“We got scared,” IIT founder says his first startup failed because of fear – netizens laud his candid confession.

One idea has been solidified: becoming a startup founder is not nearly as exciting or glorified as certain social media posts might make it look.

Downfalls usually come with a big thud, sometimes before success can even materialize.

Harsh Pokharna, an IIT Kanpur alumnus and a well-known figure in the world of startups, experienced this in 2014 when his initial startup failed massively, not due to logistical or operational challenges, but because of something much more intimate: fear.

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The Backstory

Harsh and his co-founders had created a straightforward but clever app that would update your phonebook automatically whenever friends or family members changed their numbers.

It was timely, useful, and cutting-edge.

All was going well until they ran into a group of other successful startup founders who claimed they were in the process of developing a similar solution.

Rather than believing in their own vision, Harsh and his team had cold feet.

"They invited us to join them rather than compete, and guess what we agreed,"he confessed on a LinkedIn post.

To Harsh and his team, on paper, it seemed the safer option, but in the startup ecosystem, caution does not always yield results.

A few months into the collaboration, the cracks became impossible to ignore.

The other team's product was not as good, progress was glacial, and, as Harsh reminisced,"they weren't the kind of people we wanted to work with."

Around this time, the original idea had long been dropped, and their startup journey was over in a blink.

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Reflections By Harsh Pokharna

In retrospect, Harsh saw that the real failure was not in the product, the competition, or even execution but the failure to believe sufficiently in themselves.

"The first ingredient you need to succeed is self-belief. Without it, nothing really matters," he said.

The idea of fearing taking over an entrepreneur’s enthusiasm has resonated online across much of the globe. Numerous individuals praised Harsh for his candor and lessons in his experience.

Netizens not only applauded the vulnerability of this tale but also highlighted that the experience of Harsh has brought to light a very important truth: startups do fail but sometimes not necessarily due to average products or strict competition, but rather because founders tend to underestimate themselves.

As per Harsh Pokharna’s LinkedIn profile, he is now the Founder of Next Big Thing, an exclusive community of entrepreneurs who learn, grow, and build together.

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