5 reasons I FAILED at building a startup!

Ego

I think that one of the reasons my project Motionbox failed was because of my Ego. During the past year I thought I knew more than I actually do and I thought I could do most things alone.

Lesson: Shut your ego up and rewire your brain to listen to experts who have been to the promised land while maintaining your intuition.

Fear

Also known as not getting out of the comfort zone. I have had fear of failure that paralyzed me from producing the results I wanted. In addition to that I also would avoid the pain of failure by focusing on the product and on coding.

Lesson: Try to push yourself to do one thing each day you know you should do but is scary. Make it easy by writing it down and taking immediate action.

Perfection

This can play into the first two, but getting hung up on things needing to be done a certain way or the product won't sell. This was insecurity and a protection mechanism to avoid pain of people not liking my work. This caused me to work months longer than I should have, which in those months I could have been focused on marketing.

Lesson: Validate things faster and have people test broken things even if it may hurt your feelings. There is so such thing as perfection. Even when you think you have everything right I guarantee things will still be broken regardless.

Lack of Criticism

I was too proud of my work and too confident. I should have been more self critical about our revenue numbers earlier. This is a hard one, but I do believe some self criticism is important to push you in the right direction towards being a winner.

Lesson: Without torturing yourself be more self accountable and disciplined. Call yourself out for your shortcomings and work towards figuring out how to hit your primary objective -- which in most cases is revenue or users when it comes to SaaS, and mostly revenue for us.

Lack of Preparation

Call this what you want, but I don't think I was prepared. Too much drinking and too much dreaming in my off time. I should have been more consistent with watching startup material, asking for advice, taking notes, and strategizing on Saturdays instead of drinking and having fun. Waking up late and not running weekly meetings in a consistent manner with the team hurt us. Also not spending time doing due diligence in the hiring process hurt us tremendously.

Lesson: Prepare to win, avoid temptations to drink and indulge in porn, winners must be sharp as an axe. Allocate time to prepare yourself mentally and prepare your actions/team for winning.

Final Word

It sucks failing, but I think it's part of the game. If I fail and fail again, then I think I will still be satisfied with my life in that I tried my best.

Building https://motionbox.io has given me so much experience that moving forward I am much more solid as a founder and each day my chances of success increase as long as I keep going. I need to heal my mind and heart then get back into the ring of fire much more hardened.

Also more importantly I need to learn from my mistakes, write things down and get back to winning. It's a long journey and I wont give up, only make adjustments. The biggest thing I must achieve in the next 6 months is finding product market fit and I will be documenting it.

Currently you can find me on Twitter sharing how I am going about finding PMF, one of those strategies is kind of meta, I am responding to accounts I respect using the Motionbox Twitter bot that turns Tweets into videos dynamically https://twitter.com/michaelaubry/status/1458207031249158151

P.S It feels cathartic to admit failure, because you're not attached to false success anymore i.e raising money, fake love, product accomplishment. You feel like what matters becomes clear and that for us is revenue, no distractions.

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