Don’t Ignore Your Blind Spots: What You Overlook (Or Just Don’t Like Doing!) May Be Your Biggest Weakness
As founders, we all play to our strengths. Some of us are natural salespeople who can pitch anyone, anywhere. Others are product-minded, spending countless hours refining features and making sure the tech is bulletproof. Many are visionaries, setting the long-term strategy.
But here’s the trap: the things you don’t focus on—the areas you write off as “not important right now”—often end up being your (and your company’s) biggest weaknesses, and they can undermine everything else you’ve built.
Where Blind Spots Hurt the Most
It’s not that you have to master every discipline of running a business (no one can). The danger comes when you assume something is unimportant simply because it’s not your strength. That’s when you’re most likely to be “shooting yourself in the foot.”
For example:
A product-first founder ignores marketing until competitors with weaker tech but stronger messaging own the market.
A sales-driven founder underestimates the importance of strong financial ops, only to run into cash flow disasters.
A visionary founder focuses on the big picture but neglects execution details, creating a credibility gap with the team.
The pattern is the same: what you overlook doesn’t go away. It compounds.
My Own Wake-Up Call as a Technical Founder & CEO
I learned this the hard way when building OptiMantra.
I come from an engineering and systems management background - so our team built what I’d argue one of the most robust specialty EMR and product management platforms in the market. We obsessed over features, integrations, scalability, performance. From a technical perspective, we were ahead of the competition during the early years of the platform.
But we were losing out on two fronts:
Sales & Marketing. We were going to conferences, but beyond that we weren’t investing in our public-facing brand and experience. We were growing quickly - but it was exclusively being driven by word-of-mouth (good problem to have, but a problem none-the-less).
User Experience (UX). Our first impressions weren’t strong. The product worked beautifully once you got into it and learned the workflow, but the initial perception left users underwhelmed - or a little overwhelmed.
In a viral market, word of mouth eventually spread, and people discovered how strong the product really was. But by the time we started moving upmarket, we had to circle back and reinvest heavily in perception on the sales and UX front. It was painful to realize we could have been much further ahead if we had spent a little extra time on these priorities earlier.
How Founders Can Protect Against Their Own Blind Spots
The lesson here isn’t that you need to divide your time across every discipline equally—that’s impossible. Instead, we recommend some periodic soul-searching to actively evaluate what you’re not focusing on and make a conscious choice about how to address it.
Some practical steps:
Identify your blind spots. Be brutally honest about what you avoid or dismiss.
Decide how to cover them. You don’t need to master everything—advisors, contractors, or fractional executives can bring in expertise without diluting your focus.
Check for compounding damage. If ignored for too long, some blind spots (like compliance, finance, or UX) create exponential headaches down the road.
Revisit regularly. As your business evolves, yesterday’s “not important” can become tomorrow’s make-or-break priority.
Play to Your Strengths, But Don’t Neglect the Rest
Being a founder is all about leverage. Your job is to double down on what you do best while making sure your weak spots don’t sabotage you. Sometimes that means hiring, sometimes partnering, sometimes just dedicating a little more of your attention.
The biggest danger is losing sight of those weak spots - because you’re already running at a million other priorities! - in startups, it’s rarely the things you obsess over that kill you—it’s the things you didn’t think mattered.
