•2 min read
startupsproductlessons
Common Anti-Patterns I've Experienced or Seen While Building Businesses
I've seen and often fallen into all of these. For some reason it's easier to recognize them than to avoid them.
- Building ahead of validation / too soon
- Pitching your preferred solution before understanding the problem
- Asking users leading questions ("would you use X?")
- Chasing edge-cases - solving for one vocal user instead of the core pain
- Building in isolation without feedback
- Premature optimization
- Prioritizing core or 'table stakes' features before creating differentiation
- Feature creep
- Holding back launching for some 'big release' that never happens
- Too shy to share your ideas before they're fully baked
- Staying in 'stealth' too long
- Building all the features your users ask for instead of designing around their needs
- Spending your time on trivial decisions
- Over-engineering infra - optimizing for scale before product-market fit
- Starting too broad - trying to serve "anyone with this problem."
- Not articulating the user's alternative - forgetting what you're replacing
- Hiring friends instead of complements
- Ignoring distribution early - assuming good product = automatic users.
- Constant idea-switching - abandoning progress before compounding insight
What're the most common anti-patterns you've seen when building businesses?