What is the most underrated skill for startup founders in 2025?
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Everyone says execution matters most.
But I think it’s execution in the right way
The kind that runs experiments, not marathons.
It’s easy to “move fast.”
It’s harder to design motion that actually teaches you something.
The best founders I’ve met don’t just build features but they build experiments:
test one variable at a time
measure feedback honestly
kill bad ideas fast
It’s not about doing more.
It’s about doing just enough to learn what’s worth doing next.
So if you ask me, the underrated skill isn’t execution
it’s experimental execution.
What’s yours?
What’s the boring but powerful skill that’s quietly shaped how you build?
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Replies
Triforce Todos
Totally agree. Features are outputs. Experiments are outcomes. That’s where real compounding happens.
Cal ID
I got a one word answer for it – content.
TinyCommand
I’d say context switching with clarity, knowing when to zoom in on details and when to step back to see the bigger picture.
Startups move fast, and it’s easy to get lost in constant execution. But the founders who can shift gears between “builder” and “strategist” without losing focus often make better long-term decisions.
The underrated skill that's quietly shaped how I build? Deliberate unscaling.
Everyone's obsessed with scaling - but after multiple pivots at Noodle Seed (from idea-to-app products (before Lovable) to becoming an AI Gateway for ChatGPT Apps), I've learned that the real skill is knowing when and how to intentionally compress your operation back to its atomic unit.
Here's what I mean: We had a compliance-heavy business model with significant contracted revenue at one point. Classic execution wisdom says double down, scale it up. Instead, we killed it. Why? Because we discovered our atomic unit of value wasn't "enterprise contracts" - it was "helping business owners reclaim time from repetitive tasks."
This deliberate unscaling taught us something your experimental execution framework would miss: sometimes the experiment isn't about testing variables within your current paradigm - it's about collapsing back to first principles to test whether your paradigm itself is the problem.
At Noodle Seed now, before we scale anything, we first unscale it:
Instead of building for 1000 users, we manually operate the service for 3
Instead of automating workflows, we first become the workflow
Instead of perfecting features, we break them down until they barely work
This isn't MVP thinking. MVPs still assume you know what "product" means. Deliberate unscaling questions whether you even need a product at all.
You're right that experimental execution beats blind hustle. But I'd argue the prerequisite is having the discipline to repeatedly destroy your own infrastructure to find what actually matters. Most founders can't do this - they get attached to their complexity.
The boring part? It looks like you're moving backwards. The powerful part? You're actually finding the only thing worth scaling.
This hits hard. I’ve learned that most “execution” without feedback is just motion.
My underrated skill would be iteration discipline — the ability to stop, measure, and reframe before the next sprint.
Gotta know your way around Figma. Basically table stakes if you want to iterate quickly.
MultiDrive
As my manager used to say: don't copy and paste, create something of your own: simple, clear, and different.