When startups shouldn’t focus

Startup founders have probably heard this advice a lot: You need to focus on doing one thing well.

Don’t worry, we’re not trying to convince you that this is bad advice. Startups should absolutely focus on doing one thing well — after they’ve found product-market fit. But we’ve seen founders embrace this idea at exactly the wrong time, before they’ve found PMF.

That doesn’t mean those founders aren’t iterating at all. Instead, they approach iteration in a narrow, brute force sort of way. Rather than building and testing new core product features, they keep trying to push the same product in the hopes that something will change; rather than stepping back and thinking holistically about the problem they were trying to solve, they commit themselves to a single approach.