All the Things Founders Obsess Over That Customers Don’t Care About
Aaron Dinin, PhD Oct 12, 2026
Note to Readers: Social entrepreneurs can't afford to waste time. Planning and launching require focusing on essentials. This article can help you focus.
N.B. Lightly edited for length
“I had a couple entrepreneurs come to my office hours to ask my advice about their startup’s mission statement. ….and thought I could be a good tiebreaker.
But rather than break the tie, I did something that was probably a bit more… let’s call it “unexpected.”
I laughed at them.
I didn’t mean to. Thinking back on the conversation, I still feel badly about my response. But I couldn’t help myself. Here were two young, eager entrepreneurs excited to get their company launched, and what were they spending their time on?
Oh yeah… debating their mission statement.
To their credit, once I stopped laughing, they took my reaction reasonably well. I explained that I wasn’t laughing because mission statements are inherently stupid or useless. Plenty of mature companies benefit from having clear missions that help align employees and guide decisions.
But these entrepreneurs didn’t have employees to align. Heck, they barely had customers. They had a young startup with thousands of unanswered questions, and they were spending weeks debating the precise wording of a sentence almost nobody outside their company was ever going to read.
I’ve spent 20 years building companies, teaching entrepreneurship, and advising startups, and I’ve watched entrepreneurs waste ridiculous amounts of time obsessing over things their customers barely notice……….
Without further ado, here are all the things I can think of that founders obsess over but customers don’t care about, starting with, obviously…
Mission statements. I realize this article started here, but let’s hammer home the point. Your customers aren’t sitting around comparing mission statements before deciding which project management software to buy. They mostly want to know whether your product will solve whatever annoying problem caused them to start looking for project management software in the first place.
Logos. Yes, your company should look reasonably professional. No, customers won’t notice that you changed the shade of blue in your logo from #2878FF to #2874F0. I promise.
Company names. Founders can spend weeks searching for the perfect name. In fact, I’m very guilty of this. You want something memorable, meaningful, clever, easy to spell, and, of course, available as a dot-com. Meanwhile, some of the world’s biggest companies have names that would have sounded ridiculous if nobody had ever heard of them.
Taglines. Yes, somewhere out there is a perfect combination of six words that precisely communicates your company’s revolutionary vision. No, your customers aren’t waiting for you to discover it.
How many features you’ve built. Founders see every feature because they remember building every feature. Customers see the feature that solves the problem they’re trying to solve. The other 37 features might as well not exist.
How technically difficult your product was to build. This one can be especially painful for technical founders (like I was!). You might have spent nine months building an incredibly sophisticated infrastructure to make something happen in 200 milliseconds instead of 400 milliseconds. But your customers can’t tell the difference, which means the difficulty didn’t create any additional value.
Your technology stack. Your choice of technology can absolutely impact the customer experience, but your customers won’t care. Sure, you can be proud of it, but you don’t need to publicize it or try to use it as a selling point. Your customers simply won’t care whether you built your product using the hottest new framework, an old programming language, artificial intelligence, or three interns furiously updating spreadsheets behind the scenes.
Whether everything is automated. Founders sometimes seem embarrassed when parts of their businesses require manual work, as though customers are going to peek behind the curtain and discover the terrible secret that a human being is involved. But if the outcome is good and the experience is good, customers generally don’t care how much automation produced it.
How scalable everything is. Customers don’t care whether your product can support 10 customers or 10 million customers. All they care about is whether it solves their problem. So focus on making sure it can reliably do that no matter what stage you’re at in your growth. Otherwise, don’t worry about scaling. …….
Your roadmap. To be fair, some customers might care whether you’re eventually going to add one additional feature they desperately need. But, in general, your future direction doesn’t concern them so long as your product solves the problem they need solved now.
How innovative your idea is. Entrepreneurs love novelty. Customers love having their problems solved. Those two things occasionally overlap, but there’s no rule saying they have to.
Whether competitors have similar features. Founders build giant comparison charts full of green checkmarks proving they have more functionality than everyone else. But the only comparison your customer is making is: “Which option seems most likely to work for me?”
Your startup awards. Winning the Southeastern Regional Emerging Technology Innovation Challenge might make your parents proud and look nice on LinkedIn. But no customers is going to buy your product because you brought home a trophy.
Your press coverage. Being featured in TechCrunch can provide credibility and attention, both of which are useful. But an article about how exciting your startup is doesn’t make your product more useful to the person considering buying it.
How many hours you worked. Customers don’t pay extra because you stayed up until 3:00 a.m. And they don’t need to know how many weekends you sacrificed, how many vacations you skipped, or how exhausted you are.
How passionate you are. Passion can keep founders working through difficult moments, which makes it enormously important for entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, your customers aren’t obligated to reward your passion. ……..
Your origin story. Maybe you’ve dreamed about solving whatever problem your startup solves since childhood. Maybe you experienced it personally. Maybe lightning struck while you were backpacking through Nepal. It can make for a wonderful story, but customers still have to want whatever you’re selling.
Whether your product is “finished.” Customers have no idea what’s on your internal checklist. If the product solves their problem today, it’s finished enough for them……….
How much you love your startup. This might be the hardest one for founders to accept because building a startup is an intensely personal experience. You experience the late nights, difficult decisions, tiny victories, sacrifices, arguments, rewrites, rebuilds, and all the other work nobody else sees. But your customers don’t experience any of that.”
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