No larping

There is a version of running a company that consists entirely of things that look like running a company. Naming it. Buying the domain. The logo, then the second logo. A deck that gets to version six. A roadmap with quarters on it. A standup, alone. Being in stealth, which is a word for not having shown anybody.

None of that is the company. It is a costume, and it is a very good one, because from inside it you cannot tell.

Why the costume is so comfortable

Everything in it is unfalsifiable.

A logo can always be better. A deck can always be tighter. The roadmap is about next quarter, so it cannot be wrong this quarter. You can spend a full week on any of them, finish tired, and have learned precisely nothing about whether anyone wants the thing, which means you also cannot have learned that they do not.

Compare that to sending twelve emails asking people to buy. By Friday you know something. It might be that eleven ignored you, which is horrible, and it is also the first true fact you have had in a month.

Founders do not choose the costume because they are lazy. They choose it because it is the only part of the job with no chance of a no in it.

The test

There is one question that cuts through all of it. Has a stranger used the thing, and did money change hands?

Not a friend. Not a former colleague being kind. Not somebody who said they would love it if it did X. A stranger, who had the problem, who used what you built, and who paid, or explicitly declined, which counts, because a decline is a real answer to a real question.

Everything else is preparation. Preparation is fine. Fourteen months of it is a costume.

What it looks like to take it off

You do not need to stop caring about the product. You need one thing on the list each day that can fail publicly.

Send the email you have been drafting. Ask the person who said "this is interesting" what would have to be true for them to pay. Put a price on it and say the price out loud to somebody whose opinion you cannot predict. Ship the half of it that works to one person who is not your friend.

Every one of those can go badly. That is the property that makes them worth more than the deck.

The uncomfortable part

Taking off the costume usually reveals that you have been at this longer than you have been selling it. Founders find that humiliating, and they should not. Almost everyone does this. The people who get through it are not the ones who never larped; they are the ones who noticed, felt bad for an afternoon, and then went and asked somebody for money.

You do not get points for how the company looks. There is nobody watching. The only scoreboard is whether a stranger paid you, and it has been available to check this entire time.