# Grin’s chitshow
- URL: https://www.petrikajander.com/airchat-rooms/grins-chitshow/
- Author: Petri Kajander
- Date: 2024-07-21
- Language: en
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrY0HHZM3_A

A room from Airchat's 2023 version, recorded as a video. The room's name is the title; the transcript below follows the video, and every time in it plays the video from that point.

## Transcript (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrY0HHZM3_A)

[0:00] If you don't know anything about the area and you look like, hey, that looks so simple, and then you just full-heartedly jump in and then you start to gradually realize how hard it is. For example, Danny Lake, the founder of Spotify, just commented in the latest Acquire.fm podcast episode that if he would have known how hard it is to build Spotify, he would not have done it. But now, obviously, he appreciates the experience, but knowing what he knows now, he wouldn't do it again. Or would have not done it, started at all. I think that's one of the things usually that you underestimate the effort it takes. When you have done a lot of work, you have tested a lot of things which are not working. You have iterated, you have pivoted, you have done everything possible in order to find a way which finally works. This may take 5, 10, 15 years before it really works and others start to recognize what you've been doing.

[0:59] But you're looking back at the thing and then should you share or would you or do you even consider sharing some of the knowledge and all the things you've been learning during that process? Probably some of it, yes, but most of it, you don't. Because it feels so simple and obvious now after all those struggles. That was not in the beginning the case, but now it is. So you don't even oftentimes feel like it's worth the effort. It feels like an imposter syndrome situation if you start to share the ridiculous things. And it doesn't matter if you share the knowledge because it's the experience what you gained during the process which is the valuable part. But there's another issue which is often hard to communicate. And that is that how do you tell others what you know?

[1:53] Because they haven't gone through the journey. They don't know what to look for. They don't understand things. They don't see the thing. They see the outset, but that's not the thing. That's the end result. And if they think that they can actually produce the same thing now just by seeing it, they are so mistaken. But it's really hard often to communicate. And you need to find someone who, if you're selling something along these lines, you need to find someone who already has struggled and realized how hard it is. And that's one of the paradoxes of the situation. The founders who have a touch of success, or at least that's how it feels, they often are really humble. They're always looking for market signals. They're always looking for the benefit the product produces to the end user.

[2:45] They're always looking for the end user experience. They're talking to customers relentlessly. It's a continuous, never-stopping loop. How do you keep on producing value? And that's the only commitment, basically. You are committed to solve a problem for the customers. The idea doesn't matter in a sense that, well, it's only the focus of you have a problem. You want to fix it. You want to solve the problem. And the product is just the means to the end. And the product can change if the problem stays. And you're committed to that one. And that's really hard. And you still can fail. And I've been doing some episodes where there's been successful founders who have done everything right and still everything goes wrong.

[3:40] It's the market. It's just pure luck or something which is out of your control. And you still fail. And there are successful founders who have succeeded before. So it's a really humbling experience that it's not you. It's not something you have done. And you still can fail. And it's not personal.