Phil Libin says founders should pitch their startup idea to strangers, not just potential co-founders. Talking only to people invested in your success creates an echo chamber that masks whether the idea actually works. Test it with neutral observers first to see if it resonates beyond your own head.
Yeah, so you gotta— so I think there's a few stages, right? Really, really early on, like before there's like, before there's any metrics, when it's just an idea, it's important to get the idea like out of your head as fast, like as soon as possible, right? Because you go through this phase where you're kind of getting excited about it, you're not really sure whether like it's only in the artificial world inside of your head where you've and you can kind of talk yourself into anything. And so you start talking to a couple of people who are potentially co-founders, and that isn't necessarily any better. Like, you can get a small group of people just like puffing the same fumes and, and, and convincing themselves that like their idea makes a lot of sense, like in their heads, because they're really evaluating this as not so much a product but like What is this company going to be like to build? You know, what's it going to be like to work at? Oh, it'd be so exciting to do something. So you gotta pretty quickly just like test the idea outside of your head on real people and just see if there's like a real level of enthusiasm. And that's as simple as like early on, it's just as simple as like talk to people who you aren't trying to recruit as co-founders and just see like someone with no stake in it, do they think that it's actually genuinely great?
