wrong people, because these poor employees do not meet the appropriate level. Once in the lurch, the company moves like an old bull pulls a broken car, while its rivals move as fast as a rocket. How can you choose a good employee? In fact, you can find industry experts to solve the problem, but please do not move is another thing.

7 Platform Selection

The choice of development platform is a problem that needs to be treated with caution. During the economic bubble, many startups were bogged down by choosing Windows platform servers, and Hotmail was still using FreeBSD servers for several years after being acquired by Microsoft. You have to choose the platform carefully, some platform seems to be very good on the surface, once the selection is tantamount to digging a grave. Javaapplets was once thought to be a new way of releasing apps, and the 100 startups that chose it were dead.

8 Release Slow

There is a classic saying that, the completion of software forever stay at about 85%. Startups are always looking for excuses to postpone the release of the product, but it also reflects some problems: the pace of work is too slow, do not understand the user's real needs, too much pursuit of perfection. In fact, to solve these problems is very simple, the product will be released as soon as possible: only through user feedback, you understand what you want to do.

9 Release prematurely

What are the minimum requirements for the release of a product? The core is that the product itself is available to consumers and can be a complete foundation for functional expansion. In fact, early product trials are generally very tolerant, they only ask for a useful product. If your product is released prematurely, it is not just your product, but also the reputation of the company, even if the user is gone.

10 Target User Ambiguous

If you try to solve a problem that you don't understand, it's tantamount to a noose around your neck. Many founders assume that their products will have users, but specifically who don't know their own. In fact, this is very dangerous, entrepreneurs should adhere to the "from the practice" principle, any subjective speculation is not allowed, they have to contact the user and observe their reaction. If your product cannot find a specific user, it is doomed to failure.

11 Too little money

Too little money means you can't buy enough time to make your company a success. If you get money from investors, that amount should be at least at the next level. In addition, you have to control what the next stage is and how much you spend. I suggest startups should lower these two indicators at the beginning: try to spend less, and set the initial goal to build a solid prototype.

12 Excessive spending

If you raise 5 million is not enough, then the reason is likely to be excessive spending. Hiring large numbers of workers is the classic way to burn money. I have three major recommendations for hiring: (a) exemption from exemption, (b) Substitution of shares for wages, and (C) recruitment of products or clients.

13 Funding too much

Raising too few funds is not a good thing, but too much funding can cause big problems. After more money, you want to change the office environment, recruit more people, but does not mean that the company will certainly be in the direction of development, because your employees do not like their investment, and even play a trick.

Another big investment is a time-consuming process, and it may take longer to raise a sizeable sum of money from VCs than to start a business. When your competitors are racing to develop the product, I believe you are unwilling to waste time on investors. So, if you meet the right deal, sign it.

14 Management Investors

As the founder of the company, you should deal with the relationship between the company and the investors. You can't ignore them because they are likely to offer insightful ideas, but you can't give them the company to run. The effort to manage investors depends on how much money you get from them. Even the most successful companies have been fooled by investors, such as 1985 years of jobs being kicked out of Apple by the board. Even Google has had an unpleasant experience with investors in the early days.

15 sacrificing users for potential benefits

Making the products consumers need is far more difficult than making money, so entrepreneurs should consider business model issues later. There are always those who think that it is irresponsible not to consider business models from the outset. I want to say is that the last successful companies are user-oriented companies, Google as an example, they are the first to do a good search engine, and then consider making money. It is a sin not to consider the product itself, if the business model is not responsible.

16 want to pick up the money, bend first

Of the first startups we funded, the vast majority of founders were writing programs that seemed unwilling to deal with the business of money. Only one founder spent half his time in high-level talks with the mobile phone company, and finally got a big order. If you want to start a company, you have to face the fact that you can't all sit in your office and write a program, you need someone to deal with business, and so are other industries.

17 Wolidou

For companies, the struggle between founders is common, and the withdrawal of partners with key technologies can be problematic. Most quarrels can be avoided if you are more cautious about choosing an entrepreneurial partner. Therefore, when choosing partners, do not be afraid of the same boat to alienate you and pull other people into the occupation, not because someone has technology and desperate to open a company. For startups, the most important factor is people, so there should not be too much accommodation in this respect.

18 didn't do the best I could.

Statistically, the founders of most failed startups have another well-paid job, and the founders of the successful start-ups have almost all the money they have. Startups fail because they can't do what their users need, and the reason they can't do it is because they haven't done their best. In other words, starting a business and doing something else, the easiest thing you can do is to not do your best.