This is a guest post by Nigel Eccles, co-founder and CEO of Hubdub Ltd, the company behind Hubdub, the news prediction game, and Fanduel, the daily draft fantasy sports game. Over his last three start-ups he admits he has made every mistake outlined below. Throughout the summer TechCrunch Europe is running guest posts written by people on the tech scene in Europe. If you’d like to contribute get in touch.
You know the story. A group of friends come up with an amazing product idea, lock themselves away, code like demons, eat pizza, drink coffee and several months later come out with a prototype. The prototype is good enough to convince some investors, they raise money, build the full product, launch it, users love it, product gets traction, acquirers circle and then founders exit to a large pay-off. They then give media interviews which gets summarised into something that sounds like the above story.
What is wrong with this picture?