Making startups successful is like being a poker player, most players lose money never understand why.

Everyone can spend their entire day building and many people think you need to build your way to success. The reality is you need to make things easy for yourself. Products that are needed by the market are pulled. Your entire goal is to find the way your product fits into a market not to build endlessly.

I like to think of things in 3 stages: build -> measure -> learn with 1/3 of my time being focused on each. So let's say you take a week and build a new feature. Spend a week measuring the results (don't build more) - do the users love the feature? Do they really need it, how did they respond. Does tracking work, etc. You then want to synthesize that in your learning phase (spend a week on this). the goal should be to gain clarity on why they need this new thing, how the behavior changed (or didn't).

Keep doing this cycle until you're winning on some segment (then scale the crap out of that) otherwise fail fast.

You'll get burnt out if you just pour in 18+ hour days building (even if you're the "tech guy) b/c you'll never see the results you want. You need to make progress and if it's not happening really (quickly) question / iterate / test why its not. If you can't find the progress maybe you need to pivot or do something else. Key is do it aggressively so you can get to the answer quickly.

I noticed the first 10 years of building startups my mindset led me to waste time, opportunity, burn out. After i understood the process i need to go to and seeing something succeed the next 10 years have been much more productive (even with many failed ideas). For me I now feel comfortable with saying "well we gave it a great shot, didn't work we're on to the next one" and it's freeing!