Birth and Death of Product Startups

All of us say its fun, exciting, challenging etc to work in a start up but not everyone understand the effort of running a start up till it becomes big.

Usually start ups get their initial funding to start off an office and build out a team and this funding lasts only till everyone starts warming up to the job and soon then founders will have the job of getting more funds.

Product companies need at least about 3-4 years to start making money, its quite understandable, build on an idea, recruit a team, develop, churn out the revenue model, market.

So its the duty of founders to rope in funds but how? that is when most of the products die!!
The options usually people take are :

• VC Funding - Ideal scenario, once this is done. ALL IS WELL
• Partial Services - They start taking on small projects and then it becomes big , funds starts flowing in, new people get recruited and it grows.
• Kill the product and start services - People tend to lose patience when success doesn't come soon, it usually so happens that if a product start is started by one person its certainly going to end up being a services company, makes it big.

This is where many great products get killed. Its sad but its true.