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Early-Stage Startup Collective

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1 contribution to Early-Stage Startup Collective
Great Reddit Article - "Mistakes I Wish I Hadn't Made (after building 30 startups)"
Link to Article - beginning below "I built 30 startups in 20 years. VC-backed, Bootstrapped, Apps, SaaS, B2B, B2C. Twenty mistakes I regret making: 1. Doing consumer apps. The Failure rate here is 100x of b2b rates, nearly a lottery. 2. Raising VC money. I felt like Marc Zuckerberg when we raised the first round. All journalists interviewing us. Felt like a dream. Eventually, most of these startups failed by being funded too early. 3. Hiring too early. Previously, startups took pride in large teams - a key sign of growth back then. Founders should do most of the work until PMF. Employees and contractors won't have enough love and passion for your project. 4. Ignoring SEO. None of the people in my network did SEO. We all thought it was something for late and we kept postponing it forever. 5. Ignoring content marketing. Never took blogging seriously. Big mistake. 6. Social Media Marketing. This is my biggest regret. I started using Twitter just a year ago. I have 20k followers now after putting a year into it. What if I started 20 years ago? Could I have 1M followers now? Perhaps. 7. Skipping idea validation. I'd always assume for the audience. Anticipate what they need. It almost never turned out to be true. My best projects were those I thought will fail and failed projects had my highest hopes at the start. 8. Hiring managers. I haven't yet seen any useful manager in a startup. They might be useful for corporations, but for startup, I should have hired only doers. 9. Chasing Investors. For every startup, I'd spend 40% of my time fundraising. I'd succeed in most of the cases, but at what cost? I haven't done a single outreach to investors in 2 years, but I get VCs knocking my doors because I have good traction and they search for such projects daily. 10. Hiring specialized developers.
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New comment May 3
2 likes • May 3
Point 16 has so much to unpack :-), and while it’s essential for completing tasks and ensuring accountability, the other points you mentioned regarding the importance of strategic focus are spot-on. Specifically, areas like customer validation, effective marketing, and the risks of expanding teams too rapidly are crucial considerations.
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Anu Saini
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3points to level up
@anu-saini-3488
Creative Visionary

Active 119d ago
Joined Apr 25, 2024
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