Failure in Startup

In a really long time,I learn things from outside such as books,friends’ experience,other company’s success/failure case and so on.The similarity is they are the things already happened.Using this way in daily working is totally all right because 80% of our work is just solve the normal problem others meet too,so it’s kind of a shortcut to me in my working and make me consider it’s easy to solve any problem if I can find a way through outside.

But when I startup a company,the fact is the startup is not about finding the thing,it’s about creating the thing. So there’s no way you can learn to create something new,the right thing you should do is to try&fail continuously until you success,the best strategy you should take is to assume clear,test light,move fast,and learn the failure inside.It’s truly different thinking and it’s really interesting and inspiring even the process is deeply pain.So I wanna to note the failure I meet&learn in startup to help myself re-thinking them.

The recent lesson I learn from startup is “ Users’ value First,VC’s value Last.” Although many years my logic in baixing is user first, when we met the live or dead problem I forget all the things and make the wrong decision.The outside vc market need growing-fast,so we choose to grow,we hire more sales,grow fast,allowance more money,we are confident to raise another huge money and finally we faced the capital’s winter suddenly.

Then Vc will have hundreds reason to refuse you.The more horrible things is they will tell you if you can do A or B they will consider you .And as the only thing we think is to get new money to survive,then I make second wrong decision,follow Vc’s problem and fix their “worry”.This is the most horrible thing that you should never ever do.Actually Vc don’t know how to do the things more clear than you in your industry and in your company,their advice is only the advice,you must make decision on your own thinking in the key timing.Unfortunately we didn’t make it,we put our last resource to fix Vc’s “worry”,and we hurt user’s profit to survive.

After 3 months tried,we found it was a fake need, then we had to adjust our strategy and although we found a new way in limit time,our price’s adjust had already hurt our users a lot ,half our users left which hit our team’s confidence. Through these things I learn huge not only about the company but also about my life.

Half of failure because of lacking strategy,others because of giving up.Maybe I’m right,maybe I’m wrong,but it doesn’t matter.Because I start to learn from the inside .It’s totally different in my mind and it’s really a good start to make me a better one to create the things,and learning.

I call this life.