My co-founder at Gymhopper, Louis Nicholls, wrote a great piece about the top 10 mistakes business students make when founding a startup. The article was initiated by the same questions coming up over and over again, so Louis decided to write about the 10 mistakes and his/our learnings.
Here are the top 3:
- Applying to startup competitions.
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- There are plenty of startup competitions all across Switzerland - General advice: Don't apply - you lose focus and plenty of productive time where you could have actually built a great business or talked to your customers. Your Competition-ROI usually can't compete with your productive time.
- Thinking you understand/are good at sales and marketing.
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- The stuff that a business school teaches you sounds great in the class room, in theory and on paper - but the real world looks different. Doing marketing or sales for your own business is quite different from the things you need to learn by heart at business school.
- Advisors
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- For some reason, advisors, mentors and ‘coaches’ outnumber founders and investors 10 to 1 in the startup ‘scene’, as Louis wrote in his article. There are plenty of people who are happy to help you in return for equity or money - they even do that as a regular job. However, we can assure you from our experience, that people who won't be a full-time founder (meaning working 120% at your company) or who invest real money in your startup should not be working with you. It slows you down and often the advice you get is worse than none at all. And by the way: Really successful founders (there are only a few in Switzerland) might be very busy but if you ask them they are always happy to help you - free of charge and with very valuable advice, as they have gone through the same things.
I can highly recommend you to read the full article right here. If you have any questions or just want to say hi, feel free to contact Louis (louis@gymhopper.ch) or me (silvan@gymhopper.ch) anytime.
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