In the same direction of reflecting on what kind of meaning we wanted from work, I frequently think about why Get Sandwich failed. We had customers, paying ones. We had repeated users, even in unusual places like Beirut (it was after the explosion too). We had corporate supporters. We weren’t the only ones who wanted the product to live.
But it’s necessary to have a version of reality that I can openly discuss before we decide to give birth to another startup. The opinions on this post are my own and may not be Min’an’s.
I like this YC video under 3 minutes explaining why startup fails. I watched it repeatedly because it’s so short, to the point and explains what I’ve felt all along.
Startups fail because the founders give up and stop working on [the startup]. The founders give up because they run out of money, or energy or both. And they run out of these things because either they had no users, or they don’t have enough users to convince investors or themselves that startup deserves more money and effort to keep it alive.
The reason why they have no users, is because, they didn’t build something people want. … The most common ways [to not build something people want] is to not talk to users, and build something they want but they don’t actually wants.
I think this is congruent to the recent failory survey that most reason why startups fail is because of “marketing problem,” i.e. the lack of product-market fit.
On Get Sandwich, we gave up for the same reason. We built the product first before having a repeatable and reliable customer channel that produced insightful feedback and direction (direct & public tracks like forums, discord, etc.). Talking to many customers has to be done several times a week, if not daily; otherwise, it’s not enough. In the past, I spent too long talking to each customer privately without validating whether others shared their needs.
After several years, I became unconvinced that what we had built was worth spending more money and effort—both highly finite resources.
I hope we’ve learned our lessons because giving up earlier is better than never. Creating a startup, something that’s innovative and scalable, is a probabilistic endeavour. 90% of startups fail because we are at the mercy of markets. It’s hard stuff.
What are your thoughts on this, and how do you recover from a failure in a less sucky way?