You're wasting time
Startups are all about managing limited resources. This doesn’t refer to money, it refers to time. You need to move fast and will always have more work to do than time available. You must have a razor sharp focus to get the right stuff done at the right time.
Founders with a ‘startup mindset’ get distracted by actions that build a ‘startup’. For example, getting business cards printed, designing a logo, creating a product that can scale to thousands of users, finding a lawyer, talking to investors, attending networking events.
This will make you feel busy. But, when you step back, what have you built? You have built a shell of a company, a mirage of what a startup should be.
In the first weeks of a startup, you need to have a product mindset. You need to get building and testing your product with customers. The goal is to find out if you are building something people love. Unless you can start building and creating something people want, you have no startup. This is the lean mentality.
Pets.com and Webvan created the shell of a business — thousands of staff, processes, HR policies, infrastructure etc. But they missed the fundamental basis of a startup , a product that people want.
Sometimes you want to build a startup so badly, you forget what is at the core of every startup — a product that people want. The right outcome at the end of any startup process is not to have something that looks like a startup. It is to have a product that people love. It sounds so simple. It sounds like building the startup would be the hard part.
