Product managers, entrepreneurs and business worldwide are busy solving problems that each of these hope would bring in great relief of their target audience. Outcome is never guaranteed but one thing we know for sure is that, less than 10% of these ideas will actually see a successful life. Most, almost 90+ percentage of these will cease in their early stage. There are many reasons of failure and if you have decided to kick-start your entrepreneurial journey, here are 5 pitfalls that you must be careful of.

1. Wrong problem. You believe it is a problem which actually is not a problem or you have failed to define it accurately. Who has problem? will he/ she pay to get it resolved? what is the frequency at which problem occurs ? etc – know *.* of the problem before you move on to next step.
2. Poorly designed solution. You have identified the right problem, but somehow messed up with the solution. Accuracy, efficiency and effectiveness of the solution is not good enough to solve the identified problem and hence even if you have identified and scoped out problem accurately your solution pulls you down.
3. Bad execution. Poorly defined business process or team selection ends up killing a bright opportunity. People and process when defined and chosen wrongly kills a well identified opportunity and then solution designed hardly matters, you are sure to lose the battle.
4. No Monetization. For many, monetization plan is either never defined or not thought through properly. Important questions like revenue model, cash flow etc remains unanswered even when product has entered into maturity phase. Profit is purpose of business and this purpose should be well defined in early stages as well should get matured as your product or solution does.
5. Short Scale. All looks good and you are even making profit. However, making profit is not good enough to sustain a business. How much profit? and at what scale are very important. It is imperative that the idea that you are working on is scalable else you are sure to end up slogging too hard for earning your daily bread and hence it might not be sustainable for long run.

Failing in any of the above aspects would result in competition or substitute offerings eating up your share of pie. Needless to say that it pains most when you fail on to capitalize on opportunities that you identified at right time and in right position. Entrepreneurship is all about taking chances, improving success probability and mitigating risks and you as owner of your business you are expected to take care of these pitfalls.

So what do you do to ensure that you are not victimized by any of these pitfalls. Keep it simple, have these five potential pitfalls noted on a post-it and put on your desk. Never ever let any of these slip out of your thought process. Think about these when you design new feature, when you create deployment model, set revenue targets or when you are working on user experience. Of course there are many validation point that you will come across but validation comes little late than your thought process and your thought process is first check point for you to have optimal path towards success.

@mathurabhay