The First-Time Founder Trap

You're advising a first-time founder who's struggling to get their startup off the ground. They have a strong engineering background and have built an impressive technical product. The technology is solid, the architecture is clean, and the product works reliably.

However, they're not seeing the growth they expected. When you dig into their strategy, you notice a pattern:

• Lost a deal? They think it's because they need to add more features
• Struggling with user acquisition? They want to rebuild the onboarding flow
• Competitors getting attention? Time for a redesign

The founder keeps telling stories about why things aren't working:

• 'Customers didn't buy because our platform costs too much' (told by the salesperson)
• 'Users aren't engaging because the UI isn't modern enough'
• 'We need to add [specific feature] that competitors have'

As you probe deeper, you notice these are often second-hand explanations from team members or interpretations of user feedback. When a customer says something like 'it's too expensive,' that might mean they don't see enough value - but the founder is taking it literally as a pricing problem.

The founder is brilliant technically but seems to approach every problem as an engineering problem. They're very confident in their diagnosis of what's wrong and have a clear plan to fix it - which always involves building something.