Phil Libin explains why friends won't tell you the truth about your startup idea. If your passion drops from 5 to 4 in a month, it'll crater soon. The real trap: falling in love with a technology, then inventing a problem to match it.
Essentially, and I know this from personal experience, so you have an idea, you think it's great, you go talk to your buddies, they like you, or you talk to people in the industry, they like the industry, so they're all going to be like, "Yeah, it's awesome." That's not the best feedback. As you start to talk to more and more people outside of your direct circles, the gauge is really you. You almost want to take, like, how passionate are you, 1 to 5. If it's going from a 4 to a 5, great. If it's going from a 5 to a 4, that's bad, right? That's a sign that if it goes from a 5 to a 4 after 30 days, it's going to go to a 1 after a year, right? That type of thing.
I think that's right. Yeah, it's going to go to a negative 10. As soon as you've got like employees and investors and like your first problem. So yeah, like you're not going to get more excited about it as, as you know, as you actually start building. But the feedback that you're going for is not like— you're not necessarily describing the product in great detail, right? Like you're like— and you're certainly not asking people what they want. That people have no idea what they want. You're really trying to get a sense of like, is this an invented problem? Like, did I just make up this problem? And like convince myself that a problem exists where really it doesn't. I've actually like a couple of companies that I've been involved with, I've been guilty of exactly that. We like fell in love with some piece of technology and because we fell in love with the technology, we like invented a problem to go with it and convinced ourselves that this was a real problem. But really it kind of wasn't. It took a while to realize that actually like this just wasn't that big of a deal.
