5 Post-Funding Mistakes That Can Kill Your Startup

It’s not easy to run your own venture successfully. Every entrepreneur will have certain amount of doubt, apprehension and a sense of fear while starting up.  There are lot of faulty decisions that are made in the course of starting up. An entrepreneur should avoid committing such mistakes especially during the time when the funding is already been received to the enterprise. So, all startups should take a back seat for a while and think: Are your mistakes killing your startup?

1) Too Much Hiring should be avoided

Quite often a business is relied upon by the people who are handling it. So it should be the prime concern of the entrepreneur to check upon the hires in the organization after funding. It is a noticeable fact that after the startup is funded they started spending too much upon the hiring process. Due to this a lot of cash is burned.

Also it is seen that many bad hires are done due to the addition of so many people. So an entrepreneur should act smartly while hiring. He/she should try to hire a limited amount of people who are experts. This can help in retaining the best talent as well as increase the productivity of the startup.

2)  Not Over Spending from the Monthly Budget

It’s essential to save the money to meet the unforeseen problems . As soon as the funding is done  the startup should prepare a realistic monthly budget. Based on the budget the expenditure should be checked upon every month. This budget setting will help the startups to save the money for a longer amount of time and can reduce failure risks.

Also the concept like Bring Your Own Device should be incorporated within the employees that will help in cutting the cost of systems and laptops.

There are lot of software  that keeps a check on the transactions as well as cash flows from your account that will enable you  to have a constant check over the account.

3) Avoid competing with competitors

One thing which is becoming prevalent among the startups is the competition among the competitors.  No sooner than the money started flowing from funding the startups will be seen busy in acquiring their competitors or competing with the big giants which will lead to their downfall.

In this course of acquiring and competing, the employees working in the startup won’t be paid properly and will start leaving it. The whole amount of funding would be wasted on these things and leading to the failure of Startup.

The Pay By Touch startup was failed due to this reason of not paying the salaries well to its employees. The entrepreneurs were busy competing with the giant Facebook and acquiring its competitor. This ultimately led the startup to fail. 

4) Don’t Lose Your Strategy Focus              

As a lot of entrepreneurs are new with great ideas, they are not well experienced in the industry. Due to this there are lot of incidents in which it is seen that that the strategies that are employed  during the initial investments let lose its focus and go hay way after the funding is done.

With a splurge of new ideas that comes to the mind of entrepreneurs there becomes a lot of chaos and commotion in solving out those ideas. So a proper plan should follow out after the funding based on the business model  and targeted audience.

According to Matt Salzberg Founder &CEO Blue Apron as the time and resources are very limited to the startup entrepreneurs it is necessary for them to focus and prioritize.

5) Products should not be compromised

Remember your products are the sole reason for the success of your business. Often a lot of modifications are perceived within the products after funding. The initial product range takes turn to the introduction of many new products. The organizations leverage heavy pricing on those products. This leads to low buyer list of the products.

The agenda should be such that the entrepreneurs should spend valuable amount of time upon the customer validation and customer feedback on their product range. This will help in bringing better quality of products with increase in the sales and retaining the amount spend.

Speak Well Startup based in Mumbai failed due to poor customer validation. Though it got initial funding but the lack of resources made the investor lose its confidence and trust over it.

The entrepreneur should be very thrifty in terms of spending the funding amount. He/she should plan the hire systematically, the working space and expansion mode should be economical as well as the product quality should be the major concern.