Why Startups fail

Are you ready to put everything aside and start your own business? To do everything on your own, lead yourself sometimes a the couple of other people around you who we call as founders, who are together with you, and to work a multi role. From CEO to HR, Finance, Event Handling, Client handling, project hunting, even coding testing, marketing and also sweeping and cleaning might also appear in the implicit job description.

Start up is not easy at all…. The risk involved in it, you might not even able to think while you have not been one of them. I like to organize in point form why I think as, why startups fail. These are the main points I felt from experience of doing a start up with some of my friends few years back.

1.  Commitment
There is a famous saying that “Doing a startup is not a part time thing”, as a person who had experienced it as a person who had been watching the start up becoming a failure. The founders need to be committed, only the desire wont work when it comes to work, because no one will pay you if you didn’t play your part properly like in a conventional organization

2.  Priorities
From a start up owner/ founder ask what is your priority? If they didn’t emphasize that it is the company that they are building from the scratch, trust me it will not go a long way. For a person whose 1st priority is the day Job, charity work or even family or love life, I’m warning you you need to step back and think! What am I doing and what should I do. It’s not about changing the priorities in the list but doing everything you can for the start up and then taking other things into account.

3.  Friendship
This is from my practical experience, the bond you started the startup can backfire you sometimes, Choosing the correct partners will be another topic to discuss, what I’m meaning here is once a set of friends came into a partnership, agreed on certain conditions and formed a company, you should be able to clearly distinguish your responsibilities towards the company, in other words your dream and personal relationships in here what I mean is friendship. You cannot forgive your friends for doing less work in the name of friendship, always need to be professional even among the peer group because inside the company you are directors or the drivers of the company. Friendship will not appear public as an excuse, it will be your company avoiding certain task. So ultimately the black mark will be on the company.

4.  Comparisons
We as human beings always tend to compare. Its great if you do not but most of the time it is implicit may be the subconscious is used to it. As we tend to compare ourselves with people around us, in context of a startup company you will be among the founders. If you see someone else is giving priority to something else than the start up., you will feel like doing the same. May be next time when you stucked at work and depressed. You might put the blame on him and there will begin the storms inside the theme. We need to get compared ourselves with but for the positives. If the other is working

5.  Passion
It should be the reason you wake up to. If you feel like “Oh no I have to do all these……” then start up might not be your cup of tea. You need to have that enormous fire of passion burning you from inside. The feeling I have born to success, in order to success I must do this. Sometimes the world best people who own start ups might not have the superpowers and abilities you have, but they all had that thing “Passion”, that is hard to explain by the words. The reason you wake up every morning and reason that keeps you alive for days.

6.  Value of Time
Time means everything, not only for start ups but for everything time is so valuable since its irrecoverable. When you are a startup owner you should be efficient, never underestimate a single minute. Always need to believe what I can do in one minute, I should not waste time doing nothing at all. It might be a hello you say to another person, its networking. It will give you huge returns in future. Lot of startups fail because they always think lets do this tomorrow, you might lose a client project, client might go for another thing, another person might feel the idea and will begin to implement. Just like in hundred meter race even a thought you think in a second might be useful in future.

7.  Self Aware and Driven
Me, myself, and I. Its clear we should all be self aware, but when it comes to entrepreneurs they should be more self aware than a person with a comfortable job. Through the experience I went through, I tend to feel behind the failure of a start up this self awareness of the founders is very important. We should know what we are capable of and most importantly we should be aware of what we are not capable of. What should be done for these non capabilities is not to hide, but to gather more resources that would cover it up

8.  99% Confidence level
99% confident almost 100%, yes! agree but not in a start up. You should be 100% confident about your idea or what are you going to do next. There are enough people who will tap into that 1% of your non confident level. In a start up every outside thing is an competition you should face it with confidence, even if you are not you should show that you are confident enough. This is another thing we failed upon we had brilliant products but we had that doubt will the public accept it, no matter how perfect it is our confidence level was almost around 90% with the doubt.

9.  Believe
Try to market something you feel as a fault, next person will know it by sense. Brainstorm about bad and faults but always believe that it does good the good side of your sale. Selling will be so easy once you believe in it. With my experience if I try to sell something I believe as piece of jerk no matter how good my marketing skills are we will fail. So its necessary to believe in what you say and what you do. That was about products, yes its valid to the people too! If you carefully chose that partners you should believe in them on the other hand never break the trust of a partner communication plays a very important role here! Speak what you do and do what you speak! Others will believe in you

10.  Plan very much or Plan too little
People are generally afraid of planning, some believe planning is a waste of time we rather do some work. We came across the instance of planning too much and executing so little. And also the situation vice versa plan none and execute work. Both of this levels are very dangerous. We must know the extend we should plan for. As a team setting goals for years and months then personally have goals for each week and even each day to make it a success. We can always use standard methods of planning and also very important document the plan, share it and track it.