That’s how my mind worked for years. It’s how most minds work. We’re conditioned from childhood. Work hard, get good grades, get into a better college, land a better job.

Hard work is the answer. The startup world just repackages the same message. More hours, more calls, more demos, more meetings, more features.

And brute force does work. It creates momentum and gets you something.

Then it stops.

I built my second startup on pure grind. A home renovation marketplace. Discovery, design, materials, contractors. We covered every step except the one that mattered most: project execution.

Had we done nothing but project execution, we’d have won. Instead, we spread across the entire value chain and owned none of it.

Segmentation was worse. We targeted first-time homeowners. Clueless about the market, but gullible enough to fall for contractors with lowball quotes. Our product couldn’t compete with a cheap lie. We shifted to second-time homeowners, but they wanted full home renovations which we were not good at. So we took on whatever came our way because we were desperate to grow.

We never stopped to choose. We just kept moving.

That startup failed. For a long time I blamed the market. Eventually I ran out of excuses and realized I didn’t know how to think clearly.

Grinding wasn’t the variable that mattered. Choices were. The thing we never did was sit down and decide what to say no to.

Plenty of people have a bias for action. Almost no one has a bias for clear thinking, which is why so much action leads nowhere.

That’s what strategy is. Deliberate choices that maximize your chance of winning.

The right choices feel wrong at the time. So people don’t choose.

DoorDash chose suburbs. Every competitor was fighting over metro cities. Suburbs looked like a dead end. Too spread out, too few restaurants. But suburban households had no delivery alternatives. Customers had no other option. Restaurants had no delivery infra. Families ordered bigger, ordered more often, and told other families. DoorDash grew undisturbed while competitors bled each other dry in Manhattan.

Nintendo Wii launched with deliberately worse graphics than PS3 and Xbox 360. The gaming industry was in an arms race for processing power. Nintendo made a cheap, motion controlled console for families and non-gamers. Outsold both competitors.

Costco carries 4,000 products. A typical supermarket stocks 30,000. Fewer SKUs meant higher volume per item, insane supplier leverage. If Costco stocked it, customers trusted it was the best option. Less choice became the selling point.

All three choices looked stupid at the time. That’s strategy.

The hard part isn’t knowing this. It’s doing it.

Because choosing means killing options. Saying no to customers who want to pay you. Walking away from revenue that’s right there. Letting go of ideas you’re emotionally attached to. All of it feels like losing when you’re desperate, underfunded, and your investors want growth yesterday.

Grinding feels productive. You can point to things. Shipped features, closed deals, filled roadmaps.

Strategy feels like sitting still. It looks like staring at a wall instead of flooding Slack. It looks like saying no to revenue. It looks like doing less.

No one gets promoted for staring at a wall.

So people avoid it. They fill templates and call it a “Strategic Plan” which is neither strategy nor a plan. Just aspirations arranged to look official.

They attempt strategy by committee. Committees don’t choose. They dilute. What survives is whatever offends the fewest people. Tradeoffs don’t survive this process.

Real strategy induces short-term pain. If nothing hurts, you haven’t chosen anything.

Strategy never gets easier with practice. The better you get, the more you see. Every tradeoff. Every consequence. Every second and third-order effect waiting to unfold.

Awareness multiplies the cost of every choice.

For years, I told myself familiar stories.

That I’m driven by passion for technology.

That I’m motivated by solving customer problems.

That I want to help people access better healthcare.

That I want to help people have less stressful home renovations.

That I want to help people live longer through personalized nutrition.

That I want to make the world a better place.

But those are bullshit.

They’re safe answers. Programmed through years of societal conditioning.

What actually motivates me is fear and frustration.

I fear whether I’m a good spouse, friend, colleague, or manager.

I fear whether I’m thinking deeply enough or falling into bias.

I fear whether I’m a net contributor or just a consumer.

I fear whether my competence is growing fast enough, or fading.

I fear becoming irrelevant.

I fear working on the wrong problems.

I fear my ego blocking the truth.

I fear the fears I don’t want to name.

That fear pushes me forward, and the motion turns into frustration when it hits constraints, tradeoffs, and complexity.

Why can’t we move faster for our customers?

Why aren’t others as paranoid about the details?

Why can’t we get more resources?

Why do we still understand our customers so poorly?

Why am I still bad at things I should be good at?

Why can’t I think more creatively anymore?

Why can’t I communicate it better?

It locks me into a loop of thinking, pushing, questioning. Over and over.

Fear and frustration feed each other and keep me shackled to that loop.

Here’s what surprised me.

Once I accepted this, the frustration softened. Not because it disappeared, but because it made sense.

Clarity didn’t remove the tension. It gave me the resolve to live with it.

Hope this year forces you to be honest with yourself.

• Level 1: "No one ever understands my vision."

• Level 2: "This team would fall apart without me running the show."

• Level 3: "If it wasn’t for others slowing me down, I’d be miles ahead."

• Level 4: "Management creates processes because they don’t trust us."

• Level 5: "We’re doomed to fail because the system is rigged against us."

• Level 6: "My manager is sabotaging my success on purpose."

• Level 7: "The company never values my contributions."

• Level 8: "You question the depth of your own delusions."

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• Level 19: "You use words like synergy, asymmetric, orthogonal, and mutually exclusive in meetings to make your point."

This old interview of Alex Zhu, founder of Musically later acquired by TikTok, is a gold mine of #product wisdom.

Alex's thinking is almost unparalleled to anything I have seen lately. How his minds find analogies in product development with economics, government and social status are so insightful. Here are some lessons:

1. If you want to build a new UGC platform then the content has to be extremely light - both creation and consumption need to happen within seconds instead of minutes or hours.

2. It’s pretty hard for a new startup to change human nature. It’s better to follow human nature than to fight against it. For example, people scroll, text, watch, or play games when they are on a commute instead of learning something. That's one big reason why entertainment apps tend to do much better than educational apps.

3. It helps tremendously if your early adopters are young, especially teenagers - because they have time, they are creative, and digital natives. If you attract enough of them and they really like your product, their word of mouth becomes a great distribution flywheel.

4. Many products can work at scale when they have all the bells and whistles for everyone. However, you need to optimize your product for early adopters and version 1.0. Your product needs to have great utility.

5. Initial users of Instagram 1.0 didn’t use it for stories, feeds, likes, comments, etc. They used it to make their pictures look great with amazing filters to be posted on social media platforms which made them look cool.

6. Musically had a WeChat group of hundreds of users whom they interacted with daily to learn how they think and be immersed with them. Their team would share product wireframes with these users before writing any piece of code.

7. He paints a great example of how starting a product community is similar to starting a new land and seeding the economy and how you want people to migrate from other countries to your country. Let’s use America as an analogy for Musically. Instagram/Facebook is Europe. You want people from Europe to move to America. How do you convince them?

8. The average citizen of Europe has zero to no opportunity to move upward in the social class. They leveraged this by building it for the average citizens in America - allowing them to upgrade their social status when they move here.

9. In the early days, you have to build a centralized economy - you want wealth to be distributed to a small percentage of people so they can prosper and become the role models to attract more people. You want people in Europe to look at a normal person in America who was just like them who became rich after moving there. So they’d want to migrate to America too.

10. You want the early users of your product to get a lot of value out of your product fairly quickly. This will help other content creators to be inspired and migrate to your product - a great low CAC distribution strategy.

11. However, you have to decentralize the economy at the same time. There needs to be a middle class - an average person should have an opportunity to become successful. Give all types of users the satisfaction to create and consume content.

12. Most people join social media platforms to gain fame. However, once they reach fame it’s not enough. Revenue is what leads to retention. If they are making money they will stick around. Youtube is a great example of that.

13. The interesting thing about Musically is it uses music as a raw material in the product. Music is not the product, it’s a core part of the product. Whereas, music is the product for Spotify and Pandora. So Musically doesn’t compete with them or labels and publishers. It amplifies them and becomes a great distribution platform for songs.

14. Example - Jason Derulo published his music on Musically before the official release. Within a couple of days, more than 1M videos were created by users with that sound clip. Those videos are then shared on different social media platforms leading to even more impressions. The song led to a huge success and sales when it was officially released.

Musically had 60 Million MAU in 2017 when it got acquired by ByteDance for $1 Billion. Musically was rolled into TikTok.

Let’s get the MVP out ASAP

Move fast and break things

Ideas are cheap, execution is everything

Get something out quickly and then iterate based on customer feedback

How many versions of this advice have we all heard? Probably too many.

Most product advice centers on shipping fast, yet I can’t name a single product that won just because they shipped fast.

Products don’t win because they ship fast, they win because they break through.

Products win by solving a problem customers didn’t know they had, and doing it so well, so memorably, that after trying it, they can’t live without it.

MVPs made sense a decade ago when shipping was hard. It helped separate talkers from builders.

Now, shipping is easy. Differentiation isn’t.

Why?

Because today, there’s just too much noise.

If you take any idea, there are usually a dozen products already doing the same thing or something close.

Customers will naturally wonder, “Isn’t this just like X? How is it different from Y?” if they notice you at all.

Plenty of PMs still fall for the flawed MVP trap for their 0-1 product. They cut scope, ship the bare minimum, tick another box on the roadmap, drop a Slack announcement, and bask in the emoji parade like they’ve just changed the world.

Then come the poor referrals and retention, but no worries, it’s just a “marketing problem,” right?

Next step? Team up with sales and marketing to throw some paid traffic at the problem, hoping for a miracle.

I know this because I have done this too many times than I’d like to admit.

What they often miss is that it’s almost always a product problem, not a distribution one.

All distribution does for a bad product is speed up the disappointment.

With so many options out there, most products don’t get a real second chance to make an impression.

Customers don’t have to forgive you, they’ll just forget you.

To win today, you need more than a Minimum Viable Product.

You need a Minimum Memorable Product.

Products that break out don’t ship faster, they ship differentiated.

They nail 1-2 features that make the value unmistakable.

They make it blindingly obvious from day one why they’re better, cheaper, faster or simply more delightful.

They obsess over copy, design and experience to make sure customers get it, and more importantly, talk about it.

The best products create word of mouth before they create marketing budgets.

They generate so much word of mouth that growth feels organic, delaying the need for performance marketing or formal GTM plans until much later.

So why is clear thinking so rare? Because it is hard and uncomfortable!

It’s much easier to blame distribution than to admit you don’t really understand your customer.

Clear thinking also isn’t always actionable, and in a culture obsessed with motion, that feels wrong.

PMs feel the need to look busy. So they flood Slack, fill Jira, and bombard designers with Figma comments.

They confuse activity for momentum.

It’s easier to spend 3 hours on Slack debating a feature than to sit quietly and ask yourself the hard questions:

What’s the real jobs to be done here?

How can my product solve it it a unique way?

Why would a customer even care?

What barriers stop them from using it?

What doubts or biases do they have about my product?

What will trigger them to try this?

What would make it unforgettable?

What don’t I understand about my customer?

In big companies, it gets worse, PMs feel they must always look like they know, so they hide behind a facade of confidence instead of admitting I don’t know, fearing it might look like weakness.

Instead, they hide behind GTM plans and cross-functional alignment, quietly burning budget on a product no one actually loves.

Spending time on differentiation early will save you enormous pain, time, and money later.

If you don’t want to be just another me-too product lost in the noise, you don’t need an MVP.

You need something unforgettable, from day one.