Learning from Failure – Keep an Eye on Competition

A major reason for a lot of startups failing is that they fail to keep an eye on their competition. In a highly competitive world, it is very important for a startup to identify trends, assess them and implement the promising ones before a competitor does. Startups which are not agile and don’t adapt fast enough find it difficult to survive.

My first startup Bitequest was one of the first restaurant discovery cum reservation tools in India. Being the first , we were able to get a good foothold into the market. The biggest problem we faced was within our team, we took too much time to make any decisions. There were suddenly a host of startups which entered this market. Our team, since we were the market leader at that time, paid no attention to them. Suddenly, owing to scalable business models, a couple of the new startups were able to raise money and scale up tremendously. We were still doing what we were doing earlier and eventually became a very small competitor in the restaurant space.

Advice – As important as it is to look within, it is also very important to look outside of your startup. Observing, learning and then adapting is key in sustaining your startup.