This article is part of the “Starting Up Smarter” series, where I try to share what I have learned running Erasmusu.com since 2008. I hope that it proves useful for project managers, developers, designers or any other crazy, like-minded individual, who finds pleasure in creating things. If you’re one of the above, follow me on Twitter.

Can you learn more from success or failure?

When we read of great success stories in the media, normally we only see the good points, the strengths that carried these people to where they are. However in my opinion, their faults should be equally or more important in terms of providing useful examples. If you tell me how someone became successful, I’m not sure if I will be able to replicate that success or not. But tell me where they failed, and maybe I’ll never make that mistake.

We all slip up. To err is human. And with this, I would like to highlight the worst mistakes I’ve made since launching Erasmusu.com in 2008. Hopefully, you can avoid the same proverbial booboos from hitting the fan.

Some slipups are monumental gaffes, and others are traps that you cannot help but fall into. Many have been resolved over time (everything is okay now, thankfully), however others have become part of the fixtures and fittings and are likely to be with us for as long as Erasmusu.com exists. But remember, we learn from our mistakes. As Albert Einstein said, in the midst of the trenches, you cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

1. Launching the website without crawlable content

When the website went live in 2009, the first thing we did was pull the rug right out from under our SEO’s feet.

At the time, our shining beacon for “doing things right” in social networking was the website Tuenti, an invitation-only Spanish equivalent of Facebook. Tuenti seemed to work really well with its exclusivity and total member-only invitations; if you weren’t a member you couldn’t even get past the welcome page. So this is how we decided to build our website.

However, the issue with Tuenti is that it focuses primarily on member’s social connections and not much else. And the contrast in Erasmusu is that we wanted to focus more on quality content in worldwide Erasmus destinations.

So with the approach of privatizing all our content, our entire database of Erasmus cities and Universities was now inaccessible to search engines; we had committed SEO suicide. Any information, blogs or written experiences posted by users were completely invisible to Google. We’d proverbially shot ourselves in the foot.

Furthermore, the lack of developmental resources and time to re-program or re-design was a huge problem, especially in regards to the jump from privatized system to user-accessible public interface with friendly URLs, etc. This resulted in a difficult and expensive folly for us.

2. Launching with too many features

This is almost impossible to avoid. You can read this warning a thousand times in any number of different articles, but if it’s your first project, you’re still certain to fall into this pit. We thought that all our features were essential, but in retrospect, it was far too much.

“Should we put this feature in? – Hell yeah! Look, Tuenti has it and it works so well for them. We HAVE to include this.” And we soon saw that our infinite amount of features had to disappear (in a painful way) due to unsuitability. It makes me laugh so much when I read old emails from the summer of 2008 when we were designing the first Erasmusu UX. Everything seemed so important.

Every new start-up strategy should include a definition it’s minimum viable product. Once this is defined, it’s easy to continue snipping away. The idea is to avoid creating a product that nobody wants or needs.

“The minimum viable product is that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

Be mindful! A MVP doesn’t necessarily mean an unfinished product. Create something useful and elegant. Usability and aesthetics are important, but do not overload your work with needless accessories.

This way:

You’ll spend less time on development .

. You will receive feedback sooner.

sooner. Your users will be the ones that form the future development of your product in a real way , not with your hypothesis. Nothing hurts more than reality sinking in.

, not with your hypothesis. Nothing hurts more than reality sinking in. You can focus more on what really matters . And as a result, your product will be far superior in usability.

. And as a result, your product will be far superior in usability. If nobody likes your product, you’ll know about it sooner rather than later.

You won’t have unusable sections in future iterations that you don’t want to delete because you are annoyed about the time you spent creating them.

You can envision what the real impact will be for new features as you go, testing them along the way.

3. Attempting to generate money trough affiliate programs

Only a crazy guy like David Bonilla (Otogami) can generate income through affiliate programs and still come out smiling. For the rest of us, it’s most certainly suicide.

In all seriousness, it is possible, if what you’re offering is a marketplace similar in style to Otogami or apps like HotelTonight, ReallyLateBooking, or JayIsGames where the product is totally sell/buy orientated.

But if you own a public website, blog, social network, etc. like us, and are not orientated towards a specific product, it’s extraordinarily complicated. In order to make a significant amount of money through web affiliation, your level of traffic needs to be sky-high. And you could monetize that traffic much better by other means such as direct sale of a product or service.

With Erasmusu, we tried affiliate programs from various angles: we employed widgets that searched flights through Minube, classes and Masters courses for students, the Zanox platform, etc. And unfortunately, none of them have been worthwhile.

From my point of view, after funneling high volumes of traffic towards a product or brand it’s not your responsibility to guarantee sales results. There could be any number of unrelated factors involved in certain periods: the product may not be right for your users, the landing page is not enticing enough, the product has hit the market at the wrong time, etc.

For the affiliate product owner, it will always be a win-win. Sale or no-sale, they will always receive the traffic. But for you, the outcome is more likely to be a fail-fail.

4. Working with a long distance team

Erasmusu consists of four partners, two from Murcia in the South, and two from Galicia in the North. We’ve always worked apart, occasionally in pairs, but never as a foursome under the same roof. Without a doubt, this has been the biggest strain.

In the website’s early days, we were simply proud to be part of a team. Even considering the distance, we managed to work well together, communicating via programmes like Gtalk, Skype and Google Docs, etc. Only on rare occasions we were able to meet in person, and realised at once that we worked so well together that long distance operations could never, ever, ever compare to working under the same roof.

Working with a long distance team will cost you hundreds of irreplaceable hours, and chatting away on Gtalk, writing mammoth emails trying to explain yourself, misinterpreting your workmate’s intentions through text, etc. becomes part of this.

Moreover, you will never be able to experience those small, yet phenomenally important things that come through close work relationships; quick ideas jotted on paper, the euphoria of uploading new releases, the camaraderie and laughter, the endless motivation, the joys of throwing your teammates off cliffs when playing New Super Mario Bros on the office Wii, etc.

Communication is so crucial to a business start-up, and working at a distance, although seemingly easy, is a physically and mentally expensive mistake.

5. Not selling from day one

Firstly, we need to generate the traffic, and then everything else will follow. Once we’ve got loads of visitors we’ll have a million ways to make money, selling t-shirts, or blah, blah, blah whatever. It’ll be sick!”.

In a nut shell, this was our 2009 business model. As you can see, nothing but hot air. After four years of suffering and the liters of blood, sweat and tears it took to reach a viable business model at Erasmusu, I have come to two clear realizations: