Saturday, November 07, 2009

Starting Findory: The end

This is the end of my Starting Findory series.

Findory was my first startup and a nearly five year effort. Its goal of personalizing information was almost laughably ambitious, a joy to pursue, and I learned much.

I learned that a cheap is good, but too cheap is bad. It does little good to avoid burning too fast only to starve yourself of what you need.

I re-learned the importance of a team, one that balances the weaknesses of some with the strengths of another. As fun as learning new things might be, trying to do too much yourself costs the startup too much time in silly errors born of inexperience.

I learned the necessity of good advisors, especially angels and lawyers. A startup needs people who can provide expertise, credibility, and connections. You need advocates to help you.

And, I learned much more, some of which is detailed in the other posts in the Starting Findory series:
  1. The series
  2. In the beginning
  3. On the cheap
  4. Legal goo
  5. Launch early and often
  6. Startups are hard
  7. Talking to the press
  8. Customer feedback
  9. Marketing
  10. The team
  11. Infrastructure and scaling
  12. Hardware go boom
  13. Funding
  14. Acquisition talks
  15. The end
I hope you enjoyed these posts about my experience trying to build a startup. If you did like this Starting Findory series, you might also be interested in my Early Amazon posts. They were quite popular a few years ago.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Does "The end" means end to the company?

Anonymous said...

Please ignore my previous post. I found that Findory shut down in November 2007

http://technology.inc.com/managing/articles/200806/rajamaran.html

Unknown said...

What are you working on now, new startup?