If only someone told me this before my 1st startup

Feb 11, 2025

1. Validate.
I wasted at least 5 years building stuff nobody needed.

2. Kill your EGO.
Make your users happy instead of yourself.

3. Don’t chaise investors; chase users, and then investors will chase you.

4. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF.

5. Landing page isn't important.
Go for an average template and edit texts, and that’s it.
The sale happens outside of the website anyway (in the early stages).

6. Hire only fullstack devs.
There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers.
One full stack dev building the whole product. That’s it.

7. Chase global market from day 1.
If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it’s bad, it won’t work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger.

8. Do SEO from day 2.
As early as you can. I ignored this for 14 years. It’s my biggest regret.

9. Sell features, before building them.
Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those.

10. Hire only people you'd wanna hug.
My mentor said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don’t wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them.
Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up.

11. Invest all your money into yourself and your friends.
I did some math; if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, I'd be worth $100M+ by now.

12. Post on X/Linkedin daily.
I started posting here in 2023. I wish I started earlier.
It’s my primary source of new connections, news, marketing, and networking.

13. Don’t work/partner with corporates.
They seem like a fantastic opportunity; they promise millions of users, etc. But none of this happens. Cuz you talk to a regular employees there. They waste your time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money.

14. Don’t get ever distracted by hype, e.g. crypt0.
I lost years of my life this way.
I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way.

15. Don’t build consumer apps. Only b2b.

16. Don’t hold on to the lousy project for too long.

17. Tech conferences are a waste of time.

18. Scrum is a Scam.
If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were kindergarten children, things would eventually fail.
Once I killed scrum, things changed; lazy folks left, grownups entered my team & we've been concurring the world.

19. Outsource nothing until PMF.

20. Bootstrap.
I raised over 10 times, preseed, seed, and series A.
Today, I bootstrap all my startups.
The difference is huge. I'm totally obsessed with products & users now, while in the past, I was obsessed with funding rounds, events, news coverage.