Things will go wrong

Early products fail in small ways constantly.

Features don’t land. Users don’t convert. Channels don’t work. Releases break. Customers complain. Reviews disappoint. Press doesn’t care. Investors don’t respond. Plans slip.

Each of these is normal. None of them is failure in any final sense. They’re just the texture of early-stage building. What separates founders who keep going from those who quietly stall isn’t avoiding these failures — it’s how they handle them.

Done badly, each small failure drains a little energy and a little judgement, until the founder is running on fumes. Done well, each failure becomes information that sharpens the next attempt.

Distinguish setbacks from signals

When something goes wrong, the first move is to figure out which kind of wrong it is...

Handling early failures without losing momentum