The road to success is often line with failures, but learning from those failures is the only way to keep moving forward.
While the media attention received by blowout tech successes makes it seem easy to become an overnight entrepreneurial success, the reality is startup companies have a high rate of failure. Due to one or more of several toxic factors that can poison an otherwise promising startup, it’s entirely possible for even the best ideas to eventually fall.
Fortunately, every failure teaches a lesson. Whether you’ve experienced an entrepreneurial failure on your own or you’re simply trying to avoid the mistakes of your predecessors, you can learn these hard lessons and improve your chances of success in your next endeavor:
1.      Capital is finite. After you get your initial round of funding, you might feel like you have everything you need to build your core business. But that’s a reckless mentality. Scrutinize all of your purchases and keep your spending on a tight leash until you have some dependable revenue coming in, or you’ll run out of capital faster than you think.
2.      Timing is everything. Launching two weeks too soon or two weeks too late could mean the difference between success and failure. Timing is an art and a science, so don’t jump into it recklessly and don’t spend too much time overthinking it.
3.      Perfection is impossible. No matter how much time you spend trying to make your product ideal, it’s going to have flaws. Your business model will have flaws, too, and you need to realize this if you’re eventually going to overcome those flaws.
4.      You can’t predict everything. There will always be surprises and misfortunes to blindside you on your path to entrepreneurial success.
5.      Hard work is a minimum requirement. Most entrepreneurs know that you need to work hard to be a success, but too many believe that that’s all you need to succeed. Unfortunately you also need experience, guidance, teamwork, and a little bit of luck.
6.      Your environment will change. Your audience, your competitors, your niche, and your technology will all change throughout your business’s lifetime. Be flexible to accommodate those changes or you’re bound to fail.
These are hard lessons to learn for every entrepreneur, and most of them are difficult to overcome even when you realize the threat they represent. Keep these in mind as you build your enterprise, and always maintain your forward momentum.
