Over the past fews years, I’ve been fortunate to have worked with multiple successful startups whilst I built out my own platform, Stock Market Sensei . Two of the three startups I built products for have been acquired and the other is still growing strong. With statistics saying that, as many as 9 out of 10 new businesses fail and my recent analysis of heavily funded startups that failed , I wondered why the main startups I worked with have the opposite record of 100% success rate.
Here’s a quick summary of the startups:
1. The first company I worked with, Heywire, was subsequently acquired by Salesforce and the product I helped build, Heywire LiveText, is now part of the Salesforce Service Cloud .
2. From there, I built the first android versions of Dark Sky from scratch for The Dark Sky Company . The Dark Sky Company is the provider of a leading hyperlocal weather forecasting api and it is one of the most loved weather apps.
3. Finally, with Raizlabs I built products for Fortune 500 companies and venture backed startups alike. Raizlabs was recently acquired by Rightpoint , a larger agency.
As their Crunchbase profiles show, these companies varied in funding amount. Heywire has over $20 million listed in venture capital funding whilst Raizlabs only has a half a million dollar debt financing round listed. So, funding size alone is not the differentiator between failure and success.
However, it was clear to me that each of these companies had the right key ingredients cooked together in the right way. And knowing the progress I’ve made in my own startup based on my experience with them, I realized that building a startup is as simple as making an omelette.
Below is a step by step video guide of what I learnt about building a startup omelette the right way. And, a key ingredient for a great startup omelette is patience, serious patience. I mean the kind of patience required to watch a ~10 minute Omelette/startup-tips youtube video from start to finish!