10 Simple Quick Steps To Kill Your Startup In No Time

This article is written in the concept of “Reverse Psychology”, a technique involving the advocacy of a belief or behavior that is opposite to the one desired, with the expectation that this approach will encourage the subject of the persuasion to do what actually is desired: the opposite of what is suggested.

You might have read 100s of articles which says on how to run a successful startup and here we have described you how not to.

 

  • Create A Kickass Product Which Your Customers Doesn’t Need

Create a kickass product with uber-cool features in it, awesome user interface, user experience and launch it. Never care about what your customers want, just focus on building cool product. And yeah! Most importantly never do a Market Research before creating the product and never take suggestions/feedbacks after launching the product.

 

  • Create An Awesome Business Plan, Forget Business

Bring back the learnings from your MBA classes, make a perfect business plan – Executive Summary, Market Study, Market Research, Financial Statement, etc. Business plan is going to define your business, think big, think globally. Plan, Plan and Plan, never stop planning. Your customers can definitely wait, because creating a plan which looks great in paper which no one cares is really important than actually executing the plan.

 

  • Don’t Talk To Anyone Who Looks Like A Customer.

Never ever speak to anyone who looks like your potential customers. What he/she is going to tell you which you don’t know. Talking to customers is overrated. Your job is just to create a product and they would end up buying, as simple as that.

 

  • Don’t Go In Search Of Customers

The customers have all time in the world, he/she will take all the pain to find you to buy your product. Don’t even think about Website, SEO, Social Media, Inbound Leads, Email Marketing etc. it’s a painful and time consuming tasks. When your customers can come and get you, why do you need to take efforts to go after them.

 

  • Launch Only After You Have A Perfect Product

Do not even think about launching your product if it’s not complete with all the desired features. Concepts like MVP, Prototypes, Agile etc. are just myth. Spend all your money and resource into creating perfect product, even it takes years its worth of a wait. Getting customers feedbacks? When you launched a perfect product why do you even need to take customers feedbacks.

 

  • Hire Team B

Never ever hire a person who is better than you. You should be the best person in your team, and no one should be as good as you. Also start hiring as much as team members possible. Lean Organization is just crap; 100-member team sounds better than 10-member team. You have your VCs money to pay all those employees and yeah! remember 9 moms can deliver a baby in 1 month.

 

  • Spend As Much As You Can On Advertising And Marketing

For a business to be successful you will definitely need lakhs of Facebook likes and Twitter followers. Hire a PR firm, spend money on advertisements, make a buzz in online and offline. The money you spend for marketing and promotions is directly proportional to sales you make, it doesn’t matter your product is good or not, if you spend on promotions, people will always buy your product.

 

  • Spend Most Of Your Time To Raise Funds

If you raise the funds, your business will take care of itself. Forget about creating a kickass product, getting customers onboard, doing good services, building team etc. just focus on raising funds, everything else can wait. And yeah! If you have an awesome business plan in papers the VCs will blindly write cheques for you.

 

  • Create Awesome Workspace

Have you seen the movie “Internship”? Look at the office of Google, Microsoft, Flipkart, etc. you would definitely want to build an office like that with awesome ambiance. It’s more important than creating kickass product because only then your employees can work peacefully to create your awesome product.

 

  • Profits First, Users Second

Why do you want a customer to buy from you again and again? Just focus on today, have your customer bought your product today and you got your profits?, that’s more than enough. Profits are your primary motive, never think about customer experience. If the choice is between making investors happy or making your users happy, always choose the investors.

Just follow these simple steps and kill your startups in no time, because that’s why you started up. All the best.

 

The article was first published in The Cofounder. The Cofounder is India’s first print magazine which writes about early stage startups and entrepreneurship.

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