Startup Monday – Evening Edition: 9 Ways Your Startup Can Fail

Welcome to my very first Startup Monday, evening edition. I thought, if I’m going to have a Startup Monday, why stop at one post! Of course I also wanted to have a Domaining-related post so Monday is really getting taken to the max. Since most-often all of my Monday posts are written on Sunday where I have plenty of time this works-out well!

I read this article on James Altucher’s blog and thought it would be a great one to share on Startup Monday. In this post James outlines nine ways you can guarantee your failure (even though the post is called Nine Ways to Guarantee Success). Avoid these and you might just find the opposite of failure – success! I have outlined the nine causes for failure below but you should read his entire post to get all the details:

  1. Sickness – if you’re unhealthy it’s going to be hard to succeed
  2. Inertia – if you never start you won’t ever find success, you can read a million blogs about people doing things you want to do, at some point you have to pull the trigger and do it yourself
  3. Doubts – if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, why would your customers or investors?
  4. Laziness – this one’s obvious, lazy people have way less stress than the rest of us…but that’s because they do less!
  5. Carelessness – making a ton of errors isn’t going to help you create the next game-changing product or company
  6. Vacillating – make a decision damn it!
  7. No progress – if at first you don’t succeed…you might have a crappy idea, don’t be afraid to fail and do something different
  8. Delusions – you really have to read what James writes in his blog for this one, made me laugh so hard I read it twice, I don’t want to ruin it and he really says it better than I could ever paraphrase (and it comes with a great image too)
  9. You fail backwards – pick yourself up if you see yourself falling, don’t just let yourself fall

Honestly this is one of the most entertaining and inspiring articles I’ve read yet. I highly recommend you read the full article at James Altucher’s blog – you can read it here: The Nine Ways To Guarantee Success

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton