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Startups: How to Fail With Success! Kindle Edition

by Florian Müller (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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As a founder I often find myself on the lookout for advice in order to learn from mistakes others have made, for example, so that I can try to avoid them. I’ve come to realize that there are two types of people that give me advice:

•Type A: He has never founded anything but has an awful lot of tips from books he has recently read. He intends to make practical use of them one day in his first startup (around 95% of conversation partners). The most frequent sentence in these conversations is, “You should read ‘Lean Startup’…”.

•Type B: He has already founded and implemented things; the conversation is a two-way dialog and following the conversation, both sides look forward to meeting again over a beer… (5% of conversation partners).

The here slightly exaggerated situation shows that it’s not that simple to get good and useful tips in the startup arena. Theoretical tips, often stated in the “if only” tense, (“if only you had validated earlier”) are not going to help you!

Even less helpful are run-of-the-mill tips when approaching idea-validation etc. etc. These may be tools to assist you; they will not, however, guarantee a successful startup.

But what may be helpful is trying to avoid the mistakes others have made, the mistakes with which other startups have failed. Thus you can increase the chance of success of your own startup. But if you repeat the mistakes others have made you will fail, just as we did with our last startup.

For this reason I have decided to discuss several anti-patterns from our recent failed startup, and summarize these as a kind of “anti-system-of-rules” to, so to say, convey mistakes firsthand.

Moreover, this article is written in my typical flippant writing style, so that you will not only find valuable tips, but also enjoy an entertaining reading experience.

Enjoy!