What's the biggest mistake you've made as a founder?

@gogloballakshmi What happened with your mentor - mentee part?

@richardfliu we just didn't see eye to eye in terms of execution.. My strategy was different from theirs and the communication style was a mismatch when discussing disagreements. Of course I understand this on postmortem.. I did not have this clarity when I was caught up in action.

@gogloballakshmi Was this an advisor presented to you by your investors?

@prateek_mathur mentors and advisors are not the same... I was bootstrapped, never took investor money... startups are about communities too..

@gogloballakshmi Ah that sucks :/

@adrian_topka Haha 100% - it seems like market/idea validation is a common theme

@richardfliu yea :D

@artem_smirnov A mentor is to facilitate, IMO nothing should be force especially for a founder.. What I see is you wanted someone to communicate with, so a matching communication style will help with achieving goals..

@gogloballakshmi Yes, by "force" I mean asking uncomfortable questions that I avoid asking myself.

@artem_smirnov I've done that, am doing that. I'm having to rethink because I'm self-funding and this is expensive expensive. But she helped me re-pivot and if she holds me accountable (which is a big deal) - which she has - then I need to maybe just eat it and live with it. I was literally re-thinking the investment this morning. It's painful because "intangibles" like "clarifies", "calms", "synthesizes" is not lines of code or bugs killed, newsletters written, or instagram posts.

@al3sha Haha that's an era I missed out on 😆

@richardfliu I promise, I learned A LOT! Wouldn't trade it in for a new car :D

@al3sha I did that, the customers kept asking "Are you going to go out of business?" and we were saying "No, we just launched!" ....and it was a SaaS about 10 years early but its still running today, 20 years later LOL.

@al3sha @dean_ayer Damn that's amazing haha

@al3sha @dean_ayer Almost every dot-com idea from 1999 that failed will succeed. - Marc Andreessen

@prakis Oh really wow I would have thought myself that a template feature would be what users wanted

@eddieaich That's what I'm hunkering down now with myself before going to market. It's tough though.

@seeenjake Could I ask what you did specifically here?

@jack_davis7 Haha did anything bad happen or did you get away with it 😆

@richardfliu I was so inexperienced I did not sell a single piece so nothing ever happened lol.

@emmanguyen Yeah I acutally ran into this problem with one of my friends. Realised we're really great as friends but terrible as a co-founder partner (she's more of a corporat person).

@richardfliu Startup game is starting from scratch. Not simply copy & paste solution from one place and put it to another market. The corp/ big org is well-designed process - Doing well in those does not mean you will thrive in startup.