The mistake that people often make is not paying enough attention to users and instead focusing on their own vision. They avoid talking to users and doing sales because it can be difficult and they fear rejection. It is important to find someone with a problem that they are willing to pay to fix and to fix it. It is also important to ship quickly and face feedback, even if it is humbling, in order to improve. Avoiding contact with the real world and users is a common mistake.

YC founder Paul Graham details a few mistakes that founders often make early on. Learn how to tackle common startup pitfalls from experts and YC partners in Startup School.

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What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users.

You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision.

And then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself.

And write, build some elaborate thing without going and talking to users because that's doing sales, which is a pain in the ass, and they might say no.

And you'd be way better off finding someone, anyone who has a problem that they will pay you to fix and fixing it and then seeing if you can find more people like that.

Best case is if you yourself have the problem, right?

But like you will not ship fast enough because you don't want to face the...

You're embarrassed to ship something unfinished and you don't want to face the likely feedback that you will get from shipping.

It's humbling and humiliating when they tell you how shitty what you built actually is, right?

But that's the only way you get it better.

So you will shrink from contact with the real world, or contact with your users.


Speaker 0: What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision. And then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself. And write, build some elaborate thing without going and talking to users because that's doing sales, which is a pain in the ass, and they might say no. And you'd be way better off finding someone, anyone who has a problem that they will pay you to fix and fixing it and then seeing if you can find more people like that.

Best case is if you yourself have the problem, right? But like you will not ship fast enough because you don't want to face the... You're embarrassed to ship something unfinished and you don't want to face the likely feedback that you will get from shipping. It's humbling and humiliating when they tell you how shitty what you built actually is, right? But that's the only way you get it better.

Yeah. So you will shrink from contact with the real world, or contact with your users. That's the mistake you will make.

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Paul Graham: What are some common mistakes founders make?