If you haven’t read the previous part: The Start Of It All
How to start a failure startup — The First Mistake
Preface: While composing this saga from memory, I realized that there’s a lot in the details and that one post about this would be too long to read and could make certain facts and lessons insignificant. For the ease of reading, I’ve broken it up into the number of mistake I’ve made. Hope this helps!
Of course, I didn’t know it at the time that my venture was going to fail. Here is a summary of how I caused my own startup’s downfall — and subsequently, almost mine.
I had chanced upon an idea that I felt was brilliant. There I was, looking at my screen at a worse than childish website and I knew that it would work. There was the proof of concept proving it to me and I had almost no idea how to scale it up from that crap of code I’d written.
I knew it was going to be a mammoth task and I obviously couldn’t build everything on my own. I needed a team!
I looked around — next day in college — and tried to read my friends around me. I wanted to identify who was good at what. There’s that first BIG mistake.
Never hire your friends to work on your dream idea.
I learnt this the hard way. In my silly mind, I believed that if I could learn something from scratch and appreciate a subject that I’d previously hated, others could do it, too. Of course, they could. But, I didn’t stop to analyse if they wanted to. They said they did. Saying it is different from really wanting it. And I really wanted to build something amazing no matter what challenges lay ahead.
It all started fine and everyone was extremely enthusiastic that we were about to be a team and work on something that was going to revolutionize the internet. It soon became apparent that I was the only who wanted to do something about it. I selected a guy who was good at designing and creating a database — at least better than the rest of us — and found another who was good at putting things together. He couldn’t come up with how to apply code, but he was good from a product management perspective. That’s what I understand now; I didn’t know that then. As far as I was concerned, everyone was gonna code.
They all did. Except for the DB guy, everyone else’s code was worse than what I’d raked up as my proof of concept. Yet, I didn’t let my disappointment show and began to tutor them on what little I knew.
As weeks passed, the college soon figured out that we were up to something. I’d managed to build a proper prototype — even if it did look nothing modern — and decided to put it online. Some of us coughed up our pocket money, threw it together, and put the entire code base on a shared hosting and bought the domain: binox.me.
We designed hoodies, wore it to college, and that was my plan to create curiosity and draw attention. I’d designed bright graffiti of the name and we had it printed on our black hoodies along with our names at the back. People were so intrigued by it that any passerby would stare at us and ask us about it. Our college wasn’t very large and for whatever reason, no one tried to stand out in the crowd. But, we did.
People started signing up and our teachers were asking about it. We were the students of the last bench in the classroom and all the heads turned to us. Suddenly, we weren’t the ones trying to avoid questions from the teachers; we were the ones jumping up to answer everything — even if it was wrong.
Soon, a leading city publication published an article about us and our database went wild with sign ups! We clearly weren’t prepared for it and in less than 24 hours, our shared hosting plan went up in smoke as every resource limit was hit. We crawled back after an entire day of being offline and people were still pouring in … at a slower rate. In a little more than 24 hours, we’d crossed 500 users. For a platform that looked as crappy as it did back then, that was gold!
Everything looked good for a while. But, this was the start of something brewing … good and bad. It’s like what people say; when everything’s going good, people will be around you. When everything’s going bad, the ones who still stand by you are the ones who matter the most. And I was going to find out who that was.
Read the next part: How to start a failure startup — The Second Mistake
