What I have learned about startups from building my own

Hey everyone, i just wanted to share some of the lessons i have learned from working at startups and building my own, soya. Feel free to add or critique anything.

Build and launch fast, charge your customers and assess the demand

Interview potential users before building, understand the problem you are solving deeply

Do not buy into conventional wisdom

Think from first principles, the best solution is rarely the obvious one.

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, break things move fast.

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.