Are you young, ambitious, and a strong engineer looking to build your own startup?
Here are a list of places of where you may fail:
1. You will fail. May god strike down all of Congress tomorrow if I am wrong.
2. Engineering validation is nearly disjoint with market validation. Which is prolly why the market for devs selling to devs is gargantuous because for the most part devs clobber with talking to other devs on sub forums.
3. Bridging the gap between technical implications and a particular market segment has an insurmountable amount of grey area—much of which you may not even know if its a dev or a business related problem. Especially when it comes to judgement calls—the vast majority of young people have not lived long enough to have any “judgement” that is worth anything.
4. You don’t know your audience, you never met with them— you can’t paint a strong customer profile. Knowing customers only on a surface level, never uncovers the emotional reasons why people are sold.
Like do you think Brad from NYU Stern whos rocking double-double zynzs pouches thinks the same way as SF, codeforces since the womb, dark mode toggled–hates the sunlight. They not even from the same planet. (silly example for comedy)
5. Common sense alert: being ill-connected keeps you disadvantaged. Lacking domain expertise keeps you blind or self-validating rather than receiving real signal.
6. You evidently, and obviously failed the “Mom Test”. Essentially, you talk about what you are building(in which nobody cares)–rather than digging deep into your customers problems. If your problem space can’t be equated with a dollar figure, or if you are ill-equipped to help, or any reason that disconnects the product from the problem itself, what is your purpose in building ?
If you are not ten-feet balls deep, equally frustrated about the problem as your customer, you are doing something wrong by instead painting make up and lip gloss on mark-down, css files.
7. The idea has planned for the better, and not for the worst. Where is the point in your TAM/SAM/SOM—it’s like trivia knowledge sprinkled ontop of the fact that your chances of capturing anything is worse than Las Vegas slot machine EV. Shouldn’t you want to plan for the worse? If ideas and detour plans can sustain in worst-case situations, surely thats stronger than building a bridge assuming perfect best-case conditions.
8. You don’t have it in you. If your expected value for any return is so low, what is keeping you building? Forget escaping the corporate matrix, the matrix is a lot nicer than being an “influencer” second guessing if the next contract will ever come.
9. Short-term thinking–Lack of purpose/long-term mission. A hustler is not for everyone. You are a victim to selection-bias phenomenon–you only see the handful with traction, but not the hundreds of thousands in debt, lost, miserable, etc. For every thirst-trapper, there exists hundred thousand equally qualified, and posting similar content without the monetization.
For every small business that can afford to open a new store, thousands or an entire street are filling for bankruptcy, have overdue invoices, haven’t been cash flow positive since the 2000s, and their families are in literal shambles.
[To be continued]
If you enjoy reading this style of writing, give a like! I try to keep up with writing once in a while as good reminder than homosapiens are still capable of expression complete trains of thoughts without monkey prompting.
https://huliu.ca/blogs
^If you would like to read some more silly blogs, feel free to check out some more shenanigans. Maybe one day if I become someone—I too will have a podcast where I quarter-cross my legs in dark-blue cashmere speaking into a microphone pretending as if what I’m saying is useful.
Then you will presumptively buy my course as the deterministic next step!