- Poor leadership (me). Inability to align team on a common goal (!), inability to communicate clearly about plans, etc. I learned that I'm not the leader I th

- Poor leadership (me). Inability to align team on a common goal (!), inability to communicate clearly about plans, etc. I learned that I'm not the leader I thought I was. - Canadian business. Means US B2B enterprise checks get stopped at the border for 3 weeks while they 'investigate'. Makes your last mile enterprise sale that much harder. Investors are conservative. Wanted $5-10k MRR before considering angel-level investment, no go until then. Harder to compete against Valley companies. I learned get the revenue first anyway, the days of bootstrap a free service until funding are harder and harder to come by. Revenue first. - Problem we were solving was harder than expected (barometer data to weather forecasts). Main product was going to be a weather model but we never made it that far. Data quantity, quality control and user retention were bigger problems preventing us from executing to success. This leads to running out of money. I learned that hard problems are hard. Your startup doesn't have as many advantages as it thinks it does if the incumbents can copy/do better than you with your "hard problem" solution or if you take too long to build your real MVP. - Team skills were not right to solve our problems. After company founding and initial pivots we were not left with founders and staff that could solve the problems we now had to solve. I learned to be careful starting a company with your friends. And that pivoting can have risks like a lack of skill required to complete the pivot. - Probably the final item would be despair. When things get bad there is almost no way to come back because you've lost the trust of the people who were holding up your fragile startup to begin with. I learned to know when to quit before driving things into the ground and taking your team with you. - One more item: If you can catch it before you start a startup, it's a good idea to really make sure your hobby project shouldn't just stay a hobby project. Maybe it has some organic growth and media attention - but that doesn't mean it should be a startup. I learned to keep my job and my hobby separate. I'm employed with a day job now and I can do phone weather experiments in my free time with a hobby [1], not trying to shoehorn some idea of a startup into an otherwise neat and successful hobby. [1] Labelling photos of the sky as a training dataset into machine learning classifiers for auto-labelling of weather data in photos is a hobby - not a startup: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearweather.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...