10 Short-Term Thinking Mistakes Founders Make

After mentoring hundreds of startups, I've noticed the same common short-term thinking mistakes. These aren't just minor oversights—they're fundamental miscalculations that can determine whether a startup thrives or dies.

Here I'll share some of the most common thinking traps I've seen founders fall into, and the practical fixes that have helped my clients achieve sustainable growth.

1. Falling in Love With Your Product Instead of Customer Problems

Once I worked with founders building gamified task-tracking software. They created an elaborate point system with complex rules and scoring. It was a fascinating game but terrible for task management.

Every conversation revealed they were drinking their own Kool-Aid. They spent months developing without interviewing a single potential customer to validate if gamified task tracking would solve a real pain point for anyone but themselves.

They never made it off the ground.

The Fix: Learn to distinguish between "pain pills" and "vitamins." Pain pills solve problems customers know they have and provide immediate relief. Vitamins are nice-to-haves with uncertain benefits.

If you have a headache and I have a headache pill, (a) you know you've got a problem and (b) you'll know if my pill cures your headache within 20 minutes or so.

If you're taking a vitamin because you were told it offsets dementia and Alzheimer's when you are 80, (a) you don't actually have the problem now and (b) you don't know if it will really prevent a problem in the future.

Ask potential customers how they would calculate the ROI of your solution. If they pay for your product, can they be guaranteed they'll make more money than they spend? How would they measure this?

It doesn't have to be a dollar calculation, or even something that could be translated into dollars (like hours of work saved), but developing the skill of always thinking in terms of the value from the customers perspective will help successfully guide your product development and communications with customers.

2. Chasing Quick Wins Over Relationships

Many founders chase viral launches and short-term growth hacks instead of building lasting market connections. This approach creates fleeting traction that quickly evaporates.

Imagine chasing this this chain of disapointment: massively viral posts that don't bring any visits to your site, hacking your posts to get visits but no users, hacking your site to get users but they all churn...

Eventually all companies have to provide real tangible value to customers who are happy to pay or they go the way of the dodo.

The Fix: Clearly define the specific problem you solve and narrow down an ideal customer type you can easily reach.

For example, if your product compares ad-spend ROI across social channels and automatically identifies overperforming and underperforming ads, use LinkedIn to find marketing executives spending enough on ads to justify your price point.

By narrowing down to a very specific problem you're able to also narrow down to the ideal customer and can usually find them easily.

Set a goal to connect with 10 high-signal prospects weekly. In the beginning just focus on providing value to these prospects - value from their perspective.

These relationships will provide ongoing feedback and eventually become your most valuable customers and referral sources.

3. Building Without a Customer-Defined Problem

Creating products without knowing your ideal customer leads to low adoption and wasted development time.

The Fix: Use these three powerful questions when interviewing potential customers:

1. "What's the biggest challenge you face with [problem your product solves]?"
This uncovers their primary pain point and helps you pinpoint exactly what your product needs to address.

2. "What does your ideal solution for this challenge look like?"
This reveals what features, benefits, or emotional outcomes they value most.

3. "How would solving this challenge change your daily life or work?"
This identifies the desired end-state emotions and tangible outcomes, helping you understand deeper motivations.

4. Prioritizing Features Over Customer Needs

I worked with a company that built inbox-management software and were focused on creating complex templates and rules for edge case emails to handle the replies for "all the emails."

When they interviewed customers, they kept hearing the same thing: "We want to spend less time on email." Initially, they thought this confirmed their approach - customers would spend less time replying to email if their templates and rules could handle them all.

But deeper analysis revealed their templating system wouldn't significantly reduce email time since edge cases weren't the main time sink for their customers.

We shifted their focus to making key shortcuts more intuitive and handling emails faster. They redesigned how similar emails appeared in batches so a single command could reply to many at once.

They also discovered their market differentiator: being known as the fastest email client available. These shifts completely transformed their business trajectory.

The Fix: Prioritize 3 high-impact features based on customer feedback rather than adding features without validation.

5. Neglecting a Customer Community for Solo Success

Many founders believe they can succeed alone, missing the long-term value of a supportive customer  community.

This isolation creates several problems:

• You focus on the wrong problems because you're not working directly with clients

• You don't experience wins when completing milestones because there's no customer feedback

• You develop more interest in your clever solutions than in creating actual customer value

The Fix: Build a small community of 15 engaged followers over 30 days. By engaging with customers directly, you'll receive feedback that helps you focus on the right problems and gives you a sense of accomplishment when your work helps real people.

6. Using Feature-Focused Messaging

Most founders communicate from their own viewpoint rather than the customer's. As a founder, you think of problems in terms of solutions. That's how you talk about them.

But your ideal clients think of problems as problems—that's why they haven't solved them yet. Solution-focused language doesn't resonate because it's not how they're thinking.

Additionally, founders often use technical terms to sound smart and trustworthy. But when customers hear things they don't understand, they stop paying attention.

The Fix: Collect the exact language customers use to describe their problems and desired end states. Then use their emotional terms that connect with their current state and desired outcome.

Emotion gives motion to your customers. Emotional language will resonate better than any product description and motivate clients to make decisions.

7. Scaling Without Mindfulness Practices

Founders who scale aggressively without well-being strategies eventually burn out, stalling growth.

It's common for high profile founders to lose the sense of meaning in their life after years of solely focusing on growth.

The Fix: Implement this 5-minute daily morning routine:

1. Check in with yourself about how you feel, especially noting negatives like tiredness, anxiety, or irritation. For each negative, plan a specific counteraction for that day.

When I feel nervous, I schedule an hour in the afternoon for something completely unrelated to work that I'll enjoy—reading on the couch, walking my dog, or sitting by the waterfall listening to my frogs.

2. List the 3 things you'll accomplish today. Write what completing each goal means to you or how it will impact others.

For household tasks, I note how completing them will make my wife happy. For work tasks that others might not immediately notice, I focus on how I personally enjoy that work and its benefits.

3. Identify something you feel you could do better. Visualize yourself "getting it right" today, including any necessary preparation.

If I have a difficult call coming up that I haven't been handling well, I visualize taking a few minutes beforehand to calm myself and remember the positive aspects of the topic or people involved. I then set the intention to reflect a few minutes before the call and to handle the call with more patience.

8. Overusing AI Without Human Insight

I use AI constantly for market research, polishing my writing, coding, and validating ideas.

There are two harmful extremes: not using AI at all (like my Marine Corps leaders who refused spreadsheets and did calculations by hand) or blindly accepting whatever AI generates (like a vibe coder whos app breaks in production).

For example, when I need a domain or product name, I describe the site's purpose to AI and have it summarize back to confirm understanding. Then I request 20-50 name variations and have the AI rank them by criteria like resonance and memorability.

I workshop those suggestions, telling the AI additional words to consider and why I recommend them. Through this process, I often discover the perfect name—usually not something the AI suggested directly.

Without AI, I wouldn't have the creative sparks from reviewing its output. But I can't just use what it gives me at face value.

The Fix: Balance AI with human insight. Use AI tools for research and idea generation while grounding decisions in customer feedback and your domain expertise.

AI is typically half right and lacks insights that only skilled humans with field experience will have. The conversation with AI often provides more value than its direct output.

9. Not Using Lean Approaches for Startup Growth

My Lean Six Sigma background provides powerful frameworks for helping founders think long-term.

The Fix: Apply these Lean principles to your startup:

• Define value - This exercise is eye-opening when applied to questions like "Why do you want this company?" Founders often say "money," then realize money is for financial independence, which is for freedom to do what they want. This reveals a 10-year struggle with uncertain success might not align with their true goals.

Customer value is similar, often customers have multiple steps in order to get to the end value they really want. Along the way they may even forget the end value and just get caught up on the steps of their process. Like focusing on making viral posts instead of converting and keeping customers.

• Hypothesis testing - Founders have many assumptions that need validation. Test each one systematically. The assumptions, that if false have the biggest negative impact on the company, are the ones that need to be tested first.

• Get Out of the Office / Go and See - The closer you can get to the actual problem you're solving the more insight you'll have into what it takes to solve it in the way that's the most beneficial to the customer.

• Understand waste (TIM WOOD) - Identify and eliminate steps that don't create, or are inefficient at creating customer value.

Transportation: Unnecessary movement of materials or products, wasting time and resources.

Inventory: Excess storage of raw materials, work-in-progress, or finished goods, tying up capital.

Motion: Unnecessary movement of people or equipment, increasing labor and risk.

Waiting: Idle time when people, materials, or equipment are not ready, delaying processes.

Overproduction: Producing more than needed, leading to excess inventory and waste.

Overprocessing: Doing more work than required, adding no value to the customer.

Defects: Errors or faulty products requiring rework or scrap, wasting time and materials.

• SIPOC analysis - Map complex business processes to find shortcuts by eliminating steps that don't produce end-value. (Source, Input, Process, Output, Consumer)

10. Focusing on Short-Term Metrics Over Relationships

Founders obsess over likes, shares, website traffic, signups, and customer counts. These are all lagging indicators—results of doing the right things earlier.

Focusing on these metrics is like driving without knowing your destination. You can go fast but have no idea if you're getting closer to success.

The Fix: Obsess over how deeply you understand your customer and their problem. This is harder to measure but infinitely more valuable.

The leading indicators of success are: deep understanding of the problem, insight into how customers perceive it, and whether customers adopt your proposed solution. All other metrics will improve naturally when you focus here.

My method of engaging with 50 potential customers over 30 days drives this deep understanding and builds a long-term focus on the customer and their problems.

The Long-Term Thinking Advantage

The most successful founders I've worked with share one trait: they think beyond immediate wins to build sustainable businesses.

They understand that genuine customer relationships, deep problem understanding, and personal sustainability aren't just nice-to-haves—they're the foundation of long-term success.

By avoiding these ten common mistakes, you'll build a business that not only survives but thrives through changing markets and technologies.

The path isn't always glamorous. It requires patience and genuine curiosity about your customers. But the founders who take this approach build companies that last.