Raising funding too early. This was educationally productive for 2 [opposite] reasons. 1) We knew far less than their average investment, which led to us exper

Raising funding too early. This was educationally productive for 2 [opposite] reasons. 1) We knew far less than their average investment, which led to us experiencing more and faster improvement from the same help (while remaining worse than experienced founders, I would imagine). 2) We really weren't ready for the momentum funding put behind us. We had a business model that could support the founding team (we had broken even bootstrapping for the past year) but with the money comes the compulsion to hire and so on. It also put our focus on sales and revenue instead of learning, which caused some short term optimisation (eg. "Let's polish this product we suspect has no future so we can sell it now"). So raising that round was a mistake in terms of that particular business, but it taught me things that are hard to learn without taking investment and, more importantly, convinced me that startups really, truly, honestly do have distinct stages of growth that you can't force your way through.