“Never give up” is advice people throw around casually. But taken literally, it’s terrible. It traps you in ideas that aren’t going anywhere. What actually matters is refusing to give up on the mission, not the vehicle you’re riding.
On my own entrepreneurship path, this became obvious. You keep the long-term goal, but you constantly adjust the route.
Take my last two products:
Neither got traction. The easy mistake would have been to keep shipping features into a void, hoping something would magically click. Instead, I moved on. More small bets, faster cycles, less emotional attachment. Each product taught me something different, and some lessons carried across both.
Here are the clearest ones:
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Marketing isn’t optional.
If you’re not actively doing it, you should be getting better at it. Building in silence is comfortable, but it kills momentum. -
Make something that’s easy to talk about.
“Easy to market” isn’t a framework—it’s a feeling. If the product isn’t exciting enough that you want to explain it to people, you built the wrong thing. -
An MVP is not a toy.
People throw the word around loosely. An MVP is the smallest marketable piece of value you can put into the world—something real people can actually use and something you can confidently market.