Worst entrepreneur advice ever - ranked by how much it cost me

When you go on YouTube, Twitter, or Reddit, you hear a lot of advice.
Most of it is straight up bad.

I followed it too - and it cost me a ton of money.

My name is Oskar, I've built 2 startups and coached over 50 founders.
Today I'm ranking the worst entrepreneur advice I ever got - by exactly how much it cost me. And one of them cost me €100,000.

Let's get into it.

The first one is a mistake almost every founder runs into:
"Just run ads, you'll get users quickly."

When I finished my product I thought - ok, if I want to get more users, I just need more people to see it. Makes sense, right? More people see it means more people sign up. Simple math.

So, I ran ads for two weeks.

And it worked - well, kinda. I got 20 signups.
I remember sitting in my apartment checking the dashboard and when I saw those first users, I felt like I finally made it. Like, nothing can stop me now.

2 days later, I checked my dashboard again.
All 20 were gone.

Because my onboarding had so many steps, that people left before they saw what my product could actually do. This cost me €2K.

You see, the big issue is this: if you run ads before you have your first 10 users, you don't even know if your product works yet.

Here's what I'd do differently:
Get your first 10 users before you spend a single cent on ads.

Simply grab your phone or go on social media and reach out to your personal network - like people who already know you and trust you.
And tell them what you are working on and if they want to try it for free.

And then watch how the use it.
See where they get stuck and what confuses them.

And only once you are sure people love your product and they keep using it, then you can use ads to get more users.

If you want to know how to find those people and how to reach out to them so you get your first users, that’s exactly what we do in my startup mastermind. You will get personal coaching from me and you can talk to other founders and see what worked for them.

You can join here:

This one sounds like good advice.
I mean you want to make your users happy, right? You listen to your users, they tell you what they want, you build it. What could go wrong?

That’s what I did for months. Someone asked for a feature, I built it. Someone else asked for another feature, and I built that too.
My roadmap was basically just a list of feature requests.
But I thought I was doing everything right.

But when I checked my analytics, signups were still the same.
People were leaving just like before. So, nothing really changed.

And guess what was most frustrating?
Most of the features I built - nobody was even using them.

I spent months building things nobody really needed.
And somewhere in all of that, I lost sight of the one big problem my product was actually solving. Cost me €3K.

When I get a feature request nowadays, I do it differently:
I don’t build it right away. I write it down. And I ask myself one question first:

Does this help people solve their problem faster or better, or is it just nice-to-have?

If it doesn’t help, I just put it in my backlog.

A founder in my mastermind had this exact problem:
He had only a couple of users and basically no idea where to find them.

Now, he did the opposite of what I did back in the day.
I'll tell you my version first, because it's the one you shouldn't copy.

I used to post on Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter - heck I even posted on Reddit to promote my product. And it was a ton of work.

So, I hired a social media manager to do it for me.
He made me a plan and started posting. Hundreds of posts.

And you know what I got?

→ A few likes
→ A couple of comments
→ And a ban on reddit for promoting my stuff

I wasted €5K on this.

The founder I told you about - here’s what he did:
He picked one platform - ONE PLATFORM - LinkedIn.
Because that's where his audience actually was.

And instead of posting random stuff and hoping somebody would buy his product, he personally messaged people directly - one at a time.
Two weeks later and he got his first 10 users.
‍
Stop trying to be everywhere. Pick the one platform your audience already hangs out on, and focus everything there.

This is one I got from someone I met at a meetup - and it´s probably one of the worst advice I ever got:
"Don't worry about churn, just try to get new users".

Now let me tell you - this founder is not in business any more - and I´ll show you exactly why. Imagine a little bucket:

That’s your business. At the top, you pour in some water - the new users that sign up for your product every day. The bucket fills up more and more and that’s good. But let’s say your bucket has a couple of holes. That’s the people who leave every day. Now, as long as you only have a couple of holes, it’s not that big of a deal, right? I mean, more people are coming in than are leaving.

But when you get more and more holes, then you have a problem.
And that’s exactly what happens to your startup.

When you only focus on new users and ignore the ones who leave, sooner or later you won't have any users left.

That's exactly what happened to him. I listened to his advice and it cost me €22,000 in lost revenue. From users I already had. And I just let them go.

Now I track churn from day one. And every single user who leaves, I ask them why. And it´s not a generic survey - an actual message, a real one.

Because I want to know why they left. And based on that feedback, I improve my product.

Now, let’s come to the worst entrepreneur advice I ever got.
I got it in my very first startup.

It’s launch day. I’m sitting at my desk, refreshing the dashboard ever minute. I am waiting for the sign-ups to come in.

Six months of building. €100,000.
I put everything into this one product.

Refresh - nothing.
Refresh - nothing.

And you know that feeling when you start tapping your foot because you start getting nervous? That’s me. I was waiting for hours.

But nobody bought. Not a single person.

Here's the advice that got me there:
"You just need a great idea, and people will buy it."

I believed that. I thought the hard part was coming up with a good idea.
And I got a couple of people who said it´s a good idea. So, I just built it - I built a product nobody wanted.

6 months. €100K. Zero customers.

Here's what I learned: Finding an idea is easy - You can ask ChatGPT and it will give you hundreds of startup ideas in 10 seconds. But you need to make sure that people will actually pay for it - before you invest 6 months.

If I could go back, I'd do one thing differently and it’s how I build startups now: Before writing a single line of code, I get three people to pay for it right away. And I’m not talking about "I'd probably use this" or "I like the idea".
No. Actual money.

That’s the best validation that your startup can work.

If you don´t validate your idea early on - you risk ending up in the same place I did - building your product for 6 months, and getting 0 customers.

That's the worst advice I ever got, €2K, €3K, €5K, €22K, and €100K.
All of that advice sounded right at the time. And all of it was wrong.

I mentioned earlier that you need to make sure people will actually pay for your product before you build it. If you want help with that - check out my startup mastermind. You will get personal coaching from me and you can talk to other founders to see what worked for them.

You can join here: