5 Pitfalls of online startups

I have been working for the past 10 years in the IT field, I have led technical teams building web products, And I have consulted a fair amount of start-ups, yet I'm no expert on the matter, but I thought sharing the most common and clear mistakes I've come across might spare some heartaches:

1. Spending large amounts of money and time on the first version of the service/product. Products online need to go through the feedback loop of customers, otherwise any features you create are mere guesses; at best educated ones. Which leads to the next problem.
2. Not creating multiple feedback mechanisms to understand & react to end users needs & wants. A lousy feedback form somewhere on the site is surely not enough. Proper analytics tools and visitor's session recording are among the must have basics to understand your customers.
3. Over optimistic forecasts of early revenue, revenue in online businesses is tightly related to traffic you get, and since getting organic traffic takes time you usually need sometime to build up revenue, and some more time to tune your online service to suit customer needs & wants. Those over optimistic forecasts usually lead to severe cash flow problems.
4. Relying heavily on outside vendors to develop and maintain your online business, no one party will be able to manage and understand your business more than you, so whenever you think about reaching out to 3rd party vendors always ensure that you have full control of the situation and even when they do the work for you, you have to fully understand the details of why and how they are doing it.
5. Over-specing hosting infrastructure or team as if you were sure your company is the next Facebook, always make sure that your business is scalable, but what is more important is that you make sure that your infrastructure and support team size is the minimum needed to support your business, they will grow over time as your business grows; being a start-up it's crucial to be cost efficient in everything you do. Having high overhead for your online business is one of the most vicious killers of start-ups. Having a successful online business is more like a marathon so you need to have proper control over your spending so you can compete for the longer run.

There are many more pitfalls that encounter online start-ups, I've tried to mention the ones I saw as clear pitfalls that many start-ups fall for. All sighted from my humble experience in the MENA region.

Have any feedback, or disagree with any of the points mentioned, leave a comment below and share your ideas with us.