Some lessons from a failed startup

Monday, December 21st, 2009

Creating successful startup enterprise is a great experience, but going through a failure may be a huge experience as well – at least this is what Eric Ries states in his talk at Stanford University earlier this year.

Amongst the main lessons Eric claims he has learned during five years of building out product with $40 million investment is “Don’t be crippled by “shadow believes” rule. “Shadow believes” are believes which are universally shared inside the company but never spoked out loud, never documented or discussed, never tested against the real world.

As Erick states, major of these “shadow believes” are:

1. We know what customers want – think whether the vision that you’re following really and truly reflects the reality – the actual needs of your customers

2. We can accurately predict the future – a sheet with numbers frozen in business plan months (or years) before you’ve got first investment round and never changed after that can NOT be relied upon as true prediction of future market and company conditions. Any predictions should be questioned, criticized and reanalyzed all the time as the company develops

3. Advancing the plan is progress – advancing the plan looks like absolutely right thing to do, BUT – is this plan any good? Is it worth while to advance it? Same as knowledge of customer needs and future prediction values, development plans should also be questioned all the time and adjusted to reflect the current reality

Written by: Sergii Gorpynich

Tags: startups
Posted in Uncategorized, Web 2.0 business | 2 Comments »