Failure presents great opportunities to learn and some might stick with you. Mine would likely be community first, failing to prioritise community building and nurturing caused my first project to dwindle
Failing when the product doesn't find a market is easier to accept than the opposite, in the past, I had to experiment with a startup shut down due to the core team implosion, the hardest part was that we reached 500K, active users, with a 10% per week growth rate... I've learned 2 lessons:
1/ Co-found with like-minded people and aligned visions and interests.
2/ Failure doesn't kill you, it's just one step along your path
For me, I had created a tech service that allowed multiple people at the same time to own a domain, but when it was visited you would be redirected to another site depending on who was leading that geographic area.
For example you could own example.com in some region and i could in another. Anyone visiting that site in your area would see your site and in my area, the site I set. We could then both advertise with this premium domain for pennies of what it costs IRL.
Cool tech, but no one wants to do that. I bit of market research wouldve probably shown me that. Dosent help my launch was during covid where ad dollars evaporated in terms to keep businesses doors open. So in a word - market research and validation before building.
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@tim_carambat cool idea tho! Could you pls reach out to me at maxvw at mit.edu I'd love to know more
Build products that you yourself need and would use.
Build in a domain that you are familiar with and have particular expertise in.
The fringes and overlaps of your area of expertise and some other domain are where the opportunities are.
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Failure is the piller of success
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is good
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Fail= First Attempt in Learn
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Firstly, I would like to throw some light on what I think is the meaning of 'failure'. Failure happens when you make a mistake and you don't learn and extract anything out of it. You choose not to look back, not to analyze and not to rearrange.
In that sense, I have always learned from my mistakes. Hence I'll tell you what my biggest mistake was.
Well, it has to be when I decided not to focus on one niche and try to cover 4-5 of them at the same time for the purpose of penetrating more market verticals.
It becomes really hectic and infeasible for the algorithm, users and your team to understand how to optimize and what to prioritize.
Hence, from what I could encapsulate, it's really really important to focus on the depth of your startup or your content. Take one niche and leverage as much as you can. Something great will happen.
That's my experience!!
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