4 ms·

Tangential, but: > I don’t mean sticking with a failed idea for too long. That is a mistake I see a lot of entrepreneurs make in the Seed and Series A stages.

by Mahn 11y ago

Tangential, but: > I don’t mean sticking with a failed idea for too long. That is a mistake I see a lot of entrepreneurs make in the Seed and Series A stages. That does nobody any good. How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? Because I feel assessing this is harder than he makes it sound. If you are building it, unless it's a complete and utter catastrophe that attracts no users and makes no revenue, there's always room to improve it even if you are still living off ramen.

andreasklinger 11y ago
#1 startup advice i found to be true: "Be successful then you were right"
Alex3917 11y ago
> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? The same way you know if a clinical trial in unsuccessful. You set milestones in advance, and if you don't meet those milestones then you've failed.
brlewis 11y ago
I agree it's a tricky question, but there are often clues. Users complaining a lot is a clue the idea hasn't failed yet; you're making something they want, but it needs improvement. Users silently leaving is a clue the idea failed.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
wtvanhest 11y ago
I wrote a response to this because I recently shut down my company, but when I was finished I realized that none of the advice was actionable, and I didn't know of a good framework for this. I visited a lot of coworking spaces and met people working on things that had been doing so for years with no traction. Some of the people clearly didn't what problem they are trying to solve. Some really solid advice or a framework for when to know your business is toast would be an anti-sv culture thing, but could be extremely useful for helping people get their life back on track.
- hayksaakian 11y ago
  Here is a simple but opinionated answer: If you are not growing by C% every month, you're a "dead" startup. Now, do you want to pivot to being a small business, or traditional enterprise? Are you spending VC money that demands results? Is your business funding your own lifestyle? Answer those questions and you know what to do next.
dahart 11y ago
> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? Damn good question, and I don't think there's an easy answer. If you listen to almost any successful founders' stories, you'll hear about struggles and 'failures' that they had to work through. A lot of them can talk about how if they hadn't changed something, or if some event or realization hadn't happened, that failure was imminent. Some of them talk about how they did fail, sometimes more than once, then tried something else and succeeded. Unless you learn through trying that the idea really truly can't work and there's no market whatsoever (which I'd speculate is rare), it's probably up to you to determine what success and failure actually mean, how to measure them, and what to do when they happen. If you only have a strictly limited time or money budget, then not succeeding within the window is a type of failure, and maybe what most people mean by failure. But that doesn't mean the idea won't ever succeed, it just means it didn't succeed fast enough for your budget. I'm guessing this is the functional definition of failure for most people. Now the question is why, because it could have been for any number of reasons, market fit, skills, team, execution, timing, anything. This is why the trend in startup thinking is to perform activities that seek to answer questions about your business hypothesis, and find out why you're failing, scientifically, before you fail. If you can live on ramen forever, and your idea doesn't cost much money to implement, and it makes you happy to keep trying, you might not ever need to declare a failure, you could indeed keep improving it.

by Mahn 11y ago

andreasklinger 11y ago

#1 startup advice i found to be true: "Be successful then you were right"

Alex3917 11y ago

> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? The same way you know if a clinical trial in unsuccessful. You set milestones in advance, and if you don't meet those milestones then you've failed.

brlewis 11y ago

I agree it's a tricky question, but there are often clues. Users complaining a lot is a clue the idea hasn't failed yet; you're making something they want, but it needs improvement. Users silently leaving is a clue the idea failed.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

wtvanhest 11y ago

I wrote a response to this because I recently shut down my company, but when I was finished I realized that none of the advice was actionable, and I didn't know of a good framework for this. I visited a lot of coworking spaces and met people working on things that had been doing so for years with no traction. Some of the people clearly didn't what problem they are trying to solve. Some really solid advice or a framework for when to know your business is toast would be an anti-sv culture thing, but could be extremely useful for helping people get their life back on track.

hayksaakian 11y ago
Here is a simple but opinionated answer: If you are not growing by C% every month, you're a "dead" startup. Now, do you want to pivot to being a small business, or traditional enterprise? Are you spending VC money that demands results? Is your business funding your own lifestyle? Answer those questions and you know what to do next.

dahart 11y ago

> How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? Damn good question, and I don't think there's an easy answer. If you listen to almost any successful founders' stories, you'll hear about struggles and 'failures' that they had to work through. A lot of them can talk about how if they hadn't changed something, or if some event or realization hadn't happened, that failure was imminent. Some of them talk about how they did fail, sometimes more than once, then tried something else and succeeded. Unless you learn through trying that the idea really truly can't work and there's no market whatsoever (which I'd speculate is rare), it's probably up to you to determine what success and failure actually mean, how to measure them, and what to do when they happen. If you only have a strictly limited time or money budget, then not succeeding within the window is a type of failure, and maybe what most people mean by failure. But that doesn't mean the idea won't ever succeed, it just means it didn't succeed fast enough for your budget. I'm guessing this is the functional definition of failure for most people. Now the question is why, because it could have been for any number of reasons, market fit, skills, team, execution, timing, anything. This is why the trend in startup thinking is to perform activities that seek to answer questions about your business hypothesis, and find out why you're failing, scientifically, before you fail. If you can live on ramen forever, and your idea doesn't cost much money to implement, and it makes you happy to keep trying, you might not ever need to declare a failure, you could indeed keep improving it.