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What is your biggest frustration as a founder?
by
Savas Vedova
Also happy to hear about solutions to these problems!
I think the consistent challenge for me and I see working with other startups is getting enough feedback, being challenged etc so that I can refine my ideas. As a solo founder or a small team it can be hard to not get stuck in a rut.
Ironically, this is the challenge starting up Oxogen.io which is trying to solve this problem 🤨
Very nice! Always love products coming out of a necessity :)
Marketing, but if I was actively searching for a co-founder, I'm positive that will be even more frustrating.
What are you doing to market your product?
I’m trying social media platforms - it drives some traffic but little.
On the other hand, updating docs of related websites, such as this one https://nuxtjs.org/deployments/stormkitio, leads way more targeted traffic.
Tried a lot of stuff to see what sticks, like SEO, automated email workflows, free stripped-down version of the product, affiliate program, social, multiple landing pages and documentation pages. So far SEO and GitHub (social) seem to have the most effect in my niche.
Adding/updating docs on related websites seems like an interesting strategy, especially for a project like Stormkit.
Marketing #1
Same here! What did you try so far? What worked and what not?
I haven't done much yet—posted intros on HN, Reddit, and my blog.
I’ll go first: My biggest frustration has been initially finding a co-founder. Over the course of 3 years, since I started developing stormkit.io, I tried partnering with 3 different people. The first one was a friend of mine, he is a brilliant guy, but didn’t have the motivation to keep going on as a side project. The second try came randomly from the web, through YC Startup School. It really didn’t work well, he created a mess and ghosted on me. And finally the third try came from a person I knew, I showed the product to him and he liked it. He asked if he could contribute, his primary goal was to learn new things and improve his skillset. It took a few months like this and then we decided to team up as we loved working with each other. Now we both own 50%. We never talked about shares until recently (almost 6 months after he started actively working on Stormkit). So I guess the take away is that motivated people somehow show that they are interested :)
Now our biggest hassle is to generate leads. We already have paying customers, but we’d like to reach a broader audience to scale up. We’re trying using the social media actively but I guess these things take time!