Paul Graham explains the most common startup mistake: not paying enough attention to users

If you care enough about users, you can just follow what will make users happy. The way. The way a scientist follows the truth. And eventually, without much thinking on your part, the need to grow will give you this product idea that's the result of evolution. What you will get wrong is that you will not pay enough attention to users. You will make up some idea in your own head that you will call your vision. And then you will spend a lot of time thinking about your vision in a cafe by yourself and write, build some elaborate thing without going and talking to users, because that's doing sales, which is a pain in the ass. And they might say no. And you'd be way better off finding someone, anyone who has a problem that they will pay you to fix and fixing it and then seeing if you can find more people like that. Best case is if you yourself have the problem right. But like, you will not ship fast enough because you're embarrassed to ship something unfinished and you don't want to face the, the, the likely feedback. So you will shrink from contact with your, your users. That's the mistake you will make.