The 1. 8 Mistakes That Kill Startups. October 2. 00. 6In the Q A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I. Its equivalent to. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem. If you have a list of all the things you. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. Its easier to catch yourself doing something you shouldnt than. In a sense theres just one mistake that kills startups not making. If you make something users want, youll. And if you. dont make something users want, then youre dead, whatever else. So really this is a list of 1. Nearly all failure. Single Founder. Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by. Even companies you think of as having one founder. Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this. Whats wrong with having one founder To start with, its a vote. It probably means the founder couldnt talk any. Thats pretty. alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best. But even if the founders friends were all wrong and the company. Starting a startup. Read all the hottest movie news. Get all the latest updates on your favorite movies from new releases to timeless classics, get the scoop on Moviefone. Even if you could do all the work. The last one might be the most important. The low points in a. When you have. multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way. Each thinks I cant let. This is one of the most powerful forces in human. Bad Location. Startups prosper in some places and not others. Silicon Valley. dominates, then Boston, then Seattle, Austin, Denver, and New York. After. that theres not much. Bruce Willis goes bad in a movie that could hardly be mistaken for good, playing a corrupt police chief mixed up in a bank robbery. Immediately download the To Kill a Mockingbird summary, chapterbychapter analysis, book notes, essays, quotes, character descriptions, lesson plans, and more. You can watch this fulllength movie on YouTube. Best scenes from the movie Hard to Kill with Steven Seagal. Reuploaded with better audio. Get exclusive film and movie reviews from THR, the leading source of film reviews online. We take an honest look at the best and worst movies Hollywood has to offer. Even in New York the number of startups per. Silicon Valley. In towns. Houston and Chicago and Detroit its too small to measure. Why is the falloff so sharp Probably for the same reason it is. Whats the sixth largest fashion center in. US The sixth largest center for oil, or finance, or publishing Whatever they are theyre probably so far from the top that it would. Its an interesting question why cities. Standards are. higher people are more sympathetic to what youre doing the kind. Who knows exactly how these factors combine to boost. Silicon Valley and squish them in Detroit, but its. Hard-to-Kill-1990.jpg' alt='Hard To Kill Full Movie' title='Hard To Kill Full Movie' />E arly last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision It was finally time to kill a haji. Marginal Niche. Most of the groups that apply to Y Combinator suffer from a common. If you watch little kids playing sports, you notice that below a. When the ball comes near. GaUyml5YMpA/0.jpg' alt='Hard To Kill Full Movie' title='Hard To Kill Full Movie' />I didnt make a lot of catches. I used to close my eyes and hold my glove up more for. Choosing a marginal project is the startup equivalent of my eight. If you make anything. You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas. I think this shrinking from big problems is mostly unconscious. Its not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue. Your unconscious wont even. So the solution may be to think about. What would be a great idea for. Derivative Idea. Many of the applications we get are imitations of some existing. Thats one source of ideas, but not the best. If you. look at the origins of successful startups, few were started in. Where did they get their ideas Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified. Our startup made software for making online stores. When we started. it, there wasnt any the few sites you could order from were. We knew that if. online shopping ever took off, these sites would have to be generated. Pretty straightforward. It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you. Apple happened because Steve Wozniak wanted a computer. Google because Larry and Sergey couldnt find stuff online, Hotmail. Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith couldnt exchange email at. So instead of copying the Facebook, with some variation that the. Facebook rightly ignored, look for ideas from the other direction. Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems. Watch Friday Online Hitfix on this page. What do people complain aboutWhat do you wish there was Obstinacy. In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick to your vision. Sole Proprietor Online Putlocker. Olympic gold medal. Startups are more like science. So dont get too attached to your original plan, because its. Most successful startups end up doing something. You have to be prepared. And the hardest part of. But openness to new ideas has to be tuned just right. Switching. to a new idea every week will be equally fatal. Is there some kind. One is to ask whether the ideas. If in each new idea youre. Whereas if you keep. Fortunately theres someone you can ask for advice your users. If. youre thinking about turning in some new direction and your users. Hiring Bad Programmers. I forgot to include this in the early versions of the list. I know are programmers. This is. not a serious problem for them. They might accidentally hire someone. In a pinch they can. But when I think about what killed most of the startups in the. A lot. of those companies were started by business guys who thought the. Thats actually much harder than it. They dont even get a. In practice what happens is that the business guys choose people. Microsoft Certified Developer but who arent. Then theyre. mystified to find that their startup lumbers along like a World War. II bomber while their competitors scream past like jet fighters. This kind of startup is in the same position as a big company. So how do you pick good programmers if youre not a programmer I. I was about to say youd have to. But if you cant. Choosing the Wrong Platform. A related problem since it tends to be done by bad programmers. For example, I think a lot of. Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build. Windows. Hotmail was still running. Free. BSD for years after Microsoft bought it, presumably because. Windows couldnt handle the load. If Hotmails founders. Windows, they would have been swamped. Pay. Pal only just dodged this bullet. After they merged with X. CEO wanted to switch to Windowseven after Pay. Pal cofounder. Max Levchin showed that their software scaled only 1 as well on. Windows as Unix. Fortunately for Pay. Pal they switched CEOs instead. Platform is a vague word. It could mean an operating system, or a. It implies something that both supports and limits, like. The scary thing about platforms is that there are always some that. Windows in the 9. Java. applets were probably the most spectacular example. This was. supposed to be the new way of delivering applications. Presumably. it killed just about 1. How do you pick the right platforms The usual way is to hire good. But there is a trick you could. Slowness in Launching. Companies of all sizes have a hard time getting software done. Its. intrinsic to the medium software is always 8. It takes an. effort of will to push through this and get something released to. Startups make all kinds of excuses for delaying their launch. Most. are equivalent to the ones people use for procrastinating in everyday. Theres something that needs to happen first. Maybe. But. if the software were 1. One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually. Nothing is truly finished till its. The other reason you need to launch is that its only by. Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching. Fortunately you. can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself. Launching Too Early. Launching too slowly has probably killed a hundred times more. The danger here is that you ruin your reputation. You launch. something, the early adopters try it out, and if its no good they. So whats the minimum you need to launch We suggest startups think. This is the same approach I and many other programmers use for. Think about the overall goal, then start by. If. its a subset, youll have to write it anyway, so in the worst case. But more likely youll find that. The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They. dont expect a newly launched product to do everything it just has. Having No Specific User in Mind. You cant build things users like without understanding them. I. mentioned earlier that the most successful startups seem to have.