Guide to avoid the common start-up mistakes

Nine out of ten startups will fail. This is a hard and bleak truth. It is more often than not due to the mistakes that they make along their entrepreneur journey. Here are 3 startup mistakes I’ll never make again, so should you!

1. Deciding on wrong partners or co-founders 

Let’s just think of startup as a marriage between the founders. As a couple, you have to make many decisions together and these decisions ultimately make or break your company. In the worse case scenario, a divorce or breakups can get real ugly if you don’t do your homework in advance.

Before you decide on your partners do consider these pointers:

a. Does he/she have complementary skills?

b. How are the equity split among the partners?

c. Is your relationship entirely professional? Can you spend 15 hours a day with this person for the next few years?

2.  Launching Too Early

Time is everything when it comes to launching your products or services. The danger of launching too early is that you ruin your reputation. You launch something, the early adopters try it out, and if it’s no good they may never come back.

Consider launching your product or service in phases. This is especially important for application or software start-ups as there are simply too many possible areas that can go wrong when programming them. By having a test beta, you can fix the glitches or technical fault in between without ruining customer’s perception towards your innovation.

The early adopters you need to impress are fairly tolerant. They don’t expect a newly launched product to do everything; it just has to do something.

3. Ignoring Legal Agreement

You got a kick-ass partner and your product is working fine and all ready to launch, what else can go wrong? Legal agreement is an area which many entrepreneurs tend to overlook.

Online agreements such Terms of Use and the Privacy Policy govern the relationship between you and your customers and those accessing your website. It is often noticed that startups do not invest time in drafting them and prefer copy pasting them from other websites. This may have severe consequences and hence is not advisable.

The online agreements should be carefully drafted since absence of key provisions may lead to imposition of substantial liabilities on you.  They can be either in the form of browse wrap agreements, click wrap or shrink-wrap agreements.

Another legal agreement is the intellectual property or copy right agreement. This is especially important if you are in the business of content creation. Do craft out the terms and conditions carefully and avoid copying and paste standard legal templates as what works for others might not work for your business.

These are the 3 startup mistakes I’ll never make again. Remember to not make them too!