Top 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups

Paul Graham has a post, of the same title, that lists some great advice to new entrepreneurs trying to beat down the pessimists.  I highly recommend reading it if you are just starting out, related to someone starting out, or involved with someone starting a company.

For now, I’ll simply list out those 18 things:

1. Single Founder
2. Bad Location
3. Marginal Niche
4. Derivative Idea
5. Obstinacy
6. Hiring Bad Programmers
7. Choosing the Wrong Platform
8. Slowness in Launching
9. Launching Too Early
10. Having No Specific User In Mind
11. Raising Too Little Money
12. Spending Too Much
13. Raising Too Much Money
14. Poor Investor Management
15. Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
16. Not Wanting To Get Your Hands Dirty
17. Fights Between Founders
18. A Half-Hearted Effort

As someone who’s always been in a startup and that’s involved in more than I probably should be right now, I definitely can relate.  How about you?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Startup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.