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Learning from Mistakes: Your Startup Failure Story

10 points by grist ↗ HN
In as much detail as you are willing to provide, describe a startup failure in which you were involved - what mistakes did you make, what mistakes did the company/team make? It would also be interesting to know how long the project dragged on before it finally collapsed, or how much time was spent trying to fix it instead of a pivot or walk-away?

2 comments

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starter
Tip: Try not to make decisions about your product based on what's available or what the competition is doing. Its one mistake I've observed from two of the three startups I've spent time supporting.
dwhewitson
Sounds obvious now, but don't obsess over abstracting everything in the application ("Oh, I need to create my own authentication system with redundancy and openid support!") where it's not necessary.

I've spent countless hours fumbling over parts of code which weren't really integral to the prototype at all... such as a custom javascript library...