Common mistakes of developers as first time startup founders

being technical is not enough

Being a developer can be a harm than a blessing when building your Startup. Usually, developers focus more on the product's technical part than the product itself. Another problem is building a product without talking to any customer. This article will list common mistakes developers make when starting their first Startup.

Build the product without talking to customers

Building a product is not enough. Developers love to code and build something. However, building something is not enough when starting a Startup or business. You need to build something to solve an existing problem from a real customer. It is very common to see a developer building a product that nobody asked for.

If you are building a product, and you didn't get any feedback from any customer, you should stop right there. Before adding any new line of code, go talk to your customers to validate your idea, to validate the problem you are trying to solve. Make sure this is a real problem worth solving.

I won't go into details about how to validate your idea, or problem to solve. You can use a landing page for this, like in this article A practical guide to using a Landing Page to validate your idea.

Overengineering

Your first objective when starting a Startup is to validate that your idea is worth pursuing. The most effective way of doing this is to build an MVP (Minimal Viable Product), the simplest version of your product. Reducing the scope of the initial version will make you release faster and get feedback early from your customers.

I saw a Startup using microservices for their MVP. Now they are spending a lot of time trying to simplify their architecture to move and ship faster. They spent much more money and time than they needed if they started with the simplest implementation first.

Scaling too early

Everybody is in a rush to grow faster. Conversely, you should not try to grow or scale until you reach PMF (Product Market Fit). You want to find 10/100 customers that love your product. At the start, you want to talk to every customer directly, one by one, and gather as much feedback as you can to shape your product. You don't want to grow or scale in the wrong direction.

You don't need to scale your customer success if you don't have enough customers. You can't scale your sales team if you don't have a good enough product to sell. You can't scale marketing if your onboarding is bad and you have a lot of churn.

Building more than one product/feature

Getting one product or feature right is hard enough, imagine trying to get many products and features right at the same time. There is a lot of marketing telling us that the more features a product has the better it is. However, this is not true in practice. Most customers prefer a simpler product that “works”, instead of a half-baked set of features that don't.

Instead of trying to add more and more features to solve your customer’s requirements. Prefer to focus on making your product stable, and add improvements to common workflows. Paid or good customers usually ask for product improvements rather than more features.

Adding a new feature won't make you reach PMF

Building for more than one user

Another common mistake is to try to build a very generic product for anyone. Your product can't be good for everybody. When following this approach you are going to have an average product for everybody, but not a great product for some niches.

My advice is to focus on your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). An ICP is a customer that likes/loves your product the way it is. They usually ask for improvements instead of new features. They don't complain about the pricing of your product. And the churn rate is very low.

After you dominate one niche, you can think of expanding to other niches.

Not focusing on Marketing and Sales

Your product won't sell alone. Building a great product is not enough to sell the product. The bottleneck of any Startup is the top of the sales funnel. It is the number of people that know about the Startup and the product. To get more people to know your product, you need to market your product. You need to reach your ICP customers.

Inbound and word of mouth can get your first customers, but you need a strategy for outbound marketing and sales to reach new customers.

To summarize

There are many more common mistakes that first-time founders make when building a Startup. If you know of any other common mistake, comment on this article.

I provide consulting and mentorship for early-stage Startups from before MVP to reach the PMF. If you want to avoid all these mistakes send me a message.