5 Tough Lessons for When Your Startup Fails

When your world stops spinning, the lights fade, and the silence surrounds you, you can finally think. These past 13 weeks have been the beginning of my next chapter, the regaining of consciousness, & the recovery from 13 months founding a startup.

This third instalment of the Teknically series (1, 2, 3, 4) transitions from telling our story to sharing the key lessons we learned. Part 3 examines what we learned professionally. Part 4, digs into how founding a startup poured gasoline on my personal development.

Pulling Back the Curtain

We've been immersed in the "Startup Experience" like few our age.

At our final Laurier Launchpad update presentation we summarized the five biggest lessons we had learned founding Teknically. Check out the video below, or skim the highlights in text. I hope it helps you see behind the curtain that makes startups seem unapproachable for most and only successful for the few.

1. MVP: The Medium is More Important than the Message

When it came to bringing these initial customers on board to Webplio Dashboard, few were interested. They liked the value of learning more about their website in the medium of a paper report they could hold in their hands. When we changed medium to an online dashboard, none of these initial customers were interested despite it being the same value proposition.

We had assumed that customers would love the information so much they would be willing to log on and see it on their screen. We were dead wrong in this assumption.

2. Speed to MVP is the most important goal. Period.

We fell into this trap by thinking the Webplio Snapshot Report had validated our MVP requirement. We thought that since we had sold some of our MVP we were okay to move on with other important areas. Retrospectively, I think this was our biggest mistake.

Competitions ate up months of time early on that would have been better invested writing code and launching an MVP. If both of us had been coding, we would have reached this goal much faster.

The early development stage simply can't be outsourced outside of the founding team. Somebody needs to know all the code from the beginning. As new members join, they can be the lead in bringing them up to speed and having them understand the vision of the product. This simply isn't possible if coding in parts or whole is outsourced and contractors change every couple months.

Put simply, if you're a business major who thinks your idea is the next Google/Facebook/Snapchat/Uber and all you need is a cheap coder or technical founder to be successful, you are delusional.

Execution is worth more than ideas. Learn to code so you can make your product vision a reality. There are no substitutes, no short cuts, and with Code School, Codecademy, and millions of other free resources there are no excuses.

3. Do things that don't scale.

"Do things that don't scale" is a classic piece of PG advice. We know now how profound it is.

We should have focused on putting together a hack online MVP and launching as soon as possible. Instead of just entering data manually, we spent months perfecting the Google Analytics integration. Instead of launching with our first front end mockups, we went through numerous internal revisions until we were happy with it. Instead of launching with a basic signup page, we split test wait lists, copy, videos, and marketing techniques.

At the end of the day, we had a product too big it was riddled with bugs, too long separated from actual users that it now wasn't what they wanted, and a wait list of small businesses and organizations who never got to experience Webplio.

4. Be your customer, use your competitors.

The classic YC startup has founders who found a problem while doing their job, decided to solve it with software, reached out to peers and others who had the problem, and boom...scaled to a $100 million dollar company.

The key to that story though is that it was the founders' problem to begin with. They had tried every possible solution. They had built their own hacks. They had lost hours of productivity and hours of sleep to the stress of this problem. They knew the problem best, so they could now solve it.

From our customer interviews, we knew that no small business owner we had talked to had even heard of any competitors to Google Analytics let alone used them. Thus we concluded that we didn't need to try them either, we would just focus on Google Analytics.

I had assumed the only power of competing products was just that they had more accurate or real time data. It wasn't until I started using Optimizely and Mixpanel that I understood just how difficult it would be to build a transformative product on Google Analytics data. We would have no ability in Webplio to show small business owners the data they wanted on call to actions, sales funnels, internal clicks, heat maps, and split testing results.

5. No founder is a superhero

It's easy to get sucked into believing the hype... the energy... the disruption... that everybody but you is successful.

Meeting these founders and YC legends in person confirmed something I should have believed inherently: they are not superheros. Everyone no matter how successful is still human. It's easy to point to Elon Musk, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein and say that some people are simply made for greatness. It is true no one could by hard work alone become a Musk, Edison, or Einstein.

But for the vast majority of other successful people, most have a base level of intelligence, innovation, leadership ability but the key differentiator is hard work and luck. There's no formula for success, but it certainly isn't limited to superheros, gods, or existing startup founders.

In Closing

I'm still learning so I hope you don't take the above as fact. Take these thoughts, wrestle with them, and determine what you want to believe. Don't take anything you're told for granted. Make your own thoughts. Craft your own destiny.

My next post goes into how founding Teknically poured gasoline on my personal development, check it out here!