In this week’s edition, we discuss
- The deadly mistakes that will kill your startup
- The end of season 1 of the EH podcast
Let’s get to it.
💀 The deadly mistakes that will kill your startup
Author and startup design leader Michael Burnett has seen many deadly mistakes repeatedly and observed how they played out. Any one of these will slowly kill your startup, so tackle them head-on at the starting line:
- A startup fails to find product-market fit — You need to perform Discovery, Validation, and Usability research (and investors will want to see the results of this research.)
- A startup struggles to earn enough profit margin — Making a profit on one unit is useless if you can’t scale that up into the thousands or millions. Do some math, and calculate your unit economics.
- It costs too much to acquire customers — GTM is more important than the product because a great product that can’t reach its target audience will be a flop.
- A startup’s retention is low; customers leave to copycats — When you prove market fit, the competition will appear. Be ready with offensive tactics (beachhead features) and defensive moats (patents, copyright, etc.)
- A startup’s product is slow and buggy and gets overtaken — Once you know what you’ll build, establish the principles of how and why you’ll build it.
- A startup loses steam due to inconsistency with the team and brand — A brand becomes worthless if principles don’t guide consistent delivery of value and meaning to the market.
👉 Dive deeper into these mistakes: The Seven Deadly Mistakes of Startups
🎙 Podcast season 1 is a wrap!
68 episodes later, the podcast is drawing the curtains on season one. We’ve had the pleasure of hosting interviews with outstanding entrepreneurs like Medium founder Ev Williams, Netflix Co-Founder Marc Randolph and Maven founder Wes Kao to online creators like Dickie Bush and Aadit Sheth, and everyone in between.
In the season wrap-up, host Amardeep Parmar talks about what’s been happening behind the scenes, what he’s learned from interviewing so many incredible entrepreneurs and what you have to look forward to in the future.
👉 Listen here:Entrepreneur’s Handbook Season One Finale
Till next time,
Team EH
Weekly 🔥 33: The deadly mistakes that kill startups was originally published in Entrepreneur’s Handbook on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content was originally published here.
