The biggest and most dangerous mistake that most founders make:

Be blinded by the love to their product.

𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗺𝗲 𝘄𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗴:
Founders and start-ups need to love their product and dream about their vision to be motivated and continue working to grow it – especially through the normal lows. Without the strong believe that the product / mission are needed in the world, they are more likely to quit too early.

But it can be deadly for your company if you’re not looking at the right data or making false interpretations due to little understanding or human-typical biases and emotions.

𝗦𝗼 𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲’𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗱𝗼 𝗶𝗻𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗱:
Understand the business, market and influential variables well enough to take better decisions. Use scientific facts and data-based evaluations incl. the consideration of other influencing variables instead of biases, believes and false interpretations.

𝗛𝗲𝗿𝗲 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝘁𝘆𝗽𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗺𝗮𝗱𝗲 𝗶𝗻 𝗗𝟮𝗖 𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗲𝘀:
❌ Early sales don’t show product market fit – regularly recurring sales do.
❌ Early retail orders often don’t show sales, but fluctuating inventory management. You need in-store sales rotation data.
❌ Customer requests and cooperations don’t show a demand, but interest.
❌ A communicated need is not a demand that people are willing to pay for – at least not yet.
❌ Webshop conversion, Meta Ads, newsletter openings and many other D2C KPIs don’t show that customers are intrinsically looking for the product and buying it again, but just short-term E-Commerce and marketing success.

Passion and a mission are great because they give a lot of energy and most ventures need this dedication to succeed.

But some ventures have too small success chances, basically making the opportunity costs too high (compared to other possibilities).

If you cannot or do not want to afford to continue working on the company and investing more for limited success chances, it’s important to take a reflected view and notice when pivoting could create better chances or representative data shows that starting other ventures have a higher (impact-) return on the (time) investment.

🫵🏻𝗖𝗧𝗔:
Keep systems in place to make you regularly analyze your company’s trajectory objectively - in consideration of all largely influencing variables, e.g.:
✅ Hypotheses that need to be fulfilled to evaluate PMF.
✅ KPIs that need to be met to grow as planned.
✅ A list of typical biases to look out for: Be aware of the typical faults your own mind makes.
✅ A list of important influencing variables (differentiate causal relationships and spurious correlation).
✅ Get representative target group and sales data (rotation numbers, representative statistics, uninfluenced / independent surveys,…).


❓Did you take bad decisions, because you were blindly in love with your product before? How do you approach this data vs emotions challenge?