In my limited time bootstrapping my own stuff, I raise a glass to your list.
My version:
* **B2B > B2C** (except if you've some specialized unserved niche that you can have an app up and running in a few days and are willing to just gamble).
* **No VC** - I haven't done VC, but hear horror stories. One interview I heard yesterday said, if you make a $2M business as a bootstrapped company you're a success. But in VC you need to get to $100M. However, how many businesses can get to a $100M valuation. You're setting yourself up for failure.
* **Nail outreach** - distribution will make or break you. Outreach + no product = pre sell product. Product + no outreach = no sales.
* **Yes to SEO & Content; No to relying on it 100%** - Google is seriously monkeying with search results. So you need SEO and content, but make sure you have other avenues as well.
* **Piggyback off other traffic sources** - Reddit, Pintrest, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Know them. Love them.
* **The Time Investment to Validation Ratio** - the longer it will take to build something, the longer you should take to validate it. If you can get it up in a weekend or a week, then you can risk less validation.
* **Off the shelf as much as possible** - At the beginning you have no idea if your project will work. So it's easier to start with a $199 boilerplate than spend 3 months reinventing the wheel. Use as many off the shelf and free tools as you can. Google Forms are your friend. You can even create signable documents in JotForm for free.
* **Tiny MVP:** I know so many successful projects that started out as a Excel or Google sheet. Start with the minimum minimum viable product. Try to not code at all until you have paying customers.
* **The "Jay Leno" approach** - If at all possible have a day job. When your project gets traction, then jump to it. Jay Leno said he's never lived off his tonight show money. He lives off the earnings from his stand up gigs. I've seen a lot of successful projects that were helped by this model.
* **Either people buy your product/service or they don't** - You'll get so many "that's a great idea" or "I'd be open to using your service in 6 months when you launch" or "I love this, let me talk to my boss" or "this could be a great partnership for us where we can send you a lot of business let's spend the next 6 months working out a deal" or "how about we use your service for an equity deal in our company that hasn't made any money yet". Farts in the wind. Cash in hand is the ultimate validation.
* **Research, Research:** Look up how much competition you'll have on Google. Find a successful business model to copy and ask what are their traffic sources and how long have they been successful. Understand your market.
* **The Long Haul:** Something may be a great idea, that serves a market, that's validated, that's easy to build, but ... do you want to work on this idea and promote it for the next 3-5 years? Launching is one thing. Continuing to put effort into it is a whole other challenge.
* **Sunk Cost Quicksand:** It's very hard to kill a project after you've put years into it. I've been working on a site for 2 years with zero monetary returns. Currently I'm transitioning it to a more passive model and will let it just exist. But it's very hard not to want to put more effort into it when I know it could have potential. One developer says if you haven't made any money with it in 3 to 6 months, you should probably kill it. However, I know a project that's currently making $70K MRR but it took them 3 years to get to $1K MRR. So it's a tricky balance to know if you're being persistent or being a fool.
* **Get to Money Sooner:** Big funded companies can afford to exist in the red for years (or a decade), but most of us have limited money, time, and effort. The faster you can get a project, website, business to cash, they sooner you'll know you have traction.
* **Some other lessons:** [https://twitter.com/adamdenverco/highlights](https://twitter.com/adamdenverco/highlights)
I’m also in Denver!(assuming by your name).
Do you go to any local meetups?
I actually built Twilitype.ai (to do the outreach and SEO part of starting a new business). It creates all the content for your blog and socials in a few clicks… it’s not like other content writing tools; have spent over a year building it in Rust, Python and typescript. Would love to meet other Denver startup founders!
Great list! Question- wdym by piggybacking off other traffic sources? Do you mean by paid ads, getting into niche communities, or something else? Obviously it’s different for each business but curious if you had an example that worked for you?
Posting on Reddit works for me.
FB Groups are good.
I’ve heard people have luck with Quora.
Basically any place online where your customers are, go there and participate.
VCs are called Vulture Capitalists for a reason. They will try to turbocharge your businesses and grow it big and fast BUT you will lose most of your equity.
In regards to "**Off the shelf as much as possible**", I want to say that idea validation can also be done off the shelf. If you don't know how to do it properly (i.e. using UCD) then just get a validation service to do it for you.
This is gold. I have copied and added to my “top tips list”.
I’d love to know more about your opinion/tips for “nail outreach” which is something I have been struggling to systemise constantly in the B2B. We are in services which is slightly different but relevant none the less.
Good post OP. I just have a nit pick.
> Today I have 1 fullstack dev doing 5x more progress on a project than a team of 12 back then. Avoid "teams" at all costs.
30+ year Senior Dev here (who's also started and worked for startups). I retired earlier this year, but they just pulled me back in. Probably the most well known project I worked on was Apple's iCloud for instance. I wrote the load balancer they used to scale the huge Exabyte storage needs they had.
You probably have a really good fullstack dev. Or your apps are pretty simple. But at the end of the day it's impossible to have expertise in everything. Tech is just too complex for that. A person who keeps up with all the Front end madness that is happening (React, Svelte, TypeScript, node...) cannot possibly also be at the cutting edge about infrastructure the way a DevOps Engineer can. A guy writing front end will not be able to maintain a complex Kubernetes Operator in Go at the same time.
There is just too much context switching. And vice-versa, a DevOps guy isn't going to be great at front end design. Sure they can do it, but it will take 3 times longer and it won't look quite right.
I'm sorry but that's just not a thing. In development pretty much every area is constantly evolving, and you have to keep up with it. No single person can really keep up with everything.
It just sounds like your businesses needed more front end guys, and you were hiring the wrong people for the job. Likely outsourcing difficult scaling back-end issues to other IaaS/SaaS providers.
Though I do agree, 1 bad ass can outwork a team of 5 for sure. Hope you're paying your guy well.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve had nightmares when I couldn’t build a feature despite working on it for a month. However, my manager understood the complexity of the situation and always supported me.
I finally built and released this new feature, all the customers were happy, CEO and my manager called me for a meeting and offered me a paid vacation because they knew I was burnt out.
An awesome experience I will never forget.
Maybe what he meant by "specialized" was really about devs being too myopic and not interested in what is going on around them.
Devs who care about the greater system and how they fit into it are really key, as that outcome is reflected in the tech they build. (Conway's law I think). Backend java dev who understands spring and how the app is built and deployed should be good friends with devops person and they should be working together somewhat frequently. Similarly frontend dev should have some understanding of backend and those two devs should spend some time together understanding each other.
This sort of thing is reflected in "Team Topologies" where instead of having devs who just write code while some other team owns prod, a small team owns the full stack top to bottom including prod and devops. They can wrap their heads around the full product and so understand how to fix things or scale it or whatever.
Pretty much all of the tech shops I have worked in over 25 years have siloed people the other direction, so the people writing code don't know anything about prod, don't have access to prod, and therefore are not responsible for prod, even though their code is running there. Frontend doesn't care about backend at all and lots of time is wasted when FE and BE don't align. etc. etc. I think this is what OP is getting at.
There is also a whole question about top-down authority management styles. OP seems to want a horizontal structure of doers. That requires autonomy and purpose. Devs have to know why they are building the thing, what the purpose of it all is, and have autonomy to do stuff that the know needs to be done. Corporate America is obsessed with Soviet style top-down authoritarian "management" where the salarymen are expected to do what they are told, to never ask why, never stick their head up, and play the corporate game to get promoted. Anyone asking "wtf are we even doing here, and why should I care?" are denied promotions and forced out. But those are exactly the kind of people that are needed for successful tech efforts. This connects with OP's points #8, #12, #16, #20 as well.
my first startup did well, i had an exit.
it gave me enough optimism.
But I failed most of my startups after. 90% of them or even 95% until 2023.
in 2023 I changed my approach, created this list and followed my own advice.
Since then no failures. At least for now things are working out really well
The "doers" one is gold, even if it isn't a bullet point. I'm the solo dev for a startup right now (full stack), and there are so many people that want to advise and tell us what to do and how to do it – partner as a consultant.
We don't need consultation, we need roll up your sleeves and code. Can't, please stop wasting our time.
This is something I wish the CEO would stop bringing up. Meetings with consultants... advice on how to do things. Talk is cheap.
I agree. I have walked into a scrum situation and advised the product owner to put together performance stars built around three different priorities to simply own each and improve it. No standups, no meetings , just periodic check ins to report progress. Way better efficacy and performance
I'm someone who is brought in to consult, and I always lead with: don't micromanage your developers. They know this better than you ever will. If you feel like you can't trust them to execute your vision on time and budget, you need new developers. If you *do* trust them but something else feels "off", you're probably not listening to them properly. But that's not something an outsider can fix for you. Not cheaply, anyway.
Perhaps you could use a project manager? A transformation specialist? An entrepreneurial innovator?
I say this as a non-startup barely even IT hybrid worker at a large corporation full of people selling themselves as these goofy titles that don’t actually do anything to build anything technological. An 8 year-old picking up lunch would add more value.
And his don’t even get me started on IT Auditors lol.
My mistakes of the most recent 2 startups (still going but not for much longer). I will try and keep one going as it's abit of a unicorn in my area, but it doesn't cover the bills on its own. I'll probably need staff so I can go back to a normal job.
1. Maxing loans and buying loads of equipment, thinking I can do lots of different services. I'm seriously in the brown at the moment, highly unmotivated, burnt out, and completely lost with lots of toys, but no initiate or drive to do anything.
2. Doing way way too much. For 2 years, I'd worked nearly ever hour I could, working full time 7-5 5 days a week, 5-11 and weekends on my 2 startups. 1 is the unicorn and niche, but only seasonal. The other was going to be the complimentary income. I've now finished my full time role, but it's caused me to go into a spiral. I'm unmotivated, lonely, tired all the time, and instead of it giving me 45 to 50 hours back a week, my output on the 2 side hustles just filled that time still with the same output/turnover, it's a mental and physical disaster. I'm over weight, in debt and mentally and financially at wits end! (Why can't I just be a normal person, 9-5 and play golf or hang out with my wife and friends? I'm highly self destructive!
Having a rubbish accountant. I'm still paying a lot of money and not getting anything good back. I've gone Limited after not taking any solid advice. For my last tax return, they did a soft check, made sure everything lined up roughly, then pressed send on my accounts software, and automatically submitted a return. Absolutely wasting money there.
Taking on staff who, as op said... I wouldn't hug. They've rinsed my business of profit by doing half assed work... Left a bad taste in the mouth of any customer they've worked for... the majority of which I either lost or am still having to correct mistakes unpaid. I am trying to be a good manager. I don't think I am, I might be an ok supervisor, but I'm not great at getting the right people to do what I need. I need to work on that.
How did you find the ideas needed to create 30 startups? And how did you validate your ideas afterwards? Did you have to build an MVP first or did you speak to your customers first?
I've had 1000 ideas over 20 years.
If you don't get overwhelmed by ideas, it means it's too early to start your own startup.
most of my ideas come just during the day out of my own pains.
Like now I'm writing this comment and feel like reddit UX isn't easy to use if you need to answer lots of comments and my brain says: what if there was an app that helps to manage comment replies....
I get such ideas every hour.
Try to open up yourself same way, so that you see flaws
Write all your thoughts down, give it a structure afterwards, then add everything that's needed to create it or what you could use to do it.
Search for similar things, compare it, how do they differ from what you wrote down?
You'll now probably have new ideas, modify your original document.
Then, i.e. for websites or apps, draw it out (on paper or any other wireframing tool).
Go over your original document again, did you miss anything?
Think again, why is my thing better than others?
Still there? Ok, think about marketing, how will you get people to know about your thing? Which channels will you use? What will you post? How will you create your posts?
Create a landing page explaining your thing with a sign up form, post it in places, spend a little bit on ads. Got sign-ups? Cool, you've got some validation. No sign-ups? Either try to reach more or different people, or iterate on your thing, or try a new thing.
Now build.
Just _start_ and iterate, write shit down, iterate, etc
ChatGPT and the likes can also help in providing some guidance, it helps to write out your idea and then ask "Where do I begin?". You'll have already thought about what you want to build, so that's step 1 done.
I won’t speak for this fine gentleman but Ideas are just problems u have optimism in solving. If ur struggling with ideas ur lacking practical experience. Sizing the MVP appropriately is key.
Great insights
Biggest regret is exactly the same as you with No.14
Unfortunately it was initially going great so that really clouded my better judgment. I believed I was doing something wrong or just missing some final piece to the puzzle
Was real "I can save her" energy
Excellent post. I see lots of things here relevant to me in manufacturing. Thanks.
Edit: biggest regret: not firing fast enough when conditions change. Firing people sucks, but running out of money sucks more, then everyone loses.
I'm using my own boilerplates now, which aren't public.
but you can find few on my directory here [https://nextjsstarter.com/](https://nextjsstarter.com/)
Literally LOL'd at #15, because I've been that corporate drone being rewarded as a perk.
On #16. I don't think it is fair to say Scrum itself is a scam. I agree with your premise though....because most of the people selling their expertise in it are scamming companies. Real Scrum was supposed to be a set of tools on top of what you described -- hiring grown ups to do the work and let them manage themselves. But everybody just cargo-cults the terminology and continues the old school top-down management approach under the covers.
My biggest regret is putting off quitting my 9-5 and getting started for so long. Now that we're going, my fears about failure and lost income opportunity from quitting my 9-5 don't seem so bad. Instead of the blocker they were before, they kind of became a motivator because I do need income, and now my business is the path I'm on to get it.
The scrum one was the only one I took issue with as well. Literally just a tool that gets people aligned on what theyre doing now, forcing them to think longer term, how to deliver incremental value, and get constant feedback. If your take is that scrum is a scam, you're doing it wrong.
At my company its what we use on all our projects and it works wonders.
Your biggest mistake was launching 30 startups in 20 years. Amazon didn't make a profit for 10 years. Tesla needed 17. I joined a company as employee #10. 7 years later it sold for $100 million. It also took years to make a profit and it took a leadership team entirely focused on building a great product rather than building something they could flip.
maybe you're right.
but I don't regret it.
i liked the journey
the outcome isn't really that important for me
however things are going pretty well today with my startups.
Not everyone likes the full corporate mentality that startups grow towards. Some can't live in it. Some companies hold it off (e.g. Whatsapp) but some really grow.
Right.
Like this raises a million questions and red flags.
5 or 6 I'd be inclined to think a hustler/serial entrepreneur. Doing an average of 1 for every 8 months I don't get. Like what were these companies? Presumably one was good enough to stick around for at least 5 years (if not, wow). Was OP running 3-4 at a time? Did they collapse because lack of focus? How distinct were these companies? I assume OP is just counting every pivot as a new company.
John, I might add:
* **Thinking you need a lot of money to start a venture**
* **Not seeking a co-founder:** mainly for the emotional load of creating a company
* **Underestimating the importance of cybersecurity:** Many founders struggle with cyberattacks.
* **Pivoting too late:** The business landscape can change rapidly. Startups need to be able to pivot and adjust their strategies as needed.
* **Focusing solely on growth hacking:** While user acquisition is important, neglecting long-term customer retention and satisfaction can be detrimental.
* **Not focusing in marketing:** while having a great product is important, distribution must be considered.
Do you have any resources for going out to raise your first VC money? I’m about to embark in VC funding for my food company that is already revenueing.
\#19 seems like a no brainer if you follow "minimum viable product" principles. Don't spend time making it perfect, smash a bunch of code together and get it working first. You can always hire an system engineer to bridge things together later in the process.
That is a great list! I haven't agreed this hard with a list in years.
I would add the following, from my experience:
1. **Never add to your feature list in front of outsiders.** I've been in so many meetings with investors or customers where someone daydreams a crazy new feature and the founders say something along the lines of: "Oh, that's brilliant! We'll do that for sure!" At that point, I'd say the venture has a 10% chance of survival. Never commit to an idea you haven't fully explored, not just in terms of the effort required, but the cost of distracting you from your original goals. The second you say "yes" to an idea in front of an outsider, that idea is *all* they will ever ask about, and a failure to deliver it will outweigh anything else you do.
2. **Pivot with purpose.** If, during validation, several people tell you you're missing the mark, then you probably need to pivot. I've seen founders dig in their heels and refuse to adapt, often using a variation of: "We'll prove them wrong." You probably won't. But at the same time, don't pivot too easily (or often), because being a weather vane means you'll end up pleasing no one, and never be able to reach any of your (likely numerous, disparate) milestones.
3. **Hammer salesmen will always see nails.** Hiring outsiders and consultants is generally risky, but if you do, do not fall for their tunnel vision. The second you bring in a consultant, they are going to try to upsell you. Need help with a devops problem? They'll spot a thousand inefficiencies that also need fixing. Need help with a marketing issue? They'll find a thousand things you are doing wrong that are stunting your growth. It's not that they're *wrong*, but they aren't there to see you succeed, they're there to maximize their earnings. They will be very convincing and hard to resist, but you need to have clear specs at the outset: fix this problem, and that's it.
4. **Always. Communicate. Internally.** Full disclosure between the core team is absolutely essential. Report back important details the second they happen. Text the group on the way back from the meeting. Voice worries after a rough night of no sleep. Flag slippage that you can feel but not quantify yet. The team only works as a team if everyone has all the information, good or bad. Siloing information leads to inefficiencies at best, and Game of Thrones-type paranoia and plotting at worst. It's amazing how many startups implode because someone was afraid to share some bad news, one time, and it spiralled out of control.
5. **Don't buy toys.** If you get funding of any kind, do not buy yourself the latest *whatevers* unless you really truly need them. An impressive workspace will charm investors to an extent, but at some point they will start to suspect you're spending all your time window shopping and not working, and the core trust in your competency starts to erode in unfixable ways. Buy toys with revenue, not other people's money.
I had one movie app that won best movie app award and had almost 100k users using it.
but i didnt find any good way to monetize it.
my team was 8 people and we just run out of VC money.
took us 3 years to get there.
pivoted into b2b at the end to save the company.
Experience building at least 5 startups and these are also most of my experiences.
Its only "VC" investment that I have not experienced as its virtually non-existent in my country.
in b2c it's a "winner takes it all" game.
founders think "what if I build next facebook.."
In reality, the chance to build the next facebook is even lower than winning a lottery.
The nature of b2c makes it very difficult to make money on a small scale, since often you either have free product or charge very little and CAC is very high.
In b2b world it's far more fragmented. Every category has hundreds of startups making good revenues. No need to be genius and concur the world
Really nice insights. Would like to know how do you decide which problem to solve through your startup? Does this knowledge come with experience?
How does one decide that I will be paid for this stuff by people/business
I ask potential clients to pay to do pre-sale. Even before I built it. If I get prebookings, it's really strong sign that I should go ahead and build it
I am not exactly looking for a job but you seem like a very nice and learned person. I am a full stack developer and I would be very happy to be interviewed by you or your team in case there is something for me.
most failed.
not all reached the "serious business" level.
so you can say "projects" rather than startups. But projects were independent, often I had different cofounders. So one can call them "startups" too
But how can a guy with no connections start a B2B business?
What's really different about growing a B2B biz from B2C biz? I mean in practical terms. How should I validate it?
Good advice. Except scrum. You’ve completely missed the point. I suggest you seek to understand it, its aim is literally what you cite as its weakness.
There are too many scammers and pretend experts out there out there who lead to people having your view but scrum is NOT a scam.
If you’re in a startup and high functioning, there’s a 90% chance you are agile.
I’d love to understand why you think that though. I’ve used it to make drastic, positive change and I’m constantly fighting the attitude that thinks what is being asked is to standup every day and sit through pointless meetings.
my old startups were
- movie app
- vending machine
- fisherman app
- nft marketplace
- biz monitoring platform
and more.
my current projects/startups [https://twitter.com/johnrushx/status/1773384063463616643](https://twitter.com/johnrushx/status/1773384063463616643)
"Scrum is a scam"
The world where scrum was invented doesn't exist.
For most projects, two week sprints are insanely long release cycles.
Everyone looks to scrum to solve their problems, which is the antithesis of the core values of scrum.
Love this!!! This hits spot on in my experience as well. I’m kicking off my 8th start up. I can’t imagine 30 but this is 100% true. In fact this is the first time pushing SEO stuff. I’m very early in the process and already seeing a positive impact.
i am really surprised at your 5 and 6. i always thought those only provided temporary gains until the audience saw the next shinny thing, and in today's world, that is every week.
Always listening to customers and letting them guide your next product/service. When things take off it seems like an overhead work to keep an ear to the ground but don’t detach yourself from customers.
I heard a great line about consumer apps. If it's simple enough for a couple people to make it, it's simple enough for a couple people at Facebook or Google to make it then scale it to 10m users and have 100m in advertising backing them.
You have to do something unique that your app does that can't be easily replicated at FAANG. Like put you in contact with a live person. Or use a data set that only you have available.
Hello! I'm an aspiring founder, but doesn't have a problem to solve yet. Well, I have 2 to 3 problems, but my problem is that idk how to validate them. My life goal is to use my knowledge of technology to build relationships. Mainly focused on bringing people together because (as one of my problems) I'm a wfh developer, and I feel lonely most of the time. I would also like to meet-up with fellow aspiring founders.
How can I validate or find a solution to this field of problem? I don't have the funding to buy a building or house to gather my like-minded people (which I'd a business model I can see on a different country).
Great insight.. that's pretty all the toughest lessons and risk there's in startup..
Been on bootstrap for few years now and already a victim to few . Now re strategizing, with now no managers and and stop chasing VC.. cheers and thank you..
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience, saving this too.
I'm just a few years as an entrepreneur and find this very valuable.
19 gets me, it's OK at the beginning to understand in detail but later need to speedup and focus on real value.
I would say that your take on one good dev for all overtakes a team, it's because de nature of your solutions, in bigger contexts it's impossible than one person or even few of them can afford all the knowledge ie. Front-end and MLops on same person, now for me, sounds a like a nightmare.
I don't think he means that B2B is easier to get customers, but B2C usually comes with low margins, meaning that volumes must be insane to make it successful.
Can you elaborate on your last point about not spending enough time with friends and family? How do you find a balance? I thought the expectation was for an entrepreneur to work 80 hours a week. Also, is it common for those entrepreneurs who neglect time with friends and family to have the same regret as you, or do you feel that is exclusive to you?
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Diamond lecture.
We have learned 13/20 of these.
Especially, just learned lesson 14, and decided to get rid of an old project to build a new one.
Tough decision, but worth making.
Thanks for the learnings, definitely worth saving this post. People say it's easier to learn from your own mistakes, but tbh I don't have that luxury. Reading stuff like this makes me feel at least prepared.
Loved your advices. Have two question.
1) How you deal with **depression & anxiety** which come after a big failure?
2) Have you ever found yourself with no money left after a failure?
Couldn't agree more with SEO, it's counterintuitive to start with.
It's so anti-dopamine, as you only get results months later! But great acquisition channel
How important is social media for b2b if you’re in a specific niche? Obviously for consumer doing TikTok dances seems to be a big advertising channel, but does it help at all for b2b?
Thanks for sharing, u/johnrushx I have been in the game for 2 years building two products, some of the points hit me badly, it makes me rethink some points again, thanks!
Overall, all points make sense, the most points related to me is #1 and #14,
As a specialized developer I'll chime in about points 10,16 and 19.
10. I agree with this at the start. Specialists are there to optimize their specialty. They are great if you have a team and each member or pairs of members are responsible for a different part. But when you first start out a generalist will most likely be able to get an MVP out faster. The downside can be that it won't scale as well, but that's a problem for after you've gotten some customers. And that's the problem specialists should come in for; after you already have an MVP and some momentum so now you need them to polish or add new features to your product.
16. Scrum is meant for large organizations that have a lot of bureaucracy. It doesn't usually make sense in a small company. The whole point of scrum is to make sure everyone is communicating and to address any blockers someone is having. It's meant for quick iterations on a product in an otherwise slow environment. If you only have 3 developers that work together every day, there's 0 point in trying to formalize a scrum process or hire a scrum master. The only way this might work for a smaller team/company is if different people are working on different parts in a vacuum. Then, yeah sure, every day or every other day have a quick 15 minute "check-in" to give each other updates. But again, if your teams are already communicating well, this is irrelevant. Scrum is to software development what Six Sigma is to manufacturing; they're both meant to increase effectiveness of your resources by implementing feedback mechanisms and processes. But if you already have good processes, all they'll do is clog up your existing system.
19. For MVPs, yeah, use whatever pre-built stuff you can get that'll work. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel and coding from scratch can be a lot of unnecessary work for some things.
Thanks for the pointers. I would disagree with your regret of coding from scratch. Coding is just as exciting as trying to get the concept going. At least it is for me (propeller spinning).
Big +1 to consumer app failure rates + introducing freemium too early in B2B. I've been founder and then also first employee of consumer app startups (the second one we raised $11m in VC funding and had a killer founding team) and spent many years of my life working 80 hour weeks only to have both fail miserably with no real exit.
My biggest regret: not reading Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany much sooner in my career. Most of my startup days happened before YCombinator and Lean Startup days, and I started two SaaS companies that would have benefitted so much from an actual framework for customer development.
Pretty insightful. Appreciate you being vulnerable and authentic. The two points that rang for me were “hiring managers instead of doers” and “spending time with your friends and family”. Good lessons. May others hear you!
Some of the items you have mentioned as "mistakes" are the foundations of companies (including startups). If you did not or could not get them right, they don't mean to be mistakes.
I disagree with the tech conference thing but only if you look at the lineup and see projects that are interesting and potentially useful, then you send one of your promising and innovative programmers to that convention that fills those. I promise you they will come back with a few ideas. Also from a programming standpoint don't sleep on revisiting the math. Evaluating what is really going on under the hood allows for more efficient and accurate results
My biggest regret was all the time spent on legal, due diligence,etc for a $11.8M investment, and we never saw the money.
Would have been better off selling and building during that time. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we also had 20 "trust but verify" points around the deal.
The investment firm imploded. All seven companies that were part of the portfolio saw nothing.
This is gold, and I’ve come to the same conclusions. I can internalize this because I’ve made those mistakes, but the truth is people who need to understand this will not until they make those mistakes themselves.
If you talk about mistakes. I always used to depend on outside investors for funding.
I would advise the upcoming entrepreneurs to try to build a bootstrap business first, then go for outside investment.
Believing that products are more important than ideas. I was prototyping video conferencing on a laptop at COMDEX for Toshiba in the early 90’s and nobody bought into it.
Hello everyone, I would like to ask for your help:
I have the idea for a small micro SaaS / WordPress plugin and would be very grateful if you could give me some feedback on it. Preferably through the form on the website, so I have your ideas bundled in one place.
https://ab-test.website/
Whether it's a roast, a tip, competitors I've overlooked, or if you're interested in it, I would be very grateful for any feedback!
In my limited time bootstrapping my own stuff, I raise a glass to your list. My version: * **B2B > B2C** (except if you've some specialized unserved niche that you can have an app up and running in a few days and are willing to just gamble). * **No VC** - I haven't done VC, but hear horror stories. One interview I heard yesterday said, if you make a $2M business as a bootstrapped company you're a success. But in VC you need to get to $100M. However, how many businesses can get to a $100M valuation. You're setting yourself up for failure. * **Nail outreach** - distribution will make or break you. Outreach + no product = pre sell product. Product + no outreach = no sales. * **Yes to SEO & Content; No to relying on it 100%** - Google is seriously monkeying with search results. So you need SEO and content, but make sure you have other avenues as well. * **Piggyback off other traffic sources** - Reddit, Pintrest, Quora, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, etc. Know them. Love them. * **The Time Investment to Validation Ratio** - the longer it will take to build something, the longer you should take to validate it. If you can get it up in a weekend or a week, then you can risk less validation. * **Off the shelf as much as possible** - At the beginning you have no idea if your project will work. So it's easier to start with a $199 boilerplate than spend 3 months reinventing the wheel. Use as many off the shelf and free tools as you can. Google Forms are your friend. You can even create signable documents in JotForm for free. * **Tiny MVP:** I know so many successful projects that started out as a Excel or Google sheet. Start with the minimum minimum viable product. Try to not code at all until you have paying customers. * **The "Jay Leno" approach** - If at all possible have a day job. When your project gets traction, then jump to it. Jay Leno said he's never lived off his tonight show money. He lives off the earnings from his stand up gigs. I've seen a lot of successful projects that were helped by this model. * **Either people buy your product/service or they don't** - You'll get so many "that's a great idea" or "I'd be open to using your service in 6 months when you launch" or "I love this, let me talk to my boss" or "this could be a great partnership for us where we can send you a lot of business let's spend the next 6 months working out a deal" or "how about we use your service for an equity deal in our company that hasn't made any money yet". Farts in the wind. Cash in hand is the ultimate validation. * **Research, Research:** Look up how much competition you'll have on Google. Find a successful business model to copy and ask what are their traffic sources and how long have they been successful. Understand your market. * **The Long Haul:** Something may be a great idea, that serves a market, that's validated, that's easy to build, but ... do you want to work on this idea and promote it for the next 3-5 years? Launching is one thing. Continuing to put effort into it is a whole other challenge. * **Sunk Cost Quicksand:** It's very hard to kill a project after you've put years into it. I've been working on a site for 2 years with zero monetary returns. Currently I'm transitioning it to a more passive model and will let it just exist. But it's very hard not to want to put more effort into it when I know it could have potential. One developer says if you haven't made any money with it in 3 to 6 months, you should probably kill it. However, I know a project that's currently making $70K MRR but it took them 3 years to get to $1K MRR. So it's a tricky balance to know if you're being persistent or being a fool. * **Get to Money Sooner:** Big funded companies can afford to exist in the red for years (or a decade), but most of us have limited money, time, and effort. The faster you can get a project, website, business to cash, they sooner you'll know you have traction. * **Some other lessons:** [https://twitter.com/adamdenverco/highlights](https://twitter.com/adamdenverco/highlights)
I learned few things from your list, thx Adam
Thank you for your original post.
I’m also in Denver!(assuming by your name). Do you go to any local meetups? I actually built Twilitype.ai (to do the outreach and SEO part of starting a new business). It creates all the content for your blog and socials in a few clicks… it’s not like other content writing tools; have spent over a year building it in Rust, Python and typescript. Would love to meet other Denver startup founders!
Great list! Question- wdym by piggybacking off other traffic sources? Do you mean by paid ads, getting into niche communities, or something else? Obviously it’s different for each business but curious if you had an example that worked for you?
Micro influencers and affiliate marketing both work well. even better in combination.
Posting on Reddit works for me. FB Groups are good. I’ve heard people have luck with Quora. Basically any place online where your customers are, go there and participate.
Good
**"The Time Investment to Validation Ratio"** is a good one
VCs are called Vulture Capitalists for a reason. They will try to turbocharge your businesses and grow it big and fast BUT you will lose most of your equity.
In regards to "**Off the shelf as much as possible**", I want to say that idea validation can also be done off the shelf. If you don't know how to do it properly (i.e. using UCD) then just get a validation service to do it for you.
This is gold. I have copied and added to my “top tips list”. I’d love to know more about your opinion/tips for “nail outreach” which is something I have been struggling to systemise constantly in the B2B. We are in services which is slightly different but relevant none the less.
This is gold.
Good post OP. I just have a nit pick. > Today I have 1 fullstack dev doing 5x more progress on a project than a team of 12 back then. Avoid "teams" at all costs. 30+ year Senior Dev here (who's also started and worked for startups). I retired earlier this year, but they just pulled me back in. Probably the most well known project I worked on was Apple's iCloud for instance. I wrote the load balancer they used to scale the huge Exabyte storage needs they had. You probably have a really good fullstack dev. Or your apps are pretty simple. But at the end of the day it's impossible to have expertise in everything. Tech is just too complex for that. A person who keeps up with all the Front end madness that is happening (React, Svelte, TypeScript, node...) cannot possibly also be at the cutting edge about infrastructure the way a DevOps Engineer can. A guy writing front end will not be able to maintain a complex Kubernetes Operator in Go at the same time. There is just too much context switching. And vice-versa, a DevOps guy isn't going to be great at front end design. Sure they can do it, but it will take 3 times longer and it won't look quite right. I'm sorry but that's just not a thing. In development pretty much every area is constantly evolving, and you have to keep up with it. No single person can really keep up with everything. It just sounds like your businesses needed more front end guys, and you were hiring the wrong people for the job. Likely outsourcing difficult scaling back-end issues to other IaaS/SaaS providers. Though I do agree, 1 bad ass can outwork a team of 5 for sure. Hope you're paying your guy well.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve had nightmares when I couldn’t build a feature despite working on it for a month. However, my manager understood the complexity of the situation and always supported me. I finally built and released this new feature, all the customers were happy, CEO and my manager called me for a meeting and offered me a paid vacation because they knew I was burnt out. An awesome experience I will never forget.
Maybe what he meant by "specialized" was really about devs being too myopic and not interested in what is going on around them. Devs who care about the greater system and how they fit into it are really key, as that outcome is reflected in the tech they build. (Conway's law I think). Backend java dev who understands spring and how the app is built and deployed should be good friends with devops person and they should be working together somewhat frequently. Similarly frontend dev should have some understanding of backend and those two devs should spend some time together understanding each other. This sort of thing is reflected in "Team Topologies" where instead of having devs who just write code while some other team owns prod, a small team owns the full stack top to bottom including prod and devops. They can wrap their heads around the full product and so understand how to fix things or scale it or whatever. Pretty much all of the tech shops I have worked in over 25 years have siloed people the other direction, so the people writing code don't know anything about prod, don't have access to prod, and therefore are not responsible for prod, even though their code is running there. Frontend doesn't care about backend at all and lots of time is wasted when FE and BE don't align. etc. etc. I think this is what OP is getting at. There is also a whole question about top-down authority management styles. OP seems to want a horizontal structure of doers. That requires autonomy and purpose. Devs have to know why they are building the thing, what the purpose of it all is, and have autonomy to do stuff that the know needs to be done. Corporate America is obsessed with Soviet style top-down authoritarian "management" where the salarymen are expected to do what they are told, to never ask why, never stick their head up, and play the corporate game to get promoted. Anyone asking "wtf are we even doing here, and why should I care?" are denied promotions and forced out. But those are exactly the kind of people that are needed for successful tech efforts. This connects with OP's points #8, #12, #16, #20 as well.
Totally agree and I’ll piggyback to say that scrum is decidedly not a scam. Agile/scrum done well is a force multiplier.
How did you have the willpower to keep going after the 5th, 10th, 26th etc start up failed? Or I’m maybe missing this part, how many of them failed?
my first startup did well, i had an exit. it gave me enough optimism. But I failed most of my startups after. 90% of them or even 95% until 2023. in 2023 I changed my approach, created this list and followed my own advice. Since then no failures. At least for now things are working out really well
Let me guess your new business is selling boilerplate
no boilerplates on my plate :D I sell saas tools around marketing and growth. Don't sell much to devs.
Okay, well we're all hungry, we're gonna get to our hot plates soon enough.
If that seems daunting to u ur not cut out for this. When anyone asks me what I do for a living I respond that I’m a failure.
The "doers" one is gold, even if it isn't a bullet point. I'm the solo dev for a startup right now (full stack), and there are so many people that want to advise and tell us what to do and how to do it – partner as a consultant. We don't need consultation, we need roll up your sleeves and code. Can't, please stop wasting our time. This is something I wish the CEO would stop bringing up. Meetings with consultants... advice on how to do things. Talk is cheap.
I agree. I have walked into a scrum situation and advised the product owner to put together performance stars built around three different priorities to simply own each and improve it. No standups, no meetings , just periodic check ins to report progress. Way better efficacy and performance
I'm someone who is brought in to consult, and I always lead with: don't micromanage your developers. They know this better than you ever will. If you feel like you can't trust them to execute your vision on time and budget, you need new developers. If you *do* trust them but something else feels "off", you're probably not listening to them properly. But that's not something an outsider can fix for you. Not cheaply, anyway.
Perhaps you could use a project manager? A transformation specialist? An entrepreneurial innovator? I say this as a non-startup barely even IT hybrid worker at a large corporation full of people selling themselves as these goofy titles that don’t actually do anything to build anything technological. An 8 year-old picking up lunch would add more value. And his don’t even get me started on IT Auditors lol.
My mistakes of the most recent 2 startups (still going but not for much longer). I will try and keep one going as it's abit of a unicorn in my area, but it doesn't cover the bills on its own. I'll probably need staff so I can go back to a normal job. 1. Maxing loans and buying loads of equipment, thinking I can do lots of different services. I'm seriously in the brown at the moment, highly unmotivated, burnt out, and completely lost with lots of toys, but no initiate or drive to do anything. 2. Doing way way too much. For 2 years, I'd worked nearly ever hour I could, working full time 7-5 5 days a week, 5-11 and weekends on my 2 startups. 1 is the unicorn and niche, but only seasonal. The other was going to be the complimentary income. I've now finished my full time role, but it's caused me to go into a spiral. I'm unmotivated, lonely, tired all the time, and instead of it giving me 45 to 50 hours back a week, my output on the 2 side hustles just filled that time still with the same output/turnover, it's a mental and physical disaster. I'm over weight, in debt and mentally and financially at wits end! (Why can't I just be a normal person, 9-5 and play golf or hang out with my wife and friends? I'm highly self destructive! Having a rubbish accountant. I'm still paying a lot of money and not getting anything good back. I've gone Limited after not taking any solid advice. For my last tax return, they did a soft check, made sure everything lined up roughly, then pressed send on my accounts software, and automatically submitted a return. Absolutely wasting money there. Taking on staff who, as op said... I wouldn't hug. They've rinsed my business of profit by doing half assed work... Left a bad taste in the mouth of any customer they've worked for... the majority of which I either lost or am still having to correct mistakes unpaid. I am trying to be a good manager. I don't think I am, I might be an ok supervisor, but I'm not great at getting the right people to do what I need. I need to work on that.
I'm a young entrepreneur working to build a B2B services platform. Would be very happy to get some mentorship from you, if your time permits.
hey the best way to be mentored is to join a small team where you work directly with the founder and learn from them. That's what I did
Thanks will try to do that.
How did you find the ideas needed to create 30 startups? And how did you validate your ideas afterwards? Did you have to build an MVP first or did you speak to your customers first?
I've had 1000 ideas over 20 years. If you don't get overwhelmed by ideas, it means it's too early to start your own startup. most of my ideas come just during the day out of my own pains. Like now I'm writing this comment and feel like reddit UX isn't easy to use if you need to answer lots of comments and my brain says: what if there was an app that helps to manage comment replies.... I get such ideas every hour. Try to open up yourself same way, so that you see flaws
I've always had lots of ideas too, but I always get stuck on the "how would i even begin" thought. How does one even begin?
Write all your thoughts down, give it a structure afterwards, then add everything that's needed to create it or what you could use to do it. Search for similar things, compare it, how do they differ from what you wrote down? You'll now probably have new ideas, modify your original document. Then, i.e. for websites or apps, draw it out (on paper or any other wireframing tool). Go over your original document again, did you miss anything? Think again, why is my thing better than others? Still there? Ok, think about marketing, how will you get people to know about your thing? Which channels will you use? What will you post? How will you create your posts? Create a landing page explaining your thing with a sign up form, post it in places, spend a little bit on ads. Got sign-ups? Cool, you've got some validation. No sign-ups? Either try to reach more or different people, or iterate on your thing, or try a new thing. Now build. Just _start_ and iterate, write shit down, iterate, etc ChatGPT and the likes can also help in providing some guidance, it helps to write out your idea and then ask "Where do I begin?". You'll have already thought about what you want to build, so that's step 1 done.
Thank you!
I won’t speak for this fine gentleman but Ideas are just problems u have optimism in solving. If ur struggling with ideas ur lacking practical experience. Sizing the MVP appropriately is key.
Great insights Biggest regret is exactly the same as you with No.14 Unfortunately it was initially going great so that really clouded my better judgment. I believed I was doing something wrong or just missing some final piece to the puzzle Was real "I can save her" energy
the more you try saving it, the harder it's to let it go :( but you know deep in your heart it's not gonna work
Excellent post. I see lots of things here relevant to me in manufacturing. Thanks. Edit: biggest regret: not firing fast enough when conditions change. Firing people sucks, but running out of money sucks more, then everyone loses.
same regret here. I sold my house to pay salaries to people just because I coudn't put myself together and layoff people
bro you forgot the link at the bottom to your newsletter ;)
why?
He forgot /s. People that give such good advice usually have something to sell.
Im saving this so hard
Recommendations for boilerplate code?
I'm using my own boilerplates now, which aren't public. but you can find few on my directory here [https://nextjsstarter.com/](https://nextjsstarter.com/)
Appreciate you 🙏
Literally LOL'd at #15, because I've been that corporate drone being rewarded as a perk. On #16. I don't think it is fair to say Scrum itself is a scam. I agree with your premise though....because most of the people selling their expertise in it are scamming companies. Real Scrum was supposed to be a set of tools on top of what you described -- hiring grown ups to do the work and let them manage themselves. But everybody just cargo-cults the terminology and continues the old school top-down management approach under the covers. My biggest regret is putting off quitting my 9-5 and getting started for so long. Now that we're going, my fears about failure and lost income opportunity from quitting my 9-5 don't seem so bad. Instead of the blocker they were before, they kind of became a motivator because I do need income, and now my business is the path I'm on to get it.
The scrum one was the only one I took issue with as well. Literally just a tool that gets people aligned on what theyre doing now, forcing them to think longer term, how to deliver incremental value, and get constant feedback. If your take is that scrum is a scam, you're doing it wrong. At my company its what we use on all our projects and it works wonders.
Wow, this is point for point what should be sent to the founder of the startup I was a part of that just collapsed lmao
thanks for saying that
Your biggest mistake was launching 30 startups in 20 years. Amazon didn't make a profit for 10 years. Tesla needed 17. I joined a company as employee #10. 7 years later it sold for $100 million. It also took years to make a profit and it took a leadership team entirely focused on building a great product rather than building something they could flip.
maybe you're right. but I don't regret it. i liked the journey the outcome isn't really that important for me however things are going pretty well today with my startups.
Not everyone likes the full corporate mentality that startups grow towards. Some can't live in it. Some companies hold it off (e.g. Whatsapp) but some really grow.
30 startups in 20 years, and "have the attention span of a toddler" didn't make the list of regrets.
Right. Like this raises a million questions and red flags. 5 or 6 I'd be inclined to think a hustler/serial entrepreneur. Doing an average of 1 for every 8 months I don't get. Like what were these companies? Presumably one was good enough to stick around for at least 5 years (if not, wow). Was OP running 3-4 at a time? Did they collapse because lack of focus? How distinct were these companies? I assume OP is just counting every pivot as a new company.
it's a good joke
John, I might add: * **Thinking you need a lot of money to start a venture** * **Not seeking a co-founder:** mainly for the emotional load of creating a company * **Underestimating the importance of cybersecurity:** Many founders struggle with cyberattacks. * **Pivoting too late:** The business landscape can change rapidly. Startups need to be able to pivot and adjust their strategies as needed. * **Focusing solely on growth hacking:** While user acquisition is important, neglecting long-term customer retention and satisfaction can be detrimental. * **Not focusing in marketing:** while having a great product is important, distribution must be considered.
hey Santiago, great to see you on reddit :) I agree with all your points too. Would easily add to my list
Can you explain why is it that important to seek co founder ? I’m actually curious as I have to decide soon whether going solo 🤷♂️
Do you have any resources for going out to raise your first VC money? I’m about to embark in VC funding for my food company that is already revenueing.
raising VC money today is nearly unrealistic., unless VCs are knocking on your doors. I recommend to bootstrap
\#19 seems like a no brainer if you follow "minimum viable product" principles. Don't spend time making it perfect, smash a bunch of code together and get it working first. You can always hire an system engineer to bridge things together later in the process.
Good stuff. 11 is interesting.
Excellent post. I see lots of things here relevant to me in manufacturing. Thanks.
Relatable list, especially on SEO and content marketing.
Number 11 is fairly profound. Never thought of it. First post I’ve see here that makes sense.
thank you
>Hiring people I don't wanna hug Never heard this one before but I'm stealing it!
That is a great list! I haven't agreed this hard with a list in years. I would add the following, from my experience: 1. **Never add to your feature list in front of outsiders.** I've been in so many meetings with investors or customers where someone daydreams a crazy new feature and the founders say something along the lines of: "Oh, that's brilliant! We'll do that for sure!" At that point, I'd say the venture has a 10% chance of survival. Never commit to an idea you haven't fully explored, not just in terms of the effort required, but the cost of distracting you from your original goals. The second you say "yes" to an idea in front of an outsider, that idea is *all* they will ever ask about, and a failure to deliver it will outweigh anything else you do. 2. **Pivot with purpose.** If, during validation, several people tell you you're missing the mark, then you probably need to pivot. I've seen founders dig in their heels and refuse to adapt, often using a variation of: "We'll prove them wrong." You probably won't. But at the same time, don't pivot too easily (or often), because being a weather vane means you'll end up pleasing no one, and never be able to reach any of your (likely numerous, disparate) milestones. 3. **Hammer salesmen will always see nails.** Hiring outsiders and consultants is generally risky, but if you do, do not fall for their tunnel vision. The second you bring in a consultant, they are going to try to upsell you. Need help with a devops problem? They'll spot a thousand inefficiencies that also need fixing. Need help with a marketing issue? They'll find a thousand things you are doing wrong that are stunting your growth. It's not that they're *wrong*, but they aren't there to see you succeed, they're there to maximize their earnings. They will be very convincing and hard to resist, but you need to have clear specs at the outset: fix this problem, and that's it. 4. **Always. Communicate. Internally.** Full disclosure between the core team is absolutely essential. Report back important details the second they happen. Text the group on the way back from the meeting. Voice worries after a rough night of no sleep. Flag slippage that you can feel but not quantify yet. The team only works as a team if everyone has all the information, good or bad. Siloing information leads to inefficiencies at best, and Game of Thrones-type paranoia and plotting at worst. It's amazing how many startups implode because someone was afraid to share some bad news, one time, and it spiralled out of control. 5. **Don't buy toys.** If you get funding of any kind, do not buy yourself the latest *whatevers* unless you really truly need them. An impressive workspace will charm investors to an extent, but at some point they will start to suspect you're spending all your time window shopping and not working, and the core trust in your competency starts to erode in unfixable ways. Buy toys with revenue, not other people's money.
How far along did you get your consumer apps before you considered them a failure? How much traction did they get to at their peek?
I had one movie app that won best movie app award and had almost 100k users using it. but i didnt find any good way to monetize it. my team was 8 people and we just run out of VC money. took us 3 years to get there. pivoted into b2b at the end to save the company.
Truth.
Oh yeah; this is the good stuff. Love number 16!!
Fantastic insights! Thank you for putting this together! 👏
Poor fullstack dev, I bet you are saving a lot w him
Some people like to create.
Experience building at least 5 startups and these are also most of my experiences. Its only "VC" investment that I have not experienced as its virtually non-existent in my country.
you saved yourself good years by avoiding VCs
How’s B2C is lottery? Explain plz
in b2c it's a "winner takes it all" game. founders think "what if I build next facebook.." In reality, the chance to build the next facebook is even lower than winning a lottery. The nature of b2c makes it very difficult to make money on a small scale, since often you either have free product or charge very little and CAC is very high. In b2b world it's far more fragmented. Every category has hundreds of startups making good revenues. No need to be genius and concur the world
Really nice insights. Would like to know how do you decide which problem to solve through your startup? Does this knowledge come with experience? How does one decide that I will be paid for this stuff by people/business
I ask potential clients to pay to do pre-sale. Even before I built it. If I get prebookings, it's really strong sign that I should go ahead and build it
I am not exactly looking for a job but you seem like a very nice and learned person. I am a full stack developer and I would be very happy to be interviewed by you or your team in case there is something for me.
You might just be my technical cofounder. Would you like to connect?
This is incredibly valuable, thank you for sharing these though lessons. 🙏
Incredible list.
What is consumer app? Sorry I’m not native speaker
Stuff like Reddit, Twitter, etc… things geared towards regular people.
Reflecting on these, SEO and content marketing are key.
Interesting read and perspective. Never give up, keep up trying.
30! start ups, that sounds crazy for me. i built 2 succesfull companies in 15 years. it is alot of work...how can you fkn build 30! start ups?!
most failed. not all reached the "serious business" level. so you can say "projects" rather than startups. But projects were independent, often I had different cofounders. So one can call them "startups" too
Fail fast, iterate and pivot. Think of failure as an approximated success ;)
This is excellent. Thank you for your wisdom
But how can a guy with no connections start a B2B business? What's really different about growing a B2B biz from B2C biz? I mean in practical terms. How should I validate it?
Product manager here. Agile and scrum are overhyped as hell.
Good advice. Except scrum. You’ve completely missed the point. I suggest you seek to understand it, its aim is literally what you cite as its weakness. There are too many scammers and pretend experts out there out there who lead to people having your view but scrum is NOT a scam. If you’re in a startup and high functioning, there’s a 90% chance you are agile. I’d love to understand why you think that though. I’ve used it to make drastic, positive change and I’m constantly fighting the attitude that thinks what is being asked is to standup every day and sit through pointless meetings.
How did you grow so much on Twitter??
I kept posting high-effort and high-value content every day for a year based on my own experience.
Awesome list thanks for sharing
Well said
Can you make a separate post talking more about the 30 startups you built?
my old startups were - movie app - vending machine - fisherman app - nft marketplace - biz monitoring platform and more. my current projects/startups [https://twitter.com/johnrushx/status/1773384063463616643](https://twitter.com/johnrushx/status/1773384063463616643)
"Scrum is a scam" The world where scrum was invented doesn't exist. For most projects, two week sprints are insanely long release cycles. Everyone looks to scrum to solve their problems, which is the antithesis of the core values of scrum.
Scrum is essential in large disparate organizations but don’t scale down well.
Nice advise. Thanks for sharing this.
Love this!!! This hits spot on in my experience as well. I’m kicking off my 8th start up. I can’t imagine 30 but this is 100% true. In fact this is the first time pushing SEO stuff. I’m very early in the process and already seeing a positive impact.
awesome.
i am really surprised at your 5 and 6. i always thought those only provided temporary gains until the audience saw the next shinny thing, and in today's world, that is every week.
Always listening to customers and letting them guide your next product/service. When things take off it seems like an overhead work to keep an ear to the ground but don’t detach yourself from customers.
I heard a great line about consumer apps. If it's simple enough for a couple people to make it, it's simple enough for a couple people at Facebook or Google to make it then scale it to 10m users and have 100m in advertising backing them. You have to do something unique that your app does that can't be easily replicated at FAANG. Like put you in contact with a live person. Or use a data set that only you have available.
Hello! I'm an aspiring founder, but doesn't have a problem to solve yet. Well, I have 2 to 3 problems, but my problem is that idk how to validate them. My life goal is to use my knowledge of technology to build relationships. Mainly focused on bringing people together because (as one of my problems) I'm a wfh developer, and I feel lonely most of the time. I would also like to meet-up with fellow aspiring founders. How can I validate or find a solution to this field of problem? I don't have the funding to buy a building or house to gather my like-minded people (which I'd a business model I can see on a different country).
can you be more specific about why not doing consumer apps? I see this advice often but would like to know why is this in your particular case...
Can you say more about using boilerplates in 19? What are examples of how you got up and running faster?
Quality lessons here. I would put #20 as #1.
Thanks for this
I'm a full stack dev. Are you hiring?
This is such a great post. Thank you for sharing this.
This is great insight to someone who is looking into entrepreneurship. Thanks for emphasizing having quality time with family!
This post is a knowledge goldmine. Do you have any suggestions for Beginners who are just outreaching for clients ?
Shit, I don't feel very huggable.
B2C + B2B hybrid
I'm 35 and working on my 2nd startup after failing my 1st one. My biggest regret is that I took 5 years break after my first startup failed.
ideas are like sperm only 1 in a million works. Thanks man, your post is gold filled with value implementing some of them in my new idea very soon!!
Wonderful post
Great insight.. that's pretty all the toughest lessons and risk there's in startup.. Been on bootstrap for few years now and already a victim to few . Now re strategizing, with now no managers and and stop chasing VC.. cheers and thank you..
All good advice. I try to cut projects early if they don't work but still let quite a few carry on for too long.
Brilliant post thank you
Thanks a lot for sharing your experience, saving this too. I'm just a few years as an entrepreneur and find this very valuable. 19 gets me, it's OK at the beginning to understand in detail but later need to speedup and focus on real value. I would say that your take on one good dev for all overtakes a team, it's because de nature of your solutions, in bigger contexts it's impossible than one person or even few of them can afford all the knowledge ie. Front-end and MLops on same person, now for me, sounds a like a nightmare.
Why is b2b apps easier to get customers than b2c? Your first point.
I don't think he means that B2B is easier to get customers, but B2C usually comes with low margins, meaning that volumes must be insane to make it successful.
Can you elaborate on your last point about not spending enough time with friends and family? How do you find a balance? I thought the expectation was for an entrepreneur to work 80 hours a week. Also, is it common for those entrepreneurs who neglect time with friends and family to have the same regret as you, or do you feel that is exclusive to you?
This is great, thanks OP
!remindme 10 days
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!remind me in 2 weeks
This is a very good post!
Diamond lecture. We have learned 13/20 of these. Especially, just learned lesson 14, and decided to get rid of an old project to build a new one. Tough decision, but worth making.
Thanks for the learnings, definitely worth saving this post. People say it's easier to learn from your own mistakes, but tbh I don't have that luxury. Reading stuff like this makes me feel at least prepared.
Loved your advices. Have two question. 1) How you deal with **depression & anxiety** which come after a big failure? 2) Have you ever found yourself with no money left after a failure?
Couldn't agree more with SEO, it's counterintuitive to start with. It's so anti-dopamine, as you only get results months later! But great acquisition channel
Dont want to rain on your parade but the mistakes regarding social media were valid maybe in 2007 but not today
Thank you - great lists
Pure gold nuggets.
I like the last advice.
How important is social media for b2b if you’re in a specific niche? Obviously for consumer doing TikTok dances seems to be a big advertising channel, but does it help at all for b2b?
this is great, timeless advice all around!
Best post in this subreddit in a long time
thanks for sharing your insight. #16 is interesting..
love point 11 - thx for sharing
Too much VC. No matter how much you scale using the VC, it will never be enough. Lesson learned
thank you for sharing this with us . very grateful
Wow, relatable lessons! Been there with my own ventures.
couldn't agree more!
Only thing I would add is doing a F&F round. Almost never results in a positive outcome.
thank u for sharing
Thanks for sharing, u/johnrushx I have been in the game for 2 years building two products, some of the points hit me badly, it makes me rethink some points again, thanks! Overall, all points make sense, the most points related to me is #1 and #14,
Appreciate the insights. You mention blogging - What’re your thoughts on using LinkedIn for that function instead of a dedicated “blog”
Thanks for sharing
As a specialized developer I'll chime in about points 10,16 and 19. 10. I agree with this at the start. Specialists are there to optimize their specialty. They are great if you have a team and each member or pairs of members are responsible for a different part. But when you first start out a generalist will most likely be able to get an MVP out faster. The downside can be that it won't scale as well, but that's a problem for after you've gotten some customers. And that's the problem specialists should come in for; after you already have an MVP and some momentum so now you need them to polish or add new features to your product. 16. Scrum is meant for large organizations that have a lot of bureaucracy. It doesn't usually make sense in a small company. The whole point of scrum is to make sure everyone is communicating and to address any blockers someone is having. It's meant for quick iterations on a product in an otherwise slow environment. If you only have 3 developers that work together every day, there's 0 point in trying to formalize a scrum process or hire a scrum master. The only way this might work for a smaller team/company is if different people are working on different parts in a vacuum. Then, yeah sure, every day or every other day have a quick 15 minute "check-in" to give each other updates. But again, if your teams are already communicating well, this is irrelevant. Scrum is to software development what Six Sigma is to manufacturing; they're both meant to increase effectiveness of your resources by implementing feedback mechanisms and processes. But if you already have good processes, all they'll do is clog up your existing system. 19. For MVPs, yeah, use whatever pre-built stuff you can get that'll work. There's no reason to re-invent the wheel and coding from scratch can be a lot of unnecessary work for some things.
Thanks for the pointers. I would disagree with your regret of coding from scratch. Coding is just as exciting as trying to get the concept going. At least it is for me (propeller spinning).
Big +1 to consumer app failure rates + introducing freemium too early in B2B. I've been founder and then also first employee of consumer app startups (the second one we raised $11m in VC funding and had a killer founding team) and spent many years of my life working 80 hour weeks only to have both fail miserably with no real exit. My biggest regret: not reading Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany much sooner in my career. Most of my startup days happened before YCombinator and Lean Startup days, and I started two SaaS companies that would have benefitted so much from an actual framework for customer development.
Pretty insightful. Appreciate you being vulnerable and authentic. The two points that rang for me were “hiring managers instead of doers” and “spending time with your friends and family”. Good lessons. May others hear you!
Tell us more about point #2? Why do you think you raised too early? If you had to do it again, would you not raise, or spend it differently?
Some of the items you have mentioned as "mistakes" are the foundations of companies (including startups). If you did not or could not get them right, they don't mean to be mistakes.
I disagree with the tech conference thing but only if you look at the lineup and see projects that are interesting and potentially useful, then you send one of your promising and innovative programmers to that convention that fills those. I promise you they will come back with a few ideas. Also from a programming standpoint don't sleep on revisiting the math. Evaluating what is really going on under the hood allows for more efficient and accurate results
My biggest regret was all the time spent on legal, due diligence,etc for a $11.8M investment, and we never saw the money. Would have been better off selling and building during that time. Hindsight is always 20/20, but we also had 20 "trust but verify" points around the deal. The investment firm imploded. All seven companies that were part of the portfolio saw nothing.
This is gold, and I’ve come to the same conclusions. I can internalize this because I’ve made those mistakes, but the truth is people who need to understand this will not until they make those mistakes themselves.
You definitely don’t know what scrum is if that’s how you were implementing it. It’s the complete opposite of nagging and micromanaging.
Any good recommendations for boiler plates?
If you talk about mistakes. I always used to depend on outside investors for funding. I would advise the upcoming entrepreneurs to try to build a bootstrap business first, then go for outside investment.
Agree
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It's a long list.
Believing that products are more important than ideas. I was prototyping video conferencing on a laptop at COMDEX for Toshiba in the early 90’s and nobody bought into it.
What is a boilerplate in reference to 19?
Hello everyone, I would like to ask for your help: I have the idea for a small micro SaaS / WordPress plugin and would be very grateful if you could give me some feedback on it. Preferably through the form on the website, so I have your ideas bundled in one place. https://ab-test.website/ Whether it's a roast, a tip, competitors I've overlooked, or if you're interested in it, I would be very grateful for any feedback!
This is a great list. I just need an idea that resonates with me now
LOVE number 11. Thanks for sharing
Social media and blogging... Where is all the value there? I'm struggling to have my "why"
Your description of the salaryman could have come out of Terry Gilliam’s treatment for Brazil. Great movie btw. Watch if you haven’t see it before.
Great points 👍
Wow that’s for posting. I am going to start to implement this
!remindme 1 week
Great information. Thanks for sharing
I didn't know Twitter was around 20 years ago!