article thumbnail

Why Startups Fail - 20 Top Reasons Gleaned from 32 Startup Failure Post-Mortems

www.chubbybrain.com

created a vastly higher cost structure; I had 80 people mostly on base salaries under $100,000 and was bringing in revenue at the rate of $20 million annually. Contributing to the high cost structure was the new culture of working 9-5 Monday through Friday. 11 – Pricing Issues. Pricing is one part science, 10 parts art.

article thumbnail

Customers Love Free Stuff … But That’s Not Your Problem

abovethecrowd.com

According to an interview with Elon Musk, this campaign cost Paypal about $60 million , which most Silicon Valley historians would consider money well spent. It would cost a tremendous amount of money to run such a program. With the 7% banker fee that is a 35% AVERAGE cost of capital. Billions of dollars. Wouldn’t that be great?

IPO 82
article thumbnail

The cardinal sin of community management

Startup Lessons Learned

This single decision wound up costing the company significant revenue and over the course of several months sent its customer growth into decline. In the end, we managed to repair the damage, but only after losing a lot of time and at significant opportunity cost. We were totally unprepared for the magnitude of what happened.

Community 158