Introduction – the first-order problem The first-order problem for startups often is, they are not making something people want enough to pay for. As you can see from the CB Insights data, founders identify this as the most common reason for failure. Figure 1 Reasons for startups failure Notice the connection between 1 and 2: We can paraphrase that as…
Introduction During the research period for my dissertation based on startup failures, I realized there are multiple layers of failure factors associated with any given company (or, in reverse, success factors). These are: generic business problems (e.g., cash-flow) individual-level problems (e.g., personal chemistry) company type problems (e.g., lack of funding for startups) business model problems (e.g., chicken-and-egg for platforms) Only…
I’ve dedicated plenty of time for studying and coaching startups. But why do I care? Not only care, but be passionate about them, enough to say I love startups. I got to think about that, and here are the results of that quick reflection. 1. Startups are about technology Novelty, innovation, progress… call it what you want, but there is…
Introduction It is a common issue for startups applying customer development to discover many customer problems and either relating to that or to their vision include many, many features in their product development roadmap. However, as we know, it is not about the number of features but their quality, i.e. usefulness in solving the customer pain points. Why is this…
