Lots of startups get stuck
before they get to Product-Market-Fit.

What would be the reasons?

Here are some, I see on a daily basis. They are related to issues with founders or market (in no particular order):

1) Founders haven't studied or trained on basic things of startups: idea validation, market validation, customer value-proposition, team-building, product building, basic finance, and total money required to do few iterations.
A: Work for a startup for a few years and learn.
2) Founders are solving a problem that they face in their daily life at home or work and start solving for themselves before checking whether there are others who care about the same problem. After building the product, they realize the market issue.
A: Idea validation failure
3) Too headstrong and think every potential customer can't imagine the value unless they experience the product. Hence, start building the product.
A: If you are deep and know you are at the same league as in Steve Jobs, this makes sense
4) Founders talk to few friends and colleagues and start building a product. After building the product, they realize there is no high demand for the product.
A: Spend month(s) on the problem and not on the solution.
5) Founders take too long to build a product and market changes. For eg, I still see consumer desktop web pitches v/s mobile in India.
A: Cocreate the product with a set of dedicated users or customers.
6) Founders are constantly tooling their product as they are not happy with what they have built and never take the product to market.
A: Co-create the product with friendly customers. At least 5 in enterprise and a group of 100+ in the consumer category.
7) Founders pick a very small and niche market that one cannot build a good and profitable business.
A: Understand market sizing/TAM. If I have to guess, more than 50% fail here.
8) Founders pick a niche and potentially profitable market, but not venture category. Founders think they can raise and burn, but fail to raise.
A: Understanding how angels and VCs think of categories and investment. U can always do frustrated tweets saying "VCs don't get it"...
9) Founders don’t do competitive analysis to understand why their product has a better value proposition than alternative solutions in the market.
A: Very common mistake. Spend 24 hours on Google and you will find every competitor. Benchmark them before you jump on your product.
10) Founders fight among themselves and give up.
A: Most of the founding team come together based on friendship rather than competency. In addition to friendship, there should be a massive respect for competency between each other.
11) Founders identify a great market and exceptional value proposition. But, fail to recruit high-quality product/UX/engineers in building a great product. Or fail to double down on the go2market and dole away an opportunity.
A: It is a sin, in my opinion. Stupidity. Frustrating
What else? There are many other failures, but, most of it is again related to founders OR market-related. Love to hear your feedback.

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But it has the potential to be something even bigger: the Netflix of productivity.

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We believe @seqouia and @steadfast got a good deal buying into Zapier at $5B.

We value Zapier at $7B based on:

- 30-50% YoY growth over the next five years
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No-code is huge and growing, but as @edavidpeterson has written, no-code is about more than tools: it’s about a philosophy that emphasizes interoperability and customizing your software to your needs.

https://t.co/UJY6BRtXwl


.@zapier enabled interoperability by building a solution to one of the intractable problems in SaaS: APIs that don’t talk to each other.

The product took off and hit $100M ARR in just 9 years, comparable to companies that have raised 100x as much money.

https://t.co/0Thk42eRpJ


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20 years ago, I created the Danish gaming site Daily Rush with @mwittrock – inside a startup accelerator called Prey4, complete with fantastical projections of world domination 😂 – but now it's the end, after the proprietor of many years died in 2018.

Daily Rush was the culmination of years of using the web to do gaming journalism. I started Konsollen all the way back in 1995, then ran
https://t.co/zsT3ykQcVk for years in anticipation of Id's shooter, then worked at a web portal, then Daily Rush.

This was how I got into web development, project management, organizing, writing, publishing, and how I met lifelong friends. What a wonderful time. But most good things come to an end. We should all be so lucky to see something we help set in the sea brave the waves for 20 yrs!

It's awesome to see the Internet Archive snapshots from all the way back to the early months of the site. Web design anno 2000 😍


The memory lane trip on the Internet Archive goes all the way back to the precursor to Daily Rush, that https://t.co/zsT3ykQcVk site. Here's a snapshot from 1999! Complete with all the news written by yours truly 😄

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