This Is the Real Curse Haunting Entrepreneurs — 6 Shiny Object Traps That Ruin Businesses

We’ve all heard the cliches, mantras and witticisms about how failure can be great because it’s such a learning experience, but a business failing is something that can haunt entrepreneurs for the rest of their lives. Let’s face it, nobody starts a business with the goal of learning through failure.

With Halloween fast approaching, let’s take a look at six shiny objects that are appealing at first glance, but are really traps, demons and scary things that can derail the course of an entrepreneur and lead them down the path to defeat.

Related: The Complete Guide to Effectively Using AI Writing Tools in Content Marketing

1. The AI rabbit hole

Few things are cooler than new technology, and right now, artificial intelligence is tech’s new frontier and wild west. Every startup founder wants to be the Lewis and Clark of AI and find the Northwest Passage to the next great innovative use case for it.

But AI can be a rabbit hole that entrepreneurs can go tumbling into because of several factors. AI’s newness means that people with true expertise in the field are limited, and if you want your AI to be proprietary and under your control, it requires mountains of data and large numbers of training iterations to get it to the point where you can reliably deploy it to your customers. Both of these require a significant up-front time and money investment.

To avoid the AI rabbit hole, do your due diligence and go in with eyes wide open, knowing how much it will cost and how much time it will take to deploy AI where it can truly serve your business and your customers.

2. The market mirage

Not being the first to take advantage of a hot trend is something that can live rent-free in an entrepreneur’s head. Seeing a competitor achieve quick gains from a well-timed trend can cause unproductive self-reflection where founders say to themselves, “If I had only jumped on that bandwagon earlier.” But while a few startups are lucky enough to catch a trend’s wave early and ride it to short-term profitability, a much larger group of founders are left wiped out.

Remember when Clubhouse exploded during 2020-2021? I talked to dozens of entrepreneurs back then who pivoted to audio-first platforms, but most shuttered within a few years as the trend faded. These things may look like good opportunities but they can lead to getting trapped in an over-saturated market with many competitors looking for a quick win. They can also lead to brand inauthenticity with customers, particularly younger demographics, perceiving your business as chasing a trend for profit.

To not be swept up in the “market mirage,” an entrepreneur needs to conduct market research to ensure the demand is truly there before chasing the trend. Also, make sure the new path isn’t in direct conflict with the message you want your brand to convey.

Related: These 4 Traits Set Excellent Marketers Apart From Mediocre Ones. Here’s How to Make Sure You’re Hiring Them.

3. The partnership phantom

Partnerships and collaborations appear great in theory. Combining resources to attack a problem can be a useful way to allocate resources and build networks. But like any good strategy, overusing it can create more problems than it solves. Saying “yes” to too many collabs can damage a brand’s reputation by spreading resources too thin, and partnerships initiated without the proper due diligence can expose your startup to liability.

Warren Buffett once said that really successful people “say ‘no’ to almost everything.” The most successful collaborations occur when two parties complement each other’s skillsets, and that means saying “no” to the ones that don’t.

4. The product poltergeist

We all love feature-rich products and services. But there’s a point where usefulness ends and bloat begins. When a product with too many features is released into the wild, it creates more frustration than happiness because of confusing or cluttered customer experiences. The business getting a feature-bloated product to market faces increased costs, resource drain and frustrated users.

Startups can avoid this by prioritizing customer needs instead of trying to make their product all things to all people. We all know testing can be costly and time-consuming, but it’s vitally important to do user experience testing and quality assurance testing to make sure the product works as intended and is also intuitive for the user.

Related: This Is the Simple Marketing Hack Your Business Needs to Drive Sales All Year Long

5. The marketing monster

Marketing is critically important to disseminate your business’s products and ideas in the marketplace. As far as marketing and CRM platforms go, they run the gamut from overly simplistic to ludicrously complicated. Large platforms such as Salesforce, while very feature-rich and customizable, may not be appropriate or cost-effective for a startup.

Selecting the wrong marketing platform can lead to missed opportunities. You can limit your reach by focusing on the wrong channels, which may result in low engagement. You can also damage your brand by focusing on an improperly segmented audience.

Avoid the marketing monster by clearly defining your audience so you can determine which platform will best serve them. You can also use that market research to determine which channels (email, text, landing pages, etc.) are most used by your target demographic. Setting clear marketing goals will let you scale from one platform to the next as your audience database increases and your business grows.

6. The funding lure

Injections of funding are certainly something that every startup is happy to receive. However, the allure of a big pile of cash can shift your focus from becoming profitable to reaching the next big cash infusion. Pursuing funding as a goal has costs. Those costs are the time and resources it takes to secure it, and the control you have to relinquish when you accept it. With each new infusion of cash, founder equity may be diluted and more control is given to investors. While you have a goal of growing a healthy, long-term business, your investors may have a goal of a profitable exit, meaning their goals may not align with yours.

There is nothing wrong with an infusion of funding, but the more a business relies on its own revenue and personal capital, the more control it retains, and the more efficiently it can run. Startups may also be more focused on customers when they are less focused on funding.

Related: 7 Key Traits of Marketing Professionals Who Deliver

Approach shiny objects with caution

While the allure of technology, trends, collaborations, features, software and capital investment can be powerful, going into any of these without researching the impact on your people and your bottom line can bring the opposite of the results you want. All of these aspects of a business can be beneficial or potentially hazardous depending on the approach founders take in addressing them.

The good news is that many of the issues that cause startups to go off-mission are preventable. By implementing software that works for you, knowing your market dynamics, choosing complementary partners and more, you can avoid the pitfalls that plague other startups and break the curse of shiny object syndrome before it haunts your business.

We’ve all heard the cliches, mantras and witticisms about how failure can be great because it’s such a learning experience, but a business failing is something that can haunt entrepreneurs for the rest of their lives. Let’s face it, nobody starts a business with the goal of learning through failure.

With Halloween fast approaching, let’s take a look at six shiny objects that are appealing at first glance, but are really traps, demons and scary things that can derail the course of an entrepreneur and lead them down the path to defeat.