10 amazing pieces of advice by startup founders to first-time founders
While scrolling through X (Formerly Twitter) today, I came across an interesting question posed to startup founders by Natia Kurdadze:
The replies contained many insightful and valuable perspectives from experienced founders. It got me thinking — these tips could be hugely helpful for anyone looking to get on their first startup journey.
So, I decided to put together this story to share some of the top advice for first-time founders, directly from those who have been in their shoes before.
The tweets contained a wealth of knowledge from startup veterans about the key things they wish they had known when they were just getting started.
From fundraising to hiring to product-market fit and more, these experienced founders provided thoughtful recommendations and words of wisdom for the next generation.
Let’s begin.
1. Find a partner
A talented storyteller sells the promise of the startup dream and gets stakeholders to believe in and contribute to making that dream a reality.
Their ability to persuade and inspire belief in your mission is extremely valuable in these fragile, early phases of building a company.
2. Validate before building
No matter how impressive the MVP may be technically, it won’t matter if it doesn’t solve a real user need.
The validation process of deeply engaging with real-life users through interviews, surveys, prototyping, etc takes time. But it’s time well spent to ensure you build something users want.
The best way to set your startup up for success is to validate there’s a need before wasting effort building the wrong solution.
3. Have a valuable skill
As a founder, you need to bring relevant skills to the table that will enable you to create value.
Once you have established your skill, the next critical step is identifying who your ideal customer is as quickly as possible.
This means not wasting time with generic customer personas, but getting out there and talking to real potential users to understand their needs and how your skills can be leveraged to solve them.
4. Build the right team
The success of your startup depends on the people you hire. This means going above and beyond just posting job descriptions and screening resumes.
You need to invest significant time into understanding what skills, abilities, and team dynamics will be required to make your startup thrive.
5. Sales and marketing = business
It’s easy for founders to get absorbed in product development and overlook building an audience and revenue engine.
But without sales and marketing, no one will know about your product and you won’t make any money.
Dedicate significant time early on to laying the groundwork to acquire and retain customers.
Strategically build your brand story, digital presence, and marketing channels to attract your target demographic.
6. Build an audience first
Before launching a startup, establish a way to reach potential customers by organizing an audience around shared interests and values. This could involve creating a blog, podcast, YouTube channel, etc. that provides useful information to attract your target audience.
Or, partner with someone who has already nurtured that audience relationship and credibility with an existing following.
Having an audience that trusts you makes introducing a new product much easier. They provide built-in feedback, promotion, and even initial customers.
7. Find problems that need solving
Build a startup by identifying and addressing real-world problems or pain points, rather than creating solutions looking for a problem.
The reason is that solving meaningful problems attracts both paying customers as well as investor interest.
To identify promising problems, talk to your target users to intimately understand their frustrations.
Research whether these problems are faced by a large enough market to support a business.
Look for inconvenient, time-consuming, or expensive issues that customers urgently need resolving.
8. Patience is key
Things rarely go according to plan, so you need to be ready to pivot your business model based on learnings and market response.
Maintaining belief in yourself and your capabilities will enable you to persist through the inevitable challenges.
Stay focused on finding ways to make money, whether through product sales, services, partnerships, or VCs. Progress may seem slow, but stick with it and keep adapting.
Success takes time and things may look miserable before they take off. Stay patient, learn from failures, and keep working towards finding a path to sustainability.
9. Just start
Launching a startup requires you to embrace imperfection and iteration. If you wait until you feel ready and have all the answers, you may never actually get off the ground.
At some point, you have to start turning your idea into reality so you can start learning.
Expect that things will be messy and break. Be ready to adapt based on customer feedback and challenges that arise after launching.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough to start. Have the self-awareness to know what your critical assumptions are and launch a minimum viable product to start testing and validating with real users.
You’ll learn infinitely more from the market than in a hypothetical vacuum.
10. You don’t have to hard sell
Identify the target customers who are desperately looking for a solution to their pain points, then make sure your startup is visible and accessible to them.
Be where your customers already are.
Find the channels and communities your potential users engage with. Participate authentically to build relationships.
The right customers will then organically discover you and “buy your lemonade” because you satisfy their needs.
Final words
And there you have it — 10 incredibly valuable pieces of advice for first-time founders, straight from the mouths of experienced startup veterans.
While every founder’s journey will have its unique twists and turns, leveraging the perspectives of those who have been in the trenches before provides a head start.
Taking the time to learn from the hard-won lessons of seasoned founders can help new entrepreneurs shortcut some of the painful trial and error that’s often part of the startup territory.
That’s it.
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