Start with the problem
Every product I have built started with a problem I hit personally. Foltrac came from deploying the same service across three cloud providers and losing hours to inconsistent dashboards. Tavoc came from watching my IDE choke on a monorepo with 200k files.
If I can't explain the problem in one sentence, I don't build the product.
Ship the smallest useful thing
The first version of LegionEdge had one feature: generate a full-stack scaffold from a prompt. No teams, no collaboration, no marketplace. One feature, done well, that solved a real workflow gap.
Scope creep kills startups faster than bad code.
Measure with your hands
Dashboards lie by omission. I use every product I ship, daily, as a real user. If I can't feel the friction, I'm too far from the product.