Why some startups fail — Developer Perspective
2 min readJul 7, 2019
In all this years being a digital nomad, travelling and working in many different startups who have software based as the main product, engaging with people from world wide cultures I was able learn a lot about startup culture, software engineering and how the entrepreneur mind works. So I decided to make this post to write 5 itens why some startups fail. The items below was taken from my own experience, so please feel free to comment, add and enhance the discussions about it.
- Launch an old product as new
- Launch something like uber or food delivery or tinder, without any differential, just because this models are already market validated. Terrible mistake!
- Totally ignore customers
- To spend a lot of time developing a product for personal use, with personal desires in mind, totally forgetting the customers in the developing process. When the product starts to run in the customers hand they don`t like it, bad worst, they do not even understand how to use that thing! Fail!
- No product market fit.
- To Insist in develop a product without any search of market fit, just because one of the entrepreneurs have a “divine vision” that all the world need that product. This is really bad, generates a lot of frustration, work in a project for months even years, and in the end, the software attends no one.
- Bad Marketing
- The product is beautiful, user-friendly, scalable. But the startup founders do not gave the necessary attention to marketing. So you end up with a awesome product in hands but nobody knows it. Really sad!
- Lose focus
- Think in a car share app, which you can order a pizza on it too, and use it as a tinder too, and many other things. When the startup loses the focus, you are not developing a product anymore you are creating a Frankenstein, and nobody wants a product like this, so you can image how it ends.