What would you add to these 11 lessons from a tech founder?

Listen to your users on weekly basis. Sometime things change after a month or year and idea you have in your mind is not applicable. Listening to new users can bring you, users and your product on same page.

Thanks for sharing the article. To add, and perhaps other founders can relate to this, success in a startup relies heavily on your ability to hack motivation for yourself and your team.

Michael Seibel tells it best:
https://www.ycombinator.com/library/64-what-makes-great-founders-stand-out

The only person you should compare yourself to is the person you were yesterday. It's good to be aware of what the competition is doing, but an over-reliance on how you measure up against them will make you second guess yourself constantly.

One extra lesson I would add is: Spend some time launching your product

Founders should spend more time on their launches and less on building features because you can always improve a feature but never improve a launch...

My previous PH launches were terrible but my most recent one is going super well!

Thank you @londonder for a repost, I didn't expect this coming and was actually planning to post it here with tl;dr :)

I really appreciate that!

p.s. What would you add yourself?

Starting small is a good one. You don't need to build your entire vision before you launch. Identify what the core is, launch, assess, and build on however it makes sense.

Especially at the start, prioritize identifying what works for you. If you're building something alone for the first time and you only rely on yourself - identify when and how you work best. It doesn't matter if you could be working an extra five hours, it's about working smart.

Listen and more importantly observe your potential users' behaviors way, way, way more than you watch the competition. From being in a couple of successful startups as a decision maker or getting mentored by the decision makers, you can completely ignore the competition if you know what customers need and keep focused on their goals+pain points.

#9 is definitely overlooked in the startup world. Log/track the "why" of decisions. Too often we depend on individual memory to keep us from making the same mistake in the future. It gets worse as the org grows and people leave.

Try and validate your idea as fast as possible! Even before you've written code.