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Question answered in Quora - Why do so many startups fail?


Because it is very hard, unless you have so much passion for it, do not even try it. Building a startup is like jumping off the cliff without anything, building your wings while you are in the air and getting your wings fully done, so you can fly before hitting the ground so you won't crash onto the ground and die.

If you can build the wings before jumping off the cliff, then your chances of success are much higher, so that way you have the wings, have time to test the wings, make sure it is working, working well, may be it doesn't have to work 100% perfectly, at least you have a reasonable wing that you can rely on.

Also doing a startup because it sounds exciting is a bad reason. The good reason is you have an idea that is solving a good problem that many people have and people are willing to pay for it, so you are making people's lives better and also making money in the process.

Here is one way to do it to be successful,

1 - Join an incubator

2 - Thoroughly vet your idea - do customer validation - interview potential customers, gather metrics, will they pay for such a product? How much they would pay? etc

3 - Then build an MVP show it to customers - gather metrics - talk to atleast 100 potential customers if your idea is a consumer idea, if it is B2B talk to at least 30 potential customers

4 - Then if you have the money then invest your own money - if not work on fund raising

5 - Work on all the steps above part time

6 - Once you have some funds raised or have some traction with customers & revenue then jump full time -

So now you have your wings that are reasonably okay, you can jump off the cliff

Typically successful founders with product companies had one of these two things

1 - They worked 2 to 3 years part time, developed a reasonable 1st version of the product, won some customers, got some revenue, then went full time with it, then did fund raising and grew from there or grew from the revenue

2 - They did a Phd in a subject, where they owned some intellectual property, had issued patents - leveraged those patents, raised money & then went full time with it

Also check out my book Puga Sankara's Supply Chain Blog - that is a must read before spending Hundreds & Thousands of $$$ on your MBA or Masters Degree to get the best ROI or before starting your Entrepreneurial journey.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Puga Sankara is the co-founder of Smart Gladiator LLC. Smart Gladiator designs, builds, and delivers market-leading mobile technology consisting of Smart Gladiator Wearable Scanguns, Tablets, Mobile Tech & Apps for retailers, distributors, and 3PL service providers. So far, Smart Gladiator Wearables have been used to ship, receive, and scan more than 100 million boxes. Users love them for the lightweight, easy-to-use soft overlay keyboard, texting&video chatting ability, data collection ability etc. Puga is a supply chain technology professional with more than 17 years of experience in deploying capabilities in the logistics and supply chain domain. His prior roles involved managing complicated mission-critical programs driving revenue numbers, rolling out a multitude of capabilities involving more than a dozen systems, and managing a team of 30 to 50 personnel across multiple disciplines and departments in large corporations such as Hewlett Packard. He has deployed WMS for more than 30 distribution centers in his role as a senior manager with Manhattan Associates. He has also performed process analysis walk-throughs for more than 50 distribution centers for WMS process design and performance analysis review, optimizing processes for better productivity and visibility through the supply chain. Size of these DCs varied from 150,000 to 1.2 million SQFT. Puga Sankara has an MBA from Georgia Tech. He can be reached at puga@smartgladiator.com or visit the company at www.smartgladiator.com. Also follow him at www.pugasankara.com

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