1/ Improve the lives of a tiny group of people

It's tempting to think big. What's the Total Addressable Market? How many people can I sell this to? How can this be the next Google?

Instead, you should start uncomfortably small.

Can you clearly identify and solve the problem of 1 person? Yourself perhaps? Now go find others.

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2/ Be profitable from the beginning

For some businesses, there's just no way around it. You have to invest tons of money and hopefully one day you'll be profitable.

But the vast majority of entrepreneurs are cargo-culting.

They do this because they're hiding. They don't want to do the real work (making sales) so they hide behind fake work instead.

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3/ Focus on building something great instead of on the competition.

Entrepreneurs that focus on the competition have run out of ideas.

Focus on building a product that's so great, people are banging down your door to get it or would be deeply sad if it disappeared tomorrow.

Most entrepreneurs starting their businesses could be and should be fully funded by customers.

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4/ Refuse to die

If you keep your overhead low enough, you'll get to keep iterating and trying things until you succeed.

You're making a lot of bad assumptions, the more you can replace those with less wrong ones, the better.

High burn means few experiments before you die.

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5/ Don't overbuild

Build only what you need to in order to test your assumptions.

Whatever you think you need to build, build less.

Can you test some assumptions without building?

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This list is a trick list in the sense that it's impossible to follow.

Every entrepreneur makes all of these mistakes. Hopefully, you'll recognize them faster now when you're making them.

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