We built the wrong startup, broke a "startup golden rule" and pivoted into success — I will not promote

After YC, I was in “pivot hell.” Our original idea clearly wasn't working and we knew we had to pivot. Me and the team chased hot ideas like Web3, neobanks and ecommerce because we believed we had to somehow build what was exciting to us. This is the startup advice: Build for yourself first. Be a power user of your own startup. But none of these worked. We only found success when we dove into our "boring" corporate jobs and thought about the problems we faced there. We found a dry, unsexy topic (billing) that we ended up building in. We knew the struggles people had with the topic, knew what could be better—and knew that nobody was talking about it. Aka a great opportunity. But we had to ignore the dogma of needing to be your own ICP. Because right now, we don’t have the complex pricing models, global compliance headaches, or enterprise billing workflows our ideal customers do. So we can't really dogfood our product. We're not power users of it—yet it's the idea we got real traction with. Everyone says "Build for yourself" and "dogfooding your product" etc., but if we had followed that advice, we’d still be chasing some trendy topic that isn't worth building in. Or, more likely, we'd be out of money and back at our corporate jobs now. What we learned: Don't look for what's cool now. Look for what you would've wanted 2 years ago in your career. This will help you find better, less competitive opportunities (that will probably be less sexy) Don't believe all the advice. Being your own ICP isn't always bad advice. But as our story shows, it sometimes is. Apply advice when it fits, not blindly.