Most first-time founders get this wrong:
They think building a company is about executing a business model.
It’s not. It’s about finding one.
Execution without discovery is a trap. You end up polishing something nobody actually wants. I’ve watched founders burn months, even years, building in that trap.
And I'd say this approach kills >90% of startups.
Startups are not mini corporations. They’re research labs. The job is to run experiments, not follow a plan.
You only have two real variables you need figure out to solve the product-market fit puzzle:
- the product you build
- the market you serve
Product X might flop with market Y, but explode with market Z. Your job from 0 -> 1 is to find that match - what people call product–market fit.
I learned this the hard way. In my first venture, I thought we were “executing” on a model. We had spreadsheets, projections, and a big launch. None of it mattered. Users didn’t care. We weren’t finding; we were pretending. The moment we switched to testing tiny hypotheses - building a feature in days, launching to a few dozen users, discarding it if it didn’t stick - things started to move.
If you want to predict a startup’s success, don’t look at their deck. Look at their iteration speed. Are they treating it like a search problem? Or are they blindly executing?
Once you find something people actually want, then you execute relentlessly. But until then, stop pretending you’re a CEO. You’re a scientist.
Steve Blank said it first. I just painfully learned it after doing it wrong for ~2 years.