The Startup Mistake I Made Twice - /c/SaaS

abhaygandotra252 · 2026-06-08T12:51:06.606Z

I have a tendency to fall in love with the process of building. For me, the act of coding, designing, and refining a feature is a form of control. When the world of business feels chaotic and unpredictable, the codebase is a place where things make sense. If I write the logic correctly, the output is predictable. If I polish the UI, it looks professional. This tendency led me into a trap that I fell into not once, but twice, across two different companies. It is a specific kind of blindness that affects founders who think their way out of problems instead of their way into a market. The trap is the belief that a product is a collection of features. I spent an entire year on my first product adding every possible bell and whistle. I wanted the tool to be comprehensive. I wanted to ensure that when a user finally signed up, they would be impressed by the sheer breadth of what the system could do. I spent weeks on an advanced reporting engine that only two people ever used. I spent a month on a complex permission system for teams of fifty, while my average customer was a solo founder. I was treating my product like a checklist. I believed that if I just checked enough boxes, the value would eventually emerge. But value is not additive. You cannot add ten mediocre features together to create one great product. In fact, by adding all that noise, I was actively obscuring the one thing that actually worked. I had built a Swiss Army knife when my customers just needed a sharp paring knife. I was solving problems that did not exist for my users, while the one problem they actually had was being ignored in favor of technical elegance. This is the danger of the builder's ego. We love the complexity we create, but the user only cares about the result. The second time it happened, I thought I was smarter. I told myself I would build a Minimum Viable Product. But my definition of MVP was wrong. I built a version that was functionally complete but visually overproduced. I spent an obsessive amount of time on the animations, the transitions, and the perfect shade of gray for the borders. I thought that a professional look would compensate for a shaky value proposition. I believed that if the product felt premium, users would assume the value was there. I remember a specific conversation with a potential client who had a massive problem that my tool could solve. As we went through the demo, he spent five minutes complimenting the smooth transitions and the clean look of the dashboard. I felt a surge of pride. I thought I had won. Then he said: "But I'm not sure if this actually solves my main problem." That was the moment the floor fell out from under me. I had spent so much energy on the packaging that I had forgotten to perfect the product inside. I was optimizing for the feeling of success rather than the reality of utility. The mistake is always the same: Using the act of building as a shield to avoid the discomfort of validation. It is much easier to spend ten hours polishing a button than it is to spend one hour on a call with a customer who tells you that your product is not useful. Every hour I spent on a feature that nobody wanted was an hour I spent avoiding the truth. We build features to feel like we are making progress, but progress in a startup is not measured by the number of commits in GitHub. It is measured by the number of problems solved for a paying customer. The recovery from this trap requires a brutal shift in mindset. You have to move from being a builder to being a problem solver. A builder cares about how the tool is made. A problem solver cares about whether the problem went away. I started implementing a rule that I call the Value First Constraint. Before any new feature is added to the roadmap, it must be tied to a specific, documented pain point from a paying user. If I cannot point to a conversation where a user said: "I cannot do X, and it is costing me money or time." Then the feature does not get built. This felt like a restriction at first, but it was actually a liberation. It freed me from the burden of guessing. I stopped asking what the product should do and started asking what the user was currently doing in a broken way. I realized that most users are surprisingly flexible with a UI if the tool actually solves a burning problem. They will use a spreadsheet for a year if it saves them ten hours a week. The obsession with the perfect interface is often a distraction from the obsession with the perfect solution. I also learned to embrace the ugly version. There is a profound power in a product that is visually basic but functionally indispensable. When a user is willing to use a tool that looks like a website from 1995 because it solves a burning problem, you know you have found a real market. The polish should be the final coat of paint on a structure that is already standing. If you paint the foundation, the whole thing will still collapse. I spent years of my life and thousands of dollars building things that were technically impressive but commercially irrelevant. The most expensive mistake a founder can make is the accumulation of wasted effort. There is no greater waste than a perfectly executed feature that provides zero value. Now, when I feel the urge to add a new complex feature, I stop and ask myself: "Am I solving a problem, or am I just trying to feel productive?" Most of the time, it is the latter. The real work of a founder is not coding. It is the constant, iterative process of narrowing the gap between what you are building and what the market actually needs. Check out my latest one, its free : UserOath

The Startup Mistake I Made Twice - /c/SaaS | LetIt