“You think that you know it all. After all, you’re already successful in your mind, so who cares what others have to say? Fight that urge every day…You know nothing.”

In the majority of failures, there is one basic reason: Lack of market. “I’ll assert that market is the most important factor in a startup’s success or failure,” said Marc Andreessen.

The one main reason for failure with both B2B (44%) and B2C (50%) startups was a lack of market.

One of the biggest issues we found in our study was the lack of idea validation. This affected 17% of B2C startups.

Don’t fall in love with the solution. Fall in love with the problem.

You have proved nothing until you have your first 10 paying customers.

Just because people say it’s a good idea doesn’t mean it is.

If the problem isn’t pressing enough to cause palpable pain, people will live with it, and avoid the pain of spending money to fix it.

“The main lesson here is that you can’t just listen to what your customers tell you when it seems to be what you want to hear. You have to get their active demonstration that they will invest whatever is required to use your product, whether that’s time, money, or both. Get them to run a ninja warrior course if you have to, but don’t call signups on a landing page or friendly phone conversations ‘validation.’”

Reason #2 for B2C startup failure is poor marketing. It affected 29% of the companies in our research (compared to only 7% of B2Bs).

The most important thing is getting your product into the hands of customers. You should spend an equal amount of time on MVP development and distribution.

Plan how to spend your money wisely. Don’t spend too much on the product building. At least until you are sure that you are building the product people need. In any other scenario, you will waste money on a product that nobody wants to buy.

You can avoid 80% of expenses by working from home and hiring employees who will work remotely. Don’t hire until you have a product.