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@ BITCOINSAFARITZ
2025-04-22 23:01:51
5 common mistakes by first-time startup founders
There is no business without mistakes. Especially if this is your first attempt. You feel free to make decisions, but you don't have enough experience yet not to fail.
Undoubtedly, learning from your mistakes is effective. But you can try to prevent them by studying the experience of your colleagues. Here are the most common ones:
🤦♂️ Hiring full-time employees before product-market-fit. Getting to product-market-fit is the only thing that matters in the early years of your company. Simply put, do you have something that people really love.
Until this point, you will be frantically trying many ideas, sometimes weekly. During this time anyone other than a co-founder will soon get frustrated by the changes of direction and eventually wonder if the compensation they are giving up on elsewhere is worth it.
🤦♂️ Deprioritizing offshore talent. Saving money is crucial in the early days. The biggest expense is labor and given the quality of talent around the world, and tools to collaborate with them, hiring offshore is the best way to save money early on.
Try looking for employees from lower-affluence countries or regions rather than from world centers and big cities. So you can pay less and get the same results.
🤦♂️ Holding on to the first idea far too long. Your first idea is very likely going to fail. This may seem like a gross generalization, especially since you probably just quit a job to launch your startup based on an idea you think is very good.
But success with startups usually comes from insights that no one else has. And they are seldom found in a survey but rather learned through failure. So the key to success is to iterate fast through ideas and get those insights quickly.
🤦♂️ Building a bigger MVP than necessary. Most founders have a grand vision for the solution to a thorny problem. They could create a complete product before finding out people wouldn’t use it.
Developing a mobile app or website needs a lot of resources. Just getting reliable login/ authentication, having useful onboarding, ensuring a responsive layout, etc takes a ton of time and you haven’t even got a feature yet.
Instead, conduct at least a fake-door test: make a landing page with no-code tools, describe your offer, and run ads on it. The number of clicks will show you if it makes sense to work on the idea further.
🤦♂️ Not having a marketing co-founder. The number one thing investors look for in a startup is a high growth, typically 10% month-over-month or more. That’s because it’s an easy signal for product-market-fit and a business that scales.
But getting to high growth is very difficult and requires constant experimentation with new marketing channels and strategies. A marketing co-founder is essential so that he/ she focuses on growth every day and is not distracted by other things.