Common Mistakes every Young Startup makes and How to Avoid Them

We are in the era of Unicorns and IPOs coming to the public domain almost every week, despite this, what if I tell you that almost 75% of all startups fail! This is the bleak truth, but one that you’d (as an entrepreneur) do well to meditate on.

This indicates that all the odds are stacked against you, and you might not end up being a Zuckerberg, a Brin, or a Karp. Though hard as it may be, don’t let these statistics unnerve you. These cold statistics are not intended to discourage entrepreneurs but encourage them to work smarter and harder. Stay tuned until the end to know about the common mistakes your fellow entrepreneurs make and how you can shoot your start-ups to great heights by avoiding them. 

Startups lead to failure due to multiple reasons. Some startups work on products that are not really relevant to the market; Some try to tackle way too many problems at once or don’t give enough thought to their product-market fit. Whatever your startup’s “fatal flaw” might be, you can avoid it in your venture by seeking advice from people that have the experience of growing a start-up from its early phase. Lucky for you, we’ve jotted down this piece after taking insights from the pros in order to help you avoid some of the most common game-ending mistakes committed by young startups. This will give you the complete picture of how early-stage entrepreneurs embark on the journey from an initial idea to a product with a reasonable close rate, a decent sales cycle, and glued customers. 

There are so many useful and innovative opportunities for startups that can help them grow their business faster, but not everyone is informed in regard to funding opportunities. If you’re a first-time entrepreneur trying to figure out how to get your company off the ground, start by conducting extensive research in your field. When it comes to funding, you might be surprised at the variety of options available. Accelerators to AI venture studios for SaaS assist entrepreneurs in developing the idea for a company or product while also investing funds and offering strategic direction.

Equipping your organization with an agile performance management tool is another renowned way to ensure that your start-up remains well on track to attain the desired objectives. JOP is a growth catalyst that has been helping businesses of all industries and sizes to invariably grow, specify their objectives through OKR and boost their employee experience. Having such an incredible performance management tool at your disposal, there’s no chance that your startup will experience any sort of hindrance in its growth. It enables you to see if there’s any room for error before they even pop up and hampers the functioning of your company.

Now let us take a look at the common startup mistakes made by early-stage founders:

1. Forgoing simplicity

It is momentous for the startups to understand that building a product is like packing a suitcase. It means that you plan out what you think will be needed, then remove half from it. Young startups tend to overcomplicate a lot of things such as leases, finances, and even structuring partnership agreements. This is not the place to show one’s creativity; it has to be kept simple, norms have to be followed and be transparent, so each of the employees and team is on the same page. You have to boil your idea down to one explicit thing and ensure that everyone stays religiously focused on that end objective. Make sure that you do not get distracted by the various flavors of the mouth which might lead your startup down rabbit holes and stress out everyone.

2. Not embracing agility

Many founders appear to approach their startups as they would a quest to win the Super Bowl – with extremely defined steps directing to a preconceived single, solitary end objective. This doesn’t really work when it comes to leading a startup. While it is significant to have objectives and a clear vision, in order to survive and thrive, you need to keep an open mind and embrace agility in your startup. Words such as “nimble,” “free-flowing,” and “speedy” should be the basis of how your organizations strategize and operate. An agile performance management tool will assist you in fostering an organization that works around agility. 

3. Losing focus

Whatever the height of the mountain, the only way to make it to the top is by taking one step after another. There must have been times when you would have sat on an idea for months before you tested them and found them to be just runaway successes. It’s okay; almost every other startup experiences difficulty in remaining focused. For an entrepreneur, there’s always a lot going on. They have a myriad of decisions to make, and they have to keep moving quickly. To build, operate, and grow a startup, the value of intense focus is immense. As cliche as it may sound, juggling way too many balls at once won’t lead you anywhere. You and your teams need to know what objective to focus on and why that objective is the top priority? 

4. Obsessing over funding

Tons of young startups make a blunder right at the point they regard fundraising to be a mark of success. If your business is generating revenue, you are better off not fundraising and, in doing so, retaining ownership and control of your business. And if it’s not making money yet, then perhaps there are some more significant problems to tackle before you think of starting pitching investors. When you pocket the money from investors, their business model replaces yours. At this point, the only thing that matters for your startup is to establish a viable, profitable, and growing business. Make sure that you never let ‘raising money’ replace ‘building a sustainable business’ as your business goal. 

5. Waiting too long to launch

The biggest mistake a startup can make is to wait way too long for releasing their product. It is easy to let the scope of what you’re building slip out of your hand, but most startups end up building much more than they truly need to, which is often realized only in hindsight. When startups look back at their product, they generally realize that they wasted their time since what was needed was only a small fraction of the product built by them. Instead of adding more features and delaying the launch of the product, startups could have done 10x more with the number of resources and time they wasted by waiting. 

Building startups is not easy – never was and never will be. However, things can get a bit easier if you know what mistakes can pop up and how you can adapt your organization to overcome those hurdles. The agile performance management approach is the way to go if you want your start-up to grow and thrive!