Here is what I learned after first startup failure as a technical founder

Last year in October, I quitted my job from a shining silicon valley unicorn company. Before that, I worked for big enterprises like Google and MSFT as a self taught engineer.

After quitting, I travelled a lot and enjoyed the freedom! I thought I have enough savings to live a decent life for at least a year. So back then, I was stress-free. Finally no one managed or monitored me and good bye to all those company politics and shits. I felt like I was a bird out of cage. ;-)

After I was back from travel, I was thinking about building something on my own. As a savvy technical person, I thought this was so cool — although all the fantasy happened in my mind. In my corp job, I used to hate those loud guys who never ends their bragging about things. I thought I’m the type of person who is down-to-earth and likes to get hands dirty.

Half a year ago, I discussed some ideas with my friends, shared some updates on Reddit to collect “biased” opinions on my project, retrieve some money from my savings to spin up a server on AWS — without talking with customers. Things get started!

Fast forward to today, I felt a need to have a reflective post and shared to my audience here. I treat my audience like friends and want to share with you what’s going on with my life and startup project.

To summarize, I failed at my idea of a SaaS product after building the MVP. Here is what I learned.

Do not start with coding, validate first

As technical founders, we have a natural tendency to build. We are taught at school that getting things done is a must. Our college project is coding project — not presentation or case study project. Our work requires us to finish things fast with a high quality within certain timeline, so that you can get a promotion.

I don’t blame my old self to start from coding or building. As an introvert, I can find a peaceful mind by cultivating indifference to things outside of my room. I want to focus on my flow mode to solve technical challenges.

But this is the number one mistake I want to avoid in future. Business is a business. It’s not the toy project you build in college homework. It is not the tasks you must finish in order to get a promotion at a corp job.

Think about a business model, talk to real users even sometimes you don’t want to because of shyness. Use non-code tools or existing libraries and frameworks to build a MVP without diving too deep in technical details.

Given yourself enough time to experiment because eventually startup is a test-and-trial game. Relax and embrace failures.

Learn how to sell

Naval said “Learn to sell, learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable”. Selling is a general term here.

Selling includes talking with potential customers to learn their needs, recruiting best talents in the market, impressing your investors or perspective co-founders with a visionary blueprint to raise fund.

I used to hate selling — I hate getting “NOs” from random people. Rejection hurts my emotion and self-esteem. I thought I was smart and capable of making things happen. Why and how come I could get rejected by a random person — what an ego!!

Later I realized the more rejections you collect, the more sales you are likely to get. Selling is a “rejection game”.

The self concept of “I’m not good at selling” is very subjective. It is based on my own fearful thoughts. Many people doubt their ability to excel in a particular area, and even though it is not true, it becomes true.

Go for measurable actions, not the results - because it might take longer than you expected initially.

Start with the tiniest scope and audience

The mainstream business press celebrates entrepreneurs — such as Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Elon Musk of Tesla, and Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google — who scale their ideas into substantial-size businesses.

Great entrepreneurs’ stories are inspiring, but they can also be intimidating. It’s easy to think that if you don’t have an idea as big as Facebook and your goal is not world domination or a billion-dollar market capitalization, it’s not worth going into business at all.

• I didn’t start with the tiniest audience nor a project scope that is manageable.

• Following my corp job experience, I created staging, development, and production environment for my MVP project without 3 digit number of customers.

• I wasted time in determining if I should build database backup or security detection automation.

• I created too many test cases to cover unexpected use cases and user behavior. Sigh...

• I didn’t let my initial users feel excited or continued to drive a feedback collection flywheel.

• I built everything from scratch without reusing/borrowing some accumulated technical assets, such as open source frameworks or libraries. I thought it was cool!

These are all the learnings and mistakes I made — in a hard way.

Keep your energy stable, neither too high nor too low

I remember the days building things ten hours a day. My lower back and neck are stiff. I gained a few pounds and skipped my favorite tennis classes. This lowered my overall energy level, which was not sustainable.

Startups die when the founders run out of energy.

You have to keep going when meeting bumps. The grit and resilience come from a stable energy level. Stay away from alcohol, smoke or drugs. A temporary high will cost long-term low.

You have to keep emotional stable if the customers didn’t like your products.

You have to keep indifferent when investors turned you down or your co-founders left. Filter what they told you and let it go.

Walk around, use a standing desk, drink green tea. I always sit in front of my desk without moving around. It caused damage to my physical health without notice.

Eat some high protein and green food to keep energy high. Exercise, exercise and exercise — make it stick to your schedule and habits. Why can you make morning coffee a habit but not exercise? Here are some tactics you can use.

No matter what means you use, the goal is to keep your body, mind and soul coordinate in a harmonious way. So that you can focus on daily tasks in a long run.

Something on the brighter side

I don’t regret quitting my job to do the startup projects stuff. I learned so much more than a corp job. I need wear different hats — marketing, sales, ops, engineer, designer, product. All these things give me a bird eye view of how a business should function. If a business is like a machine, learning how to stitch these pieces together is critical, especially as a startup owner or founder.

You need to first learn what works and what doesn’t. And then you can break down and delegate tasks to others — no matter employees or outsourced contractors. Don’t run before you can walk.

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Thanks for reading to here. If you are building something and need help to build, DM me or reach me through here and see how I can help. If you liked to follow me around my latest learnings, check me on twitter

Cheers!