71. Where do most web startups fail? I‘d like to suggest that web start-ups founded by quality teams often fail due to time. Especially if you are selling something (e.g., SaaS), it’s going to take you 24 months to get to any meaningful revenues, and probably 36 months to get to enough repeating/repeatable revenues to have a really stable business. Many seemingly great entrepreneurs just let themselves run out of time: • People get discouraged and quit when they don’t have traction in 3-6-9 months. It’s no fun when the bell doesn’t ring for days on end. • People get discouraged and quit when they have some pre- traction, some early signs of potential success ... but it’s not enough to build a real business. • People get discouraged when they finally learn what the market needs (after 3-12 months of learning), and they learn it’s just so much work and will take so much time. FWIW my view, my learning, is you have to give yourself, truly budget, 24 months to get your start-up to true initial traction, from first release to iterative release to first users to first customers to a product people actually want to pay for that can scale. Faster is better, faster is what your seed investors want, faster is what you want. Yes, fail fast if your idea is a dog. But if you don’t give yourself time, you will probably fail. SAASTR.COM 67