No one gives a fuck

OH MY GOD, JUST LAUNCH IT!

Very nuanced, thoughtful, deeply strategic advice that I howled at a friend who has been building a product for months.

He was doing the thing founders do before launching.

Strategizing.

About competition.
About market timing.
About whether a big company might build your whole company as a tiny feature.
About UX. And onboarding, and referral flows, and micro-interactions.

All valid concerns. Also very irrelevant right now.

Launch. Try to get one customer. Then a second one. Then a third one.

Everything else is dreamland.

Dreamland is where founders go to feel productive without risking getting hurt.

This is the part about starting a company that is hard to understand until you have wasted a deeply embarrassing amount of time.

I would know, I spent almost 2 years in dreamland.

My first startup made a grand total of 0$ in lifetime revenue.

For almost two years, I built stuff. I kept building because it felt like progress. It gave me something to do. It let me pretend (to myself) that I was building a company. And let me avoid the part where I had to go out into the world and find out that no one gave a fuck about what I was building.

When you are building something, everything can feel important. Like finding the exact shade of blue that says trustworthy but not 2000s enterprise software.

But the only thing that really matters is getting one person to care enough to pay.

Not compliment.
Not beta test.
Not say “this is cool”.
Not tell you they could totally see themselves using a future version.
Not give feedback.

Pay.

Money is a useful metric because it is inconvenient. It is the only feedback that comes with a small amount of pain. In the beginning, it is the only feedback that matters.

When someone pays you, they are saying: I have a problem painful enough that I am willing to exchange something real for your imperfect attempt at solving it.

And that first dollar is everything, because the baseline is soul-crushing indifference.

You spend months, sometimes years, bleeding over this thing. You find the perfect idea, spend weeks doing market research, build the first version and then the twentieth, solve impossible bugs, iterate on the onboarding experience, and wake up at 3AM because you suddenly realize that button should be disabled in that specific state.

And then at some point, hopefully, you launch.

And then nothing happens.

No dramatic rejection.
No painful feedback.
No angry mob.
No public humiliation.

Just nothing.

Everyone is busy. Your product is just one more thing they don’t care about. Or even know about.

This sounds depressing, and it is. But it’s also freeing.

If no one gives a fuck, you don’t need to design the perfect logo, write the handbook, or make onboarding delightful.

You need to put the extremely ugly thing that does just one thing in front of someone who might have that problem and ask them to pay.

Then you will find out.

The first version of Adaface, my second startup (or fifth?), was ugly.

Not “minimum viable product” ugly. Just ugly ugly.
And I obsess over design and fonts and UX, so putting this out into the world with my name on it was mega painful.

But customers do not care about my taste in UX if the product does not solve a problem they have.

So we launched mega ugly.

Ugly website, ugly app, ugly logo.

I still have screenshots of the first version, and I’m still embarrassed by it. But embarrassment is cheaper than spending six more months polishing something nobody wants.

The first dollar matters because it breaks the spell of theory.

In theory, the market is huuge.
In theory, users will love it.
In theory, the competition is shit.
In theory, this way to do it is better.
In theory, the integration gap is obvious.
In theory, everyone needs this.
In theory, atleast someone should care.

But that’s just theory.

Until you find the first person who cares. At least somewhat. Enough to take out their card.

In the beginning, the only thing that matters is finding one paying customer.

Then one more.

Everything else can wait.

Because no one gives a fuck.

Until someone does.

Find that person.