So often each day we hear about a hot new startup being seeded breaking out of its incubator and yet there is another startup is quietly riding off into the sunset. Business plans have to be realistic and must show profit within a finite period if additional funding and sustainability to be seen. So, today we bring a post-mortem analysis of Startups straight from the hearts of global entrepreneurs. Learn here to differentiate what makes a startup fail or succeed.

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A Focus on Key Topics in a
Startup Post Mortem
So often each day we hear about a hot new startup being seeded
breaking out of its incubator and yet there is another startup is quietly
riding off into the sunset. Business plans have to be realistic and must
show profit within a finite period if additional funding and sustainability
to be seen. So, today we bring a post-mortem analysis of Startups
straight from the hearts of global entrepreneurs. Learn here to
differentiate what makes a startup fail or succeed.
1. Recurring Patterns
When you look back at what went wrong, try identifying recurring
patterns that stunted growth and contributed to your downfall. Knowing
where the roadblocks were and the issues that caused them will give you

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the perspective you need to avoid those same problems moving forward.
Be brutally honest with your team and with yourself. – Danny Wong,
Grapevine
2. Your Points of Highest Leverage
Aaron SchwartzI wrote a post-mortem in the spring of 2014, as we’d
been struggling for a few months. My goal was to look at the hard truth
that we were losing money rapidly and asks, “If we could change
anything today to help us survive, what would it be?” While going
through the exercise revealed a lot of answers big and small, what made
the biggest impact on our company were the high-leverage bets. We’ve
since focused only on those activities and have yielded big results which
have helped us not only survive, but thrive. – Aaron Schwartz, Modify
Watches
3. All Assumptions That Were Made
The best thing to do in a post-mortem is to list all the assumptions you
made when you started the company that were false. This way you can
identify where the gap in your thinking was and how you can find a
better solution. Most companies fail because they either did not execute
on something properly or they made an assumption about the market that
was not true. By looking into the assumptions you made that were false,

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you will be able to better address the problem and learn from these
mistakes. – Randy Rayess, VenturePact
4. Solutions Versus Problems
Perform an analysis of the solutions your product or service offered, and
what was the actual real-life pain point or problem they were supposed
to solve. It’s a useful way of thinking about past mistakes that can train
your mind for the future. A lot of the time, when you look back you’ll
see that much of what you thought was a solution didn’t have an existing
problem that it solved to begin with. If the solution did solve a problem,
analyze why consumers couldn’t see the value. Plus, if the market ever
changes and that problem actually does occur, you’ll be primed to
identify it and revive the part of your business that arrived at the wrong
point in time. – Jared Brown, Hubstaff
5. Puzzles
Frame the challenges that you encountered as different puzzles or
“business school-esque” case studies that could be solved with many
solutions. Divide your team into small groups and have them tackle the
challenges as if they were in your shoes. You will not only learn how
your team thinks but also discover different ways to approach similar
problems in the future. – Firas Kittaneh, AstraBeds

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6. Big Bets That Failed
What were the biggest bets that you made that did not work out? This is
where you can find the most opportunity for learning. Assess why you
thought it was a good bet in the first place. Then, describe the process
for executing on that bet. Finally, analyze the reasons that it did not
work out. This approach will show you whether you made mistakes
either on the execution or the assessment of the opportunity, and help
you focus your efforts more effectively the next time around. – Sathvik
Tantry, FormSwift
7. Managerial Issues
As we have found time and time again, bad management leads to
unhappy employees, which in turn leads to an unsuccessful and
unhealthy work environment. When evaluating why a startup has failed,
it is a must to look into managerial practices and what might have gone
wrong between members of the team. If there was poor communication,
micro-management, a lack of employee rewards or even empowerment,
success and growth may have gone south when employees lost
motivation or sight of what needed to be accomplished. These problems
within management should be pointed out and discussed so that they can
be solved for the future. – Miles Jennings, Recruiter.com

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8. Product-Market Fit
Get down to the basics with why it didn’t work out. At the simplest
form, it’s because you don’t have a market or your product isn’t the right
fit for that market. So, it’s best to review your processes for arriving at
your final product solution and how you came to understand your
customer’s needs, or not. Next time you should start with solving a
simple problem, that a certain type of person has, then build a product
while getting close to and understanding this audience. – Andy Karuza,
SpotSurvey
9. What You Did Well
Avoid being overly critical and give your team the credit where it is due.
Post-mortem can become extremely negative and demoralize the team,
so balancing it with some appreciation of the jobs well done can go a
long way. Moreover, the team should know what they did right, so that
they do not lose sight of the positives and continue to exhibit those
behaviors. – Pratham Mittal, VenturePact
What Have We Learnt?
The outcome of the discussion here suggest these common factors for
every startup to imbibe and they are: Cutting costs, Improving
productivity, Equity Sharing, Better efficiency with automation and an
effective management.

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With competition heating up in the e-commerce and startup space,
companies are continuously focusing their efforts on finding new ways
to keep going strong. In the process, they have discovered one thing in
common – while they don’t have much control over the external
environment, they do have control on internal factors such as cost. And
they can play to their advantage on this front. So, frugality has emerged
as the new buzzword in the retail world.