4 mistakes to kill a startup launched by a first-time founder
She made these mistakes that almost ruined her. But pivoted and launched a successful SaaS with hundreds of users on the waiting list. Here’s her story.
Imagine you’re about to arrange a meeting for a bunch of your school friends. Going to a restaurant where everyone can enjoy their favorite food sounds like a bulletproof plan. But what restaurant should it be? Matthew likes Chinese. But Laura is allergic to oyster sauce. Dan is fine with pizza. But you can’t stand Italian after being on an Italian takeaway diet all the way through the lockdown…Hell, it’s so-ooo complicated to match all tastes and no-goes, and map it on the available local options on top of that! Sounds like a perfect startup idea!
That’s exactly what Liz Heinberg thought (but for the lockdown part) when she felt a nudge to take a leap and start her own business, as she always had an aspiration for. Everyone she talked to about this “tastes and restaurants matching app” idea was absolutely thrilled.
— Go for it! You’ve nailed it all! I will definitely use something like this because — gosh — it’s such a headache to figure out where to go! — a standard reaction she received.
Being encouraged by everyone she knew, Liz, a marketing and branding expert, who always felt she was up to something more than 5/2 office hours, hesitated no more. She made a leap to begin a brilliant and adventurous journey as a startup founder…To lose all her savings, learn a couple of useful lessons, and launch another startup that already has an impressive waiting list of paying customers.
The lessons learned
– I made every possible mistake a first-time founder can make, — admits Liz. Here’s what she’s learned.
Mistake #1. If you are building a tech startup being a non-techie founder, don’t hire a tech developer
An agency, a freelancer, or whoever is going to do the actual coding. Find a tech co-founder, learn how to code, or use no-code tools. When Liz started her first tech business (2016), no-code tools were almost…
