New teams need to build momentum quickly. My understanding of momentum is simple: getting a startup team to function effectively around a product goal. It’s about giving smart people meaningful work, clarity on both team objectives and individual tasks, and enabling them to actively move toward those goals.

Our team is currently in this phase of building initial momentum. The biggest insight I’ve gained is that even while dreaming of the stars, you must walk the path right in front of you. Don’t aim too high too soon. Focus your energy and resources on solving one core problem well. In the beginning, simpler is always better.

Maintain a Low-Ego Mindset, Avoid Perfectionism

We’ve all heard countless successful startup stories. When starting your own company, it’s natural to aspire to be like these successful predecessors, building a company that benefits the masses and leaves a mark on history. Having ambitions to achieve something significant is good! This is the most important motivation for entrepreneurs.

However, these types of ventures are constrained by historical timing windows and face enormous competition. For early-stage teams, wanting to immediately build a great product and a great company is perfectionism driven by ego—something to be cautious about.

Market Selection: Stay Grounded

New teams face choices about which market to enter. Entrepreneurs should seek the largest possible market with the least possible competition.

In practice, new entrepreneurs often get caught overthinking the endgame, making horizontal comparisons to judge which sector might produce the next super company, and consequently falling into decision paralysis.

This approach usually makes two mistakes:

• The biggest markets typically require the strongest capabilities, which most startup teams simply don’t have. “Entrepreneurs should pursue the largest market within their capability boundaries.”
• Even the smartest minds cannot predict future trends with 100% accuracy. Seeing a general direction clearly is already incredibly fortunate.

This doesn’t mean that what a company does initially determines its ceiling. Companies evolve dynamically, awareness grows, and at each stage, you can seek to solve larger user needs.

I once read on Lei Jun’s blog that many entrepreneurs were dreaming of building “platform” businesses. His advice was “internet entrepreneurs might want to set aside platform dreams initially.” “Everyone starting a business naturally wants to build a platform company. If such an opportunity arises, I would fully support it! But you must realize that many people want to build platforms, competition is fierce, and ultimately only a few succeed… After gaining experience and strength, it’s never too late to build a platform.”

Product Ideas: Practice First

What makes a good idea? Simply put, ideas that succeed in practice are the best ideas. Practice is the most important way to test the merits of an idea. You must evaluate entrepreneurial ideas from a practical perspective.

New entrepreneurs often want to perfect an idea with better product forms and details. But for startup teams, identifying core, important features and validating them in the market through the shortest possible path is urgent. Go to market quickly.

Launching your product early allows you to hear users’ authentic voices and gives the team more confidence to continue.

Set Clear Goals, Keep Moving Forward

Building momentum means identifying a clear direction and then executing with determination. This isn’t as simple as it sounds—you must constantly fight against human tendencies toward greed, fear, and reluctance to face challenges.

Lack of Focus (Greed, Avoidance)

A common situation for startup teams is being in the middle of working on something when suddenly discovering something else that looks promising. It seems valuable and easier to accomplish. And just as you’re delving deeper into your current project and encountering various difficulties, a thought naturally arises: should we pivot to that other product instead?

We’ve been tempted many times. Each time before switching directions, we felt certain we had chosen the wrong initial path, only to discover previously invisible difficulties after pivoting. Looking back, in rapidly evolving fields like artificial intelligence with saturated competition, all relatively mainstream directions are crowded with companies. No direction is truly easier than others. In reality, all directions are challenging.

Startups need simple principles to limit human tendencies toward difficulty avoidance and greed. For example, we can divide the process into two stages:

Initial idea screening stage, validating ideas by answering key questions:

• Do we have a unique advantage in this area?
• What are our short-term goals and long-term vision?
• How long will it take to reach our first milestone?

After entering the implementation phase, set clear “abandonment rules” to avoid easily changing direction:

• Only consider giving up when the core technology demo falls far short of expectations and cannot be improved
• Only consider repositioning when the product fails to gain any user approval

Fear

Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about moving forward amid uncertainty. Uncertainty about the business, the team, and yourself all generate fear about the future. Responsible entrepreneurs want to be accountable to investors, their team, and their own expectations, yet face the probabilistic nature of startups, leading to internal fear and anxiety.

“Sometimes your fear is the biggest problem. Because in a state of fear, your rhythm becomes chaotic.” Entrepreneurs need to develop the ability to remain optimistic under extreme uncertainty. This equanimity comes from setting aside the self, enjoying the process, accepting challenges, and growing through them.

Simplicity Over Complexity, Action Over Process

In the early stages of entrepreneurship, I thought streamlining administrative processes would be enough. For example, limiting company rules to a single page and avoiding cumbersome employee handbooks. But I quickly realized that for product development, startup teams should similarly avoid over-formalization.

We once tried to replicate big company product development processes: requirements analysis, product meetings, PRD documents, review meetings, development design, testing, and release. This process benefits large companies by facilitating internal collaboration and information synchronization. But for startups, this sacrifices our most valuable advantage: agility.

Small teams already sit together, ideas can be exchanged instantly, and formal meetings only slow down progress. Startups needn’t be bound by processes, but should understand the core value of each component:

• Is the need real? Listen to user voices through social platforms
• How do competitors solve this problem? What’s the user response?
• What’s our differentiation?
• What’s our growth path and ultimate goal?
• How technically feasible is our solution?

Previously, after having an idea, we jumped directly into feature design. This ignored the fundamental purpose of product development: meeting the needs of target user groups. If you don’t understand your users’ actual needs and instead just conceptualize your product in isolation, you’re heading in the wrong direction. Understanding competitors’ solutions provides insight into what users actually need and how those needs can be satisfied.