

Ask HN: Founding a company – what's your one piece of advice? Why? - kipepeo

If you had to give ONE piece of advice to a friend who&#x27;s preparing to found a company, what would it be? And why?<p>I&#x27;m looking for your biggest non-obvious insight &#x2F; &quot;aha&quot; that you discovered when preparing to launch (prior to bringing employees on board and&#x2F;or scaling).
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ZenoArrow
Starting a company is not rocket science, do you want to hear interesting non-
obvious anecdotes, that may be highly specific to the individual situation, or
do you want to tell your friend what works?

Focus on the factors under your control. When you start out, the easiest
factor to control is your expenses. Stay lean and you'll make profitability
much easier to achieve. Starting is great but until profits are fueling your
growth don't overthink what you're doing, keep your energies focused on that.

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visakanv
Has he worked as an early employee in another new company before? Because all
of the best founders I know have. (Zuckerberg is an extreme outlier.)

Experience will save you a lot of heartache. I'm learning so much at the
startup I'm currently working at, just by witnessing how decisions are made,
what tradeoffs need to be made, etc.

These will all be invaluable if I ever start my own company, and yet I never
realized any of this until I accidentally ended up working for somebody else.

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jpn
Your MVP is always half of what you originally thought.

