What I have learned about startups from building my own

Talk to customers, understand the problem you are solving deeply

Do not buy into conventional wisdom

Use first principles

VC isn’t always the path, again don’t buy into conventional wisdom

Talk to your users and iterate accordingly

You don’t need to hire a ton, often small is better and more productive

Buy into Paul graham, Steve blank and others

Always learn from your failures.

Iterate, pivot if necessary

Find market gaps, fill them in. Aka identify opportunities

Be delusional yet realistic at the same time

Constantly test new things

Learn from your users, understand how they are using your product.

Don’t get obsessed with adding features, start with doing one thing really well and then adding features on top of that.

When marketing never do ads, terrible conversions. Ideally if you build a really great product your users will do the marketing for you.