JANUS SIGNAL

Welcome to this week's Signal.

Startup failure is rarely about lack of ideas. More often, it is about building too much, too early, across too many directions at once. Across early and growth stage companies, features are often shipped without clear demand, adjacent markets are pursued before product clarity is established, and experiments are launched without defined ownership or exit criteria. Momentum fades not from competition, but from dilution.

This issue looks at overbuilding as a structural risk, and why restraint, sequencing, and focus have become core startup advantages.

Spotlight Theme

Why Most Startups Fail by Trying Too Much Too Fast

In the world of startups, doing more does not always mean succeeding more.

Main Story:

Product Focus vs Overbuilding Startup failure is often linked to overextension and lack of focus. According to multiple studies, the top reason startups fail is the absence of product market fit, a symptom of building before understanding real demand. A rigorous survey of startup outcomes found that “42% of startups fail because there is no market need for their product.”

Building features without validated customer demand can lead teams away from solving the core problem customers care about. In effect, overbuilding becomes a distraction rather than a competitive advantage.

Zoom In:

What Happens When Startups Chase Too Many Frontiers Startups often confuse breadth with opportunity. Instead of first proving value in a core area, teams branch into adjacent markets or add secondary features, increasing complexity without corresponding adoption.

Startups should prioritize high impact, core workflows before expanding: “Getting one thing right early is more valuable than trying to do everything at once.”

This discipline shifts the mindset from “feature accumulation” to “validated learning,” helping teams refine what truly matters to real users.

By the Numbers:

The Data Behind Startup Focus and Survival

• 42% of startups fail due to no market need

• 29% of startups fail due to running out of cash

• 19% of startups fail due to being outcompeted

These data show that structural startup risks often stem from lack of focus on core value and execution rather than ideas alone.

What stands out:

Slack’s Focused Pivot to Product Market Fit

Real Founder: Stewart Butterfield — From Game Developer to Workplace Communication Pioneer

Slack’s rise is one of the clearest real world examples of how startups can escape feature bloat and product sprawl by narrowing focus and responding to authentic user needs. Originally part of a gaming company called Tiny Speck, the team discovered that the internal messaging tool they had built was more valuable than the game itself.

What makes them stand out:

Slack’s breakthrough came when the founders recognized that their internal tool solved a widespread pain point: fragmented, cluttered workplace communication. By pivoting away from the gaming product and focusing exclusively on solving that core communication problem, Slack avoided the trap of trying to build a broad suite of disconnected features.

By concentrating on organizing messages, files, and integrations in a single interface, Slack simplified the user experience and made the value proposition immediately clear to customers, a feat that many early startups fail to achieve when they overbuild without market validation.

Why Slack matters for our theme (The Cost of Overbuilding):

Slack’s product-market fit arose from reducing noise and focusing on the essential user problem rather than layering complex functionality. Rather than expanding into multiple features before proving value, Slack honed in on what users actually needed: streamlined, searchable, and intuitive communication.

This disciplined refocusing allowed Slack to grow rapidly in a crowded market, turning simplicity and precision into competitive advantage, a lesson directly relevant for founders who struggle with product sprawl and diluted execution.

Signal from the data:

In its first year after pivoting to product focus, Slack reached over one million daily active users, demonstrating how a clear core value can drive immense organic growth when the product fundamentally resonates with user needs.

Global impact:

Today Slack is a central hub in modern workplaces, integrated with tools like Trello and GitHub, showing how focused execution on core product value, rather than broad feature sets, can lead to industry-leading adoption and influence.

Tools That Actually Help

Amplitude: See What Users Actually Use

Amplitude helps startups understand real user behavior by tracking which features are used, ignored, or abandoned. Instead of relying on opinions or assumptions, founders can see where users find value and where overbuilding is happening.

This makes it easier to cut low impact features, double down on core workflows, and prioritize based on evidence rather than instinct.

Productboard: Turn Feedback Into Clear Priorities

Productboard is designed to help product teams avoid roadmap chaos. It centralizes customer feedback, links it directly to product ideas, and helps teams prioritize what to build next based on impact and demand.

For startups, this reduces the risk of building features that sound good internally but do not solve real customer problems.

Mixpanel: Focus on Metrics That Matter

Mixpanel allows startups to track key product actions and retention over time, making it easier to understand whether new features are improving engagement or adding noise.

By highlighting trends in usage and drop off, it supports sharper decision making and helps teams avoid investing resources into features that do not move core metrics.

Founders’ Radar

From founders to funders, this conference is where product clarity meets scalable focus.

ProductWorld 2026 will take place February 18 to 20, 2026 in San Jose, California, and is positioned as the premier product management and product development conference for startup builders and teams focused on reducing overbuilding and refining execution.

Expect expert-led sessions, hands on workshops, and peer networking that examine clarity in product strategy, prioritization frameworks, and how to avoid distraction from feature sprawl, a core concern for startups scaling efficiently.

Whether you’re building your first MVP or optimizing your next expansion cycle, ProductWorld 2026 offers actionable frameworks and community connections that help founders build smarter products, not bigger ones.

Seats are limited. Register soon to secure your spot.
Register here.

ICYMI (In Case You Missed It)

NJx Venture Summit — Startup Pitches and Investor Panels in New Jersey

The NJx Venture Summit took place on December 3, 2025 at the Montgomery Innovation Hub in New Jersey, bringing together founders, investors, and ecosystem partners for a full day of startup pitches, panel discussions, and networking opportunities.

Highlights:

• The summit blended startup exposure with investor insight, offering direct pitch and networking time for founders to refine their narratives and positioning in front of active capital sources.

Spotlight: Cheryl K. Goodman, Co-Founder of Perseverance

At Janus Innovation Hub, we focus on connecting startups with tools and platforms that support sustainable growth. This month, we feature Cheryl K. Goodman, Co-Founder of Perseverance, a mentor platform designed to support entrepreneurs beyond traditional accelerators and help them maintain momentum.

In a conversation with Aras Sheikhi, Goodman explained the core problem Perseverance was built to address.

Perseverance is designed to provide ongoing support for entrepreneurs after accelerator programs. According to Goodman, many startups reach a peak during accelerators and then lose momentum once that structured environment ends. Perseverance addresses this gap by functioning as a perpetual accelerator.

A Structured System for Progress, Guidance, and Resilience

The platform combines AI-driven guidance with human mentorship. Startups input their business profile daily, identify current bottlenecks, and receive AI-generated prompts to guide next steps. This process is supported through twice-daily and twice-weekly check-ins with mentors. Perseverance also calculates a “perseverance score” to track progress over time, with the goal of maintaining accountability and ensuring that startups advancing on the platform demonstrate resilience.

Goodman emphasized that Perseverance is not limited to very early-stage startups. The platform is designed for any entrepreneur committed to growing their business, including lifestyle businesses and high-growth technology startups.

Unlike traditional accelerators, Perseverance does not take equity upfront. Startups pay a $100 per month subscription fee for access to the platform and mentorship. If a startup demonstrates perseverance and readiness for investment, Perseverance facilitates connections with investors, which may later involve a small equity arrangement.

For startups that have already graduated from incubation or acceleration programs, Perseverance functions as a next-level accelerator. According to Goodman, the platform helps these teams refine operations, validate business metrics, and match with appropriate investors globally. The AI tools and mentor network guide this process systematically. She noted that, depending on a startup’s level of commitment, some teams can be evaluated and prepared for investor connections within three weeks.

Global Mentorship for Scalable, Resilient Startups

In terms of sector focus, Goodman stated that Perseverance is over-indexed on technology, including AI, XR/AR, robotics, and tech-enabled impact businesses. However, other sectors are not excluded. The primary criteria are perseverance and readiness to grow. The mentor network is global, with experts from Japan, Europe, and other regions, supporting startups with international scaling ambitions.

For startups within the Janus Innovation Hub ecosystem that are actively seeking investment, Goodman described Perseverance as a platform that helps teams remain accountable and systematic, continue the momentum gained from incubation, and access measurable insights, tailored mentorship, and a global investor network.

She described its role as bridging the gap between being investor-ready and successfully connecting with the right investors.

Goodman’s advice to startups considering Perseverance is direct: engage fully. She emphasized tracking daily progress and embracing accountability. The platform is designed to help startups identify blind spots and resolve bottlenecks by combining AI guidance with human mentors, rewarding founders who consistently commit to moving the needle.

To learn more about Cheryl Goodman and Perseverance, visit their platform and explore how they support startups in turning momentum into measurable growth.

Reality Check:

How Markets Penalize Overbuilt Startups

In the current U.S. startup environment, overbuilding is no longer seen as ambition, it is increasingly interpreted as lack of strategic discipline by investors, customers, and acquirers. Market signals since 2023 show a clear repricing of focus versus scope.

Founders are now explicitly advised to delay expansion of features and markets until a narrow core demonstrates strong retention and revenue density.

“Investors are pushing founders to do less, better, focusing on core users and revenue before expanding scope.”

Startups that attempt to scale product surface area too early experience slower iteration cycles and weaker signals from users, making it harder to identify real product-market fit.

“Premature scaling, including feature expansion, makes it harder to learn what users actually want.”

Operational data confirms the cost. The 2024 SaaS Benchmarks Report by OpenView shows that companies with broader product scopes at early stages exhibit lower revenue per employee and slower growth efficiency compared to focused peers.

“Top-performing SaaS companies prioritize depth over breadth in their early product strategy.”

What We’re Tracking:

How Overbuilding Is Showing Up Inside Early Stage Startups

At JANUS, we are closely tracking how overbuilding emerges not as a single product mistake, but as a pattern across strategy, execution, and decision making in early and growth stage startups.

Highlights:

• Roadmaps Decoupled from Proof: We are seeing teams commit to multi quarter roadmaps before validating a single core use case, locking resources into assumptions rather than evidence.

• Feature Led Fundraising Pressure: Startups are expanding scope to satisfy perceived investor expectations, mistaking visible complexity for progress, and narrative density for traction.

• Unowned Experiments: Product experiments are launched without clear success criteria, owners, or sunset decisions, resulting in features that never graduate, but never die.

• Execution Debt Accumulation: Engineering velocity slows as teams carry forward legacy features that no longer serve the core user, increasing maintenance cost and cognitive load.

• Focus as a Differentiator: The strongest founders we track are deliberately underbuilding, sequencing releases, and using constraint as a tool to accelerate learning and preserve optionality.

Crack This!

Answer to the last riddle: Process

Did you guess it right?

I don’t break the product,
But I slow every release.

I arrive feature by feature,
Without anyone inviting me.

I make simple changes expensive,
And fast teams cautious.

I’m not a bug,
I’m the cost of excess.

Closer Thought:

Momentum isn’t luck. It’s the quiet result of consistent decisions.

Keep going,

— Team JANUS

P.S. Not every step needs applause. Some just need to be taken.