It’s easy to overthink and overanalyze issues with your startup when there are so many unknowns. Projecting into the future, your plan highlights key risks and potential downsides that you might encounter over the next few years. Instead of worrying about things that might happen in the future, your overriding focus should be on taking the next step forward. There’s only one thing that you can plan on – nothing ever goes according to plan. The problems you worry about will rarely be the problems that you actually encounter. A common “problem” that web startups worry about, for example, is being able to scale to handle millions of users. Founders usually start worrying about this before they’ve landed their first user. As a result, the team spends weeks or months overbuilding to prepare for a flood of users. Only the flood never comes. Instead of being productive refining the app, learning from users, or addressing pressing issues, the team focused on solving a problem that wasn’t yet a problem. When you start worrying about the future, realize that it ain’t a problem ’til it’s a problem.
