Common Startup Struggles You Need To Avoid

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4 min readFeb 23, 2019

If you’re trying to bootstrap a startup to profitability, be aware that it’s very easy to get sucked into financial black holes by making what appear to be common sense business decisions. After all, who could argue with feature-rich products or a business that keeps its foot pressed down on the accelerator at all times? But as we’ll see below, those are precisely the types of approaches that are responsible for the most commons startup struggles you need to avoid.

Feature creep

On the product management side of your startup, you need to make sure that you are not giving into a deadly form of thinking known as “feature creep.” That’s when you decide to keep adding feature after feature to a product, even after the marginal utility of each new feature is getting perilously close to zero. Put another way, customers might be utterly delighted if your product has Feature A and Feature B. Adding Features C, D and E adds nothing to the experience. And, even worse, each new feature you add will only bog down your product development team, lead to cost over-runs, and generally make everyone’s life miserable.

There’s a big reason why the smartest startups today are embracing the MVP — the Minimum Viable Product. In contrast to the product bogged down by feature creep, the MVP is shipped out the door as soon as a minimum number of features are ready. It ensures that the test, learn, iterate cycle is as short as possible. As soon as a product is ready, your customers are testing it, you are learning, and then adding in changes to make the product even better.

High cash burn rates

Another common startup struggle involves burning through too much cash, too fast. There may be a number of reasons why this is happening. The most distressing reason, of course, is if your company is still in the (*polite cough*) pre-revenue stage. In other words, your business is blowing through obscene amounts of cash because you haven’t yet figured out how to make customers pay for your product. Meanwhile, you’re leasing expensive real estate, hosting extravagant launch parties, and giving away far too many perks to your young millennial employees.

Growth for the sake of growth

“Growth” is perhaps one of the most abused words in the startup lexicon. That’s because most startups never use the word growth by itself — it’s usually included with a word like “hyper, “triple-digit,” “super-fast,” or (best of all) “exponential.” On the surface, this would seem to make perfect sense — shouldn’t every startup try to hit it out of the park and achieve “exponential growth”? The only problem with this concept is that all growth needs to be scalable. Not all businesses can grow at triple-digit growth rates for extended periods. This is just Economics 101. (If in doubt, just watch the talking heads on CNBC for a few minutes — there will undoubtedly be a smart Wall Street girl or guy talking about all the perils of an overheating, inflating economy)

If you want your startup company to reach its full potential, then be aware of these everyday startup struggles. Stay focused, aim for scalable growth, and try to eliminate as much risk as possible. If you can do that, you’ll be well on your way to startup success.

Hey! I’m Tomer, an entrepreneur, and maker. You might know me from Mevee, Crane, and Shots, and now Slides among other products I’ve launched! This article is a part of a more extensive series I’m writing mostly based on my experiences and is mainly made of me and my team’s opinions.

I hope this helps you to avoid making the same mistakes I did, and remember to keep shipping!

This article is part of a series to help you with your startup launch and capital raise :

Common Startup Struggles You Need To Avoid

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Written by Tomer Dicturel