1. Single Founder
- The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone.
- “I can’t let my friends down.” is one of the most powerful forces in human nature.
2. Bad Location
- Benefits from location:
Standards for that industry are higher; people are more sympathetic to what you’re doing; the kind of people you want to hire want to live there; supporting industries are there; the people you run into in chance meetings are in the same business.
3. Marginal Niche
- Competition is common.
- You can only avoid competition by avoiding good ideas.
- It’s not that people think of grand ideas but decide to pursue smaller ones because they seem safer.
4. Derivative Idea
- Where did great startups get their ideas? Usually from some specific, unsolved problem the founders identified.
- Instead of starting from companies and working back to the problems they solved, look for problems and imagine the company that might solve them. What do people complain about? What do you wish there was?
5. Obstinacy
- Don’t get too attached to your original plan, because it’s probably wrong.
- The hardest thing is often discarding your old idea.
- Fortunately, there’s someone you can ask for advice: your users. If you’re thinking about turning in some new direction and your users seem excited about it, it’s probably a good bet.
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
- Have to find a good programmer to help you hire people
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
- How do you pick the right platforms? The usual way is to hire good programmers and let them choose.
- But there is a trick you could use if you’re not a programmer: visit a top computer science department and see what they use in research project
8. Slowness in Launching
- The reason you need to launch fast is that it’s only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.
- Several distinct problems manifest themselves as delays in launching: working too slowly; not truly understanding the problem; fear of having to deal with users; fear of being judged; working on too many different things; excessive perfectionism
- Fortunately you can combat all of them by the simple expedient of forcing yourself to launch something fairly quickly.
9. Launching Too Early
- The danger here is that you ruin your reputation.
- We suggest startups think about what they plan to do, identify a core that’s both (a) useful on its own and (b) something that can be incrementally expanded into the whole project, and then get that done as soon as possible.
- The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don’t expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something
10. Having No Specific User in Mind
- Find a small market first.
- You can no longer guess what will work; you have to find users and measure their responses
11. Raising Too Little Money
- We advise startups to set both low, initially: spend practically nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a solid prototype.
12. Spending Too Much
- The classic way to burn through cash is by hiring a lot of people.
- Hiring when you extremely need it.
(a) don’t do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.
13. Raising Too Much Money
- If VCs fund you, they’re not going to let you just put the money in the bank.
- Once you take a lot of money it gets harder to change direction hire more people. That will change the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better.
- Another drawback of large investments is the time they take.
14. Poor Investor Management
- A lot of our energy got drained away in disputes with investors instead of going into the product.
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
- The reason we tell founders not to worry about the business model initially is that making something people want is so much harder.
- In version 1 product, solve the core problem.
- It is irresponsible not to think about business models. It’s just ten times more irresponsible not to think about the product.
16. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
- Nearly all programmers would rather spend their time writing code and have someone else handle the messy business of extracting money from it.
- If you’re going to attract users, you’ll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some.
17. Fights Between Founders
- Most disputes are not due to the situation but the people.
- Don’t start a company with someone you dislike because they have some skill you need and you worry you won’t find anyone else. The people are the most important ingredient in a startup, so don’t compromise there.
18. A Half-Hearted Effort
- The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn’t do much of anything
- If startup failure were a disease, the CDC would be issuing bulletins warning people to avoid day jobs.
- The number of people who could have made it, if they’d quit their day job, is probably an order of magnitude larger than the number who do make it.
- Most startups fail because they don’t make something people want, and the reason most don’t is that they don’t try hard enough.
From: http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
Live In the Future 