What I’d Tell Myself Before My First Startup

If I could sit across from myself before my first startup, I wouldn’t talk about strategy, funding, or growth.

I’d say something simpler. Don’t give up. Not because it will be easy. But because the first time is meant to be messy.

When you build your first startup, everything is new. Every decision feels heavier than it should. Every mistake feels bigger than it is. You don’t have experience to lean on, no benchmarks to measure against, no instinct yet for what really matters. And that’s not a weakness. That’s the point.

The first time is not about getting it right. It’s about learning how wrong you can be and still keep going. You will make errors constantly. You will misjudge people, timing, priorities. You will overthink small things and underestimate big ones. That’s normal.

What no one tells you is that experience only comes after you’ve already needed it. The first startup is where you earn it. Slowly. Uncomfortably. Often quietly.

So instead of chasing perfect decisions, I’d tell myself to have fun with the process. To stay curious. To treat the work as exploration, not examination. You’re not being graded. You’re discovering where you can arrive if you don’t quit too early. 

Small results matter more than you think the first time.

A few users. A working prototype. A problem solved slightly better than before. These are not insignificant. They’re proof that you can turn an idea into something real. And once you’ve done that once, you’re no longer guessing. You’re building.

I’d also remind myself not to obsess over short-term outcomes.

The first startup rarely delivers the result you imagine. But it almost always delivers perspective. It teaches you how you work under pressure, what you care about, where you lose focus, and what kind of problems you actually want to solve.

That knowledge compounds.

Vision matters more than early wins. Not the loud kind of vision, but the quiet one. The sense of direction that keeps you moving even when results are small and progress feels slow.

If I could say one last thing, it would be this:

Your first startup doesn’t need to succeed to be successful.
It needs to change you.

And if you let it do that, nothing you build after will ever start from zero again.