Founders are frequently short-sighted

When a founder comes with the idea for building a new product, more often than not, he describes a quite extensive set of features that he believes to be necessary to accomplish his vision. i.e. not only she wants to immediately start building what the product should be now, but also what the product wants be in the future:

• “This feature is important because the goal is for Bestie Images to become the best image upload tool Users ever had.”
• “We also want Bestie Images to be the go-to image metrics platform for the user. This is important as well.”
• “ Social Media is everywhere nowadays, so we also want users to be able to share their metrics in social media of course.”

This is normal as the founder is rightly thinking long term but, as it’s now common sense in the post-lean-startup era, what you often think it’s the right approach to a problem, often it’s not; or not exactly so.

Usually the right process comes to first validate a few key aspects before going forward with your product’s vision: Is this the right problem to be solved? Is this the right solution? Is this the right way to build it?

Are we aiming to create a user base of 300 MAU? Or do we want to convert the two companies from leads to paying clients?

Or in other words:

What should you be validating first? What’s your first milestone?

I think this happens in part due the emotional attachment that founders have with their Products — they believe that they’re building the right thing the right way, and not much will change along the way. But the truth is that it will.

And if Founders don’t have a clear short-term milestone to be focused on first, they will will be building everything and nothing. They will be working towards their vision, while being short-sighted.