Start a Company
Why going all-in too soon might kill your startup idea
There’s one thing that will kill your startup dream, guaranteed.
And yet, it’s surprisingly easy to avoid.
Going “all-in” too soon will almost certainly kill your startup.
If you want to stop that from happening, avoid these 9 scenarios:
…
- Quitting your day job before you’re confident you have a repeatable way to win customers.
- Drawing salaries before you’ve validated at least one income stream.
- Bringing in cofounders with no founder equity vesting schedule.
- Hiring team members before you understand the skills your startup needs, which you lack yourself.
- Building a product before you’ve understood the problem from the mouths of the very people who are going to pay you for it.
- Hiring a sales person before you can sell yourself.
- Raising money with terms that hurt you when things don’t go perfectly. (They won’t, and you’ll end up resenting the startup you used to love.)
- Raising capital from VCs before you’re gaining more customers organically than you’re losing through churn (i.e. found product-market fit).
- Working without a break, giving no regard to your own mental health and capacity for burnout.
I realise it’s possible to do these things and still build a successful business. I’m not saying it isn’t. But the best way to avoid failure is not to go all-in, but to iterate, learn, adjust and grow incrementally without putting undue financial and other types of pressure on your business, your team or yourself. Is it not?
There must be dozens more things to add to this list. What did I miss?
