The 10 big lessons I learned from failing my first SaaS startup.

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I was only 5 years old when Dad show me how to play chess, 51 lost matches, and around 24 months after I was able to win for the first time in my entire life, I was only 7 years old, I played chess almost daily just to win my dad a single match one day.

I never forgot that jake mate, but I never knew if he lost on purpose, or if I win because I was getting better since I preferred to believe the second thought so, so I never asked him, and I never will.

My old man remembers this single story almost all years, “51 losses for just 1 win is still worth it son”, he always said, with a smile on his lips.

The fact is that I never liked to lose, and I still don’t, I hate it, but now I understand is part of the game and I embrace it, luckily differently than when I had 5 years old.

I stop playing chess for a long time after that match, just to avoid the pain I was feeling when remembering how many matches I lost.

But, thanks to that experience I never had a fear to lose again, maybe Dad knew that I was not going to be a chess professional, but I was going to lose many times in the future, he was smart.

Dad, show me a great skill that I did not have, which I did not notice for months that this was on purpose though, of course, I was just a kid, but he knew how such a bad loser I was and during those matches, he teaches me to lose wisely, endurance the pain of failure as a man, and take notes on the lessons of those failures just to increase the probability of not make it them again.

By then, every jake mate on my king was painful and their words were always the same:

“Son, jake mate, you lose again, but that does not matter, you just need to be resilient in life, life is hard and will never give you all you want, but if you keep trying at the end you will always win”.

It took me four different countries and working for eight different companies until I felt I was ready for my next big win or failure.

I arrived in the United State of America and I said to myself “This is the country where dreams come true, go and fight for yours”.

This I how I started my first company, just a marketing app idea, no money, no friends, no connection, not even a place to live yet, just a single sentence in my heart that still today I repeat to myself all day and still my heart bumps faster when he listened.

I develop an MVP in 6 months of working entire long nights, living in a six hundred square feet apartment, and selling ford trucks (this is another story) during the day.

I showed the idea to 15 people I knew could help me, and only three accepted to work with me, six more months and we were ready to launch, but just a few days before we decided to do it I found that the main branch in our repository was empty, I called the teammate that sent the commit deleting almost all files but he never took the call and I never saw it again.

One year of work and one betrayal that I did not understand still will not stop us to release our project, with some bugs that were only fixed by the guy that delete the main branch.

I fixed the main branch with the latest version of my code that I still had on my computer and finally, we released it, just two months after the release, we did not have money left. By then, I was working alone at night again, since we did not get any customers in the first month, the team was with no people, and the two remaining teammates left me saying that they could not keep working for free.

I tried to tell you this story in just a few sentences because It will remove the unnecessary pain I still feel when writing it, but luckily a protection barrier in my mind always blocks the pain, I always have my old man whispering to my ear:

“Son, you lose again, but that does not matter, you just need to be resilient in life, life is hard and will never give you all you want, but if you keep trying at the end you will always win”

I fail again, but that does not matters, the lessons I received from that experience are the best win I could get by then and here I’m sharing them with you for free.

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Lessons:

1.???Trust.

Building a company with someone you trust is a great competitive advantage, It’s always harder to find a good partner than a good idea.

2.???Execution.

Execution matters more than the idea itself, project architecture, solution, and business model should be designed in such a way that helps you execute faster and learn quicker.

3.???Team

Transactional and exceptional teams can scale any idea quickly and faster, is not hard to find them, what is hard is to make them believe in your idea and vision.

Choose them wisely and strategically, they should be filling a black or white spot that you cannot do for yourself.

4.???Asymmetric risk reward.

Startups are risky, more if you don’t know what the heck you are doing.

Find imbalance risk rewards ideas, this is not easy to define, but you should trust your guts and at least assess the risk-reward ratio to analyze the opportunity cost of your new venture.

5.???Speed

Yes, speed matters, not only when shipping a product, speed matter and give you momentum, please do not be confused, momentum and speed are not the same, but momentum keeps your team engaged in the vision and mission of the company.

I will make sure that in my next company, we did not care much about the famous lean concept cycle of build-measure-learn and cares more about shipping strategically faster.

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6.???Launch then listen.

There are some products that clients still do not need, those that for some reason you know they will need if you create the product you had in mind, in this scenario you can’t listen to them because they will not give you any valid insight.

Still, from my experience, I learned to litter when talking with specific customers before launching.

Now I think is best to launch, show them your vision in practical products, eliminate their pains, and listen to their insight just after that happens.

7.???Founder that sucks.

Yes, I was one of them, I did not know a thing and I was not prepared, with no money, no trust, no skills, no connection, no mentor, and no business experience, I had nothing, and when you had nothing is hard to crystalize a vision.

Being the right founder matters, you do not need all of the above mentioned, but you need something, at least skill, some knowledge, and also guts.

Founders should show to the world their vision with intention and actions not only with aristocratic words.

Founders that do not suck are great people, they maybe don’t know design thinking, customer development, extreme programming, or continuous programming or are the best in any other things by any means, but good innovation that still exists will have a great heart with pure intentions.

If you are lucky enough to find one of them, only let her/him go when you are better than her/him, and if you are smart you will make it to trust in you.

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8.???Products need time.

Everything needs time to get better, early customer needs time to understand and know the product.

Use time wisely ship faster and learn faster.

If your vision is good enough the product will never be ready, because you will be always dreaming about the new feature.

An iteration is a great tool for this, define clear iterations and set a specific period for each of them.

Changing the problem to solve will always need more time and effort than changing your customer base or clients and just pivoting your product to a different target.

But be careful also with time, low your company `burn rate`, and choose a viral growth engine as fast as possible.

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9.???Visible and Actionable metrics

I did not know how important metrics were, you cannot improve what you don’t measure.

Use metrics to guide your team, not only you, but metrics should also be visible to the whole team and should give actionable insight into the direction of your company.

Early employees should be open to communicating easily, this allows effective and smooth internal learning iterations.

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10.?Skewed Distributions.

“Skewness is the degree to which returns are asymmetric around the mean.”

Assess the distribution of your failures and wins like if you were trading a portfolio of securities, make sure your ideas or products returns are right, or positively skewed, this implies that small negative returns will occur more often than a few large positive returns, but this latest win, if big enough, can be the only thing you need to change your entire life.

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11.?Fail Again

I heard once Will Smith saying, “Fail Big, Fail Fast, Fail Often”, and never stop failing, failures teach you more than wins, failures reveal your weaknesses and show you the man you can become, the pain you can resist, and the changes you need to do.