432: Don't Give Up... Your Assumptions

Hey. It's Arvid and this is the Bootstrap founder. Let's dive into one more piece of entrepreneurial advice that's really really irritating and quite dangerous. Today I want to talk about the one that I get quite a lot. Don't give up. Bit dangerous. And before we get to the actual reasons why this is dangerous and how to make it less dangerous, a word from our sponsor, paddle.com. I'm using them as my merchant of record for all my software projects. They do all the taxes, currencies, detract decline transactions. They update credit cards in the background, really cool, so that I can focus on dealing with my own business instead of banks and financial regulators. So if you think you would rather just build your own product, focus on your stuff, toughen it out, well, check out paddle.com as your payment provider and merchant of record. Don't ever give up. Force yourself. Grind it out. I mean, obviously, that's dangerous advice because it builds on a founder's capacity to struggle through challenges, but it uses this for the wrong reasons. Right? There's a good reason to struggle because if there is something you really want to accomplish and it's kind of within arms reach, yeah, you you toughen it out. But just to not give up at any point. Now here is what makes this particularly dangerous. It is really really useful advice until a certain point. And after that, it becomes extremely dangerous with the problem being that as a founder you never know exactly where that point is. You only ever know where that point was in retrospect. And even then things are complex. Right? They're highly interdependent, codependent. You don't even know what caused that point to appear in your journey. Even if you really dig into it. There might be a lot of internal external factors. It's hard. It takes a couple years usually after you stop a business, either you sell it or you grow it and become successful, whatever it is. It takes a long while for you to figure out why things happened the way they did because a lot of the reasons for success and failure are not even intrinsic to your project. They're part of the market or part of technological advancement or the actions of a competitor or the inaction of a competitor. And there are so many reasons why things work or don't work or things shift and make things possible or impossible all of a sudden that you never really know in the moment. So don't give up is a good motivational thing to use when you struggle with the initial pains of establishing this understanding of your market. Because I think that's one of the ways that I think it actually works. You don't know much. It takes a while for you to learn all the nuance of a complicated field. So when you don't really see what you want to see for the first …