Studying repeatable patterns of startup failure (startup anti-patterns) is more useful than studying non-repeatable strategies for startup success.
Top Startup Anti-Patterns
- Analysis paralysis
- Arrogance
- Attribution risk
- Bad revenue
- Bleeding on the edge
- Boiling the ocean
- Bridge to nowhere
- Changing strategy instead of execution
- Chasing the competition
- Confirmation bias
- Confusing activity with results
- Consulting to product
- Death by pivot
- Deathmarch
- Delayed scaling
- Demand generation
- Design by committee
- Designing for investors
- Drag
- Elephant hunting
- Escalation of commitment
- Escape to the familiar
- Escapism
- Featuritis
- Forward thinking
- Founderitis
- Groupthink
- Hail Mary
- If you build it, they will come
- Ignorance
- Ivory tower
- Lack of focus
- Lagging indicators
- Learned helplessness
- Long feedback cycles
- Lying to investors
- Magic salesperson
- Mentor whiplash
- Missing your exit
- Myopic bootstrapping
- Next round only
- Not knowing your investors
- One-off customization
- Oooh, shiny!
- Overengineering
- Overselling
- Oversteering
- Platform trap
- Platform risk
- Premature optimization
- Premature scaling
- Promiscuity
- Proof by anecdote
- Pushing a rope
- Raising too little
- Random founders
- Scapegoat
- Second class citizens
- Seed extensions
- Secrecy
- Silver bullet
- Spreadsheet Bingo
- Stovepipes
- The one idea entrepreneur
- Top-down planning
- Uber pivot
- Underqualifying
- Unicorn hunting
- Unrealistic expectations
- Warm bodies
- Weak board
- Yes man
- Zombie
Updates since the initial post:
- Outsourcing your architecture (via Alan Neveu)
Note: the list is not “drawn to scale.” Some anti-patterns occur more frequently than others and some are more likely to cause a startup to fail than others.
At some point, I’d like to have a post for each anti-pattern. Let me know if you’ve experienced them. Subscribe for updates and, please, share this page so that more entrepreneurs become aware of the common & avoidable patterns of startup failure.
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Thanks for assembling these in one place. I only wish you’d done it and I’d seen it last summer. My first start-up shut down in december. Lack of focus and death by pivot did us in. Lean start-up is no panacea.
No methodology guarantees success. That said, the best ones steer us away from a greater number of anti-patterns.
I hope you won’t let your first startup experience dissuade you from being an entrepreneur again.
I’d maybe add “Designing for investors” [rather than customers]. Seen this more than once and it can be tricky to mitigate. Great list Simeon. Goodness, just realized, I don’t think I’ve had any interaction with you since some emails posts about WDDX and CF in about 1999 ! Hope you are well. Did you ever write a book about building Allaire on $18k?
Yes, it’s been a very long time. I’m doing well and having lots of fun combining entrepreneurship and investing.
Nobody on the Allaire side ever wrote that book. If anyone should do it, it should be JJ.
Designing for investors is a good one. I will add it to the list.
Thanks Simeon for assembling the list. Where could we find the descriptions of these antipatterns? “Analysis paralysis” is self-explanatory but what means Zombie in startup context?
What a fantastic list Simeon – I’m sure there is a story behind each of these. The names are well written and I can visualize real people/startups for most of them. I also live in a glass house, so I’d like to say that this is like looking in a mirror for some of them, so not throwing stones here…
That said, I’d like to add one to the list: Outsourcing your architecture. I have seen startups begin with the assumption that they should be able to outsource their product development. They usually wind up with a product that is nothing special – something their competitors could build easily, or their customers could build in-house. As a software architect, I try to explain to them that product architecture is their opportunity to create value out of thin air. Outsource architecture and you will most likely get software engineering without a brilliant architecture to frame it. That can work for creating a minimum viable product, but in most cases the founders are hoping to get something much more from such efforts.
Alan, I’ve definitely seen this one play out. I’ve added it to a new updates section. Would you like to do a guest post on this one, written in the style of the others?
Well, I fear that writing an elaborate post on this would be like throwing those founders under a bus, after they have already been hit by it. I might also get depressed or become much less fun to be around! But I’ll think about writing something about the opposite, which is to create value out of thin air using software architecture. How’s that?
🙂
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