31 mistakes that kill 99% of startups | BEST OF 2025
No Bullsh!t, January 2, 2026, 34 min, 1,517 views. This is a best-of collection from the No Bullsh!t podcast for 2025: a cut of remarks from different guests, held together by the theme of the mistakes that kill almost every startup.
| Published | |
|---|---|
| Length | 34 min |
| Views on YouTube | 1,517 |
| Language of the episode | Russian |
| Where to watch and listen | YouTube, Spotify, Telegram |
Date, length and view count according to data from the episode page on YouTube, as of the page update date shown in the footer.
In short
It covers the corporate path and the entrepreneurial one without setting them against each other, women in entrepreneurship, hiring the right people and the role of advisors, and the psychology of invested money after a round. One block is devoted to the classic failure of confusing the existence of a problem with the market's readiness to pay for it, and to the cost of splitting focus across several ideas instead of one. The guests take apart the mechanics of venture money, cultural differences in sales across Europe, the United States, the United Kingdom, Latin America and Asia, and the shift brought by AI agents. The value is a concentrate of conclusions from dozens of conversations in a little over thirty minutes.
Key ideas
- Roughly 1 percent of those who start make a startup work, which is exactly why you cannot spread yourself across several ideas at once: a founder's focus and energy are the scarcest resource.
- A user having a problem guarantees nothing: to pay for a solution the problem has to be sharp enough not to be endured and frequent enough to be worth solving.
- The gap between what the product needs and what the founder can actually do as a product owner is often 2 out of 10 against the 6 required, and it is closed by buying product expertise rather than by hoping it will develop.
- Selling first and building afterwards works more reliably than the familiar logic of building first: investment in a product without confirmed demand usually burns.
- Venture money is not about building a sustainable business, it is a very small chance of earning a very large amount at the price of a board, reporting and targets that serve the fund rather than the founder.
- A pitch deck holds the structure of a meeting and guarantees nothing: deals have closed without a single slide, while the real red flags are a founder's parallel projects and a team of fewer than three people.
The full transcript
The episode is recorded in Russian, and the full transcript of the conversation is on the Russian page of this episode. English and Spanish subtitles for the strongest episodes are rolling out on YouTube in waves.
Open the transcript