Startups and very early pitfalls
Working with the ever-colourful startup scene, since the mid 2000s, in almost every rodeo that I’ve been involved with, either as a Software Engineer or a Co-Founder, we stalled way too much in many important areas and shot ourselves multiple times in the foot. Looking back, some of the mistakes we did were obvious, for others, I take full responsibility! I mean, how else would you get a good story if everything works out straight away? Nowadays, I’m working with startups in exactly the opposite side of the fence, acting as a technical and business advisor on how to best leverage AWS and I can’t help but notice some of the same mistakes I did.
When you are starting up, there’s this feeling of excitement that keeps you up at night and pushes you out of bed early in the morning. You feel empowered, nothing can derail you and you can’t wait to open your laptop and work on your idea and solve the worlds’ biggest problems (at least big enough in your mind).
In reality, you are surrounded by all kinds of dangers that can easily put you off track, so why not decrease the chances of entrapping yourself in a loop, that seems like good decision-making and progress on the surface!
Not sharing the idea because someone might steal it
Your idea worths zero and nobody is going to stop their everyday jobs or lives all of a sudden, just for your “special” idea. Chances are you are missing out on valuable feedback and indirect introductions. If you are in the midst of raising your first dollars, avoid asking for NDAs from Angel Investors and VCs. Don’t slow yourself down, instead, embrace the fact that someone is interested in throwing money your way, get quickly to the point and try to instil excitement to the other side of the table or get very specific action items that will get you closer to a LOI. Else, bail!
Raising capital to build the MVP
First, prepare to not raise capital (especially in the current state of the market), unless your name is Elon Musk or you sold a couple of companies already or you are simply out for feedback. In the unlikely event that you manage to raise MVP dollars, prepare to spend money for something that is going to end up in the trash bin and in spectacular fashion. No smart investor will give you money to learn ABC, and you want to have smart investors onboard. Build the MVP yourself or partner with someone who can.
Needing 1 MSc, 1 PhD and 150 certificates to start
Unless you are seeking an academic career, not even a Bachelors degree is required. I’m not saying that its not important to have expertise on a certain domain, I’m underlying mostly the necessity to have a proven record of expertise for the whole thing. Instead, focus on what you do best, protect but share your vision and you can always hire or offer a stake to people with complementary skills.
Creating a solution in search of a problem
Save yourself the time and try to not write a single line of code until you are sure that there is a problem to solve and a potential market. Do you research! Then strategize around what a Minimum Viable Product is in terms of weeks, not months. If it takes you months to build a first version of your product, you are overthinking it. Let your first users drive the decision-making on new features, changes and product enhancements.
Being defensive with user-feedback or when pitching
This is true regardless of startups. Being defensive prevents your from “connecting” with your counterpart. It signals that you are not comfortable in general, you possibly get easily offended and you are hard to change, when a change is really needed. It’s a difficult skill to master, but of the utmost importance.
Using buzzwords and not getting straight to the point
More often than not, browsing through pitch decks and homepages of different startups, I find it hard to understand what a startup is actually doing. Generative AIs and Deep-Neural networks and a multitude of tech details that are irrelevant. These are tools, don’t focus on the tools, focus on the value. “We help X do Y, Z times faster”, as simple as that.
Implementing a product for everyone
Think big but start Niche! Solve a problem for a small enough market, such that, you do not waste huge amounts of money into the marketing abyss, you know where your early adopters are or you can easily track them down. Try and build on top of that, listen to your users carefully by setting up feedback mechanisms and have a strategy in place to connect the dots and expand to a bigger market later.
Postponing release for the perfect implementation
You’ve just signed up for a lot of pain and patience is not your friend here. Make sure to start with something that in a year’s time, you will look back at it and feel ashamed. That’s how rough it should be, and in fact, when you re-visit, you are going to feel proud and see a definite progress, and as a result, it will fuel you to keep going. Outline attainable goals, with small iterations, driven by feedback and keep building.
Being on Stealth mode for too long
I already wrote about the implications of this one and I particularly don’t like being in Stealth Mode, working in the shadows for months and years, I’d rather see users interacting with something scrappy. Unless you have a b2b startup, with well-placed contracts and you are already selling to beta-customers and have a well-defined cadence of feedback and action items, then I see no other reason for being a Stealth-mode startup for even half a year. Get your startup service/product out asap and fail fast or improve even faster.
Hiring an employee takes 3 months
Remember a startup has to be nimble and quick at all aspects, especially early on and especially on hiring. If it takes you 3 months to hire an employee, it means that you need to pause and re-think the process. Be fast on that aspect, don’t waste time with weeks of screening and interviews, define a clear threshold for hiring competencies and culture and do so without comparing candidates. If someone can do the job, hire them regardless of the candidate pipeline and leave your what-if thoughts aside.
Leasing datacenters, building servers and bare metals
I wouldn’t want to tie myself with even a single Cisco Switch for that matter. Been there, done that back in 2004 where Cloud was not a thing and I went through the pain of purchasing, setting up and maintaining miles of Ethernet cable, 100 terminals, with all the bells and whistles of Racks and Switches and RAID Controllers and any other little sloth available in the hardware and networking jungle. It was exciting for my early 20s, bragging about bits and bytes, but not anymore. Not if you want to be a tech-savvy entrepreneur or a wise-guy CTO that sees around corners and wants to have a head-start. You leave this for the cloud, using managed services as much as possible. Always ask yourself; how to solve problems and add value, as fast and as close to my end-users as possible.
Striving to be cloud-agnostic and driving decisions based on that
You better think hard about the pros and cons before introducing any “cloud-agnostic” endpoint into your architecture. Chances are that you won’t go as “cloud-agnostic” as you’d imagine. On top, you don’t have the negotiation power being a startup, and while trying to be cloud-agnostic, you’ll blissfully shoot yourself in the foot with management overhead, multiple learning curves and you’ll leave out bundled discount opportunities by running workloads here and there.
Starting with microservices
Users do not give 2 flying cats for that. Many startups I know in the Bay Area are using spreadsheets to keep track of records and customer transactions. Not suggesting to go berserk on spreadsheets, but implementing μ-services or using Kubernetes with 5 developers at early stages, will definitely make a difference, for the worse! It will certainly not change the fact that your competitors are going to get the numbers and the feedback they need to move onto the next product iteration, while you’ll be busy upgrading your cluster every quarter, and praying that nothing goes wrong in the meantime! Remember, time-to-market is way more important than flexing, more so at early stage startups.
Keep your eyes on the price and happy start-upping!
