The Three Things You Need to Build a Startup (And Why You Don't Know Which One Worked)

After your first successful product, you feel like you've figured it out. You want to tell everyone what you learned. You're certain you know exactly what made it work.

You're probably wrong about half of it.

I've built three mid-six-figure and three seven-figure companies over the past 20 years. After the first one, I thought I had all the answers. After the second, I realized about half of what I thought I knew was wrong. When I go back and read things I wrote 10 years ago, it's a little painful.

This is the trap of overgeneralizing from one win. And it's everywhere in the startup world.

The Three Building Blocks

I think about startup success as requiring three things: hard work, luck, and skill. You need some combination of all three, but the mix varies.

Hard work is table stakes. It's the one you control most directly in the short term. I don't mean 90-hour weeks. My entire entrepreneurial career, I've worked 40 hours a week or less, except for short sprints of 60-hour weeks lasting six to eight weeks when there was hard stuff to push through. Hard work and focus, not burnout.

Skill compounds over time. If you have tremendous skill in marketing, building an audience, choosing niches, or building great products, you may need less luck. Skill is what lets you see patterns, avoid mistakes, and move faster the second or third time around.

Luck is the variable most people underestimate when they're winning and overestimate when they're losing. I know a founder who stumbled into a hobby project that became wildly popular. He got lucky, built a team, and sold the company for tens of millions. By his own admission, he never worked that hard. Right place, right time.

Then there are founders who don't get lucky at all. They put in years of hard work, build their skills, and it takes them a decade to get where the lucky founder got in one year. Both paths are valid. But they're not the same path.

You Don't Know What Made It Work

Here's the uncomfortable truth: after your first win, you don't actually know which of these three factors drove your success. You think you do. But you're pattern-matching on a sample size of one.

Maybe you found a niche that happened to grow. Maybe you rode a wave. Maybe you really did work hard and build something great and it took five or six years to get there. You can't tell the difference from the inside.

It's only after the second company, the third, the fourth, that you start to see real patterns. You start to separate the things that were actually repeatable from the things that just happened to work once.

The "Have They Done It Twice?" Filter

This is why I've started asking a simple question whenever I see a new expert or guru giving startup advice: have they done it at least twice?

Obviously there are exceptions. Jeff Bezos hasn't built two Amazons. But most founders I know who really understand what they're doing have built multiple companies. People like Hiten Shah, Jason Cohen, David Cancel—they've done it two, three, four, five times. There's a different quality to their advice because they've had the chance to test their assumptions across multiple attempts.

I also ask: are they giving advice on something they're actually expert in? Growing a solo app to $30K a month is completely different from building a team, crossing a million in ARR, or scaling to $3-4 million. Each stage teaches you different things. Someone who's done the first hasn't necessarily learned anything about the second.

Why This Matters

Most people giving advice are doing it to build a personal brand so they can sell you a book, a course, or get you to invest with them. That's not inherently bad. But it means there's an incentive to sound confident even when the sample size doesn't support it.

The natural human desire to teach kicks in after any success. You want to share what you learned. But "what you learned" after one win is mostly a hypothesis, not a proven framework.

Be careful about who you take advice from. Be even more careful about the advice you give. The patterns only emerge after you've done it more than once—and even then, you might be wrong about half of it.