Converting and ideas to product a humongous tasks and need lot many soft skills, sacrifice and courage in addition to hard core technical skills. There are many Startups and entrepreneurs failed to reach at pinnacle of their work just because somewhere in between inception and implementation, they lost faith in idea, product or themselves and shelves the whole plan along with great opportunity to make something valuable to society.
The current stats suggest that only 5% Startups do survive in their third year and out of those only 2% become profitable in fifth year. However, it is very difficult to digest that out 100 only 2 ideas were worthy enough to survive!
After talking to some seasonal entrepreneurs and looking existing startup data, we have compiled a list of factors those might contribute into ultimate failure during startups lifecycle.
1. Someone will nick your idea
Never scare in revealing your ideas to friends, family, colleagues, VCs, Meet up group or any potential investors. The notion of someone can nick your idea is largely false as converting idea to real products needs lot more than just writing something on piece of paper or verbally discussing it.
Takeaway: Let people dissect up your idea at early as possible as their critique can help you to fill up gaps in your thinking and build a real product that can be monetised
2. Not riding against latest fads
Entrepreneurship is all about riding against the tide, if current trends suggest to go right, you shouldn’t hesitate to go left if you strongly believe that it works in your favour. The gist is if you will try to develop the product by following recent trends, you will more likely to fall, as many Startups try to ride on the popularity of Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Twitter and ended up creating similar kind of social media platform and subsequently died.
Takeaway: Create a product that solves problem or filling any gap not just follow existing successful products targeting niche market in hope that you will also become part of history.
3. Giving yourself fix time frame for positive cash flow
Many budding entrepreneurs gave themselves specific time period when start ventures. However in realty it is other way round i.e. in many cases it is almost 1000th day of your start up that company goes in positive cash flow with the exception of few companies.
In addition to, the Entrepreneur also stops because they are running out of cash or failed to evolve their product to cop up with market changes but these issues can be offset if planned beforehand! Such as don’t scare to work at Tesco Till or as Bar Tender or take part time consulting work if that can pay your bills and keep you going with product development.
Takeaway: Keep going until your product is monetised and don’t set a time period as that might hinder you eventually become successful.
