As a startup founder, there’s a crucial difference between persistence and stubbornness. Persistence means you’ll keep at it till you win. Stubbornness implies you assume you’re correct when that’s not necessarily the case. The goal of a founder is to ‘converge’ to a problem/solution the market wants - rather than force their solution down someone’s throat (all too common in startup territory).
Startups grow because they are rewarded by the market for introducing efficiency in one form or another - and their rewards are a fraction of the efficiency they introduced. If your solution isn’t improving market efficiency, no amount of stubbornness will make it work - it’s time to pivot.
It’s easy to make two wrong assumptions as a founder: “finding startup ideas is easy,” and “I’ll build it and they’ll come.”
Mistake #1: “Finding startup ideas is easy”
There are a near-infinite number of problems you could solve and be rewarded for. But there are also an infinite number of tarpits that merely seem like good ideas. Comparison: there’s an infinite number of natural numbers, yet if you throw a dart at the number line, your probability of landing on a natural number is near 0. Startup ideas are similar. It’s hard to solve such problems unless you’ve specifically been impacted by them - and it’s nearly impossible to know you’re in a tarpit till it’s too late.
Mistake #2: “I’ll build it and they’ll come”
Before starting a company, founders in tech usually work with people vetted for skill, and coworkers aren’t paying you. Selling to someone who has NOT vetted you is orders of magnitude harder. It’s hard to convince someone you can solve their problem, and hard to build reputation. One way to tackle this is building in a domain you’re a known expert in (e.g., a doctor building a medical product is likely considered more competent than an engineer doing so alone). This is also why Paul Graham suggests you “do things that don’t scale” in the beginning - you need to delight your initial customers or they’ll give up on you, leaving you with nothing to build credibility with.
Credits to Paul Graham (essay: paulgraham.com/persistence.html), from whom the author borrowed heavily.