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@levelsio @levelsio
Tuesday, April 16, 2024 import

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I had a crazy conversation with a friend who wants to start building startups too, his name is @csonotes and before this he was always a freelancer The problem he had was he thought every idea he had was not big enough or did not have "product founder fit" With that he meant he wanted to build a product that fit close to himself as a personality and he gave me as an example of someone with great "product founder fit" I asked him do you really think I always had a burning passion for interior design and that's why I did Interior AI? Or I have always wanted to enter the model photography industry with Photo AI? Or I'm very very passionate about jobs which is why I have Remote OK? Nomad List might be the only exception where I acutally do have "product founder fit" I told him I think it's a highly overrated concept because I had no idea what businesses I would be running when I started and still don't know what I will be running in the next few years, because it's impossible to plan what business you will build. The market changes so fast and most things you do fail. So it's more like surfing waves and the market CHOOSING YOU to do something, not you choosing what to do. You try smell and follow the customer demand, and only then you can have a viable business...for a while, until it ends and the demand goes elsewhere Elon Musk started by digitizing the Yellow Pages phone book as a startup, now he's building rockets to Mars, sure he has great "product founder fit" now but that's a bit of a big thing to ask for when you're just starting out as a entrepreneur doing your first thing. Regarding "nothing being big enough for him" (lol btw), you almost always start small, but small things can grow big (lol): Facebook started as an online year book and now it's a bleeding edge VR tech consortium of social media apps. Only if you have millions/billions to burn like again Elon did later in his career, you can start building things more fundamentally from principles where you want humanity to go. Even then it's crazy hard to get that demand, see how Bezos' space startup is doing compared (and he also has the billions to burn!), it's just hard (lollllll). So yeah IMHO: 1) ignore this "omg it's not big enough" idea, just ship a small thing, 2) if customer demand, or no customer demand, your ship is now in the ocean and you'll start sailing and see where you end up, things start happening cause you took action and made something (and hopefully launched it, talked about it), 3) "product founder fit" is mostly a myth, nobody does exactly what they want to do, and you can't just CONTROL the market like a god to make exactly the business YOU want, you can at maximum steer the ship a little bit, but the waves/wind (aka the market) are 100000x more powerful than you and they'll bring you somewhere else you don't expect to end up! ⛵️ Enjoy sailing the stormy oceans of entrepreneurship!