Mistakes I made that you should avoid as a founder 👇🏼

Hey PH community👋🏼 I wanted to share some news and lessons from a recent experience of mine that hopefully will help other founders/makers here. After multiple pivots and not making much progress, I have decided to shut down Blubi AI 😔 Blubi started as a side project, where I wanted to tackle the writer's block problem using AI. For context, here's the announcement. This is not the outcome I wanted, but it's best to move on and not spend too much on one thing! Some mistakes I made that you should avoid as a founder and what I’m brewing next 👇🏼 1. Don’t commit to building complex solutions: After getting a ton of feedback, Blubi quickly became complex. It all made sense in theory, but when building the actual solution, we realized it takes a ton of time - signing up for this makes you lose enormous momentum, which means losing interest from users. 2. Don’t spend too much on the waitlist: Waitlists are cool, but IMO, they only work when there is sustainable hype - in my case, I lacked that. We had 1100+ people on the waitlist and we never leveraged them. My biggest advice is to spend a short time building hype by letting users in and gaining social proof from them. 3. Ship a simple MVP as fast as you can: One of the biggest mistakes I made is that we never shipped an MVP when we had a decent one - partly I thought the MVP itself is not valuable. I guess this should come from users. Don’t leave anything for assumptions. 4. Validate with pricing from day one: We would have saved so much time if we had a paywall with some pricing. This instantly validates whether we are building something people want. You don’t need many paid users. Just 1 or 2 are OK to get the ✅ 5. No momentum = Your product is dead: If you are not talking about your product from day 0, come to the conclusion that your product is dead. Momentum is the oxygen for any startup. 6. Pivot fast: It’s good to talk to users but balance it out while building what you hear. Move fast and test in public - something I missed big time. 7. Avoid yeses that don’t convert: Many people signaled that they wanted to become paying customers - while it feels good but in reality, they are either being nice or giving you hope. A complete transaction counts; everything else doesn't - we should have had a pricing page that clears things off. 8. Ideas are enticing, and execution is deal-breaking: This is the trap and it's an easy one to fall in. Attach to building and detach from ideating. What’s next for me: Learning from this experience, I want to build small products solving simple problems - and I’m working on one already 🚀 Stay tuned and follow me on X for more updates 🙌🏼 This time, I promise I won’t repeat any of these mistakes 💪🏼 Even after building and selling a SaaS product for 6 figures, I made easily avoidable mistakes. I’m not perfect, and I’m still learning. I felt I could build a solution that solves writer's block but in reality, it didn’t work out. I hope this helps. I'm here to answer any questions. I appreciate y'all for reading 🙏🏼❤️