Is this what it's supposed to feel like?

Read the linked page. Sounds tough. Thought I’d take a look at the job openings - page not found. 🤔

The early days are messy, gritty, and a little bit dirty.

As a relatively inexperienced founder, I share some of those feelings as well. It took me a bit of time to figure out that the perspective as an outsider is skewed towards success stories, and a lot less of the hard times of building a business.

Hey Trevor,

I know this problem, but I'm surprised to see it at your stage. As I understood your article, you're up and running since at least 9 months and already have a team of professional developers and funding, right?

Do you know where these problems come from? You obviously did something right in marketing (which I lack a lot of of knowledge :-)), since you have quite some listings.

I'm a software developer and I know that it can be hard to follow up all the tasks in your to do list. I would guess, that most problems come from difficulties in prioritization or technical debt.

As for prioritization it's always helpful to look at the business impact and effort. This way you maybe would have done the email notifications a lot earlier.

Technical debt is a bit more complicated of course. I'm not sure, if that is actually a problem of yours, but as I see you writing about bad performance and see the long long list of available offers you are displaying on one page, I only can suspect, that this is the reason.

If it's really hard to add features or change parts of the existing app, you should clean up your code base and/or architecture. It shouldn't take long to decrease the number of offerings displayed on one page, which already should improve the performance quite a bit.

Hiring is also quite hard in this area. As an IT person it's currently very easy to find a job. I'm personally looking for good design, nice tech stack and professional setup/colleagues. What tech stack are you using and what kind of teams/team members do you have?

If it's hard to fill your job positions, did you consider hiring freelancers for some time. It's expensive of course and you cannot keep the knowledge in your company, but it might be a good idea to do some cleaning up.