You Think These Mistakes Are Obvious For A Startup?
If you have followed my blog, you may have already known that I interned for two companies in 2 completely different industries in this summer, one of which is a F&B startup and the other is a tech one. Both of these startups have stayed in the markets for pretty much the same period of time, which is 5-6 years to be more specific. After I was done with my first internship, I have gained a lot of insights on common mistakes that a growing startup makes. It became interesting as I noticed the second startup that I interned for was making the same mistakes as the first one. Trust me, even though you think these mistakes are obvious and can be categorized as basic mistakes that are not to be made, growing startups are still making them. So, you wanna know what those are? Here you go, the 2 most obvious but common mistakes a startup makes!
- Not listening to your customers: I know that when someone started a startup, they must see a pain or a problem that is needed to be solved. However, for one problem, different people have different ways to solve it and their needs to look for a way to solve it always changes! As a startup grows, they focus so much on building a good-quality product that sometimes they forget to check what customers think about their products. Do they actually like it? Is there a minor feature about a product that makes customer unsatisfied? Normally, a growing startups do take surveys of their customers, but then they don’t know how to analyze these answers and filter them into actionable insights.
- Customers don’t know what you are selling: Sometimes a startup thinks the company has well presented itself on the platform for customers. They write a whole story of the company on their website, include a bunch of information explaining how good their service is, only to forget that customers only spend about 30 seconds to skim through their website. When a customer looks for a service that solves their problem, they care about WHAT THE STARTUP IS SELLING and to be honest, customers don’t really care about how the story behind a company if that company cannot convey clearly what they are selling to the customers. For both of the startups that I interned for, they included so much unnecessary information in their UX design that they immediately got customers confused.