What are the most common mistakes first time entrepreneurs make?

I started my first business when I was 16.

Since then I’ve started over 15 businesses in 22 years.

Most of them have failed so I am intimately familiar with what doesn’t work!

Here are some things to understand when you start out:

• Nobody cares about you. Stop worrying about what they think about you. They’re not thinking about you at all.
• Nobody is waiting for you to fail. They’re also not waiting for you to succeed. They’re not waiting for you at all.
• Your #1 obsession has to be your customer: Who are they? Where are they? What do they like/watch/read/listen to/like/dislike
• You can NEVER know enough about your customer
• Success is about selling. Selling is about numbers. The more you sell, the more you’ll sell.
• Launching is not an achievement.
• Launch asap. The faster you get your product/service into your customer’s hands, the more successfully you can iterate and evolve your product.
• Profitability is an achievement.
• Investors invest in profitable, scalable, sustainable businesses.
• Raising funding isn’t an achievement.
• Retaining customers is orders of magnitude easier than acquiring customers.
• Follow the traction.

Some of the above things work some of the time.

Asking for advice is like asking the lottery winners for their numbers. The above worked to motivate me but may not work in your context.