A Thousand Ways to Fail at Startups
We thought we were on the verge of something big. And although we might very well have been on that verge, however the concerned verge didn’t seem to share our notion of giving in to something wonderful beyond.
So another startup bites the dust.
For the uninitiated, YANA offered affordable 1–1 sincere conversations with trained Listening Buddies to manage one’s mental wellbeing better.
Hundreds of people used the service. Hundreds volunteered to be Listening Buddies. Many helped us along generously with their time and network without asking for anything in return. We ourselves felt the power of the purpose impacting us positively, even though we tried our best to treat it as a business.
It was supposedly a new category, in a space that is in vogue, solving a problem that the founders personally dealt with. It was going to be beautiful!
Alas, the problem doesn’t seem to exist at the scale that we thought it did, not yet.
This is what we understand:
False signals from the market
There’s a near-universal, latent human need to “help others” through “their” issues . This is kind of an echo-chamber which told us that the need is widespread. All our market research and real experiments confirmed this hypothesis and we allowed ourselves to be drowned in this echo-chamber. Reality is that the segment “seeking help” is much smaller, at least for now.
Picked up by the impressionable
Both the co-founders were not happy with their state of being back when they started-up. In itself, it’s not a bad place to be at, especially if one’s looking to change the direction of one’s life/ career. However, we didn’t watch out for our own subconscious, affirmative bias to start something up.
Who’re good at starting-up
Together, the two co-founders have done this stuff collectively 5 times (present case included) and have gotten good at this over time. Our first MVP was well received and subsequent improvements progressively brought down the CAC. That early success unfortunately wasn’t indicative of the market size potential (that is, the current market size; we still believe that in a few years time, this space will be big; see next point)
But NOT YET
We thought that proactive mental wellness was at a similar cusp of taking off as physical well-being was, say, 30–35 years ago. Now we think that this statement will reside in that indeterminate state of being simultaneously both true and false for a few years (or millions of dollars) more.
1-year of deep, immersive learning! Our minds have expanded and unfortunately will not go back to their original dimensions. It will make for a general state of dissatisfaction mainly because our experience is pretty useful if we continue in the startup domain (we might) but is utterly useless if we go back to corporate careers (we know some of you will disagree but we’ve our reasons to say so).
This got us thinking as to how we can rescue some of this learning from the void it’ll invariably go into if we didn’t do anything about it.
There’s tons of literature out there on how to be successful at startups (or anything in general), and it is mostly written by people who’ve been there, done that.
They tell you what works. Then they tell you everything can work. And then they tell you anyone can make it work.
This prevalent view in the public domain is beseeched with survivorship bias and, while it makes for an inspirational reading, it is patently unrepresentative of the stats. Why, 90% of startups fail.
Reality is that what seems to work works in a specific contextual set comprising the precise circumstances, at a precise period in time, with a precise set of hands at the helm and a precise pinch of chance.
This magic is not replicable. Even big tech like google, facebook, etc. acquire more than build internally, despite no dearth of investment or resources. A hypothetical question to ask is if a successful entrepreneur were to travel back in time, would s/he be able to recreate the same magic? I’d say that the odds would still be stacked against you. And what if you run into your past self and mess up the flow of reality?
So we’ve decided to start a small blog that will be all about what didn’t work. Even the attempted humour in this blog will sometimes not work.
The blog’s purpose, apart from keeping its authors somewhat busy (if not useful), is to get you to start-up (or not) with your eyes open. We welcome all entrepreneurs, present or former, real or imaginary, to contribute. Just write to vikas.c.rathi@gmail.com.
PS: The tentative nature of this article, as indicated by abundant sprinkling of words like “seem”, “think”, “as we understand”, etc., is deliberate. As a friend remarked to us: truisms are dangerous (which itself is a truism). So it should really be: truisms can be dangerous.
