Why Startups Fail ─ And How Yours Can Succeed

For the want-to-be entrepreneur thinking about taking the leap, the boot-strapped entrepreneur trying to energize a business three or four years in, and the venture-backed entrepreneur trying to scale, Why Startups Fail shows you the key mistakes new ventures make—and how to avoid them. Nearly everyone has an idea for a product they could build or a company they could start. But eight out of 10 new businesses fail within the first three years. Even only one in ten venture-backed startups succeeds, and venture capitalists turn down some 99% of the business plans they see. The odds appear to be stacked against you! But entrepreneurs often make the same avoidable mistakes over and over.

Why Startups Fail can help you beat the odds and avoid the pitfalls and traps that lead to early startup death. It’s easy to point to successes like Apple, Google, and Facebook. But the biggest lessons can come from failure. What decisions were made, and why? What would the founders have done differently? How did one company become a billion-dollar success while another—with a better product and in the same market—fail? Drawing on personal experience as well as the wisdom of the Silicon Valley startup community, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and blogger Dave Feinleib analyzes companies that have come and gone.

In short, powerful chapters, he reveals the keys to successful entrepreneurship: Excellent product/market fit, passion, superb execution, the ability to pivot, stellar team, good funding, and wise spending. In Why Startups Fail, you’ll learn from the mistakes Feinleib has seen made over and over and find out how to position your startup for success. Why Startups Fail:
Shows venture-backed startups and boot-strappers alike how to succeed where others fail.
Is equally valuable for companies still on the drawing board as well as young firms taking their first steps.
Takes you through the key decisions and pitfalls that caused startups to fail and what you can learn from their failures.
Covers the critical elements of entrepreneurial success.
What you’ll learn
Avoid the key mistakes that cause startups to fail
Pitch, raise money, and recruit
Find the right market
Build world-class products that people will use
Outrun the competition
Know when to stay the course and when to pivot
Who this book is for
Why Startups Fail is for the aspiring entrepreneur who wants to avoid the key mistakes that have caused hundreds of thousands of companies to fail. Why Startups Fail will appeal to venture-backed technology entrepreneurs. It will also appeal strongly to boot-strappers and those who have, by hook or by crook, survived their first three or four years and are starting to hit speed-bumps. It’s an excellent choice for entrepreneurs who want the know-how to make themselves and their companies successful for the long term.

Table of Contents
Part 1—Market, Product, and Entrepreneur
Chapter 1: Poor Product-Market Fit
Chapter 2: Bad Products
Chapter 3: The Missing Entrepreneur

Part 2— Sales and Marketing
Chapter 4: Investing in Sales and Marketing Too Early
Chapter 5: Losing Money on Sales
Chapter 6: Invisible Startups

Part 3—Execution
Chapter 7: Failing to Communicate
Chapter 8: Not Getting Started
Chapter 9: Failing to Execute

Part 4—Capital and Liquidity
Chapter 10: Pitches That Fail
Chapter 11: Managing Liquidity
Chapter 12: From Fa...

David Feinleib is the producer of The Big Data Landscape, Big Data Trends, and Big Data TV, all of which may be found on the web at www.BigDataLandscape.com. Mr. Feinleib’s Big Data Trends presentation was featured as "Hot On Twitter" and has been viewed more than 45,000 times on SlideShare. Mr. Feinleib has been quoted by Business Insider and CNET, and his writing has appeared on Forbes.com and in Harvard Business Review China. He is the Managing Director of The Big Data Group.Prior to The Big Data Group, Mr. Feinleib was a general partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures. Mr. Feinleib co-founded Consera Software, which was acquired by HP; Likewise Software, which was acquired by EMC Isilon; and Speechpad, a leader in web-based audio-video transcription. He began his career at Microsoft. Mr. Feinleib holds a BA from Cornell University, graduating summa cum laude, and an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. The author of Why Startups Fail (Apress, 2011), he is an avid violinist and two-time Ironman finisher.