The best startup advice for founders rarely comes from books or courses. Six years ago, while juggling a full-time job and a side project I’d just launched in beta, I posted a question on Reddit that I genuinely needed answered.
I asked founders at every stage to share the single most important piece of advice they’d give to someone just starting out. Within days, 86 upvotes and dozens of responses from real builders, not gurus, not course sellers, just people who had actually done it.
The people you hire will define your company more than any product decision
The most upvoted response in the thread was simple: hire well. Not just for skills, but for who someone is and how they work with others.
One founder said they rejected technically strong developers simply because they wouldn’t work well with the team. Another nearly passed on their best ever hire because the candidate seemed too junior and too unassuming, until something clicked in the interview. That person ended up keeping pace with PhDs.
The lesson I took from this: skills can be learned, but character and collaboration cannot be installed in someone after the fact.
Build a landing page before you build a product
One of the most practical pieces of advice in the thread was also the most counterintuitive. Before writing a single line of code, create a fake landing page and try to attract real interest.
If no one signs up for a product that sounds perfect on paper, you’ve just saved months of engineering time and thousands of euros. If people do sign up, you have validation before you’ve built anything.
Buffer famously did exactly this. Two pages, a pricing screen, and a queue of signups before the product existed. This approach, often called a fake door test, has become standard practice in lean product development for good reason.
Marketing and sales are not secondary. They are the business.
The most repeated theme across the entire thread was this: you can have the best product in the world and fail because nobody knows it exists. You can have a mediocre product and succeed because your sales and marketing are excellent.
One founder put it bluntly. Invest in marketing and sales from day one. Not after you’ve built everything. Not once you feel ready. From the start.
As someone who spent years in conversion rate optimization before moving into product management, I’ve seen this play out firsthand. Distribution beats perfection every time.
Be passionate about the problem, not the solution
Multiple founders pointed to passion as the thing that carries you through the hard moments. Not passion for your specific product, but for the underlying problem you’re solving.
Products change. Features get cut. Pivots happen. But if you genuinely care about the problem, you’ll find a way to keep going when the original idea stops working.
Don’t be addicted to investment. Be addicted to revenue.
One of the most nuanced pieces of advice in the thread challenged the default startup playbook. Money is the easiest thing to get, one founder wrote. Be careful not to bring on investors just for cash. Get investors who bring real value, where money is the least interesting part of what they offer.
The goal should be to make money from day zero. If you can sustain yourself, you can afford to be selective. And being selective is where leverage lives.
The best advice in the thread was also the shortest
One person wrote: don’t take any advice, except from a customer.
It sounds like it contradicts everything above. But it doesn’t. All the advice in that thread, the hiring wisdom, the landing page test, the marketing first mindset, all of it only matters if it leads you back to understanding your customer more deeply.
Frameworks and advice are starting points. Customers are the truth.
This post was originally inspired by a thread I started on r/startups in 2020. Six years later, building AI products in Berlin, these lessons still hold.