What's the biggest mistake you've made as a founder?

being once a co-founder in digital agency, I've made a mistake of hiring first, scaling up later. You should scale up the team after you've scaled up the monthly revenue, not backwards — otherwise, you will get too many expenses with low income at the very beginning and this is a risk of burying a good concept (that's what practically happened then)

Being to naive 😅

Not backing yourself. Getting better at this every day.

- Scaling too soon... - Not taking enough time for customer development - Not listening to mentors' advice

Didnt have a waiting list for launch.

Not taking the time to talk to more customers. We built a B to C platform but we made the product keeping us (three co-founder and some employees) in mind. We did not take the time to speak with our super subscribers (people who benefit a lot more from the product than us) which gave us a low retention rate. Retention is everything while starting out!

With our current product, we would have put more effort into building a community before building the product itself.

I founded a startup that grew to nearly $50M/year but was ultimately sold in liquidation. So many things look like mistakes in hindsight. One recurring mistake I think back on - we had more than one very credible chance to merge with strategic partners along our ten year path. Each time we were the ones that called it off. We thought we could win alone. I didn’t appreciate the value of scale and what more access to talent and capital could have meant over time. Judgment calls and bets end up looking like mistakes when they don’t pan out. The mistake wasn’t in making a call. You have to make bets, and sometimes really big ones. The mistake was a level of overconfidence that kept us from being intellectually honest when we were presented with major alternatives.

Sourcing out our MVP and not doing it in-house which cost us a lot of money and headache. Also, not doing enough research about the partner/advisor we originally teamed with to help us (ended up giving up 15% company share to him while all he did was repeat the same thing over and over without taking one single action to help us).

The co-founder problem....indirectly became a solo founder with no mentor....mayday!