Want to save your startup? Here are 11 tips from mistakes I made.

Jemal Swoboda
HackerNoon.com
7 min readJul 18, 2017

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How to endure running out of money, building the right team, managing investor relationships and taking do-or-die chances.

A few years ago, I took over Dabble, which was someone else’s startup and made it my own. With the help of a community of customers that loved the product; passionate, dedicated team members who stood beside me; and Chicago- and St. Louis-based investors who believed in me, I was really able to make the company into something special and we’re just getting started.

In our case, this is powering the listing and discovery of local “how-to” classes, experiences, and tours through our curated marketplace, Dabble.

In your case, you might be an ad-tech marketing platform, digital content aggregator, cloud security app, home cleaning service, or a food and meal delivery startup. You secured the early adopters, got into a top accelerator, launched with a well-timed TechCrunch article, oversubscribed your seed round, and were growing 20% every month and had so much traffic you broke the internet. Sound familiar?

The first few months are so much fun. It’s all so new. You shared the screenshot of getting that huge investor wire into your account with friends and family. You got to work building what you truly believe would be the next unicorn…

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Jemal Swoboda
HackerNoon.com

Recovering two-sided marketplace founder building a new community for the curious with @Polaroid. Love early product ideation, design, and team building.