Stupid mistakes I made while building my first startup
OP: Thanks for sharing this. I have a few questions, if I may:<p>&gt; <i>We shipped features at a tremendous pace. But we never talked to enough users to identify if it was something necessary. We assumed things and kept building – in a few months, we had a product which was an engineering marvel – but nobody cared to use.</i><p>I am curious because the YC application needs one to clearly articulate who ones target customers are, what they do today, why is it such a pain, and what one is building to solve that pain-point. And it looks like you folks at Marketfox did have it figured out [0]. It is interesting to me, then, that you&#x27;d cite this as a key mistake. What am I missing?<p>&gt; <i>We were very naive to think that building software is the hardest part of building a startup.</i><p>Well, there&#x27;s a balance here: Both are equally hard. Writing code is less hard if you&#x27;re a software professional and same goes if you&#x27;re a Sales or Marketing professional. You did say you shipped features at a break-neck pace... but usually, for an enterprise SaaS, isn&#x27;t that the bread and butter anyway? I am curious why you&#x27;d consider this a mistake. Not every (SaaS) product is novel anyway, and learning from your competitors is a shortcut to the otherwise long arduous road of defining a category &#x2F; industry &#x2F; market. Assuming that you folks did not build a feature in a vacuum (that is, you&#x27;d have would thought a feature was necessary only after looking at competitors do it better or a paying customer ask for it), was it the case of feature mis-prioritization &#x2F; building too many bespoke features that only one or two customers wanted?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-marketfox-floyd-servx-fibo-and-wifi-dabba&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ycombinator.com&#x2F;yc-w17-launch-lively-scaphold-m...</a>