In the many thousands of articles advising entrepreneurs on what they have to focus on to build successful startups, much has been written about three key factors: team, product and market, with particular focus on the importance of product/market fit. Failure to get product/market fit right is very likely the number 1 cause of startup failure. However in all these articles, I have not seen any discussion about what I believe is the second biggest cause of startup failure: the cost of acquiring customers turns out to be higher than expected, and exceeds the ability to monetize those customers.

In case you are not familiar with the importance of Product/Market fit, Marc Andreessen has a great blog post on this topic: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 4: The only thing that matters.

In this blog, Marc argues that out of the three core elements of a startup, team, product, and market, the only thing that matters is product/market fit. I agree with Marc’s view that product/market fit is extremely important. However after closely watching several hundred startups that have failed, I observed that a very large number of these had solved the product/market fit problem, but still failed because they had not found a way to acquire customers at a low enough cost.

more of the SOA World article from David Skok