I was joking with a friend about my latest YC rejection. It was another "no," another reminder of how stupidly difficult it is to build something people actually want. His response cut through my self-pity: "Well, it wasn't going to be easy. You know this from the get-go. Hard is the minimum requirement."
Here's the thing about that phrase—it's not motivational poster material. It's just reality. When you're trying to build something new, hard isn't some special challenge you overcome. It's literally the starting point, the baseline, the minimum bar for entry.
Think of it like oxygen for climbing Everest. You don't get extra points for needing it. It's just the basic requirement to even attempt the climb. The real work hasn't even started yet.
That's what building stuff is like. The difficulty, the rejections, the constant grind - that's not the exceptional part. That's just table stakes. The real question is what you do on top of that baseline of hard.
Sometimes, I think we spend too much time waiting for things to get easier. They won't. They might get different, but not easier. If it was easy, someone else would have already done it (probably).
So when people ask me about my startup journey, I don't sugarcoat it anymore. Hard is just where you begin. Everything else—the strategy, the execution, the actual building—comes after accepting this basic truth.