Creating elaborate decks and spreadsheets provides a feeling of productivity but is often a sophisticated form of procrastination. It allows founders to delay the core, uncomfortable task of directly engaging potential customers and facing rejection, thereby making no real progress on finding product-market fit.
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Founders often get stuck endlessly perfecting a product, believing it must be flawless before launch. This is a fallacy, as "perfection" is subjective. The correct approach is to launch early and iterate based on real market feedback, as there is no perfect time to start.
Early-stage founders, especially those who are analytically minded, must resist the comfort of spreadsheets and data. The most crucial activity is direct engagement and selling, even if it feels uncomfortable. No amount of analysis can replace the impact of the founder personally championing the product.
Many founders perceive selling before building a product as an extreme approach. They prefer the comfort of building first, even though it wastes months on irrelevant products. This aversion stems from a fear of interrupting people without a finished product, a mindset that equates building with preparation and early selling with being premature.
Founders often create complex plans and documents to avoid the simple, hard, and uncomfortable task of selling. Just as getting stronger requires consistently lifting heavier weights, finding product-market fit requires consistently doing the core work of talking to customers and trying to sell.
Pre-PMF founders get stuck in a frustrating loop: their outreach hypothesis is wrong because they haven't sold anything, but they can't get conversations to fix the hypothesis because it's wrong. This circular trap prevents progress until the founder breaks the cycle by changing their approach to simply getting meetings, not validating an idea.
Founders often believe their product is flawed when facing rejection. However, if they're only speaking to 1-2 potential customers a week, the core issue isn't product-market fit. The real problem is an insufficient number of conversations to validate or disprove any hypothesis. You haven't earned the right to have a PMF crisis yet.
Founders often default to building product not for strategic reasons, but because it is a more comfortable activity than selling. Early-stage selling, without a finished product to lean on, creates significant discomfort. This aversion to uncomfortable situations is a primary driver of the value-destroying 'build it and they will come' mindset.