Qhojo's Startup Mistakes
Qhojo was a peer-to-peer marketplace for lending equipment started by Manish Sinha. Manish, took a chance and quit his job to build a business, however it didn't go to plan. You can read the original article here. Below is what I think of Manish's article.
1. No Customer Development
After reading the first paragraphs of the article, I had already figured this would have been one of the mistakes. Not talking to customers and getting an idea of what they want is a big mistake, something that I make a lot. It is really tempting as an engineer to jump headfirst into building a solution however you must know what your customer wants (Or importantly needs!). As the famous saying goes (Often attributed to Henry Ford) “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” and or a newer update "No one said they wanted faster horses, they wanted less horseshit", figuring out what problem the customer actually wants solving is not trivial. However you need to start somewhere.
2. Bad name
Although this one didn't hit me straight away, spelling of a name can be problem for spreading the word. So when coming up with a name it is best to be careful. I would suggest if you are going for a non-existent word, make sure it is easy to transcribe "Twitter". If you are making a change to an existing word, make sure it is easy to explain e.g. "Fiver with an extra r on the end".
3. High risk-to-reward ratio
Manish raised a really interesting point about how Qhojo had a lot of risk for users, so it wasn't worth their while. You could break this down even more to say, the product didn't offer enough value to the user. Selling something on eBay will give both the seller and buyer a gain, Qhojo was putting a lot of risk on the lender.
4. Over engineered
Once again going back to the engineers mindset, Manish wanted to make the code perfect. This is good for a long term solution however Qhojo was just an MVP and hadn't even proven its' business model yet. As I write this, I realise I am making the same mistake with one of my projects...
5. Lack of lender protection
An attempt to solve mistake #3 however not well thought out and encountered problems. A lesson from this is that sometimes a solution to a problem creates more problems itself'.
6. No team
As Paul Graham said, a single founder is a bad thing. Paul's last point really resonates with Manish's story, bearing the sad times can be hard when you are alone. Although Manish had another founder working part-time with him, it wasn't enough to drive the company forward.
7. Misleading encouragement
When you pitch your idea to friends many will say it is great (Sometimes just encouragement), which feeds into your confidence in the product. However sometimes it is very easy to ignore critical voices, but they are the most important! You need to balance these out. Make sure the people who say it is great put their money where their mouth is, an excuse should be treated as a no.
Conclusion
Once again a very interesting article with some nice take homes. For a company entering an area where a lot of risk is placed on users, Qhojo offers a lot of lessons and things to think about.
I would like to congratulate Manish on his achievement and subsequently sharing what he learnt.
Original Article