How to fail with your business

How to fail with your business
by Bart Jellema on October 11, 2010
A while back I did a short presentation on how to most effectively drive your startup into theground. This list is a mix of things I’ve read, experience from people I’ve spoken to and a little bit of personal opinion. This post has been sitting in my draftfor a while as I was going to add more info. But here’s is just the list I used:
Team
- Single founder
- No technical team member
Idea
- Refine your businessmodel before you start
- Do in-depth market research
- Write an impressive 40-page business plan with awesome graphs, charts and projections
- Build a “nice tohave”
- Be in it for the money
- Stick to your idea no matter what
- Don’t tell anyone about your idea, they will steal it
- Don’t network, it’s a waste of yourtime
Funding
- Seek funding before you start
Development
- Outsource all development
- Don’t quit your day job
- Make it perfect, don’t launch until it is
-Spend lots of development time making sure your app is scalable before you have any traffic
- Add lots of cool features (twitter/facebook integration etc)
- Giveup when you hit a barrier
Growing
- Don’t talk to your customers until the product is finished
- Assume that when you build it, they will come
- Don’t waste timeon your hiring process, any coder will do. If they don’t work out, give them a second chance
- Don’t listen to your customers/users, you already know what theywant and need
- Don’t worry about the business model
Keep in mind… this is the perfect recipe for guaranteed FAILURE…. so you might want to try the opposite