Tuesday, May 31, 2011

7 Signs of Failure for Internet Startups

Let’s see how well with my Internet Startup (malaysiamostwanted.com) fair based on sgentreprenuer’s Mapping The Startup Genome: The 7 Signs Of Failure

  1. Not working full time - I am 80% fulltime (up from 50%) at the moment. PASS.
  2. Solo Founder or 4+ Founders – I am a solo founder still looking for a business-savy partner with Internet Business knowledge. NUTS.
  3. Don’t have a Technical co-founder – I am a techie. PASS.
  4. Wrong Founding Team Composition for the Wrong Type of Startup – Based on the survey, I am The Automizer (Type 1): Common characteristics: self-service customer acquisition, consumer focused, product centric, fast execution, often automize a manual process. PASS. (Benchmark your startup - WARNING: the questionnaire is pretty lengthy).
  5. Don’t Pivot at All or Pivot Too Often. I won’t say pivot, but introduce new-relevant product when necessary, and abandoned less valuable products due to limited resources at hand. PASS.
  6. Don’t Listen to Customers. Not much direct feedback from users, but the user base is still growing organically (we must be doing something right, though it could be better) with some good comments. PASS.
  7. Scale Without Validating Market. I think they mean capital and burn rate, but we definitely don’t have funding for massive growth.



At times I do hope for 2 things, a business-savvy-worthy partner to help me with customer acquisition and monetization, and perhaps funding to build the team and accelerate the growth.

At the same time, I do marvel the fact that she is started with self funding (never thought I would be doing this, most of the time thinking of burning someone's else money for my own glory, hahaha) and actually sustainable with good growth and prospect. Could this be the start of the not-so-typical family owned small Internet Startups kind of thing? Or we should join the get-funded-and-grow bandwagon? I hope I am not delusional.

1 comment:

Vito Lee said...

BlackBox is doing a good job, the project is absolutely distributing like htc wildfire mobile phone across the group. The only thing to be worried about is to have a little understanding to a risky thing.