Most products don’t die facing competition or because of a bug: they die before they even launch, killed by five avoidable mistakes — a scope that is too broad, over-engineering, the lack of a clear target, a product built without ever talking to users, and a time-to-market that is too long. Spotting them early is worth more than any feature.
A scope that is too broad
The number-one mistake. You want to put everything into the first version, and the launch keeps slipping month after month. Every added feature is more time, more bugs and more complexity — for a product no one has validated yet. A V1 should solve one problem, very well.
- List every feature you can imagine, then cut 70% of them. What remains is your real V1.
- Keep only the 3 to 5 user journeys essential to the problem you solve.
- Everything else goes into a "post-launch" backlog — not into the V1.
Premature over-engineering
Building for a million users when you have zero is a classic trap. Microservices, ultra-scalable architecture, abstractions everywhere: all time invested in problems you may never have. A simple, proven stack — Next.js, NestJS, PostgreSQL — easily handles your first few thousand users. You optimize when success demands it, not before.
No clear target, no contact with users
A product "for everyone" is a product for no one. Without a precise target, every decision becomes a bet: which features, which tone, which price? Worse, many founders build for months without ever showing their product to a single real user — and find out too late that they solved a problem that didn’t exist.
- Define a precise target user: role, problem, context, budget.
- Talk to 10 target users before writing the first line of code.
- Show them the product every week — their reactions are worth more than your intuition.
A product for everyone is a product for no one. A narrow target is a product that hits home.
Too much time before launch
Every month spent building in silence is a month without revenue, without feedback and without learning. The market doesn’t reward the most complete product, but the one that learns fastest. That is the whole logic of a V1 shipped to production in 7 days at a fixed price (€15,000 at Khufu): release a real product quickly, put it in front of real users, then iterate on facts rather than assumptions.
These five mistakes share one common denominator: building too much, for too long, without proof. Tighten the scope, simplify the tech, pick a target, talk to it, and launch fast. The rest, you’ll learn from the market.