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.