Avoid Premature Optimization

A super common mistake early-stage founders make is spending precious time and energy on problems they haven't earned the right to have yet.

The Trap of Future Problems

Founders love to think about the future. It's exciting. Having a vision for the future is often what inspires us. But spending energy on future problems before solving present ones is a form of procrastination disguised as productivity.

Common premature optimizations:

• Getting into YC ... before you have traction worth accepting
• Fundraising strategy ... before you have a business worth funding
• Acquisition planning ... before you have anything worth acquiring
• Scaling operations ... before you've manually done it 100+ times and know exactly how to operationalize it
• Hiring plans ... before you are truly bottlenecked by a lack of work hours
• Legal structure optimization ... before you validated there is a company to be formed

Every hour spent on these future problems is an hour not spent on the thing that actually unlocks them: building something people want.

Build Something People Want

YC's motto isn't just a nice slogan. It's the entire game at the early stage.

But "want" isn't just ephemeral. It's measurable. Real want shows up as:

• Users who come back without being reminded
• Customers who pay money
• People who tell their friends
• Engagement that grows week over week

If you don't have these signals, you don't have product-market fit. And if you don't have product-market fit, nothing else matters. Not your pitch deck. Not your cap table. Not your YC application.

The Investor Trap in Secondary Markets

In secondary startup ecosystems... cities where most angel investors made their money in real estate, medicine, or law rather than tech... founders face a unique challenge: investors who don't understand how early-stage startups work.

These investors often ask for:

• 3-5 year financial projections
• Detailed pro formas
• Complex business plans
• ROI calculations based on assumptions

Mike Tyson said it best: "Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face." In startups, you get punched in the face every day.

Yes, you should have a plan. You should see where your business could go in 3+ years. You should have a rough outline of the next 18 months covering go-to-market, product roadmap, revenue, and expenses. But that plan is a living document that evolves weekly, not a promise carved in stone.

Founders who spend weeks perfecting pro formas for non-tech investors are often using that work to avoid the harder, scarier work: talking to customers and building an MVP.

The Scale Fantasy

Another common trap: founders in early markets spend enormous energy worrying about future scale. Future exits. Future outcomes.

"What happens when we have 10,000 users?"
"How will we handle enterprise customers?"
"What's our exit strategy?"

These are great problems to have. But you don't have them yet. And planning for them now is like drawing a house with your eyes closed... you might get the shapes roughly right, but nothing will be where it needs to be.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham's essay "Do Things That Don't Scale" is holy scripture for early-stage founders. The core insight: manual, unscalable work is how you learn what actually needs to be built.

This applies to everything in your startup:

• Customer support: Do it yourself before you build a help desk
• Sales: Close deals manually before you build a sales team
• Operations: Do it by hand before you automate
• Onboarding: Walk users through it personally before you build flows

When you do things manually, you learn exactly how they work. You discover edge cases. You understand what actually matters versus what you assumed would matter. Then... and only then... you optimize, operationalize, and automate.

You Learn by Doing

Startups are not theoretical exercises. You cannot think your way to product-market fit. You cannot plan your way to traction. You have to do the work.

Every customer conversation teaches you something. Every manual process reveals inefficiencies. Every failure shows you what to fix. This is the iterative loop that builds great companies:

1. Do the thing manually
2. Learn what works and what doesn't
3. Iterate and improve
4. Repeat until you deeply understand the process
5. Only then: optimize, systematize, and automate

What You Should Actually Focus On

If you're pre-product-market-fit, your entire focus should be:

1. Talking to customers ... understand their pain deeply
2. Building an MVP ... the smallest thing that tests your hypothesis
3. Getting users ... manually, one at a time
4. Learning and iterating ... weekly cycles of improvement

That's it. Everything else is a distraction until you have evidence that people want what you're building.

When It's Time to Think Bigger

You earn the right to think about scale, fundraising, and exits when:

• You have users who love your product (not just use it)
• You have revenue (or clear path to revenue)
• You have growth that's straining your current approach
• You've learned enough to know what you actually need

When you get there, you won't need to force it. Investors will find you. Scale problems will present themselves. The path forward will be obvious because you'll have earned the knowledge to see it.