“If you think of all the things that make for good TV, do none of them. Focus on the things that make for boring TV — sitting and coding, talking with customers, making sales calls.” — Sam Altman

The family stage of startups as defined by Reid Hoffman is the stage where a startup has assembled its founding team and is ready to take on the world with their minimum viable product.

While I have not personally started any company of my own, I have spent a fair amount of time in the startup ecosystem to observe what sort of mistakes and pitfalls founders usually fall into. These mistakes might seem obvious to an observer but it can often times clog the founder’s intuition until it is pointed out to them. A lot of these mistakes happen when founders get distracted by work that seems important but provides no value for their startup in the family stage. For this article, I will provide three of the most common mistakes I observed in early stage startups and why it occurs time and time again.

1. Adding features excessively

The first mistake that founders often make is being overly obsessive on adding new features for their product. In the startup world, doing one thing and doing it really well pays off. This delusion, through my observations, originates more from founders who do not necessarily have a technical background. This might be due to the fact that these founders lack the understanding of painstakingly difficult it is to actually create a feature of a website or mobile application and iterate it into perfection. They often have the illusion of “if only” and will delay their product launch just because they wanted to add a feature to their product because “if only” the product had this feature, it will certainly beat out competitors. These founders are so paranoid about launching the perfect and feature loaded product that they will delay the launch of their product and eventually die out. I think one of the most crucial steps for founders during the product development stage is to learn how to say no and to not let excess features creep in.

2. Indulge in vanity metrics and press coverage

The second mistake that I think most family stage startups fall victim to is making the mistake of cheating themselves with vanity metrics and excessive press coverage. A lot of startup founders have this fantasy in their head that if only they had a super-mega-ultra launch party with all the press coverage, their startup can certainly be an overnight success. They tend to forget the one core thing family stage startups are supposed to do — building & improving the product to acquire loyal customers. When you see a founder spending more time at networking events and conferences than actually working on product development then you know that the startup is not heading in the right direction. Sure the idea might be great, but is it so great that with a grand launch, everyone will automatically whip out their phones and rush to the app store to download it? Even the largest companies today could not pull that of a feat. Unless your idea is giving out free gold bars on a mobile app, it is far more productive to actually focus on product development and sales than to partake in any kind of PR events.

3. Outsourcing everything without understanding your product

The third mistake that founders often make is having the belief that everything can be solved by outsource work. Without the emergence of more and more developers and tools, there is a notion that founders with zero technical knowledge can successfully build billion dollar tech startups. While it is entirely possible, it is often rare that a startup without any technical co-founder can iterate their product into something that the original founders envisioned. While you do not need advance technical knowledge to start a tech startup, founders should take the initiative to learn the basics about the technology powering their product. The startups that tend to fail usually consist of founders who refuse to learn anything about their own product and believe that through outsourcing, they can build a product that is just as good as their competitors’. I guess the fault lies in the founders not entirely understanding their product. Without even understanding your own product, there is no way you can connect with customers to grasp their perspective on your product.

Conclusion

Here’s a recap on the 3 mistakes that I shared today:

  1. Adding features excessively.
  2. Indulge in vanity metrics and press coverage.
  3. Outsourcing everything without understanding your product.

Of course, there are many other kind of mistakes that family stage startups tend to make without even realizing it. Working in a startup accelerator, you get to see how startups grow or wither. In the end, I think it is important for a startup to understand that often times the boring and unglamorous work that the media rarely portrays is actually of the greatest significance.