> The problem is that most startup books tell you what not to do, not what to do.
This is actually better. Because it means that the authors have had their failures (hopefully?) and are telling a practical story. It's subtractive but it works, re. Ten Commandments, via Negativa style.
It's actually much worse to tell somebody who'll probably be halfway across reading your book to jump x metres when the wind speed is just under y mph to achieve some z business effect.
Point is your context may not be somebody else's context, so it's much better to harp on universal principles which you violated in business than to show us a sequence of events which leave out the role of timing, chance and other unknown unknowns.
Re:What I learned from my startup’s failure
by sverhagen on Monday May 22, 2017 @01:37AM
(#14391239)
It seems you're confusing what's undoubtedly an art, to come up with a good idea, with the mechanics of being a startup, the latter being a more-repeatable motion, that is well-described in the literature that I believe people here are referring to. Of course there's also plenty of testimony on what were bad startup ideas, but obviously it'll be up to the entrepreneurs in question to come up with their own brilliant startup ideas.
Before anyone mentions Lean Startup or Startup Owner's Manual - I've read them, lent them to friends, actually put them into practice, and that startup (startups, actually) still failed. And I've got a half dozen or so friends and acquaintances who have done it too, and their startups all failed too. The advantage of that methodology is that you fail fast, oftentimes before you quit your day job, but if founding a startup is something you really want to do, knowing a few dozen ideas that aren't viable businesses is only marginally useful.