Ask HN: Important nonobvious startup/business lessons you've learned?

1. If the idea is any good, you‘ll quickly encounter others who are better funded and need to execute extremely well. „Build it and they will come“ has worked for the tiniest minority or orgs I‘ve worked with and for, it certainly hasn‘t for us.

2. If your original idea is well researched and partially proven or already sold before building, why pivot? We didn‘t regret to sink a tenth of our initial invest into a great domain and brand.

3. True that. If you can‘t put your business model into a one sentence elevator pitch that includes a real-world problem and its solution that someone will actually pay for, din‘t even start…

Attention is scarce and there are already lots of good alternatives for almost any product idea. You better be good at sales and marketing if you want to cut thru the noise. A good product is not good enough.

Most startups don’t need press - unless you are asocial media app, chances are customers won’t pay simply because TechCrunch or CNN mentions you. They pay to get their problems solved.

Experience can't be shared to team member. I don't mean that experience can't be documented and read. But that readers don't have visceral feeling upon reading. It goes both way.

First, team members with limited experience don't internalized why certain things is done certain way. They "know" it through indoctrination. It could be cultural or technical. This leads to reinventing wheel or people sharing some random blog article and following advice blindly. You want to exploit your experience.

Second, it is hard for yourself to identify blindspots. Trust and delegate is easier said than done. You want to explore unknown hence expand the island of experience.

Have a mental model on where you and your teammates are on the relative experience spectrum and switch between explore and exploit is important. Fast iteration/feedback cycles help you identify that relative position on the spectrum.