2 years of doing startups as a 22-year-old: Failures & Lessons Learned

Hi everyone, I'm Tham/Sylvia, business student turned self-taught software engineer, and also maker of MindPal https://mindpal.space/ — a platform for building internal AI tools to automate thousands of tasks. (We're also launching on Product Hunt today, appreciate your support: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/mindpal-3) The past two years, from failing my first startup to gaining early traction with MindPal and heading towards more ambitious goals for the future, has been nothing short of life-changing for me. Although I am just getting started, these two years have taught me invaluable lessons that I will never forget. Lesson 1 — Do Hard Things To be honest, we never thought we could do what we have done until we did. Just a year ago, I would never think I could code, let alone building an entire application like MindPal with just two people. We weren't sure if anyone would buy our product, and now we're serving over 1,000 customers in over 120 countries. It's normal for all of us to tend to stick to what feels safe and comfortable, but we may be underestimating our capabilities. It's in doing hard things that we discover our true potential. These challenges may seem intimidating at first, but as we tackle them, they become familiar, extending our comfort zone and unlocking even more growth. Lesson 2 — Just Get Started It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the complexity of "hard things" and many of us have a tendency to wait for the perfect conditions to begin. We may wait until having a good pair of shoes to start running. We may wait until we have the perfect startup idea and funding to start building a startup. We may wait until being taught to learn something. For us, no one taught us about generative AI or building applications on top of LLMs (It's very very new). We are pioneers defining a new category in the market, and there's no playbook for us. We have to get started, fail, learn, and keep going. The key is to have the courage to start today, despite uncertainties, doubts or inertia. Lesson 3 — Don't Quit A year ago, Tuan (my co-founder in both startups) and I were on the verge of giving up. Our finances, morale, and confidence were at an all-time low. We questioned whether we should return to school and pursue traditional paths. But for some reason, we didn't give up, and that was the best decision we made. Those difficult times laid the foundation for the knowledge and skills we needed to build MindPal. We believe the biggest secret to knowledge, wealth, and success (whatever it is), is time. Just show up every day and keep going regardless, and the little things we do today will have a compounding effect much bigger than we could ever imagine. These lessons have shaped our mindset and working culture at MindPal, and we believe they will continue to guide us as we grow. We are just getting started, and we look forward to learning even more along the way. How about you? Share with me the lessons you've learned during your startup journey so far!