What I Learned as a First-Time Startup Founder Who Scaled to 7,000 Users and Secured VC Funding
I recently closed my first-ever fundraising round for my startup, AllMind AI. Looking back on the past few months, I’ve realized how much I’ve learned and how different the process is from what people online often describe. I’ve always been a perfectionist. If I decide to do something, I want to do it exceptionally well. A great example of this is when I nearly scored 100 in Calc 2 at the University of Waterloo, while the class average was below 50. However, this mindset had to change when I started AllMind AI. Starting a company was entirely new for me. I had experience working in startups, but never learned how to start one. My naive belief was that building a business involved writing code, shipping it, and becoming a tech billionaire. I was very, very wrong.
1. Take Your Time: When I started building AllMind AI, I approached it like a software engineer: start writing code immediately. This isn’t the best way to build a business. Take your time to think about what you want to build and why. Talk to potential users to ensure there’s a market for your product. Many of my friends failed because their products had no paying users.
