There are three reasons why businesses can fail: 

• it’s a bad idea 
• bad execution
• outside factors 

Examine your business with these three filters to see where you’re at.

Outside factors are the things you cannot control, but Execution and Ideas are the things that you should review and re-estimate very often if you want your startup to succeed. Here’s how Calacanis ofers to do this:

The Execution

How well you’re executing?

• Are you ahead, behind or on schedule? 
• How everyone in your organization rank your product?
• How outsiders rank your product and features?

Put your project up against your two top competitors, compare yourself and your competitors on the top 10 features. 

Execution is the easiest thing to fix, and you can do it one of two ways: 

• get the people in your organization to perform at a higher level, 
• or get higher-level folks into your organization.

It really is that simple: folks can either step up or step out.

The Idea

If you’re idea is wrong, it really doesn’t matter. What matters is if the original idea allows you to evolve into your big idea.

• Have you adapted to your market? 
• Have your customers asked you for something different than you’re currently providing? 
• Have you given it to them?
• After you give them what they want, can you anticipate what they’ll ask for next? 
• Are those items following a theme?

Your first idea is rarely your best.

Indeed many of todays widely-known successful projects have started with totally different idea and than evolved.

I like this quote from TechCrunch’s post about hiring right people:

The most important part of hiring correctly is to not hire the wrong people. The second most important part of hiring correctly is to hire the right people. What that means is that it is better to not hire anyone at all if you can’t find the right person.

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The right people are the ones that really, really want to work with you. You can tell they’re excited to be a part of the team. They actively look for problems to solve, and then solve them. This is a personality type that is very easy to spot once you know what to look for – they have fire in their eyes. They’re warriors.

I totally agree with this. I have seen lots of interesting projects/ideas die because of hiring wrong people.