Help me understand this
Post: Stop Building Dreams. Start Solving Pain.
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I’ve seen it countless times — a founder walks in with a big, beautiful idea.
A platform. Open source. AI. No-code. Multimodal.
Everything. For everyone.
But when you ask, “Who exactly has the problem?” — silence.
No user. No context. No moment of pain.
That’s not a startup.
That’s a fantasy.
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Big visions sound smart but die fast.
The beginning of something real always looks the opposite —
small, specific, even boring.
A sharp hypothesis sounds like this:
> “Hair stylists lose 20 minutes a day on no-show clients.
> A WhatsApp bot could auto-confirm appointments.”
You can test that tomorrow.
You can sell that next week.
That’s the point.
Vision is easy. Proof is hard.
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First-time founders love to live in the what-if.
> “What if we built a platform where…”
> “What if we could connect everyone who…”
But that’s not the work.
The work is finding one real moment of pain — and making it go away.
Once you solve one pain, you earn the right to dream bigger.
Not before.
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You Can’t Learn Business on Paper
I’ve seen this pattern hundreds of times.
You can’t coach fundamentals. You have to live them.
And the only way to live them is to build something real —
small, ugly, limited —
and put it in front of real people.
To 99% you’ll fail.
But you’ll learn everything:
the market, the user, your ego, your limits, your timing.
Business isn’t understood on paper.
You have to strap on the snowboard, slide down the first small hill, crash hard —
and then you’re finally ready for the mountain.
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The Real Advice
Forget the platform. Forget the vision. Forget the “one big thing.”
Find one user, one pain, one small proof.
That’s not playing small.
That’s the only way to start something that actually grows.