“ i have not failed, i have just found 10,000 ways that wont work” said Edison and rightly so.
Back in 2018, it was a time when startup was a trending topic. Like every other college student, i wanted to have my piece of cake of the huge industry. I partnered with my high school friend to open a book subscription service that would be later known as feather-box. Funnily it didn't take more than a week to ‘inaugurate’ our startup. We decided to fund it with our own savings since we had no experience in raising funds whatsoever. Long story short, the startup operated in loss and closed down 2 years later. These are the 5 lessons i learnt from my experience.
Choosing the right partner-
Just because you ‘go well’ with your roommate, doesn't means you should consider him being partner of your data science startup. Make sure that all of your team has clear idea of the niche of your startup. its a bonus if they have experience in the field. Making my high school friend partner was my biggest mistake, he had no idea about the industry and his contribution to the startup was almost nothing. All this did was to make foundation of the startup weak.
Knowing the niche-
One of the biggest reason startups fail is not because they don't effectively solve a problem, but because the problem simply doesn't exist. They think there would be a market for their product but meanwhile there isn't. My niche of book subscription simply didn't exist in my country. Even if it did, someone else was already selling the product and market was over saturated. all of this misunderstanding occurs due to lack of market research. One should be well aware of their potential customers and the scalability of their product.
Marketing-
It’s something which is easy to plan and think of when it comes to execution, marketing is a very complex matter. without a good marketing expert, spending money on ads, banners etc is just burning money. Different markets have different social platforms. Its relatively easy easy to find book readers on Instagram than on Facebook or twitter. So diversification on ad spends in this case would not simply work. It may cost some money to outsource product marketing but its always better to have your ad budget blow and have no results.
Feedback-
Whatever your startup may be about, customer is still the king. And you should always act in accordance to their needs. In my startup, we used to take all kinds of feedback from our customers but never would act on it. We had all the data about what our customers wanted but couldn't redesign our book box accordingly and let it loose still expecting to sell book boxes staying relevant in the industry. Sadly, we were kicked out and our sales dropped to never rise again.
Emergency fund-
This rule applies to all self funded startups. Always allocate an emergency fund to keep your business operations running in case your initial seed fund runs out. Our startup never had such structure and we were always pumping money into the business with no records whatsoever and operating at a loss. so it virtually had no end and bankruptcy wouldn't be possible since there was no end to this rabbit hole. Then one fine day, we both cut our pockets and closed the startup.
“Learn from the mistakes of others … You can’t live long enough to make them all yourself!” — wendell homes
