The 6+1 biggest startup problems with time
In previous posts on this blog we mostly wrote about our initiation, some of the website features and our workflow. But there is one topic that highly contributed in the birth of tellyouridea.com.
As you may already know, the world of startups with all its challenges and ups and downs are not unfamiliar to us.
So let us summarize our experiences regarding this topic. This is a highly recommended read for all of you who is thinking about launching an own firm.
Before we jump in the middle of it, let’s admit that writing about startups and startup problems could fill a book. Therefore, instead of writing just 1–2 paragraphs about each hardship that can come along with establishing a startup company, we’ll make a series of this, talking about specific problems one by one a little more detailed.
Let’s suppose that you have a great product idea, you have already thought over your whole business model and have serious plans on starting your own firm.
Let’s start with one of the most obvious problems. You may think that’s money. But actually, an even more important factor here might be time. Just an example: you have endless free time but no money, and you’d like to develop a mobile app. You can take as much time as you’d like to polish your app to perfection. (Well, this is the case that you probably won’t face). If you know how to do it, it doesn’t matter if you lack in financial resources, as you have all time of the world, so you can launch your product, whenever it is ready.
But first of all: a late market launch can easily mean the doom of your product, doesn’t matter how genius it is. Secondly, after a while it’s quite impossible to maintain a serious service just on your own, and the third part is that you can encounter difficulties that you don’t have the expertise to deal with, definitely not in a short notice. Already some downsides, right?
If you start your own firm, time will be always at least as critical as money.
That’s why, before even thinking about how to fund your startup, you’d better think about the problem of time. But let’s just see the most time consuming things one-by-one that you’ll encounter while starting up your company.
- First and foremost, you’ll spend an enormous amount of time with research. You have to analyze all aspects of your idea, define your market and analyze your competition. Regarding this part, you’ll have to define your exact goals and all details of the solution you’re about to provide for the problem.
- If you’re done with that (if you’re lucky you only hesitated a few months until this stage), your next step will be fundraising. As a huge part of the whole startup topic, we’ll talk about the money factor in a future blogpost, but let’s just say, that can be extremely time consuming as well — unless you’re in the lucky situation that you already have enough funds to start your business, but this is not the average case.
- Now comes more likely the longest phase of your starting period, the actual development of your product to prepare it for market launch. If you’re tired of it or actually can’t do it by your own, you’ll have to hire professionals (see next point), or trust a freelancer or agency/outside firm to help bringing your concept to life.
- Let’s presume you successfully raised enough funds for your dream project. Now you have to face that as a one man army it’s unlikely to maintain a whole firm and keep it operating. Now you’ve arrived to the phase when you have to get the right people around you. First you’ll look for professionals, ask around in your circles and announce some job ads. Than about a hundred times more applications will be received, so many that you can’t just hire, but actually will have a hard time to process all the CVs in your inbox. After filtering out the best CVs received, now you have to call them one by one, for a video or personal interview, and then the best candidates you’ll probably meet a second time as well before making the final decision. It’s really important to find the right people for a young firm. Although it doesn’t matter if it’s too tiring or takes so much time, you just simply can’t skip or rush through this step.
- You have the team assembled and your product to be finalized. This is the stage where we see stuff get stuck. At about 85–90 % of a product’s completion, usually the whole story slows down unexpectedly. What can be the reasons of this? The final phase of development and testing might highlight some yet unseen problems. For sure you’d like to be certain that a you’ll burst out with a well prepared product. You’re just about to see your dream project come true, which you struggled maybe years to happen, spent your livelihood and sacrificed your fix job. So you want it to be perfect. But be aware, if you keep polishing your stuff forever, maybe you’ll step to the market too late, and the whole marketing strategy or maybe your whole product itself will lose a lot from actuality.
- You’re one pioneer and you overcame all these hardship, finally you have an operating firm and all seems to be fine. Then, all out of a sudden, a key member of your team quits. Or some technical issue strikes in. Or your customer service alarms you that there are far more improvements demanded with your product than you ever thought. These are just some of the most common problems that may crash in soon after your market launch. So you have to hire new team members, make urgent updates with your product, and the business development you originally planned will be postponed to an unknown future.
+1. If you’re smart and/or lucky enough to avoid the problems described above, there still might be an unexpected change in the market or a major alteration in the field of your business. Remember how the impact of Facebook affected Myspace, for instance? In a better scenario you just have to wait out a little bit until your firm will shine again, and hopefully you don’t have to shot gates for good.
Of course, there are not only problems you’ll see if you decide to start your own firm. Seeing your dream concept come true could worth the entire struggle, no doubt. We consider this article as a short guide, and draw your attention to possible dangers lurking for you.
If you’re an entrepreneur type, or you have an entrepreneur type of partner, and you’re prepared enough for the possible obstacles, head on! But if you’re unsure you want or can handle all dangers in this business, you better off finding another way to profit from your idea. There are some other ways of making money from your concept, and it’s much better to sell your idea than just let it sink into oblivion.
If you’d like to read more about this topic, we recommend these articles:
http://www.fastcompany.com/3051201/hit-the-ground-running/how-timing-can-make-or-break-a-startup
