I and my co-founder have been building my startup for past 9 months. Lets be practical, most founders don't have clarity at Day 0. Same goes for us.

Initial 4 - 5 months, hearing all those advices on Problem, solution, customer , value blah. We get it. Idea alone is not enough. Perfect junction of Customer, problem, solution, Value and pricing matters a lot. At some time, we realise this and we position our product in this junction.

Next stage is the toughest one. "Why would customer choose you over similar existing tools?". Story telling, SEO, landing page blah, blah, still you are not there yet.

All the surrounding advices stop here. Because no playbook exists to crack this.

Thats why most investor look for traction in your product. Idea + solution + traction ~= investment.

Painful days are those in this phase "Idea + solution + traction", is where real thick skin founder persona within you is built.

100 Dms, no response

10+ feature updates no response

50+ demo calls, no real conversion.

Still you keep refining, polishing and moving in paradox of 1% hope, ignoring 99% failure reality.

Today we got 10+ customers but, looking back we could not derive any logical conclusion on how we got here, because our journey was and still is now swinging in delusion paradox of 90% failure and 10% hope.