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It’s so easy to fall into the illusion of work where you can spend hours doing something that feels like work but that in reality is not contributing anything to the health of your startup.

I fell into this trap many times during the initial 18 months of Toky by attending to conferences, doing interviews for media outlets in Paraguay and in Mexico, actively seeking attention for my “successes” with Toky and generally enjoying the praise I was receiving from the public for being “brave and smart” for having created a tech startup.

I was enjoying myself feeling important. It’s an addictive feeling that’s so hard to let go of and that’s so toxic at the same time.

I felt like a winner back then and ironically, I was absolutely certain that I was great and that Toky was going to turn out to be a huge success. It’s ironic because today, after almost 6 years and having survived all sorts of shit-shows, I still need to remind myself every day that I’m more experienced now so that I can gain the confidence I need to execute.

I wasted many months working on the wrong things and focusing on unimportant stuff. My fellow batch founders in Wayra were doing exactly the same thing and no one was telling us we should be focusing on our businesses instead. Many startups on my batch died, and I don’t know enough to make a fair judgment here, but I’m sure the lack of focus was one of the main reasons for this outcome.

In 2015, and after realizing we had an expiration date because we were quickly running out of money, the shock of learning this fact opened our eyes and we were forced to work on the right things or admit we were going to fail.

In a memory that I can recall vividly, I remember Oscar and I walking around Parque México in Mexico City discussing that we needed to change focus and start charging money for our product or that otherwise our days were numbered. After a few walk-arounds that park, we turned Toky from a B2C business into B2B.

After that, our attention-seeking addiction slowly started to vanish and we slowly also started disappearing from the visible world. We locked ourselves down and started building the product that we have today.

In an unsurprising turn of events, we saw that the world didn’t actually care at all about us. When we chose to not show ourselves any more people hardly noticed. It was a new reality that was hard swallow but that we learned to move on from eventually.

Focus doesn’t receive enough attention and is a piece of advice that is easy to accept but very hard to follow. I’ve been there myself and I get it, but this time you need to not just listen, you need to act.

Determine what’s important for the success of your startup, determine the order of importance of each thing, and focus on one (or a small few) thing(s) at a time.

At the beginning of a new project everyone is super energized, hopeful and ready to bleed for the end goal. Hopefully those days will never end but if they do, you have to be prepared and protected.

You have to do an explicitly targeted work to keep the relationship with your business partners healthy. You have to truly care about their wellbeing and you have to mean this. It has to come from the inside and you have to make time to talk about it regularly.

The above advice will keep you from ever having to recur to the legal papers I’m talking about here. The order is important. Invest in your relationships first so that you don’t have to fall back to the legal documents ever.

Having said that, every aspect of your business deal must have a paper counterpart. How much everyone owns, vesting periods, what happens if someone decides to leave, how to decide if someone is no longer a fit and what to do about it, how is decision power divided, how to fire a cofounder, how to handle dividends, how to decide if you want to sell the company, etc.

This post is not about creating a comprehensive list of the things you need to consider for the contract between you and your partner. It’s more about bringing to your attention that you need to protect yourself and everyone involved by having all rules of the game very clear from the very start.

Remember that creating a startup is already stressful. You don’t need yet another worry to your anxiety bucket if for any reason something unexpected, like a cofounder wanting to leave, happens.

Everyone has an opinion on everything and a reason to think they are right and that you are wrong. Ironically enough, this post can very well be one of them, but I’ll let you make that decision yourself ;-).

When I was going through Wayra, the startup accelerator Toky was part of in 2014, the advisors hired to help us were coming mostly from the corporate world. They all had relevant roles and academic titles proving on paper that they made the time to learn what they came to advise, but the disconnection between how they did things at their jobs and how things can be done in a tiny startup that is more dead than alive, didn’t seem to be evident to most of them.

I remember being forced to make a huge spreadsheet with user acquisition projections, how much we were going to make in sales, and how things would look like in 5 years. It made complete sense to them that we should be spending time on multi-year projections instead of on building a product and actually selling it.

On another occasion, I remember we were having meetings and attending law firms to meet Intellectual-Property lawyers who were helping us patent everything we built. The only problem was that we didn’t really have anything worthy of a patent at that time but they were following a timeline that I’m sure made sense on paper but in reality, was completely useless and a waste of time.

Why weren’t we meeting product people and working all the time on user acquisition? Why no one was noticing that we didn’t have an infinite runway and that we should be focusing on improving our metrics to look more appealing to potential investors so that we can survive another year? Why was all advice assuming we had a huge budget of millions to pay people to come to visit us and buy our product?

I’m sure everyone there had good intentions and really wanted to help. I met great people there and I know one of the reasons we still exist as a business is because they gave us the seed money we needed to take off. The last thing I want is to sound ungrateful.

My point is that you should listen to every piece of advice and opinion you can, but giving your maximum attention to the ones coming from people who had been in your shoes before or that are in a place where you would like to be in the future.

Like making charity with other people’s money, throwing startup tips from the comfort of a safe corporate salary, is just too easy to not do it. Always take them with a grain of salt.