What advice would you give a first-time founder?
Let’s help the next wave avoid mistakes 🙏
What would you tell a founder who just got their incorporation docs and opened a bank account?
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Let’s help the next wave avoid mistakes 🙏
What would you tell a founder who just got their incorporation docs and opened a bank account?
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Product Hunt
Ship fast but market faster. Time to market beats time in market. If you experiment, listen, and iterate continually for a year, you will win.
@steveb Thank you for sharing such great advice!
Velocity
@steveb Good one!
Velocity
Get over yourself. Be absolutely servile to the purpose of real world users. It's not important that you follow the thread all the way to the end with just one user, you can keep moving on from one to the other but truly don't impose your will for change upon them. Then build the most embarrassing crap and get it out and repeat. I cannot think of products that ever just land out of space, they iterate there. The faster you can push yourself into that hard place and that hard conversation to iterate the better. I did a talk on the same and called it cringe driven development: https://youtu.be/MQnUPlBXUdo?si=EN-uFC_6vpOyLQnV
@kevin_mcdonagh1 Love this thinking of "harnessing the power of cringe", it's weirdly powerful.
Velocity
@dheerajdotexe Like cringing about how crap you, your pitch, the product, the team all are... it's just par the course until you earn better
@kevin_mcdonagh1 This feels like an attack haha, but 100% agree
Velocity
@dheerajdotexe Don't worry, I'm just pulling up out from the longest year of my life cringing hard asf.
Velocity
Talk to your users from day one! Know who they are and what problem you're solving for. Build for them, but always align with your business goals.
Get used to shipping things that aren’t perfect, the goal is to see if the value lands. If it doesn’t, pivot fast. Don’t waste time polishing something no one wants.
Tell everyone what you’re building. People will surprise you with how supportive they are.
Focus on getting your first few users, then build from there. And go meet your users in real life if you can. Nothing beats that.
@rachel_long_smithawesome, thank you Rachel!
IXORD
There is no such thing as a bad experience, all attempts to create something help to create what this market and people need.
@ixord cool! thank you Igor!
just launch it.
Focus on solving just 1 market problem, curate the easiest user journey, ship fast.
@misilvia 👍👍
One of the habits I’m most grateful for is writing down why we made certain decisions, not just what we did. Especially the early ones. Things like: “We deprioritized feature Y this sprint in favor of feature X,” or “Chose tool A over B because of speed-to-ship.” I run Equally AI now, so I live in a world where decisions have real regulatory and user impact, and these early decisions snowball later. So start early. Your log doesn't have to be overly 'formal', but it should contain enough information to give future-you (and your team) context down the line, especially when you've likely forgotten the minutiae.