Maybe not the biggest, but now that I have your attention, today I thought of two mistakes that embryonic companies make.
JUST DO IT
I think one of the biggest startups make is stalling in the initial stages of the idea development stage. When things are very embryonic, you have to make a decision: wait for perfection or roll something out, no matter how trivial.
Allow me to backtrack: this week we moved. The new place is amazing. We doubled office space and pay the same rent because the square footage is far more reasonable. We moved from a very centralized, uber-hip area to the next up and coming hip area.
Anyway, I didn’t get a chance to clean much in terms of getting rid of paperwork, so today I went into the office and see what needed to be thrown out.
I came across a number of business plans for new companies. Basically, people sending me their business plans to review, help get money, find people, refine strategy etc. I must have had about 25 business plan, most of which were in the Internet consumer space, with a few in far-flung sectors as biotech and retail.
And guess what, of the 25 business plans, only five of the ideas were up and running. The remaining 20 were non-existent. I don’t know what percentage of companies were launched and never took off, but my gut says that most of the companies never took off for one reason or another.
Now, I’m the first person to realize that not everyone has the money, time, technical wherewithal to launch a company without financing, people, etc., but nowadays, there are plenty of ideas, products, applications, companies you can launch by bootstrapping, no?
People criticize me for reaching too high, wanting to do too many things at once, they’re crazy. The bottom line is that focus is relative, so long as everything you do helps one another, you are going in the right direction. Some people spend years dreaming big but fail to lift off.
It’s a shame. That’s one mistake.
SHARE THE PIE
Granted, one of the mistakes entrepreneurs make is dole out equity right and left to people who don’t add anything, won’t contribute much and can lead to headaches down the road. Having worked with snakes and rats myself, I can tell you that you are better off not getting in bed with people that give you a bad vibe… but assuming you won’t have the misfortune of encountering such petty losers, the second mistake some entrepreneurs make is not sharing their vision - and proverbial pie - when they meet someone that can really help.
Of those 25 business plans, I can easily think of 5, 10, 15, even 20 ideas where the entrepreneur could have seen his dream take off with the right partner. But, for whatever reason, they held out and never partnered up. That’s a bloody shame.
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