First and foremost, I'm just guessing that focus is important because I still don't have a successful startup, either by a successful exit or by a tremendous cash-flow positive (aka profitable) business. But since I keep hearing about it from successful serial entrepreneurs, from successful investors and from my own core believes, I say that focus is extremely important for a startup success and the converse is also true: lack of focus leads to startup failure.
But you probably heard that before!
Well, when I started Sampa I heard many times to focus, to be good at the core of the business, to avoid distractions, yada, yada. But what does it mean? What it means to have focus? Gosh, most people will say they are focused on what they are doing, but that's because it's hard to define focus. I think is much easier to define lack of focus.
So here is your...
Guide to startup failure by lack of focus
Diversify your product very early
Hey, are you creating a photo sharing site for teenagers? Why not let them share PowerPoint presentations as well? Why not let them share their Address Book? And since you are sharing address book, it makes sense to use this feature to expand into Small Business... What about enterprise?
Meetings and consensus are important
Achieving consensus amongst all on the team is important. That's why you should have each employee give an opinion on each other employee work. Actually, you should have each employee contribute to each stage of each other's work. Meetings are a swell way to achieve that, but don't forget to use email as well and always send it to the entire team. Also try to get the opinion of your accountant, lawyer, designer, UPS delivery guy, your spouse, etc.
Do more, not less
A big mistake is to think that you can only do 2 out of 3 features on the next month. You should do all 3, in parallel. If you are not good at multi-tasking you shouldn't be an entrepreneur, right?
Plan for the long run
It's important to really plan to when you'll have 17 million users on 32 countries accessing it on 6 different types of devices.
Fix all the bugs
Nothing bother users more than bugs, so you got to fix all of them. Yes, that might delay shipping by a few weeks, but it's important. And if you find a bug that cannot be dealt with on the current architecture, you must change the architecture to support this corner cases. Let's not discriminate: All cases are important!
The plan is fluid
You set out to build a company for musicians to share song concepts and the idea is not getting a lot of traction? The core technology will be the same, so why not explore sharing pictures by dog owners? It's ok if the original idea is not finished yet or not even in beta. Let the plan and each one on the team change the plan every other week. At one point you'll find something that works.
Did I miss something?
I'm the Co-founder & CTO of 
