... Staring at the screen feeling overwhelmed: 5% The number that gutted me was the 18% I spent on "research." I was consuming content about building instead of actually building. I was reading threads like this one instead of talking to users

... makes them feel smart for saying, or what they think you want to hear. But when it comes time to actually change their habits or pay money, a different person shows up. I'm not saying "don't talk to users

... advice. Podcasts, newsletters, Twitter threads, YouTube videos. I had a notes app full of frameworks and mental models and "7 things successful founders do." Every article was "do this one thing" and every one contradicted the last one. Talk to users

... Talk to users

... Something you thought was a great idea at the time, but looking back you'd do completely differently. Could be: Launching too early Launching too late Building features nobody asked for Not talking to users

... There is so much advice for founders now that a lot of it starts to contradict itself. Launch fast, but don t launch too early. Talk to users

... build) ~$150,000 Total $415,000 That's what we spent to learn we were wrong. What we thought we knew We assumed enterprise customers wanted the same things as our small business users, just more of it. More security. More control. More features. We never talked

... cold DMs to my target audience to see if I could get signups to my waitlist. If this could work (which it did) it meant I can continue doing the same once I launch to get customers. 3) TALK to users

... Genuinely curious: what s your first-mile approach before you book those early interviews? Do you start with Reddit deep-dives? Reverse-engineer reviews? Talk to personas in your head? I ve been experimenting with ways to simulate early conversations using real user

... chasm. Our hardware product would have flopped even though it would have been the most magical thing in the world. The Conversation That Changed Everything After a board meeting in mid-2024, my co-founder Sahaj and I started talking about whether the hardware device was really the right path forward. At first, I pushed back. This was my childhood dream, something I d been working toward for the last 16 years. But over the next few weeks, we kept ... ... week. Two months before that, we weren't even a consumer software company. By January, we were seeing long posts on LinkedIn and X about how the product had changed people s lives. We also saw ~20% of our users

... posthog, the toolkit for building successful products - a single platform for building products, talking to users