When you make the bold move to take your idea and turn it into a startup, the cards are already stacked against you. Depending on what you read, some folks say 70% of startups fail, others say 80% of startups fail. Either way, those aren’t good percentages no matter what way you slice it. Couple that with the fact that you are trying to grow your startup outside of a major startup hub like Silicon Valley and many may believe that’s a recipe for doom.
Of course thats not the case for the nearly 2000 startups we’ve covered from “everywhere else” since launching nibletz.com the voice of startups “everywhere else”. So we circled back with some of our startups to find out what challenges they face, or more specifically, what was the biggest challenge they faced in starting up.
Most of these challenges facing these entrepreneurs aren’t unique to one certain geographic region, but rather encompass challenges faced by most.
Finding a Team & Resource (you thought we were going to start with funding didn’t ya?)
Many startups that we’ve interviewed have eluded to the fact that finding the right team was one of the toughest parts or challenges they faced as a startup. When you build your startup outside a centralized technology hub like Silicon Valley, Boston or even Washington DC, attracting top tier talent to work for next to nothing to get your idea off the ground can be challenging.
Even Kapture, a startup founded in Brooklyn had problems at first attracting a great team. Kapture’s co-founder Michael Szewczyk had actually made the decision to move back from Silicon Valley to Brooklyn to launch Kapture. That may have helped them attract a good team.
“The biggest challenge is being creative with the limited amount of resources you have.” Jumyo said in an interview.
In Seattle,
story telling startup Jumyo is also plagued by the talent problem. Seattle has often been thought of as a hub for innovation yet they had trouble attracting a good team. Imagine if the problem is rampant in Seattle and Brooklyn, it’s gotta be a whole lot tougher in Boise and Providence.
Even a startup coming out of Dartmouth had a challenge with finding the best team.
“I think the hardest part for a software startup is finding a rock-solid team of devs, especially when the first founder is not technical, as is our case. It took quite a while before I found James and Sang and got them on board, but I feel incredibly lucky for the team that we have. Recently, we added another pemanent developer, who is actually located in Bulgaria, and so now the development process has been going really smoothly.” Square One Mail co-founde
r Branko Cerny told us in this interview.Changing an age old industry
Some more innovative startups are taking problems that have existed for years in traditional industries and trying to solve them once an for all. Such is the case for
New York startup Unpakt. Unpakt has taken the Expedia model and applied it to an industry where over billing and even fraud has run rampant for year. That industry is the moving industry. Unless you had a big enough house that you called one of the gigantic companies like Allied or Mayflower, you were faced with a lot of mom and pop or small regional companies.
No one knows when the time clock starts or stops. No one can remember how much furniture was originally allotted for the move. In the end the people being moved are either out more money or in some instances their belongings are held hostage for more money.
By making the process all but transparent through the Unpakt system this New York startup can help people who need to hire movers and honest movers as well. Unpakt’s problem was getting movers to buy in to the new:
“Convincing movers to see the benefit of an exact pricing system and operate within a larger network, instead of the historic autonomy of the industry. We’re demonstrating to movers that revealing their rates and exposing pricing is ok. To be successful in the online world, pricing needs to be readily available.
” is what they told us in this interview
Launching
Launching a product is tough no matter where you are at. There are a lot of confusing methodologies out there especially for a new entrepreneur and a new startup.
For instance, if you just got into the startup world and went all hipster as soon as you did, you’re probably preaching the Lean startup methodology and “minimum viable product”.
On the other hand you may not want to show off your minimum viable product to anyone because it’s in complete and it looks like crap. A big worry for those entrepreneurs second guessing this method is that in showing an MVP they may actually have their idea ripped off when in fact they planned on a much grander idea in the first place.
Iterating can be a problem too. Some startups worry every time they think of a new feature that they need to add it to version 1.
Other startups like
Vancouver based Perch, found that while their product technically worked, it’s a video product and they wanted it to be the best it could be. They would launch it and then pull back. They went through this process several times.
“Getting Perch out the door. We’ve come so close to launch numerous times, but because we’re dealing with video and very technical aspects of video, we’ve had to pull Perch off the shelf and back into development several times.”
Perch told us in this interview.Linkage:
Kyle
