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Mamaearth's Ghazal Alagh warned entrepreneurs of dangers of ‘early confidence’ as she shared 3 lessons from 10-year journey of building Honasa Consumer Ltd. The 37-year-old entrepreneur went on to explain Dunning-Kruger Effect to prove her point.
Mamaearth co-founder Ghazal Alagh set off a conversation online with her recent LinkedIn post that has gone viral. The 37-year-old entrepreneur shared 3 lessons from 10-year journey of building Honasa Consumer Ltd as she warned startup founders of dangers of 'early confidence.'
The post captioned "The Danger of "Early Confidence" asserted that the most dangerous phase of building anything is “when you’ve had just enough success to start believing you’ve finally cracked the code.”
Giving an insight to the Dunning-Kruger Effect, she stated, “You hit a few milestones, the growth looks good, and suddenly your confidence peaks. You feel like an expert. But the hard truth is, that confidence usually comes from what you don’t see yet.”
What is Dunning-Kruger Effect?
According to Psychology Today, Dunning-Kruger refers to the phenomenon of cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. Lack of self-awareness is deemed responsible for such assessments.
Meanwhile, Ghazal Alagh describes the Dunning-Kruger Effect as the tendency to overestimate one's competence before the individual realises the full complexity of the problem.
Let's have a look at Ghazal Alagh's 3 lessons from 10-year journey
- Urging her followers to seek out the "I don't know" moments, she wrote, “In the early days of Mamaearth, those moments felt like weaknesses. Today, I know they are the only starting points for a real breakthrough.”
- Giving an informative advice to co-entrepreneurs and startup founders, she appealed them to hire employees for their “blind spots” instead of ego not your ego. "If you’re the smartest person in every meeting, you aren't leading; you’re just bottlenecking. Surround yourself with people who make you question your "proven" methods," she added.
- The last but the most important takeaway was that one should never come out of their learning zone and be a student always. She believes that the moment one starts thinking that they have fully understood their consumer is the point when they stop innovating.
Concluding the post she stated, "The goal isn't to feel "certain" all the time. It’s to stay curious enough to be proven wrong." One must be steadfast in facing the challenges that make them feel like a beginner again.
Social media reactions
A user wrote, “Early confidence is good, but it can also fool you. I think a real turning point for founders is when they stop trying to prove they’re right and start actively looking for where they might be wrong. That change affects the decisions you make, the people you hire, and even how long your success lasts.”
Another user remarked, “Early confidence often comes from pattern recognition, not pattern exhaustion. The danger is mistaking familiarity for mastery.”
A third user stated, "This is such an important call-out. Early confidence is comforting, but it can quietly cap growth. The willingness to sit in “I don’t know” — even after wins — is what separates momentum from mastery."
A fourth comment read, “The danger isn’t ignorance, it’s premature certainty. In my experience working with entrepreneurs, the ones who scale sustainably are the ones who never stop questioning their own assumptions.”
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