Megatron is the leader of the decepticons and part of the Transformers franchise. Their the evil lot or if you want to make it more relatable to reality, North London man. Like all robotic characters, their robots in disguise much like the tech industry. For the past few years, we’ve witnessed huge amounts of capital being invested in startups that result in weak outcomes, so the question is why is this happening?
Everybody has a dream, I dream of living in the canary islands sipping on cold beverage while lying in a hammock pretending to read a book that I couldn’t give a toss about, and why would I, I’m rich! Like I was saying before I digressed, many people that run start-ups have dreams of making it a worldwide success however I wonder if most ask themselves if their offering a service that consumers need and that will accumulate substantial profit? I belive this os one of the reasons why Soundcloud is failed, which I wrote about last year, have a read here! For anybody that pays close attention to the music streaming market like myself, you’ve probably heard of a company called Rdio. They were a music streaming company that competed with Spotify before Apple came into the mix. Rdio were initially a paid streaming market which were struggling to gain traction seeing as they were competing with Spotify who had a freemium option. According to Business insider, they were able to raise $125.7 million! Sadly in late 2015 they filed for bankruptcy and their intellectual property was purchased by Pandora for around $75 million. Despite being able to raise so much capital, Rdio still failed, they may have been serving a consumer need but they failed in making a profit in such a demanding and vibrant market.
There’s too much of the same shit providing the same service! A majority of them will fall off and only those who have bucket loads of money and excellent marketing will survive. Corporations that dominate the market aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. Uber (The cash guzzler but that’s an article for another time), Spotify, Google, Microsoft, etc. They all dominate their market and so if there isn’t a space to maneuver, its best to cut your losses and consider other ventures. I’m not trying to say f**k your dreams (I am) but it’s better to save time then to waste money AND time! But then again I could be wrong, look at Blockbuster and Netflix.
It’s so easy to get distracted when building a business. Excitement can get the best of people that they can start working on multiple projects to grow the business but they ignore the core that is the foundation of the business, it’s like Spotify saying they now want to focus on video content instead of refining what gained them attention, streaming music! This was one of the reasons why MySpace failed! In case you don’t know myself and two of my friends run a podcast called THEPOINT and a few months ago we spoke to Andrew Davis who was one of the original producers for BBC 1xtra and was prominent figure in establishing Myspace in UK. He spoke on this specifically about the demise of MYSPACE, it’s lengthy but it was a very interesting and insightful two-part episode
There are so many other reason as to why Startups fail, greed is one of them and the others that I have also mentioned so if you’re reading this and you have an ‘amazing’ idea, consider what I’ve mentioned. Again I’m not saying f**k your dreams, I’m just emphasising caution and careful decision making, startups can either make you or flipping break you! While you’re here, have a read of the tweets that sparked this article, shout out to Zai!
