The below applies to young founders and extremely nascent industries.
Everyone loves giving advice about startups. Whether it’s about the importance of the first ten hires or what they think the future of your industry, etc. Maybe they listened to Founders, read some thought leadership on Twitter, or asked chat-gpt, who knows where the advice is even from.
What I’ve realized is 1) most people giving advice are regurgitating what they've heard, and since they rarely know the original context, they're unlikely to give you the right advice and 2)/more importantly you won’t be able to execute on majority of them - probably because you’re inexperienced.
Instead, just focus on not fucking dying.
Let’s take for example: hiring. Every founder thinks they need the Avengers. Reality is 1) most people won’t see your vision 2) you can pay qualified people (mercenaries) to ‘trust’ you/your vision, but there’s usually a high premium.
Instead just hire what’s necessary to get you from Point A to B. You can afford the luxury of building the Avengers when you have PMF and you have the traction because now people see the vision.
The Winners Rewrite the History
I wish I could say Spotlight Media's first 10 employees were all A players. The reality is we were poor, bootstrapped, and most of the world thought TikTok Shop would fail.
So instead, our first 5 employees were 4 people applying to law school who agreed to help us for 3 months. They didn't care about social commerce, but they were cheap because they knew nothing about marketing.
But it's through them that Sam and I learned what a non-"ideal" employee was. If we hadn't hired them, we probably would have never known and even then they helped us make our first couple case studies and become the company we are today.
However, one important caveat: you need to be ruthless about firing non-ideal hires as you scale and can afford your Avengers team. You gave them the opportunity to join a rocket ship, whether they believed in it or not. But that doesn't give them the right to stay forever. Additionally, if they can't level up, you risk losing your Avengers team.