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Let me give you the essence of this post right away. Most startups ideas fail even before starting up. I have tried to identify the points where startup ideas fail. So far I have 3.
#1 : Holding onto the idea without action
I am one of those people who get a whole lot of ideas sitting on the toilet seat and I must cofess that most of them are not that good. I am sure that there are many such people out there. But ideas alone are not enough. In my short stint as a struggling entrepreneur, I have realized that there are no unique idea. You only think that it’s unique. You will only be kidding yourself if you thought that you were the first person in this whole wide world to have thought about it first. A lot of people have good ideas but they don’t share them for the fear of someone else profiting from it. I think, having an idea is only 5% of the job done. You need to execute the idea and execute it well.
#2 : Go - No Go
Let me take back the last sentence for a moment. Even before execution comes the decision to execute the idea. According to me, Once you have decided to execute the idea, 50% of the job is done. The remaining 50% is execution. The reason I stress on the “go-no go” decision is because I strongly believe that it is at this stage where many ideas die.
#3 : Lack of skill
So now let’s say you have an idea and you also have the guts to execute it but many times, you just don’t have the right skill set to execute the entire idea. The first thought that comes to ones mind is to search for those skills within your friend circle. If you find that person in your friend circle then it’s great. There is nothing like working with a friend in a start-up. Most successful companies were started by friends - Microsoft, Google, Apple, Infosys and Baazee.com. There are chances that the friendship might suffer but that rarely holds back the enterpreneurs who have reached this far in the start-up process. But what does one do when you don’t find the required skill set within your friend circle. Earlier people would give out ads in newspapers saying “Associate required”. But then that requires money. Now there is a solution for that as well. I recently read about a service called Partnerup. Partnerup is a service that helps you find people how are willing to work on start up ideas. I like the whole concept but the service still “US-only”. Its only a matter of time that they go global. Businesspundit has a review of the service on its blog.
This post is not intended to be preachy but just an insight. I might have missed out on other points of failure. Please feel free to add them in the comments.
by Aditya | on Friday, September 14th, 2007 at 3:45 am | 
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