Why startups fail

Ever wondered why startups fail? My startup has failed and I’ve seen a bunch of my friends startups fail. Watch out these steps so as not to fail.

☠︎︎ 1. Implement everything in-house

Cure🩹: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Before building your own component – check for third party service or open source solutions. And if later that component becomes your strong selling point – then you can double down and implement a more performant/robust solution in house.

☠︎︎ 2. Don’t use UI kit

Cure🩹: I’ve seen it at some startups – very harsch pixel perfect design reviews and no UI kit. And so for each feature you’ll need to write a UI from scratch.
Surely you want your brand to stand out. But do you think your users will mind if you use some ready-made UI kit? Users need their problem solved, not your oh-so unique shadows below buttons.

☠︎︎ 3. Build mobile app

Cure🩹: If your product can be a web application – keep it this way, don’t build a mobile app. Users hate it – downloading and managing the apps. With mobile app you will need to care about backward compatibility. And you’ll need to maintain 2 code bases – for iOS and Android. Instead go with web application, mobile first, responsive. If people like it they will find a way back to your web app.

☠︎︎ 4. Create whole suite of products

Cure🩹: Focus on solving one pain point of your user and make it good. It’s impossible to build a one stop shop. Probably some subproducts you start building will not even be released – because of priorities change. And the precious time is gone.

☠︎︎ 5. Select diverse sexy tech stack

Cure🩹: Polyglot microservices, multiple DB vendors, complex cloud infra. Don’t do that. Users don’t care about these buzzwords, they need an app simply to work.

Why do startups fail in your opinion?