This happened to me around 1½ years ago, and I just thought I'd post a follow-up to a very negative story here.
After this whole thing fell apart I sat down and thought about what I could have done differently, and how it could have made our chances of success better. A lot of the things that happened (break-in, heart attack, etc.) were black swans that probably can't be avoided in the future. I did learn some important lessons though.
- Make sure your co-founders are as engaged as you are. I would even go as far as to say that if you can't find someone that really believes in the idea and is willing to put some serious work behind it it's better to go it alone.
- Make sure expectations are squared off, and you don't oversell the promise of riches. Most startups fail, and your co-founders need to know this. Otherwise you'll end up with broken friendships, which is never a good thing.
- Learn to code. When I looked back I saw that if I had been able to code I would have been a much better manager and founder, and would probably have been able to do a lot of the stuff that gave us so much trouble myself. I've since become pretty proficient at PHP, MySql and CSS. And I'm learning python and javascript.
The stuff I'm working on now is coded by myself, and I'm doing it alone. Not because I don't want a co-founder, far from it, but I don't want to have a co-founder that drags the whole venture down.
> A lot of the things that happened (break-in, heart attack, etc.) were black swans that probably can't be avoided in the future.
Neither a break-in or a heart attack is a black swan—people take out insurance against both all the time. If you're working with an organization, rather than an individual contractor, they most certainly have measures in place to ensure you never feel the brunt of such an event.
When your co-founders have heart attacks and break-ins I would consider it abnormal. Sure you can insure your way out of it, but it's a constant tradeoff. A normal insurance (which we had) didn't help much since it only covered new equipment after the breakin, and didn't cover anything in the heart-attack case since we weren't working for a client with a contract. As a startup you have limited time and money and you've got to decide where to spend it. Large corporations have the luxury of being able to have all-covering insurance policies,redundancy, policies for replacing employees, well-established back-up plans, etc. Most startups don't.
The very things that make a startup cheap are also what make it vulnerable.
After this whole thing fell apart I sat down and thought about what I could have done differently, and how it could have made our chances of success better. A lot of the things that happened (break-in, heart attack, etc.) were black swans that probably can't be avoided in the future. I did learn some important lessons though.
- Make sure your co-founders are as engaged as you are. I would even go as far as to say that if you can't find someone that really believes in the idea and is willing to put some serious work behind it it's better to go it alone.
- Make sure expectations are squared off, and you don't oversell the promise of riches. Most startups fail, and your co-founders need to know this. Otherwise you'll end up with broken friendships, which is never a good thing.
- Learn to code. When I looked back I saw that if I had been able to code I would have been a much better manager and founder, and would probably have been able to do a lot of the stuff that gave us so much trouble myself. I've since become pretty proficient at PHP, MySql and CSS. And I'm learning python and javascript.
The stuff I'm working on now is coded by myself, and I'm doing it alone. Not because I don't want a co-founder, far from it, but I don't want to have a co-founder that drags the whole venture down.