I was recently asked, "What did your first startup teach you?". It prompted me to think again about it and I wanted to share my experience in condensed form to help any wannabe Entrepreneur in his preparation for this adventure. And I distilled the lessons from my experience to these three points as an answer.
My first startup failure taught me 3 key lessons below:
- ME AND MY BUSINESS : First things first - know your strengths and weaknesses. Map it to your start-up needs to be successful. Think about how you fill the gaps.
- MY PRODUCT AND ITS BUSINESS : Apply GOOB (Get out of the building) principle to do real market research for product-market fitness. If you learn that the product market fitness looks frail, you are saving yourself from a ton of stress to say the least. Otherwise, learn what it takes for a product to click and plan for things accordingly.
- ME, MY PRODUCT AND MY COMPANY: Having learnt the personal and product gaps, it then becomes pertinent to decide how you complement those by establishing a company and what will this establishment demand. Do you have the resources to feed the establishment and until what point?