If you could give only 1 advice to yourself at the beginning of your startup, what would it be?

Advice: Avoid the noise, focus. Why? During the very early days, when you are out in the wild with your product, you will notice you don't know many startup related buzzwords. You will feel like you are missing something and will start attending startup related programmes. You may lose focus on your own business. Unless this programmes, including incubators are bringing you some leads specific to your business, or actively introducing you to investors - don't be their products.

Be okay with good enough. It can be so hard to ship something that doesn't feel perfect or anywhere near what you envision, but getting quick feedback is so much more valuable than going all in on getting something that may not be right.

Do not go into details when implementing. Do as simple as possible. The result of the MVP is needed ASAP and the idea may change many times. Some technical tricks may not be useful at all.

Advice: Although you want to launch as early as you can to collect feedback on your execution, start tweaking your original idea only once you've hit the minimum stage where you think your product actually solves the problem you set out to solve well. Why? Too often the feedback from users on very early products comes from the fact they're not able to see exactly what you are trying to do just yet. In turn, you run the risk of misinterpreting the feedback as relating to the fundamental idea as opposed to your current execution of it. A balance to strike of course, but I'm seeing this happen (and have made the mistake) more often nowadays

Before You Begin: Get in the right mindset. Don't forget to keep your attention on your own business journey and avoid comparing your achievement to others.

Advice: Build something that few people love instead of something that many people like and don't run after people that will never love your product. Why? It's much easier to scale a product that is loved by its first 100 customers than something 1000s of people somewhat like. Asking for payment early on (even if it's scary), helps a lot in separating the "lovers" from the "likers" :)

Building something people want is crucial for a business to succeed. It doesn't matter how many users you have if they aren't the right ones. It doesn't matter how many tweets you get if they aren't positive ones. Focus on building something that people want.

Oh, great question. Advice: Go where the research takes you. Don't try to fit your perception of a problem onto a market's actual problem. Why? As founders our bias can over ride decisions on days it gets a little tough.

Narrow your focus. Don't expand into multiple things. Find that 'sharp value proposition' as fast as you can.

Not knowing everything will feel NORMAL after a while. Because it IS normal. Don't be afraid that you're being thrown in the deep end - you'll meet incredible people along the way that will teach you, support you & help you come out of everything stronger.

Advice: Prepare your MVP to generate money ASAP, not growth. Why? By following the growth in the early days, you may end up burning money and not earning a dime. You can have a startup with millions of users and yet lose money. These will force you to close the doors or raise more money and lose the share of your startup too early. in the early days of your startup look for ways to make money from your early users and then focus on growth so you can support that growth.

Start where you are. There will never be a perfect time of the day, month, or year to get started. If you keep waiting for "perfect conditions," they'll never come, and you'll keep putting it off. Just start. And keep showing up.

If you’re not a marketing expert, you need to become one. You might have the best product or service in the world, but if nobody knows about it, then your startup can’t succeed.

I've built many startups, some of which have achieved hypergrowth like Uphold, Airtm, and Cadoo. I wish I'd built an incentivized community of collaborators with skin in the game prior to building an MVP on all of them. Community is the platform for your Network. The two M's in community stand for memes and money. That's why I built Slyk-- to make it easy for any project, startup, founder, or community to reward growth with their own coin and redeem that coin for whatever they want to offer the world. Build something people want by rewarding them for helping you build the thing they want. Makerbox needs a CPC (coin-powered community) ASAP.

NONE. ❌ Then it would completely destroy or divert me from the sheer joy I receive from failing and crashing and getting up and figuring out. I hate spoilers! 😂

Talk to your users and listen to them! A lot of startups seem to ignore the fact that they should be solving a real problem, not some abstract one. If you have users talk to them and try to listen to what they are saying. Ask why they are using your product, and what about your product they dislike the most. Don't use these interview to validate your idea, use them to listen to what your users have to say, don't interrupt them

All advice in this discussion is valuable. My advice to myself :) would be - set constraints on resources, especially time but also money. Track these resources carefully because you need both to get users. Hope this helps.

There’s a difference between moving quickly and rushing. You should move quickly to text a concept, start conversations with your potential users, pitch, etc. that said, rushing just means you haven’t put the effort in before going out and testing. Do the work, take it seriously, just accelerate your pace. Avoid shortcuts.

Don't run for the perfection of features. Build them and roll them out so that you can gather feedback at an early stage.

Passion will work for you on the days you lose motivation or when you're mental health is impacted. Passion will keep you going till you get your rhythm back. It's the secret to discipline and drive.