Lessons From My Failed Startup
Two years ago, I signed on as the third partner at a company called Saaspire. At the time, I had two goals: to build a sustainable business and to learn. The business part didn't work out too well, but I did learn a quite a bit.
One of the things that made life at Saaspire interesting was that my partners and I often had differing opinions. Many times this was a good thing. For example, when working through the design of a new feature or product we would often come up with very different approaches which given time and discussion we could merge and mold into a final solution that was better than anything that we had individually come up with.
Over time however, we started to have larger and larger disagreements. Most significantly, our disagreements expanded scope from product decisions to questions of direction for the company. Eventually we decided to split up and go our separate ways. One partner left to pursue his own endeavor while my remaining partner and I continued on with the Saaspire name. All things considered, the separation went smoothly and everybody left on good terms. That being said, the whole process and the disagreements leading up to it were a huge distraction that we sunk an incredible amount of time and money into.
Lesson learned: Make sure everybody is on the same page in regard to the company’s direction as early as possible. What do I mean by direction? Are you going to bootstrap the company or try to raise funding? How ambitious of a product are you looking to build? Are you going to focus on one product or create a suite of products? Obviously you can’t know all of the answers to these right away and things will change over time, but the sooner you can work them out, the happier everybody will be. Leaving any of these questions open for too long, especially due to an internal disagreement, will only burn up resources you don’t have and distract you from building your business.
