List of Startup Mistakes and Lessons
Startups are a way of making the act of screwing-up into a profession. Here’s an ever-growing list of things we’ve done wrong and/or had to learn:
0. FAIL FAST! Think seriously what this means – because we didn’t and it’s been a pain. “Fail Fast”, we’ve learned, is about finding the “killer issues” with your startup in weeks, not months.
1. Not putting a timed release on the apps. 2am on New Years Day not only resulted in me spilling my sparkling wine, but also ensured a press-release nightmare.
2. Features aren’t news-worthy; stories are.
3. “Hiding Uncommon Features” and “Good UX” are NOT the same. As a non-designer and a hacker I’ve learned this the hard way – I think I can write an essay about it now!
4. Timing is everything. We saw that trickling news out did nothing to drive awareness – we learned to do things in big pushes.
5. Be patient. Sometimes releasing something is not a good idea – a good example is using all your energy to kick out something in summer when everyone’s on holiday and isn’t reading the blogs.
6. Customers don’t care about features – they care about solutions. Even though we knew this in theory, it’s taken us a long time to be able to put it in place.
7. KEEP DESIGN SIMPLE! Why? Because beautiful complex designs mean that new pages/promos take ages to complete. That has punished us time and time again.
8. Design doesn’t matter anyway. Sadly. Hype trumps design. Product trumps hype.
9. Trust your gut. Gut instinct has been evolved over millions of years to keep humans out of harm’s way, so you’d expect it to be pretty good. Perhaps there’s some science behind that, perhaps not, but either way you’ll kick yourself a lot more if you don’t trust your gut and it turns out to be right!
10. Correctly attribute quotes from the press in a way that avoids any ambiguity. If you don’t, be prepared for a very interesting afternoon (the site involved was very understanding, thankfully!)
Wanna read more about our startup experiences? Check out our Startup Notes page. Failing that, why not go to our home page to find out what exactly it is we make.
