What I learn from a collapse of a startup.
For the last two years I have been working in a startup named DSYNC. It provide integration service for SMB.
The service is rather popular and we are wining over quite a few major clients.
However, the business failed miserably due to founder’s personal issue.
Here are a few things that I learnt along the process. I am just writing it down for future reference.
Investor Relation is paramount especially if the business needs external capital to operate.
Proper governance will help to keep the investor’s confidence at a higher level.Coming up different charts/figures for different financial aspect does sounds trivial and adding extra work to founder’s hand.It’s especially difficult for start ups as they are normally lacking resource.
However, it’s important to deliver these figures on time. Investors have the right to know what is happening with their investments.
In the early days of Dsync, the financial reporting and management side of things are in total chaos.i.e the is no clear statistics for sales/cost/growth etc. Although, this is a trivial thing to do, it’s very important to keep this on track.
Here I would personally thank Nicolas and Martin trying to bring things back on track.
However, the communication broke down for too long and the confidence can’t be recover once lost.
Company lacks proper governance will fail eventually.
Most of the start up think is okay to be lacking proper governance. Here are few basic things that need to be done as a founder/director.
Financial report/payrolls etc.
Founder’s personal life does matter as it affect the mental stability of the person.
A startup can’t afford one of the key member/founder no working which still getting paid a significant amount.
Healthy partnership and referral programs are important to a early startup.
As a B2B business, most of our customers are from partner/referrals.
Especially for major accounts, most of the revenue are actually coming from those major account.
They usually have more complicated requirements but also paying much more than normal SMB client.
customer service/support is important to expand customer base in the long term
More to add…
