Founders Skip Validation, Build Wrong Thing
Startup founders struggle with misleading feedback, difficulty translating prototypes into revenue, and a lack of practical advice and accountability within their communities. The pursuit of ideas and hype often overshadows the hard work of execution, leaving founders feeling lost and unsure of how to build a sustainable business.
SOURCES (60)
“The decision fatigue part is underrated. A lot of founder burnout seems to come from having 20 plausible directions and no reliable way to decide between them. What helps is defining the decision criteria before consuming more advice: what evidence would make me pivot, persist,…”
That one to ten multiplication is usually the hard part to get right
“Yup I’ve shipped multiple. My second startup exit started as a total side project. The secret is to sell the product before you build. That’s why I try to do and then build the minimum to demo to get confirmation. If you check my background you’ll see I’m old and don’t have time to play around with ideas. They all have to be monetizable from day one.”
“It’s so difficult and hard to push through and find what really works, would love any tips in marketing an app?”
“The part nobody's mentioned is that half the exhaustion is everyone having an opinion. Ignore that. Pick one channel you can actually stand doing weekly and get boringly consistent there before touching a second one. The scattered feeling goes away fast. Although I do agree that marketing work never has a finish line.”
“The less money you have the more you must focus on customer discovery and market demand research. Build It And They Will Come is a bitch when you never solved for "they." Bad marketing manager ... baaad.”
“I've been talking to founders daily for a while now. Some built excellent software, some rough. Barely matters - almost all of them hit the same wall: not enough buyers. And it's rarely the product. Here's what finally clicked for me. A solo dev and a company can ship the exact same tool. The customer still picks the company. Not because it's better - because a company gets two things for free that a solo builder has to earn from zero. Trust. Why would a stranger hand their money”
“You do need to bring in money, so that does come first :) People shipping at high intensity have runway, so you probably will not be able to compete in that. What is complex today is that by the time you ship, your competitors are far away. So my advice: if you are building something slow, be sure it is in a difficult niche that a founder with high intensity will not know how to enter (or will not think of entering). Else you'll be entering once the market is saturated”
“No this is my first time, hence the question too I suppose. But I’m making progress with customers and setting up demos and pilots to try to get paying customers. I don’t have prior experience that this strategy works. Heck, this is my first time doing anything like sales. But I’m getting better at it and hopefully I’ll get to real paying customers soon too”
“yeah, marketing is honestly the part that drains me the most. building feels like it has an end. either the thing works or it doesn’t. marketing can feel infinite because there’s always another post, email, channel, or idea to try. what helped me was stopping the “did i do enough marketing?” question and tracking one real thing instead: did this create an actual conversation with a human or not. having one scoreboard makes it feel a lot less endless.”
“The stuff that never has a finish line is usually two different things mixed together. Writing new content and deciding what's actually working, that's real judgment and only you can do it. Posting the same piece three different ways and answering the same handful of DM questions, that's repeatable, and it's usually the part actually burning people out. I'd split the list into those two buckets. The repeatable half can go to a tool or a VA. The judgment half stays yours. Most”
“Exactly — and a process still needs a finish line. I’d make it a four-week experiment: one channel, one offer, one primary metric, and a fixed three-hour block each week. If qualified calls don’t move from, say, 2 to 5, change the message or channel. Marketing never ends; the experiment should.”
“Have you already shipped something you built (eg a business - not an app on the appstore)? I am asking not to be provocative but to check back if your strategy has results. I know many people who have 20 projects running at the same time and they essentially never go beyond just having 20 apps somewhere that noone actually uses.”
“Hey, it's all about the result. That said - are you less likely to succeed with low intensity? Yes. Does that mean you won't be successful? No. Depends a lot on the niche you have, the competition out there etc.”
“What I do differently now after my 4th venture, I build a thesis, do some competitive and market analysis, but mainly run a marketing and sales campaign before actually doing anything. I think too many entrepreneurs waste so much time and money trying build and test when they need to validate if people want to buy. My last side gig test, I spent more time cold calling my target market and testing out my pitch and landing discovery lunch and learns. I spent maybe just 2 nights building and most o”
“Why not just hire someone to market for you? If every dollar you pay earned $10 it's a good deal”
I have to give a shit about what I work on. Absolute non-negotiable for me
I see so many posts: "What are you building this week?" ~ This is great for visibility, but is it moving the needle? If you're a new founder, I strongly suggest sitting…
“Watch "The Social Dilemma" carefully, and you will understand it.The problem with Big Tech is not that they "selling your data". This wouldn't be that profitable to them. The problem is that they make more money by having tons of users and being able to build really accurate consumer behavior models, which then can be used to be used as a way to change mass behavior.The most direct way is of course by having hyper targeted advertising, but this also affects people in many other ways in ways that”
“The order makes sense. One genuine question, though: "talk to buyers before you build" and "charge before it's ready" aren't the same move. To charge someone you need something to charge for, so is that a rough MVP, a landing page with a CTA, or a pre-sale? The ones you saw charge early, did they have anything built when they did it, and what was it? That's the bit that decides whether you build something small first or just move to the next idea.”
“Don't overthink it. People want everything to be free. What happens when you start charging, that's the real validation.”
“Recently started following microsaas founders on twitter and I’m not sure which one is legit and which one is fluff. I read one guy posted generating 20k lines of code with claude and him not reading that. That lowkey turned me off. submitted by /u/OtherwiseCicada877 [link] [comments]”
“My mind has turned in that direction, and it makes a lot of sense, but I’m also half way through The Mom Test which is heavily quoted on this sub. And with that approach it seems a big part of shaping your offering is keeping it out of view while you interrogate potential market participants so as not to bias the feedback you get until you’ve validated the problem to be solved. They seem like equally valid but opposite approaches.”
“if you can get them to pay for your product that’s the quickest win. i have been building for a long time now and there’s smth i have recently learned, the best way to build a product is to let the people who it’s for build it w you.”
“Build a product that delivers all its value in the first minute. (No retention. No scalability.) Build a vitamin pill instead of a painkiller. Build for broke people. Build for a very small market. Build a solution for a problem you don't know anyone has. (not even you). Build a very vibe-coded-looking UI (low credibility, high bounce rate). Build a solution because you think it's cool. Build every feature in the world because you're a dreamer. Build without talking to clients. (I se”
“Good day everyone. I am currently a first time entrepreneur with a friend who is highly skilled in app development. We have built an app called Recovery Plus. It is an accountability app for recovering addicts. As recovering addicts ourselves, who have also worked in the recovery space, we have found that the AA approach does not necessarily work for everybody, so we base our entire process on Honesty, Transparency, and Accountability. Our app will be free, as it is a passion project. We wanted”
“Good day everyone. I am currently a first time entrepreneur with a friend who is highly skilled in app development. We have built an app called Recovery Plus. It is an accountability app for recovering addicts. As recovering addicts ourselves, who have also worked in the recovery space, we have found that the AA approach does not necessarily work for everybody, so we base our entire process on Honesty, Transparency, and Accountability. Our app will be free, as it is a passion project. We wanted”
“People are answering this way too confidently. There's a myriad of potential causes here, and we don't have nearly enough detail to know whether you have something viable or not. The fact that people are paying is a good start, but saying they don't know what they're paying for is certainly a red flag. If you want specific advice from the community, you'll have to share more. In general though, you need to root cause this. Talk to the customers. Ask why they bought it. Ask wh”
“Counterpoint: we don’t ignore competitors at all. We compare against them aggressively and update our market research monthly, on a schedule. The schedule is the whole trick. Your problem isn’t that you look at competitors, it’s that you look reactively, when anxiety strikes, with no goal. That’s doomscrolling with a business justification. Of course it produces nothing useful. Structured is different. Once a month we go through the same checklist: pricing changes, new features, positioning shif”
“There are plenty of consumer products that are free, but the bar to make it a successful business are extremely high. Could your product generate exponential organic growth by word of mouth with no marketing spend? Generic Google ads get you just $1 per 1000 impressions, so you need really high volumes to make the numbers work. You can boost those numbers by having user data that allows much better targeting to boost as revenue. This can happen implicitly e.g., users belong to some niche or you”
“First define what is the value for the user, then define what is the uh real value for the user and how much it costs To achieve. Then position yourself in contrast to that human cost. And probably as a background. Tools, processes or whatever it makes to achieve the effect with that cost. Then by the way, also redirect to gap analysis making what makes it hard harder to achieve the goal. Then implement that stuff and become a better partner for your clients. Then discard the ones that don't”
“Give it for free and the people you'll attract will mostly be those that will expect it to be free. With a thought out monetization strategy from the start you will be able to conceptualize what type of people to attract from the start, to get users that you actually can get through that funnel all the way to them paying you. So it doesn't start with just any idea and getting as many as possible nonpaying users, that you then try to turn into paying users, because the wrong users are an”
“Why does this subreddit have the most posts about “business solutions” and “so I built…”?”
“I'm a solo bootstrapper, 4 yrs. in and counting. I have a few products, one particularly-massive one I've spent a lot of time building. To this day, I still struggle with psyching myself out over-obsessing about competitors and (probably) paying too much attention to them. I've had anxiety problems for years, and solopreneurship has must definitely never helped it - but it is what it is. On the one hand, I want to keep tabs on the market and see what other products are offering to un”
“I think Claude (and similar tools) has lowered the barrier to building an MVP dramatically, but it hasn't eliminated the need for engineering.”
“Not even close. A lotto ticket is 1 in 30,000,000. A pre-revenue startup making it to a liquidity event is 1 in 100. Statistically, you're off by 5 orders of magnitude.”
“exactly. the reframe that helped me was thinking of viral views as market research, not distribution. 5M views told you the concept resonates emotionally, which is real signal, just not buyer signal. now you have a concept people validate for free but a product a much smaller group would pay for, and those groups are almost never the same. journaling communities on discord and small subreddits are probably where your first 20 paying users live. quiet, deep, been there 3 years. worth 100 viral po”
Practice and feedback. I talk to people and demo all the time.
“the "confidence comes from evidence, not positive thinking" line is the whole thing. the highlight reel trick works because self-doubt lies about your track record and evidence doesn't. what helped me alongside that: writing down the specific fear before doing the scary thing, then rereading it after. 90% of the time the imagined outcome was way worse than what actually happened. that gap between predicted fear and actual outcome becomes its own evidence over time. eventually you s”
“These days so much outreach is automated, it’s likely that lazy founders are throwing you into their outbound without taking the time to see what you really do. Your title might be similar enough that it falls in some filter, or they are thinking some professional services teams do recommend products to clients.”
“"your valuation is a liability, not a trophy" is the exact phrase i wish i'd internalized 2 rounds ago. the secondary point is the underrated one. most first-time founders don't realize you can capture the excess demand without pricing the primary at it. the other thing worth adding: high valuations also filter your investor pool downward in quality. the funds willing to price you at insane multiples are usually the ones who need to justify it internally with aggressive milesto”
“If you’re a startup founder, why spend your time meeting with people, and doing demos for people, who aren‘t prospective investors or customers? I work in professional services in the tech industry. Startup founders frequently want to meet with me and show me their products. I work in the tech industry and I can help them with some aspects (within my niche line of work) of their business, but what their product does or doesn’t do is irrelevant. For example, say I work in HR in the tech industry;”
“Back in college, 13 years ago, I made this pretty cool niche embedded device for disc golfing. I want to recreate it to sell but don't really possess the knowledge to do it anymore. It requires custom PCB, sensors, and software (That I could probably write). I've never done anything like this before, how would you go about finding someone to help you develop this product? submitted by /u/prthug996 [link] [comments]”
“imo the roadtrip analogy undersells how iterative distribution actually is. you rarely find the right channel before you build, you find a hypothesis for one. the real mistake is building for 6 months in silence, not building before you have a perfect marketing plan”
“that's the real trap. you're shipping, iterating, talking to customers, but the metrics don't feel like progress yet so your brain keeps score wrong. by the time you see it reflected in numbers, you've already built the muscle. the people who quit usually do it right before the pattern becomes visible. sounds like you're past that point.”
“When you come up with a SaaS idea, the two questions you need to ask yourself are: Does my product solve a problem? How can I reach my ideal customer/how can my ideal customer find me? Everyone intuitively knows that if the answer to #1 is "No" then you simply do not build it. But no one here seems to understand that if your answer to #2 is "I don't know", then you should also not build it. Question #2 is the hard question everyone here seems to skip. Building a SaaS befo”
“It’s not that you wouldn’t, it is that there’s something special about the way founders see their product, customers and vision that’s hard to replicate and “give it up”.”
“I know of at least two startups where founders hired their first product leader (e.g., head of product, director of product, etc.), and there was always a lot of tension between the founder and the first product leader. It seems to be because the founder is very passionate about the product they are creating and giving it to another person to own the roadmap and the customer is a very difficult thing to do. Is this common? submitted by /u/StartupLifestyle2 [link] [comments]”
“I’m assuming at this point almost all founders who can’t yet afford marketers are using LLMs to do marketing. I’m curious what questions you’re asking them. submitted by /u/South_Army_3305 [link] [comments]”
“There's a sentence that kills more rounds than bad terms ever will and it's "we're in, but we're waiting for a lead." Here's the thing founders rarely question. There's no rule that a round needs a lead and it's really just a convention investors use to outsource risk to each other while everyone waits for someone else to go first. The fix is simpler than people think. Go back to everyone who already said yes and ask directly what it would take for them to w”
“I’ve been a web developer for more than 6 years. For a long time, that was probably my biggest weakness as a founder. Whenever I felt uncertain about an idea, I built another feature. More code made the product feel more real. It also delayed the moment when I had to ask whether anyone actually needed it. I repeated that process across four SaaS products. Idea. Large feature list. Months of building. Launch. Almost no distribution. 0 users. My latest MVP was already finished when I finally asked”
“I have a small team building something really great (I know, biased but still) and we are a bunch of builders and visionaries. When it comes to talking to others about what we are doing, it's easy to get people engaged, but we struggle with how to get people to 'care' enough to click on our posts beyond a thumbs up and move on. We are great at heads down work and progressing engineering releases, but don't really have a marketing person. I know the easy answer is to find someone”
“I run a dev shop that builds MVPs for founders. For a while my whole pitch was the obvious one: we save you time and money getting your MVP built. It's what everyone in this space says. Recently I killed that positioning entirely, and I want to know if I'm right or about to shoot myself in the foot. Here's my thinking. The founders who chase "cheap and fast" are usually the ones with the smallest budgets, the most anxiety about spending, and often the weakest ideas. They”
“Effectively, industry roles are a tiered system which determines access to the cashflow. Going the YC founder route is a much faster and more efficient way to secure a high tier than climbing the SWE ladder. The whole thing resembles a kind of mini class system, with high tiers granting access to generational wealth, and low tiers being better off than the average non-industry Joe. Once you're in the high tier, there's no way to fall anymore, you just move wherever the cash is being pumped in, c”