"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself" Startup ideas inspire hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world. On the flip side, the majority of entrepreneurial ventures fail. Have you ever wondered what the catalyst for such failure is? Startup failures are complex. Most of them are not caused by stupid or simple mistakes. So, be careful when you conclude: Startup X failed because of Y. Therefore I should avoid doing Y in my own startup. It is not that simple. Startups fail because of a combination of factors and causes, some of which are almost impossible to put a finger on. This book is aimed at identifying reasons that can lead even great ideas to complete failure. It also presents how you can make your way around them, earning everlasting growth and prosperity. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Omar Mohout is a Growth Engineer. He is an expert in building repeatable, scalable customer acquisition engines for born-on-the-web companies. Omar is an entrepreneur that turned startup advisor & mentor. Après un doctorat en informatique, Carine Lucas a travaillé plusieurs années comme consultante sur des projets d'innovation. Chez Agoria, elle conseille les entreprises sur leur stratégie digitale et leur business models.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

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.

If you want salient advice about your startup, you’ve hit the jackpot with this book. Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann annually compiles the best posts from many blogs on technology startup management, primarily for the benefit of his students. This book makes his latest collection available to the broader entrepreneur community. You’ll find 72 posts from successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, such as Fred Wilson, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, Joel Spolsky, and Ben Yoskovitz. They cover a wide range of topics essential to your startup’s success, including: Management tasks: Engineering, product management, marketing, sales, and business development Organizational issues: Cofounder tensions, recruiting, and career planning Funding: The latest developments in capital markets that affect startups Divided into 13 areas of focus, the book’s contributors explore the metrics you need to run your startup, discuss lean prototyping techniques for hardware, identify costly outsourcing mistakes, provide practical tips on user acquisition, offer branding guidelines, and explain how a choir of angel investors often will sing different parts. And that’s just for starters.

Failure sucks. You may have heard of the famous startup math: nine of out 10 startups fail. The bitter truth about failure hurts but the most important thing is that most entrepreneurs move on to do something else. It's not over until you give up. There are a ton of startups trying to make it, and a lot of them just don't make the cut. Whether it's poor budgeting, lack of excitement, or bad management, the onus is on the founders to explain what really happened. The good news for aspiring entrepreneurs is that, some founders open up about their failures and share their experiences with the public without hesitation.I have rounded up over 50 startups that failed and the reasons why they failed to make it. The reasons for their failure were shared by the founders and those close to management in various startup post-mortems online.Learn from their experiences and avoid the issues they had to deal with.

When you’re starting your own venture startup, the last thing you want to focus on is failure. Nevertheless, if you explore the common reasons for failure in advance, you will be significantly less prone to succumb to them yourself. This book is a collection of the main reasons why startups come up short and tips for avoiding them.