LinkedIn Post Example: Lessons from Building a Startup

3 years of building a startup taught me: 1. It's a marathon, not a sprint 2. Hire slow, fire fast 3. Customer obsession is everything 4. Culture eats strategy for breakfast 5. Embrace the chaos The entrepreneurial journey is the most rewarding thing I've ever done. Hard work pays off! What's the biggest lesson you've learned as a founder? 👇 #startup #entrepreneurship #founder #lessons

I've been building my company for three years. The most expensive lesson cost us $120K and four months. Last spring, our biggest customer asked us to build a custom integration for their internal tools. They were paying us $8K/month and hinted that they'd expand to $25K if we built it. So we did. Four engineers spent four months building a feature for one customer. When we delivered it, they used it for three weeks and then their VP of Ops left the company. The new VP chose a different vendor entirely. We lost the customer. The integration was so specific to their workflow that no other customer wanted it. It's still in our codebase. Nobody uses it. Now we have a rule: no customer-specific features unless three customers independently ask for it and we can build it in under two weeks. We turn down feature requests every week. Our roadmap is better for it.