the keepmoving.company

storytelling starts here

Why Startups Fail

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by

mikeswelsh
in

Having spent time in startup land from early to late even acquired, I can tell you that this book captures a solid amount of what not to do to your startup. My biggest takeaway is the failure to do research with users before making an MVP… does your idea even matter to users? Are you understanding what human need is or are you trying to ‘force your idea into existence’ and ‘they will come’.

They won’t and you are not your user, you are also not good at understanding real humans doing real things. There is a momentum problem that forces MVP at all costs including research. Will a user even care? I stole that from another book about choices.

Do the research, spend the money like it was your own.

False Starts is a concept and cases illustrate this. So many product ppl and founders w good ideas decide and commit way too early and miss the moment and lose. Do the research know the humans.

Publisher’s Summary

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail.

“Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.” (Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times best-selling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way)

Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it.

So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.

  • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.
  • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready”, founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.
  • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.
  • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast”, hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.
  • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.
  • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.

Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise – from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles – Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them.

A must-listen for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a road map charting the path to startup success.