I wish someone slapped me with this list before I started building startups.
Would’ve saved me years.
1. Validate first. I burned 5 years building things literally nobody wanted.
2. Kill your ego. It’s not about your vision. It’s about what users actually want.
3. Don’t chase investors. Chase users. If users love you, investors will DM you. Not the other way around.
4. Never hire managers before PMF. Only doers. Titles are useless early.
5. Landing pages don’t matter that much. Pick a decent template, write clear copy, move on. Intent matters more than design.
6. One great full-stack dev > a big dev team. Teams slow everything down. One owner builds faster.
7. Go global from day one. If it won’t work globally, it probably won’t work locally either.
8. Start SEO immediately. I ignored it for 5 years. Biggest regret of my life.
9. Sell features before building them. I DM users daily. If they don’t care, I don’t build.
10. Only work with people you’d wanna hug. Sounds stupid. Saves years of pain.
11. Invest in your startups and friends. Not crypto. Not stocks. Network > everything.
12. Post online daily. Twitter changed everything for me. Traffic, users, connections.
13. Don’t partner with corporates. They promise a lot. Deliver nothing. Waste your focus.
14. Ignore hype. Crypto cost me 1.5 years and some friendships.
15. Avoid consumer apps. Go B2B. Consumer is a lottery. Monetization is hell.
16. Kill bad projects fast. Max 1 year. Dragging it only hurts more.
17. Tech conferences are mostly useless. Lots of suits. Very few builders.
18. Scrum is overrated. Adults don’t need daily babysitting.
19. Don’t outsource before PMF. Nobody will care about your product like you do.
20. Bootstrap if you can. Fundraising stole years of my life. I didn’t even know bootstrapping was an option