kalm, nieuwsgierig, vastbesloten
A lot of problems with a song in progress can be solved by starting a new and different song
A lot of problems with a song in progress can be solved by starting a new and different song
This was discussed at yesterdays Music and Bits as well. I would argue that music startups still make sense, if they turn to music that has not yet been signed to traditional industry parties. Saves tons of money, opens up a lot of possiblities for (future) sustainability.
Overall, Caldwell’s talk isn’t going to be encouraging for anyone hoping to launch a music startup: at one point early on he says, “Every time a founder does a music startup, a likely-more-successful startup dies”. But Caldwell’s message doesn’t seem to be that launching a music startup is completely impossible. Rather, it’s just incredibly hard, because you have so many things working against you. And he wouldn’t recommend it.
The bottom line for fledgling startups: these record execs need to discover businesses that will generate hundreds of millions of dollars, and they can’t take gambles with a bunch of startups that want to gradually build up a user base and focus on monetization when they (probably never) hit critical mass. They’ve tried that, and it hasn’t worked out for them.
Not to be disregarded
The fact that you are learning only from success is a deeper problem than you imagine…drawing conclusions only from data that is available or convenient and thus systematically biasing your results.
Luckily, the startup community often courageously shares their stories – even when things don’t end well. And so below is our list of the 25 “best” startup failure post-mortems of all time. Three notes before we begin:
- After reading these, you realize more than ever that the startup community is really like no other. We were amazed by the candor and generosity of many of the writers of these post-mortems. Corporate America could learn from this.
- We didn’t find post-mortems by investors (VCs, angels, etc) except for one by Roger Ehrenberg. We’d love to see these given the number of businesses you see and ultimately invest in. It would be an admission that you’re not infallible, but we already know that
Read more at www.chubbybrain.com
- If we’ve missed a great post-mortem others would benefit from reading, please leave it in the comments, and we’ll add it. BTW, if you do the count, there are actually 32 post-mortems in this post. Think of it as 7 bonus post-mortems on the house.