March 10

Robert Fitzpatrick – How to avoid the downfall of your start-up?

Are you interested in knowing what the greatest cause of start-up failure is and how to avoid it?

Most start-ups fail because they are unable to find a sufficient number of paying customers. Are you also facing the challenge of how to as quickly as possible and with limited resources develop a product that your customers will in fact purchase?

Welcome to the start-up entrepreneurs’ club! Detecting (identifying) problems, pains and customer expectations is a demanding phase since information is usually combined with the entrepreneur’s incorrect assumptions, which are based on his/her ego, as well as misleading and concealed opinions.

Technology start-up entrepreneur Rob Fitzpatrick has several times tasted the bitter taste of entrepreneurial defeat. He uses the lessons learnt in his new entrepreneurial ventures and when advising start-up entrepreneurs in the early stages of development. He mainly mentors entrepreneurs on techniques and approaches to customer integration in the development process of products. Rob focuses on the challenge of identifying the right users and creating value for them. He summed-up his experience in his bestseller “The Mom Test”.

Rob is a technology entrepreneur from London. After a very comfortable academic period, Rob crossed paths with start-ups, gave up writing his dissertation and ventured into a completely new world. In 2007 he founded the Habit Industries start-up, went through the Y Combinator programme and acquired several investments in the Silicon Valley and London. His start-up assisted entertainment companies such as MTV and Sony in setting up safer interactive advertising campaigns. Rob only managed to keep the company alive for four years after its establishment. This failure and the failure of two other companies which underwent successful bankruptcies have thought him a lot.

Nowadays Rob holds training workshops at Seedcamp, HackFwd, Emerge Venture Labs and UCL. Rob writes about start-up strategies in the early stages on http://thestartuptoolkit.com, provides support to start-ups on http://foundercentric.com and is developing his new start-up on http://dex.io.
 

In his lecture and workshop, Rob will talk about the:

  • Steps in discovering one’s first customers and identifying their needs, pains and expectations,
  • Pitfalls that could dim your view and lead you astray in this process,
  • Most important expertise and knowledge required for successful development of a product,
  • Key errors hat prove fatal for start-ups in their early stages.