# Biggest mistakes first-time founders make

**Author:** Michael Seibel
**Type:** Video
**URL:** https://www.ycombinator.com/library/66-biggest-mistakes-first-time-founders-make
**YouTube ID:** D56QeyyQMLI

---

Y Combinator Managing Director and Group Partner [Michael Seibel](https://twitter.com/mwseibel) on the biggest mistakes
first-time founders make.

## Transcript

here are some of the biggest mistakes first-time founders make when starting their company and in the first year afterwards first I often see founders choosing to solve a problem that they actually don't care about well this mistake isn't fatal and while there are many many examples of founders who've learned to love their product or their problem at later date one of the things that I do see is that a lot of

startups that fail basically fail because they lose motivation to continue working on their their company and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they actually didn't really like the problem they were working on in the beginning they were trying to pick a problem that they thought people might want or they thought could grow quickly or they thought might be cool but it wasn't actually something they were willing to devote a significant amount of time like you know five years plus of their life to solving there was no deep connection to the problem the second one

is helping users you don't care about you know we had this experience at justin.tv and twitch in the beginning of justin.tv you know we were kind of excited by the general idea of democratizing live video and making it easy for anyone online to share live video with their friends but we weren't actually terribly in love with the people who chose to use the platform as a continue to grow and only when Emmett kind of really refocused the company

around video game streaming did we regain the love for our users you know Emmett was a gamer and he loved gamers and he loved building things for gamers and that was really the one of the core drivers of twitch becoming a successful company um the next is choosing co-founders that you don't know well once again all of these will have counter examples there are exceptions to every rule but in general startups are so hard that it is nice to have a pre-existing relationship with your co-founder just so you have a sense of

whether you're going to be able to get through the hard times together whether you can work well together now that pre-existing relationship can be a friendship it could be a co-worker they could be someone in your school you did a school project with which is helpful that you've had some context with them that you're not you didn't just find them on the street yesterday the next one is not having transparent conversations with your co-founders there are very typical topics that create drama most co-founding teams performance is my

co-founder working as hard as I am goals are we trying to accomplish the same goal rules whose job is it to do engineering whose job is it do product whose job it is to talk to customers and oftentimes founders just don't have these completely transparent honest conversations about these topics and as a result resentment builds up and the relationship degrades and then when you do have the conversation turns into a fight and that can really critically harm the startup so that's really important to be just having open

transparent conversations well-organized conversations that are not designed to argue or to create fights but to really just share how you feel about the current situation the company how its organized who's doing what um the next one is not launching launching has become this interesting phrase I think when people think about launching their company they think oh I'm going to get in the press I'm going to be on the news I'm gonna be on these popular blogs and so they're afraid of launching because

they don't think they're ready for all that exposure one of the things that we tell people is first let's think about the products that you might use and like a lot today do you remember the days snapchat launched do you remember the day Instagram launched humor the day that whatsapp launched remember the day that uber or lyft launched most likely you don't so it turns out that launching is nowhere near a significant event to your users as it is to you so you should move up the launch as soon as possible

until you can get your product in front of customers you can't validate whether it solves their problem and so it's much better to build a crappier product release it sooner and get it out there in front of customers see if they want to use it now there's some exceptions for example in some extremely regulated markets like banking example or lending it's just really hard to launch you actually have to get one done before even allowed to get customers but in most consumer and b2b startups that we encounter it's actually possible to get some form of MVP built and launched in less than a month and so

that's what you should be thinking about the next one is not using analytics not measuring what your users do when they come to the site we just see this time and time again I'm part and parcel to building product is measuring so that you know what's being used and what's not but the next biggest mistake is having no idea where your first users will come from I get this email a lot I'm a lot of founders emailing me saying where do I find my first users and I kind of think to myself you chose this

problem that you're working on and you chose to build a solution it's interesting to me that you chose a problem where you don't know anyone who has the problem including yourself I think it's a wholly different question where do I get my first hundred users or my first thousand users you know that might require some kind of deep digging but where I get my first two users or one user or three users or five users you know that should come from people you know or you already have identified through some other way and then last is

prioritization oftentimes people will prioritize sizzle over steak that volatize press and hiring conferences investors all these are the things above getting product out there and talking to users in the end of the day you know we look at these startups and we say your cargo cult in the startup you are pretending to be a start-up but the actual work of startups is pushing product getting in the users hands and seeing if they like it and then iterating it improving so those are the common mistakes that startups make

caveat I bet you can name a start-up that has made every one of these mistakes and has still been successful in fact I bet there's a start-up that's made all of these mistakes and it's open successful but those tend to be exceptions and if you're trying to kind of generally improve the odds of your startups being successful try minimize these mistakes as much as possible thank you

you

## Transcript

here are some of the biggest mistakes first-time founders make when starting their company and in the first year afterwards first I often see founders choosing to solve a problem that they actually don't care about well this mistake isn't fatal and while there are many many examples of founders who've learned to love their product or their problem at later date one of the things that I do see is that a lot of

startups that fail basically fail because they lose motivation to continue working on their their company and a lot of that has to do with the fact that they actually didn't really like the problem they were working on in the beginning they were trying to pick a problem that they thought people might want or they thought could grow quickly or they thought might be cool but it wasn't actually something they were willing to devote a significant amount of time like you know five years plus of their life to solving there was no deep connection to the problem the second one

is helping users you don't care about you know we had this experience at justin.tv and twitch in the beginning of justin.tv you know we were kind of excited by the general idea of democratizing live video and making it easy for anyone online to share live video with their friends but we weren't actually terribly in love with the people who chose to use the platform as a continue to grow and only when Emmett kind of really refocused the company

around video game streaming did we regain the love for our users you know Emmett was a gamer and he loved gamers and he loved building things for gamers and that was really the one of the core drivers of twitch becoming a successful company um the next is choosing co-founders that you don't know well once again all of these will have counter examples there are exceptions to every rule but in general startups are so hard that it is nice to have a pre-existing relationship with your co-founder just so you have a sense of

whether you're going to be able to get through the hard times together whether you can work well together now that pre-existing relationship can be a friendship it could be a co-worker they could be someone in your school you did a school project with which is helpful that you've had some context with them that you're not you didn't just find them on the street yesterday the next one is not having transparent conversations with your co-founders there are very typical topics that create drama most co-founding teams performance is my

co-founder working as hard as I am goals are we trying to accomplish the same goal rules whose job is it to do engineering whose job is it do product whose job it is to talk to customers and oftentimes founders just don't have these completely transparent honest conversations about these topics and as a result resentment builds up and the relationship degrades and then when you do have the conversation turns into a fight and that can really critically harm the startup so that's really important to be just having open

transparent conversations well-organized conversations that are not designed to argue or to create fights but to really just share how you feel about the current situation the company how its organized who's doing what um the next one is not launching launching has become this interesting phrase I think when people think about launching their company they think oh I'm going to get in the press I'm going to be on the news I'm gonna be on these popular blogs and so they're afraid of launching because

they don't think they're ready for all that exposure one of the things that we tell people is first let's think about the products that you might use and like a lot today do you remember the days snapchat launched do you remember the day Instagram launched humor the day that whatsapp launched remember the day that uber or lyft launched most likely you don't so it turns out that launching is nowhere near a significant event to your users as it is to you so you should move up the launch as soon as possible

until you can get your product in front of customers you can't validate whether it solves their problem and so it's much better to build a crappier product release it sooner and get it out there in front of customers see if they want to use it now there's some exceptions for example in some extremely regulated markets like banking example or lending it's just really hard to launch you actually have to get one done before even allowed to get customers but in most consumer and b2b startups that we encounter it's actually possible to get some form of MVP built and launched in less than a month and so

that's what you should be thinking about the next one is not using analytics not measuring what your users do when they come to the site we just see this time and time again I'm part and parcel to building product is measuring so that you know what's being used and what's not but the next biggest mistake is having no idea where your first users will come from I get this email a lot I'm a lot of founders emailing me saying where do I find my first users and I kind of think to myself you chose this

problem that you're working on and you chose to build a solution it's interesting to me that you chose a problem where you don't know anyone who has the problem including yourself I think it's a wholly different question where do I get my first hundred users or my first thousand users you know that might require some kind of deep digging but where I get my first two users or one user or three users or five users you know that should come from people you know or you already have identified through some other way and then last is

prioritization oftentimes people will prioritize sizzle over steak that volatize press and hiring conferences investors all these are the things above getting product out there and talking to users in the end of the day you know we look at these startups and we say your cargo cult in the startup you are pretending to be a start-up but the actual work of startups is pushing product getting in the users hands and seeing if they like it and then iterating it improving so those are the common mistakes that startups make

caveat I bet you can name a start-up that has made every one of these mistakes and has still been successful in fact I bet there's a start-up that's made all of these mistakes and it's open successful but those tend to be exceptions and if you're trying to kind of generally improve the odds of your startups being successful try minimize these mistakes as much as possible thank you

you
