TLDR:
- Gauge how patient were you with your business and how it aligns with the timeline for similar businesses in your niche
- Were you able to understand the ins and outs of your market dynamics well enough?
- How smart were you with the money invested in the business?
- How quick were you to adapt to any fluctuations within the market and your target demographic?
- What was your relationship like with your team and network during this time?
- “Failure is a wonderful teacher” ~Steve Harvey
Taking the learnings to apply next time
Unless you’ve had immense luck, it’s very unlikely that your first startup business will be the one.
While most of the time it may not have been a complete bust with some saving graces to take away from it, even if it was, there are still key learnings for you to understand, and we’ll briefly be going through 5 of those.
1. Patience Level
- How long were you working on this? Did you pull the plug too early, or did you indeed spend the right amount of time depending on what your niche was?
- What did your findings say about how long on average it took for startups in your niche to begin finding consistent traffic?
2. Market Dynamics
- Did you understand the tastes and preferences of your target demographic well enough?
- Did you target your intended market through the proper channels?
- How niche was your business? Depending on how niche it was, you may have had to deal with a low volume of competitors. If this is not the case, you may have been fighting a lost cause of occupying space in an already very saturated market.
3. Financial Management
- Did you plan and budget your finances accordingly?
- Were you controlling your expenses properly, or did you exhaust funds very quickly most of the time?
- How smart were you with the money you spent towards your business looking back?
4. Adapting to Change
- Were there any changes in the dynamics of your market or target consumer base during the time your startup was still live? If so, how agile were you in adapting?
- How quick was your business to grasp any small gaps of opportunities that may have emerged in your market or target demographic?
5. Collaboration and Networking
- If you had a team, what was the size, and how good were you at communication and everyone staying up to date on the ins and outs of the business?
- If you had a team, how frequently did disputes come up? If they did, how quick and easy were they to resolve, and were there any trends in the manner at which they came up?
- Depending on the size of your network, did you leverage it well enough to further the reach and scope of your business and maximize its potential?
6. Related Links
All these questions seem very rudimentary at first glance, however if you ask yourself these questions, the odds may be that there’ll be a ripple effect of follow-up questions not listed in this article that are much more specific to your business, and you may be able to truly answer the question you’ve had in your mind for a while now that you could apply for the next time: why did my business fail?