Why I Keep Starting Things
I’ve started a lot of things. A cleaning brand that did two lakh in its first month. A trading simulator that got featured by YC’s Startup School. A couple of products that now exist only as graveyards in my old repos. The pattern is obvious to anyone watching, and the obvious read is that I can’t finish anything. I want to argue the read is wrong. Or at least incomplete.
Starting a thing teaches you what no amount of studying the thing can. The market doesn’t talk to spectators. It only talks to people with something at stake. People who shipped, took money, took the public risk of being wrong in front of others. Every start, I’m not just building a business. I’m buying information that’s only for sale to participants. You can’t read your way to it. You pay the entry fee, which is starting.
The non-obvious part: most of what I know about distribution, pricing, what people actually pay for versus what they say they want, how a brand earns its first second of trust, none of it came from the projects that “worked.” It came from starting, over and over, and watching reality respond. The ones that didn’t last weren’t failures to finish. They were experiments that returned their data and got shut down, which is what experiments are for. We just have an ugly word for it when it’s a business and a clean word for it when it’s a lab.
The world has one story for the serial starter and it’s a scold. You lack discipline, you chase novelty, real builders commit. There’s truth in it I won’t dodge. Some things only get great if you stay for the boring decade, and the serial starter rules those out. Fine. But the scold misses the other ledger entirely. Each start compounds you. You get better at zero-to-one every single time. Faster at building, sharper at reading a market, calmer in the early chaos, quicker to spot the wedge. The projects are disposable. The operator who started them is not.
Think about what a start demands, all at once. Pick a problem, judge a market, build the thing, find the first users, set a price, take real money from real strangers. That’s the entire surface area of business crushed into a few months, run solo. Do it five times and you’ve trained on more full cycles than someone who spent five years in one slow company touching one slice of one of those skills.
Earnestness is part of it too, Paul Graham’s word and the right one. I’m not starting things to look like a founder. I start because the questions I most want answered are the kind only reality answers, and reality charges admission, and the cover charge is to begin.
So yeah, I keep starting things. Each one is tuition. I’ve gotten very good at the thing I keep paying to learn. p.s. still working on the finishing part.
One of a series of essays. I’m Prajjwal Chittori. prajjwalchittori.com.