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Saturday, October 24, 2026

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Advice for early-stage founders

Start with customer discovery: talk to prospective users before committing to a large build. Look for repeated problems, understand the current workaround, and test whether the problem is urgent enough for someone to try a solution.

Build the smallest useful product that addresses that specific problem. Keep the scope narrow, get it into users’ hands quickly, and prioritize improvements that help them reach a clear outcome—not features that merely make the product look complete.

Use a simple prioritization loop:

1. Identify the most important user problem.

2. Ship the smallest change that could help.

3. Watch how users respond and ask what blocked them.

4. Keep, revise, or discard the change based on what you learn.

Treat distribution as part of the product, not a final launch task. Choose channels where the people with the problem already pay attention, and measure meaningful actions—such as qualified conversations, trials, or repeat use—rather than reach alone. In a YC Startup Library discussion on launch videos, Farza Majeed and Aaron Epstein discuss treating every demo as a launch, making videos feel natural, and choosing channels that convert; the page notes that a smaller YouTube audience can outperform a much larger Twitter audience.

Finally, make feedback easy to act on. Record what users say, separate one-off requests from recurring patterns, and let observed behavior inform the roadmap. The goal is not to satisfy every request—it is to learn enough to build something a specific group finds consistently useful.