My boss taught me how to build a Failed business (15 lessons)

I'm a senior software developer at a three-year-old startup that has been making $0 in revenue. I've been with this startup since its beginning, and it pays me $1200/month.

My boss has broken the records of the number of stupid ideas and stupid features that he asked me to implement. He taught me (unintentionally) all the lessons I should NOT do to build a successful business.

From bad product ideas, bad business decisions, not listening to your team, not building what target customers want, and falling in love with your bad product.

The product we're working on is a desktop program that moves the cursor with your finger using the webcam (gesture recognition). Why in the world would anyone pay money to move the mouse cursor with his finger? No one knows. My boss watched Iron Man (the film) and saw how Tony Starks do gestures in front of his "advanced" computer and thought it was cool so he asked me to build this for him to sell it to enterprises (then pivoted the target customer to schools).

Of course, no one bought this software. All the people he meets tell him it is cool but he never hears from them again. No one on the team, except my boss, thinks this software will succeed.

He keeps adding irrelevant features to this software just because he "thinks" people will love it. We added 3D object visualizer, ChatGPT integration, and Quizzes.

I suggested moving everything to the cloud and focusing only on improving the education industry by providing solutions that help teachers better prepare their lessons and understand where each student lacks by recording lessons, summarizing them for students, generating quizzes using AI, and analyzing the part that each student didn't understand. However, to do that, we need to forget the part of moving the cursor with fingers because it can be done only on Python, not NextJS. He simply replied, "NO, moving the cursor with fingers is COOL".

So here are the lessons I learned from my boss to build a failed business:

1. Never listen to your team.
2. Always build what you think is good and never let anyone from your team say it's a bad idea.
3. Fall in love with your business idea.
4. Don't talk to customers.
5. If no one bought your product, it's because they don't understand how cool it is.
6. If a member of your team say it's a bad idea, ignore them, they don't understand how cool your idea is.
7. Always hire interns because they're free labor and give them the most sensitive parts of the work like payments and databases.
8. Make your business dependant on you.
9. Don't let your team do their job the right way, give them orders to do it YOUR way.
10. Hire experts to tell them what to do not to tell you what to do and how to do it.
11. Never do marketing because people will steal your idea.
12. Ask your team "What you think?" but ignore them.
13. If your wife and children think your product is cool then it's cool.
14. Start a business in an industry that you know nothing about but act like you know everything.
15. If no one is buying your product, keep adding irrelevant features that no one asked for.

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Edit: I didn't mention all the "stupid" ideas I built for him so here you go:

1. Replacing Zoom, Teams, and Meet meetings with meetings in the metaverse. Target customer: Enterprises.
2. An app that lets you scroll through social media without touching your mobile screen (using gesture recognition). We didn't build this because it's technically impossible to continuously use the phone camera outside your own app. He didn't believe me so asked his friend and told him the same thing.
3. A software that controls the computer with gestures (moving cursor, single click, double click, ALT Tab...). Target customers: Enterprises
4. Building a classroom in Decentraland (metaverse) to replace classes through Zoom and Teams
5. He told me to build the startup website but to not make the home page the first page a user lands on when he opens the website. He wants to make the visitor lands on another "almost" empty page and if the user wants to go to the home page he should click on "Home" in the navbar.