How to Ruin a Startup

After reading "Rework" recommended by Haozi, I got some inspiration on how to ruin a startup.

💎 Pursue the Perfect Product

We all know there's no perfect product, but for startups wanting to create a perfect product, at least these efforts are needed:

1. Absolutely bug-free: Comprehensive product interaction design, strict coding process, complete test cases, etc.
2. All-encompassing features: Don't waste time distinguishing important from secondary - all capabilities must be included, all platforms must be supported, all functions must be available.
3. Delayed delivery: Pursuing a perfect product requires time and effort - delay after delay after delay.
4. Silent feedback: After developing a feature, it takes forever to go live, getting real customer feedback much too late.

Pursuing the perfect product, wanting this feature and that feature, delaying product delivery, crushing team confidence, reducing company success rate - death by a thousand cuts.

📊 Meeting Techniques

Meetings are poison. When holding meetings, we should maximize their toxicity:

1. No clear problems, no set agenda.
2. Maximize attendance. Don't streamline meeting participants, add more irrelevant people.
3. Everyone speaks. Listen to ineffective opinions from incompetent people.
4. Go to the meeting room. Can directly interrupt everyone's work.
5. Unlimited duration. Don't limit meeting time, the longer the better. A 1-hour meeting with 10 people can reduce company productivity by 10 hours.

Through these meeting techniques, you can effectively increase meeting duration and accumulate more armchair theorizing.

📆 Make Long-term Plans

The essence of planning is using the past to guide the future, using previous experience to constrain future changes. Making long-term plans can trap a startup.

When a startup executes a long-term plan for a period and finds things going wrong, they might stubbornly continue due to:

1. Sunk cost: We've already put in 4 months of effort, wouldn't it be a shame not to continue?
2. Pride and arrogance: We've already set our goals, wouldn't changing them be embarrassing?

🍔 Satisfy All Customers

After launch, remember the customer is king - all customer feedback must be absorbed, all customer demands must be satisfied, making your product bloated. Benefits of a bloated product:

1. Many features. Meeting all user needs means having corresponding features for every demand.
2. Increased complexity. Each added feature needs corresponding interactions, messy features make product interactions complex and interfaces gaudy.
3. Repel new users. By increasing product complexity, you can effectively reduce new users.
4. No personality, approachable. Like a bus - anyone can get on.

Never pursue simplicity. Our goal is to become like WeChat - creating a massive, bloated garbage product!

💰 Raise Funds to Expand, Hire More People

When the product achieves some success, immediately raise funds. The benefits of fundraising are numerous:

1. Bigger offices, more employees
2. Spending other people's money is addictive
3. Losing control of the company
4. Risk of investors cashing out
5. Fundraising is extremely time and energy consuming
6. Product may cater to investors rather than customers

Hire more people. New hires:

1. Don't understand the company
2. Don't understand the project
3. Are mutually deferential and polite
4. Nobody dares point out product flaws

🎯 Focus Resources on Trivial Matters

People and resources are always limited. We need to properly allocate these human and material resources by investing them all in trivial matters. How?

1. Don't prioritize. Among many tasks, don't try to find the focal point - all tasks must be done, all requirements must be completed.
2. No urgencies. When everything is urgent, nothing is urgent.
3. Be agreeable. Compliance is always easier than confrontation - people easily agree to add new features, accept overly optimistic deadlines, and accept mediocre designs.

🚫 Don't Aim for Profit

Postpone how the company will profit from the product, like when designing Shenzhou-1, first assume gravity doesn't exist.

When a company doesn't aim for profit, its sustainable survival becomes questionable. Give employees some exit strategies:

• How to liquidate in bankruptcy, ensuring everyone gets n+1 compensation
• Being acquired by other companies

Give employees less courage to burn their bridges, and the company can reach its Ending sooner.