How Tough Conversations Reduce your Startup’s Chance of Failure.
Many posts have been written about reasons startups fail. Most of them focus on things such as not achieving product-market fit or having the wrong business model. And these are definitely important reasons that can kill your startup. But another reason is often overlooked: having the right team, and getting the team on the same page.
Research suggests that from 23% up to 65% of reasons that startups fail is due to ‘people problems’. Any way you look at it that is a big chunk, and it covers, among many other things, co-founders leaving, cofounder conflicts, experience deficiencies, character issues, flying solo, and hiring debacles. From personal experience I think the actual number may be even higher: team issues kill startups early on, even before they get the chance of failing because of market or product reasons, even before they had the chance to make their mark.
Understand the problem
Knowing this, as a founder it makes sense to want to get a grip on this problem to avoid becoming a victim. And that means, getting to know the problem. Where does it come from? How does it arise? What makes it blow up?
To illustrate, let’s look at a scenario.
A team of three founders have been working for over a year to build their first project…
