9 Lessons on Startup Failure
Birds fly, fish swim, startups die. This is a fact, but people learn most from their failures. Sarfaraz Hassan (@_sarfarazh) is a UX designer and entrepreneur from Guwahati, Assam, India. Two years back I had the pleasure of working with him for some time while I was in Bangalore.
Sarfaraz then went back to the entrepreneurial journey with a project called chefsnear.me, a site designed to connect foodies with home chefs. Unfortunately, the project failed and the company pulled the plug after 1 year, 3 months and 26 days. These are the 9 lessons that Sarfaraz and his team learned from it:
- Do not search for ideas. Search for problem and then find an idea to solve it.
- Startup idea competitions are good. But winning or losing it says nothing about your idea.
- Stay away from press. Do not create a hype before you have validated your idea. You’ll disappoint more users.
- Do not wait to build a perfect product. There isn’t any. Launch. This is what we did and it helped us realized our mistake sooner!
- “Everyone” or “Anyone” will never be your customer. Find that “Someone” who will buy.
- You might have a good idea but it may not be practical. Test it yourself and ask if you’re gonna use it.
- The first time you fail doesn’t mean it’s over. change and adapt based on your lessons. But do it fast. We took too long.
- Talk to your customers before writing a single line of code.
- If the problem you are solving isn’t big enough you won’t find enough customers.
If you want to read more about the story behind the site and how they learned their lessons, you can read the full post on the chefsnear.me blog or on plugged.in, a site for Indian startups, who reblogged the story. I wish Sarfaraz and his team more success with their future projects.
