For both technical and non technical founders: what is one mistake that you made early on in the process of creating your business that you wish you could roll back / would not do again in your next venture?
To make sure this post meets the 250 character requirement, ill tell you mine: we wrote too much code too early on. If i could do it again id be waayy more hands on, doing as much manually as possible.
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To not listen the audience! It takes times and all we want to build fastly
Started coding before selling
I was coding all day long before I even had my first customer, rookie mistake
Never waste money
What’s waste and what’s hindsight 20/20
Trying to decide equity instead of officially adding people to the team equally.
Thinking that what works for other companies can works for you. You have to think HARD about your company goals and what you want to achieve, taking “inspiration” from others is just a way to delay.
Early code obsession
Trusting an egotistical developer to be a cofounder.
Kept blackmailing me every few months for more equity. Didn’t put any money in, and didn’t want to build a team. Then, didn’t work on the product for 6 months.
Luckily, I had a founders agreement in place, and he was within the 1 year cliff.
Spent 8 more months with 2 experienced devs trying to refactor his crappy, antiquated code. Out of 250 files, 249 had his name in them - crazy.
Get a Founder agreement in place!
Team, expectations, vetting the idea, equity, I could actually go on for hours. 4 years later I’m still paying for it
I got stuck in a “you should” sales mode instead of “what problem do you have and can I solve it”. It doesn’t matter how I got into this bad habit. It’s far better to listen and be responsive.
- Too obsessed with tech and products
- Not marketing from day one
Fundraising on a vision turns out to be hard. Transforming a vision into a product people with buy is very challenging.
Not choosing A grade co-founders who I could rely on. Cost me 2 startups over 7 years to learn that lesson. 3rd time around I found amazing partners who are mature, responsible and can be trusted on their own.
Never pre-scale.
two things: 1- too much coding and features. 2- rushing to get a co-founder which ended up very bad.
Solution in search of a problem. Also, bad sales strategy. Users didn’t even wanna talk about their problems. I sometimes wonder if it’s the user segment which is the issue.