Episode 781 | A Founder's Regret List: 12 Mistakes I’ll Never Make Again

A book can help you learn more, can give you the knowledge to be more successful, but you still have to put in the work, develop your skills, and push things forward on your own. And you're gonna have to make a lot of hard decisions with incomplete information and ship ship be right most of the time and get things out the door in order to be successful. At a certain point, you do have to stop reading business books and start shipping. Welcome back to another episode of Startups with the Rest of Us. I'm your host, Rob Walling. And in this very personal episode, I walk through my founder regret list, 12 mistakes that I will never make again. I say this is a personal episode because there are several stories that I'm gonna share as I walk through this list that I don't believe I've ever shared in public before. And it wasn't out of any desire to shield these or somehow keep them hidden. Just several of them hadn't given the deep thought required to really dig in to the mistakes that I made over the years over the last twenty plus years of my journey as a founder. I've been asked over the years what are the biggest mistakes that I've made as a founder, as an investor, as an entrepreneur, probably as a human. That's a different list I'll admit. And I always struggled to come up with a list that I felt was meaningful and and genuinely things that I regretted, things that I wished I had done differently along the way. Sometimes I come up with one or two or three, but I sat down for an extended period of time and really thought this through and I came up with 12 mistakes that I'll be running through in this episode. Before I dive into those, if you haven't checked out the SAS Institute, this is our premium coaching, mentorship, and mastermind community. Saasinstitute.com is where you can find the full info, but it's for founders of SaaS companies doing at least 1,000,000 in ARR who are looking for private coaching, private masterminding, and looking to find an incredibly ambitious community of other folks who are paying a good chunk of money to be a part of this community. The quality is extremely high, and we just started it a couple months ago. So it's very small and very hands on. You're not joining a group of 50 or a 100 people. There are a couple handfuls of folks in the SAS Institute and we have some amazing coaches including Jordan Gall, Mark Thomas, and Taylor Hendrickson. So if you feel like you could use someone to walk alongside you in your journey as well as be able to do a call or two with me, you should head to sassinstitute.com. In addition, if you've ever thought about sponsoring this podcast or any of our microconf events, we have in person …