All big startups have obstacles during their growth. Sometimes you may even have to shut down your business but from every failure, you will learn. Here are the best lessons learned from doing their biggest fuckup's of startup superstars Ilkka Paananen, Spotify Daniel Ek & Skype Niklas Zennström.
Part 2: Biggest fuckup of Daniel Ek, the Co-Founder of Spotify
When we started up Spotify, desktop was very important. We had business model where desktop was free but for mobile you had to pay. While people had better and better Mobile phones, people wanted to use more and more mobile Spotify. Unfortunately the did not download Spotify for mobile because they had option to use desktop for free, but had to pay for mobile.
Due to increasing need for mobile but no free mobile software we were afraid of losing customers so we had to make mobile also for free. Unfortunately our licence with record companies did not allow this so we had to go back to record companies to start negotiations again. It took 18 months for record companies to accepth the freemium model for mobile. After that we were lucky to show investors huge growth on downloads but unfortunately we lost our business model.
We changed to subsciption model and fortunately people started to pay for desktop+mobile and now Spotify is big.
You have to accept to change your business model. You need to be ready to pivot for new business models.
Have a successful life!
Ilkka O. Lavas
serial entrepreneur, City Digital restaurant software, the 2nd fastest growing company from Finland