0:00 Okay, get this.0:01 Forty-two percent of startups fail because of "no market need." Forty-two.0:06 So, nearly half of all the blood, sweat, and tears just… goes into building something nobody actually wants.0:13 Exactly.0:14 It’s not about running out of money, not really.0:17 It’s not about getting outmaneuvered by a competitor.0:21 It’s building a beautiful solution to a problem that doesn't exist.0:26 Last week on the confessional, we talked about those unfiltered truths, and honestly?0:32 This feels like the most painful one of all.0:35 Because it's the one you can't blame on anyone else.0:39 It's not the market's fault.0:41 It's not your investor's fault.0:43 It's yours.0:44 You fell in love with an idea, and you never stopped to ask the one question that mattered: does anyone give a damn?0:52 Yeah.0:52 And I wanna talk about one of those today.0:55 A story that just… it perfectly captures this.0:59 Halo Smart Labs.1:00 Remember them?1:01 Vaguely.1:01 They had that… smart smoke detector, right?1:04 Looked sleek.1:05 Felt premium.1:06 Exactly.1:07 They called it a "best in class" product.1:10 And you know what?1:11 It probably was.1:12 But they shut down.1:13 And the founder, in the post-mortem, was just brutally honest.1:18 He said, and I’m quoting here: "With Kolos, we did a lot of things right, but it was useless because we ignored the single most important aspect every startup should focus on first: the right product." Useless.1:33 Wow.1:33 To call your own product, your baby, useless.1:36 That's a level of honesty you only get after a spectacular failure.1:41 It's the kind of clarity that costs millions of dollars and years of your life to acquire.1:47 They were so focused on making the best thing, they never confirmed if it was the right thing.1:54 And that’s the trap, isn't it?1:56 The engineering trap.1:57 The designer trap.1:59 We get so obsessed with the craft, with the elegance of the solution, we forget to check if anyone has the problem we're solving.2:08 We get positive feedback from our friends, from other tech people… Who all say "Oh, that's so cool!" but would never actually buy it.2:17 It's qualitative feedback without commitment.2:21 It's the most dangerous drug for a founder.2:24 So what does this mean for you, Admin, sitting in your sprint planning meeting?2:29 It means you have to be the professional skeptic.2:33 When everyone is celebrating a technical breakthrough or a beautiful UI, you have to be the one asking, "Okay, but which specific customer gets so much value from this that they will open their wallet?2:47 And how do we KNOW that?" You have to be willing to be the least popular person in the room for five minutes.2:55 Because the alternative is being the person writing a post-mortem like the Halo founder eighteen months from now.3:03 You know, this reminds me of V1 Interactive.3:06 The video game developer.3:08 Oh, yeah.3:08 They launched that game, "Disintegration," back in 2021.3:12 It had a big name behind it, a veteran from the Halo—the video game Halo, not the smart detector—franchise.3:20 Right.3:20 Pedigree.3:21 A cool concept.3:22 It was this hybrid of a first-person shooter and a real-time strategy game.3:27 On paper, it sounded amazing.3:29 And in reality?3:30 In reality, it was a game for an audience of, like, twelve people.3:35 The shooter fans found the strategy parts boring, and the strategy fans found the shooter parts shallow.3:42 They tried to please everyone and ended up pleasing no one.3:46 And they shut down the entire studio nine months after launch.3:51 NINE months.3:52 The founder said something that I think about all the time.3:56 He said, "Maybe I should be happy that I lasted for about two years… After all, statistics out there say about 90% of start-ups fail in a year." It's this weird mix of devastation and, like, grimly accepting the odds.4:11 But the odds aren't just a roll of the dice!4:14 The odds are a direct result of these decisions.4:18 V1 didn't fail because of a curse.4:20 They failed because they built a product for a non-existent customer.4:25 They misread the market.4:27 Just like Halo Smart Labs.4:29 And just like that anonymous founder from the CB Insights report.4:33 What did he say?4:34 "Markets change and we didn’t change quickly enough." And then the kicker: "tl;dr: users > partners, no premature scaling." Users over partners.4:45 He spent all his time chasing deals, getting validation from other businesses, when he should have been obsessed with the end user.4:54 He was building for his partners, not his customers.4:58 Another version of the same mistake.5:00 It's so easy to do.5:01 A big partnership feels like a win.5:04 It's validation!5:05 You can put a logo on your website.5:08 But if the users of that partner don't care… it's all just theater.5:12 So for you, Admin, if you're running a B2B or a B2B2C company, this is the lesson.5:18 Your partner is not your customer.5:21 Your customer's customer is your customer.5:24 You need to be talking to them.5:26 Directly.5:26 If you can't, if you're firewalled from the end user, that is a five-alarm fire.5:32 You are flying blind.5:34 One hundred percent.5:35 You're just taking someone else's word for what the market needs.5:40 And their incentives are probably not your incentives.5:43 I've got one more.5:45 And this one… this one is recent.5:47 And it is PAINFUL.5:48 Okay, lay it on me.5:50 A game developer, Boomie Studio.5:52 They soft-launched a game called "Neon Fall" back in May of this year.5:57 The team was hyped.5:58 They thought the physics were great, the look was cool.6:02 They were proud of what they built.6:05 Uh oh.6:05 I can already hear where this is going.6:08 They set a goal for the first week of the soft launch.6:12 A modest goal, they thought.6:14 Ten thousand downloads.6:15 Okay.6:16 10k.6:16 Seems reasonable for a new game.6:18 They got one hundred and forty-two.6:21 Oof.6:21 Wow.6:21 Not one thousand.6:22 One.6:23 Four.6:23 Two.6:23 One hundred and forty-two downloads.6:26 The gap between expectation and reality… it's just a chasm.6:30 The founder, Sudhishkumar, wrote this post-mortem and you could just feel the pain.6:36 He said, "It is painful to write this, but it is necessary." God, that’s just… that's the sound of a spreadsheet telling you your dream is dead.6:46 You can argue with qualitative feedback.6:49 You can find excuses.6:50 You can't argue with one hundred and forty-two when you needed ten thousand.6:56 The market has spoken, and it just whispered "nope." That is the most brutal form of "no market need." It's not a slow decline.7:05 It's a brick wall on day one.7:07 All that time, all that code, all that art… for nothing.7:11 And you know the team loved it.7:13 That's the tragedy.7:14 Internally, they were probably getting amazing feedback.7:18 "This feels great!" "I love this level!" They were their own focus group.7:23 They built the game they wanted to play, assuming thousands of other people wanted to play it too.7:30 And they were wrong.7:32 It's the ultimate echo chamber.7:34 So, Admin, here's the takeaway.7:36 If your only validation is coming from inside the building, you have NO validation.7:42 None.7:42 You have to get your hypothesis in front of real, paying, cynical customers before you write a single line of production code.7:51 Not friends.7:52 Not your mom.7:53 Strangers who do not care about your feelings.7:56 Test the ad copy.7:58 Test the landing page.7:59 Ask for a credit card before the thing even exists.8:03 Anything that forces a real commitment, not just a polite "yeah, that's cool." Because a "like" is free.8:10 A download is cheap.8:12 A credit card number… that’s truth.8:14 You know, we're talking about the product, the market, the metrics.8:19 But there's another layer to this.8:21 The human cost.8:22 That Wilbur Labs survey from this year… it found that 90 percent of founders have considered quitting because of the stress.8:31 Ninety percent.8:32 So basically everyone.8:34 Basically everyone.8:35 And what's more stressful than pouring your soul into something for two years and then watching the world completely ignore it?8:44 That's not just a business failure.8:47 That's an identity crisis.8:48 It's founder burnout, and it's a huge reason why these death spirals happen.8:54 You're so exhausted and emotionally invested, you can't see the writing on the wall.9:00 You start believing your own hype because the alternative is just too devastating to contemplate.9:07 You double down on the bad idea.9:09 You convince yourself that one more feature, one more marketing push, will be the thing that turns it all around.9:17 Premature scaling.9:18 You're trying to grow something that doesn't have roots.9:22 You're pouring water on concrete and hoping for a forest.9:26 So what's the antidote?9:28 I mean, besides just… not failing, which is easier said than done.9:32 I think it's about changing the culture around failure.9:36 We talk a big game about "failing fast," but we don't really mean it.9:41 We mean "succeed fast, and if you can't, then fail quietly over there, please." Right.9:47 Fail fast, but don't mess up my cap table.9:50 The idea of a "pre-mortem" is something I think is criminally underused.9:55 Before you even start, you get the whole team in a room and you say, "Okay, it's a year from now.10:02 This project has failed spectacularly.10:05 Why?10:05 What happened?" And you write it all down.10:08 "We couldn't find customers." "The tech was too complicated." "A competitor beat us to it." You map out all the landmines before you even take the first step into the field.10:21 It reframes the whole exercise.10:23 It makes it safe to talk about the risks.10:26 It turns pessimism into a productive tool.10:29 It’s the opposite of the echo chamber.10:31 And it means that when you see one of those landmines in the distance six months later, you don't pretend it's a mirage.10:40 You recognize it.10:41 You say, "Hey, remember that thing we were all worried about?10:45 It's happening." It's about building a system to protect you from your own optimism.10:51 Because that optimism is what gets you started, but unchecked, it's also what will drive you right off a cliff.10:59 There's that quote from James Everingham that I love.11:03 "You have to be impatient with shipping, but patient with your career." Mmm.11:08 That's good.11:09 I think that's the key.11:11 This one product, this one launch, it feels like everything right now.11:16 But it's not.11:17 It's one at-bat in a very long game.11:19 The failure of Neon Fall or Disintegration or the Halo detector feels final.11:25 But it's only final if you let it be.11:27 The lesson is what you carry to the next thing.11:31 If you can survive the post-mortem.11:33 If you can be as honest as these founders were and actually learn the lesson.11:38 Forty-two percent of people don't.11:41 They build another beautiful thing nobody wants.11:44 So maybe the real question for you, Admin, isn't "how do I avoid failure?" It's "how will I behave when it happens?"
