The Startup Anti-Patterns Series: Why Common Practices Can Kill Your Company
An anti-pattern is a commonly used process or structure that seems like a good response to a problem but actually causes more harm than good. This series, by Itamar Novick and Simeon Simeonov, draws on their experience as founders and investors in over 100 startups to identify and explain these patterns. From 'elephant hunting' to 'unicorn hunting,' the list of 75 anti-patterns highlights the subtle mistakes that increase startup risk and hamper execution, offering tangible examples to help founders avoid them.
Pursuing an anti-pattern doesn’t mean that your company will die tomorrow or in the next year, but each anti-pattern adds-up and could lead to clouding your focus and hampering your ability to execute.
- 1saadcodes
Some seem to treat microservices as a sign of good engineering when it's often just premature complexity. You can always split a monolith later, but you're stuck maintaining that complexity from day one
- bhouston
The issue with many critiques like this is that “it depends” and that many of these strategies actually work while often they do not - but given that most startups fail even generally successful strategies will have a high rate of failure.
And the people that study these types of lists to apply it to their own case are then engaging in “analysis paralysis” because the list is so long you are bound to be caught up by it.
So while I think it is useful to critique your idea and business the best thing to do is to try and sell it and make money and keep adjusting and trying new things to maximize your income. There is no magic bullet.
- saimiam
Such anti patterns are like Nostradamus’s prophecies - you see a company flopping then curve fit a narrative to justify the antipatterns.
How do I, as a founder, know that I am falling into an anti pattern? I don’t believe it is possible to know. You can only “know” in hindsight and that makes these anti patterns useless.
- CM30
Seems like a useful list of things to avoid when running a startup, plus situations where it may not always be a bad thing.
Still, got a few thoughts here:
> if you build it, they will come
This feels like the cause for so many news/media bundling services, akin to Blendle. Loads of people seem to have the thought process "no-one pays for journalism, that's because it's too inconvenient to subscribe seperately, let's bundle it all", but far fewer people actually seem to want such a service.
> Chasing Blue Oceans
This feels like the explanation for the Wii U, despite Nintendo obviously not being a startup of any kind. The Wii was a blue ocean product, and the company clearly thought the same logic could apply to its successor too. Find an idea that didn't have much competition (using a portable screen to control what's going on elsewhere), and use that to attract a new market.
Unfortunately, while the concept worked on a handheld device, it didn't really feel good to use on a larger scale, and the ideas designed for it (usually some sort of asymmetric gameplay experience) just didn't have the appeal that more traditional ones did.
> Boiling the Ocean
This seems really common with crowdfunded products, since if their scope isn't unrealistic as hell beforehand (and if it wants the public's attention and money, it usually is), it certainly is once the stretch goals start being added and the creators start promising everything and the kitchen sink.
Also with video games, as shown […]
- brinepot
Yep, seen too many startups jump straight to Kubernetes and microservices before they even have a validated product. Ouch.