A builder watched 200 startups rise and fall over 8 years — here's the pattern
A developer who has built products for for eight years shares what he learned from watching roughly 200 launch and either succeed or fail. Most of the ones that died did not have bad products — many solved a real problem, looked decent, and worked technically.
If product quality were the deciding factor, most of them should have survived, but they didn't. That forced him to accept that the product itself is rarely the reason a startup dies.
Instead, a small set of repeated decisions killed them. The first and biggest one: spent months building before ever talking to a single person willing to pay for it.
Key points
- Built products for professionally for 8 years, closely around 200 ' outcomes
- Most failed had solid, working products — quality wasn't the deciding factor
- First recurring fatal decision: building for months without talking to a single paying-willing customer
- The author admits guilt for having encouraged this approach with in the past