What is your biggest learning experience from failure?
Anisur Rahman
2 replies
Failing when the product doesn't find a market is easier to accept than the opposite, in the past, I had to experiment with a startup shut down due to the core team implosion, the hardest part was that we reached 500K, active users, with a 10% per week growth rate... I've learned 2 lessons: 1/ Co-found with like-minded people and aligned visions and interests. 2/ Failure doesn't kill you, it's just one step along your path
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Dagobert Renouf@dagorenouf
I had initially cofunded my startup with my wife, with whom the work relationship is very easy (complementary skills, same work ethic, get along superbly well). Then after a while we brought in a third person to help with marketing. He had a very good energy, but didn't really share the same mindset or ambition as we did. Yet he tried and was very positive, so we thought we could make it work, and chose to only look at the bright side.
But after more than a year, when our product still wasn't finding success, he started to get really anxious. Everything became a debate with him, and he was overwhelmed with doubt and fear. All of the little incompatibilities from earlier got back to the surface, and it quickly deteriorated, to the point where it put the company in danger. Eventually we had to "fire" him, and the process was very costly emotionally and financially. Not even accounting for all the wasted time. It almost killed the startup.
What I learned from this is that picking a cofounder is incredibly hard. The reason is that you can't really know how a person will react under stress before it happens (and stress WILL happen in your startup). I'm lucky that I could choose my wife to work on it, because we already had a working relationship. But I would advice anyone against getting a cofounder except if they absolutely need to or if they have a prior history of good collaboration with that person.
Hope it can help someone out there :)
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