Ask HN: Habits of Highly Unsuccessful Founders (Anti-Patterns)

21 points by jayliew 5 years ago

There's a lot of prescriptive successful founder patterns, but not a lot written about anti-patterns.

While doubling down on your strengths is good, in certain cases, working on addressing severe deficiencies in skills critical to founding a business (getting it to at least "baseline competent") may yield a better overall results for the founder per pound of effort + time.

Please be specific and constructive. The more actionable the anti-pattern "in reverse" is, the better.

I'll start off with some examples:

- When soliciting for feedback, only hearing what you want to hear

- Not knowing how to engage with people to pitch and sell

- Thinking that if you build, they will come

- Worrying about things unlikely to be of real concern at the phase you are in. E.g. worrying about patenting an idea for a marketplace / network-effect startup when you haven't done anything at all to test if it even has legs

helph67 5 years ago

- Ignoring the power of advertising - Not being aware how your client/prospects `see' your business/products - Lacking appropriate experience, particularly employees

In television programs like "Restaurant Impossible" you have the opportunity to see the same issues being repeated by multiple business owners.

CM30 5 years ago

Well, from what I've seen some of the following are common patterns too (with almost any failure story):

- Thinking your idea is some million dollar unique concept that others are desperate to 'steal', and only talking to people if they sign an NDA.

- Not knowing the audience your projects/products/companies/services are for, and making someone no one actually wants or needs.

- Copying other companies without having any real way to differentiate your product. This can in theory work if you can do things for super cheap (I think Rocket Internet or someone like that in Germany does it), but most copycats tend to fail.

- Expecting others to do all the work while being the 'ideas guy'.

- Relying too much on people who you don't know, who don't live nearby, who aren't being paid and have no loyalty to you.

- Getting stuck in an endless cycle of feature/scope creep, and not putting out a MVP. This is probably my own biggest issue, for pretty much everything under the sun.

- Launching at the wrong time, especially if your market has moved on. Actually, these last two points kinda go hand in hand really, you spend so long working on an unproven idea with no hurry to get anything done that by the time it does get released your 'audience' has long since left and moved onto other things, and the rest of the world has left you behind in terms of tech, aesthetics, design, etc.

claudiulodro 5 years ago

> Thinking that if you build, they will come

I have heard this a ton and have fallen prey to this trap before on multiple occasions. I have a question about this, and maybe people reading this have some insight. :)

I understand that when trying to build some brand new technology with no proven market, it's a wise decision to first determine whether there is potential demand for that technology. What about when building a "clone" of an existing, successful product? What's the process look like there? Is it more marketing and less finding product-market fit?

Copenjin 5 years ago

The sad thing about the 4 things you listed is that the person in question is rarely conscious of employing those "anti-patterns". And most of the times convincing them of what they are doing takes a lot of effort.

If I'd had to choose and original sin/anti-pattern I'd say not having a growth mindset and a tolerance for solving the multitude of problems they'll find along the way without succumbing to the emotional component of problems (being able to approach problems in a detached way).

  • jayliew 5 years ago

    > The sad thing about the 4 things you listed is that the person in question is rarely conscious of employing those "anti-patterns"

    This is like with talk therapy. You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped, whether they're unaware of their problems, or are aware but are in denial.

    This list is more for people who do want to help themselves.

outtolunch 5 years ago
 

  - prioritizing solutions over customer problems

  - "what -> how -> why" instead of "why -> how -> what"

  - not taking risks nor responsibility for failure

  - not taking advice from other people
duxup 5 years ago

I feel like example list is more so from the perspective of folks who don't like what the founder is doing.

Someone who "only hearing" may have heard someone else, but felt it wasn't correct and moved on.

Trias11 5 years ago

Taking pride in building solutions that are looking for a problems to solve.