Joe says the biggest reason is trying to do too many things. StrongRoom had seven products with only about eight engineers left, scaling horizontally and vertically at the same time and pushing into the UK and US at once. The lesson: get back to the core fundamentals and try to do one thing really, really well.
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The hardest part of the rebuild was that StrongRoom had too many products — "strong room had seven products," with "like eight engineers left," so each product was a single point of failure with one person supporting it, and most had very little traction. In Joe's view they "essentially died cause they try to scale horizontally and vertically at the same time" — building every product in every direction and trying to go to the UK and US at the same time. Besides the financial mismanagement, "it was very lousy engineering management." His takeaway on why companies die: "if they just stuck to what they were doing well, that would have grown fine. Sometimes it's just trying to do too many things... and then you end up running out of money, you end up doing creative accounting." The fix is to get back to the core fundamentals and do one thing really, really well.