The Pitfalls of Startups

By Rudy Rupak

Bad partnerships• You want to get

money from whoever you can, but that could come back to haunt you if your investor doesn’t share your vision and decides to exert their influence

Lacking flexibility

• A lack of flexibility could lead to dangerous tunnel vision!

• Startups have crash and burn because their founders are more interested in what they want than what their customers want.

Not identifying your customer persona

• Create an effective marketing plan to identifies a group of people with the biggest need for your product or service!

• Stay away from the “ideal customer persona” that prevents you from identifying this group

The wrong location

• You might want to launch in a cheaper location to save money!

• But you often get what you pay for, and attracting the best talent is hard when you’re asking them to move somewhere boring or dangerous

Not going into debt

• Going into debt is all part of launching and growing your startup!

• Get a good line of credit and a business loan, which will allow you to purchase cover yourself until you can make a profit

Too much equity• Giving away too much

equity can cause problems!

• If your equity is spread out over multiple investors who can’t agree about what needs to be done that could lead to chaos!

• You may also find yourself with a startup over which you have very little control

Cronyism

• Being able to make lots of money with your friends is a nice fantasy, but hardly reality !

• Navigating dispute when dealing with your friends is challenging when you need to define roles and responsibilities

Not enough investment

funding• Startups need

to acquire enough funding to tackle any potential roadblocks