What's something you believed for way too long because someone senior told you?
I will go first.
"Just launch. The market will tell you what it wants."
A senior founder told me that. He meant it as encouragement. Do not overthink. Ship. Learn from real users.
I followed that advice. We launched. The market told us what it wanted. Silence. No feedback. No users. Just quiet.
The problem was not the advice. The problem was that we launched too early. We had not validated the problem. We had not talked to enough potential customers. We had not built something people actually needed.
The market did tell us what it wanted. It wanted us to go away until we had something worth paying attention to.
I held onto that advice for two years before I realized I was using it as an excuse to skip the hard work of talking to people before building.
What is something you believed for too long because someone experienced told you?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
Replies
"Don't push back on the founder. They have the vision, you execute."
I believed that for a while. Stayed quiet when I knew a UI decision was wrong. Watched features ship in ways that confused users because I didn't want to seem like I was overstepping.
The founder doesn't always know what's hard to use. That's literally why you're there. Your job isn't just pixels. It's to be the person in the room who says "users won't understand this" when everyone else is too close to the product to see it.
@raj_shekhar12 That is the quietest form of failure. Not the code that breaks. Not the feature that no one uses. The knowledge you have that you do not share because you are afraid to overstep.
The founder has the vision. The founder does not have the cursor. They do not watch users struggle to find the button they thought was obvious. You do. That is your job. Not just to execute. To be the one who says "this is confusing" when everyone else is too deep in the product to see it.
The worst part is that the founder usually wants to hear it. They just do not know how to ask. They hired you to see what they cannot see. When you stay quiet, you are not being polite. You are depriving them of the one thing they need most.
What is the most important thing you have said that the founder did not want to hear?
@imed_radhouani I told a founder that the apps onboarding was too long and had too many steps. He'd spent months building it and didn't want to hear it.
We did some secondary research and decided to cut the steps in half. Numbers got better immediately.
"Don't think about it. If it does not work, the testers will tell you.'
This was, like, 18 years ago :)
@stoyan_minchev That is the kind of advice that sounds efficient until you realize the testers are not there to think for you. They are there to validate what you already built. If you did not think about it first, they have nothing to validate. They just have a mess to report.
Eighteen years ago, that might have been survivable. The stakes were lower. The feedback loops were slower. Now? You cannot afford to hand off thinking to someone else. The testers will tell you what is broken. They will not tell you what you should have built instead.
What is the most expensive "testers will catch it" moment you have seen?
@stoyan_minchev -That will kill motivation. If I spend time and money building something that I am sure is valuable, and never get recompensed, after a while, I will eventually need to look for a more lucrative way to spend my time.
This hits incredibly close to home because I’m stuck in this exact trap right now. I built my product based entirely on a problem I experienced myself, telling myself, 'If I have this issue, other people definitely do too.' As a result, I rushed headfirst into building and completely neglected talking to customers. Thanks for the wakeup call.