People love writing articles about what makes a great startup. While some of these listicles offer good advice, most of them fail to mention one key detail. There’s no formula for startup success. If there were, everyone who followed it would be successful.
There’s one rule in particular that caught my attention: “Don’t start a company unless it’s an obsession and something you love.”
Startups demand the same dedication as raising children: love, patience, and lots of hard work. If you’re not obsessed, your effort won’t match competitors who are pouring their heart and soul into their vision.
Here’s where most founders go wrong, and it’s tied to another common rule: “If you have an exit strategy, it’s not an obsession.”
When You Work Backwards, You Break the Product
A solid business is built from the inside out. You figure out who you’re serving, what problem you are solving, and why your product matters.
Most startups fail due to unrealistic expectations coupled with backwards thinking. Founders envision their exit. The acquisition, the IPO, the payout, then reverse-engineer their product to meet that fantasy. They’re answering the wrong question.
When I was in school, I had to take a series of Critical Thinking classes. I hated those classes, even though I knew they were important.
They forced us to examine problems from every angle and avoid jumping to conclusions that seemed obvious. You had to break everything down, step by step, until you understood the full picture. Many students failed because they couldn’t break the habit of working backwards from what looked right.
We’d get problems like: “A lab technician collects pus from a leg wound using a toothpick. Then washes a facial wound with iodine and uses the same toothpick to collect serum from that wound before dropping it in a culture tube. List the mistakes.” The obvious answer is “he reused the toothpick,” but that’s just one of multiple errors involving contamination, procedure, and safety protocols.
The point wasn’t to test medical knowledge. It was to train us to think through the entire process, not just spot the glaring problem.
The Exit Strategy Mindset
Founders with exit strategies lodged in their minds make the same mistakes. They know their desired answer (a $50 million acquisition in three years), so they build their product to match that timeline and valuation. The focus is rarely on solving real problems or dominating their market.
This creates a disconnect. They’re not asking themselves “How do we build something so valuable that companies will fight to acquire us?”
Instead, they’re thinking “What can we build that looks acquisition-ready in three years?” These lines of thinking look similar but they lead to two completely different products.
The strongest startups emerge when founders obsess over their product, their customers, and their market position. The exit becomes a natural consequence of building something exceptional, not the blueprint for building something mediocre.
Build for the Future
A startling number of entrepreneurs enter business with zero experience and no desire to learn the basics. Not everyone is meant to run a company. Just like they are people who aren’t meant to be a doctor or police officer. Those who succeed share one trait: they think forwards, not backwards.
They focus on making their product or service a formidable competitor first. The exit strategy comes later, based on the strength of what they’ve built. It’s not supposed to be the other way around.
If you’re planning your exit before you’ve built something meaningful, you’ve already failed. You’re just working backwards from the wrong answer.
📌 Changelog
- December 5, 2025: Changed the formatting and re-wrote some sections to improve the flow of the article.
- November 18, 2013: Date article was originally published.
