Peter Gillan

An essay: Why founders fail, despite being good at coding and high IQ. Being mathematically smart hurts startup founders. Math doesn’t account for emotions, and this is why devs easily build useful products but fail to get to Product Market Fit in 99% cases. Imagine you’re building a building to sell. As a good builder, you put great effort into the materials, structure, architecture and make a great house. You host open day for the potential buyers, but a nasty cat drops a 💩 at the entrance. It smell shit. People come and the first thing they feel is the shit smell. It disturbs their perception and all those genius construction idea and great efforts aren’t important anymore. In products, emotions mean as much as the actual value the product delivers Devs tend to ignore it. The best example is the UX. It always feels like a decoration that’s not so important, as long as the features are in place and there is a way to benefit from the product for the user. However, some times, the size of the button, the label, or the sequence of the steps in a flow becomes a deal breaker. Every part of UX sparks certain emotions in users. Very often the simplest fixes bring the highest impact for the UX. And here comes another issue for a dev mind: the amount of effort never equals the amount of impact. The more mathematically intelligent you are, the more you get excited by hard tasks, where your IQ can shine. Any rational calculations often confirm this assumption too. It again, the emotions don’t work this way. So this is what makes tech startups so hard. One must build solutions to real problems, and at the same time, engineer the user emotions to basically manipulate user into feeling great while using the app. The “feeling great” comes when 1) user never has to think. Literally. Imagine the user using the product while driving a car or running. 2) user feels certain achievement and proud of themselves for the outcome. Ideally, user give the smallest input possible, and it makes high impact on the outcome. Versus the opposite: high effort and low impact. Another enemy of smart devs building products is their issue with prioritization. Bugs and big features always feel important. But the reality is that one must always do both. The hopeless hope that one day there will be no urgent tasks and I can finally spend time on UX and cosmetics is what kills so many good products. Every day, you need to find an hour for small things in the emotion roam. Like moving that button into navbar, because keeping it behind the menu is confusing. Or making the text size smaller for the sidebar. How to know what small tasks deserve attention? 1) Play user sessions (use posthog for it) 2) Turn on a podcast(about quantum physics), listen it with a good focus and try using your product as a user, while being very focused on listening the podcast. It’ll make you behave more like a user who is lazy and doesn’t know the app and spot the weaknesses.