What is your biggest regret with creating your startup?

Still learning how to use the advice from that book. I'm so excited about my ideas that I rush to tell everyone. That ruins their feedback and my chance to learn from them.

"But I'll be different" ;)

So for what I'm doing and for most SaaS apps, you could:

1. Write down your product concept/ hypothesis.
2. Use a landing page builder to flesh out a page with designs/ wireframes of what you want to build with the copy to support it.
3. Run google ads to your site.
4. Make an action that represents a conversion (measure it with something like google analytics goals). Make an email signup list, make a page after clicking "Buy now" that says the product is coming soon, subscribe to know more, etc.
5. Email the people that sign up, ask what problems they had that they were looking to get solved, see how well that fits your hypothesis.
6. Build something that you absolutely know will solve people's problems.

Of course this advice can vary based on what type of service you're offering, but that's a general idea.

None of the usual horror stories, our investors were all excellent, fair people who did everything they could to help. But taking funding completely changes the dynamics of a business in a couple of very dangerous ways:

1. It gives you money to spend. No, duh, right. But a cash injection is actually a really dangerous thing for a small business. Suddenly you have more money to spend than you ever have before but it's not money that you know how to spend. It's amazing how easy it is to throw away gobs of money on things that lead nowhere. Organic revenue growth, being frugal, and careful budgeting are much better skills to develop then playing with an artificial injection of someone else's cash.
2. It changes the definition of success. When you take money from investors you are agreeing to grow their investment by a certain multiple. It should be better than what they could get from the stock market, otherwise why would they take such a risky bet? Lots of investors are looking for a 10-20x return over five years. If you start with a company making $100k/year, valued at $1.2M (12x revenue), and its blows through $2m in the next 4-5 years and reaches a $24m valuation, then you are a company that is ideal for venture investment. But what happens if you work super hard for 5 years and you're only making $600k/year? $600k/year for a small team is a huge success but if they have investors, it's a failure. That's nowhere near the return that they needed from their investment. Even worse, how are you going to get them their money back? If you're not growing enough to keep raising rounds of funding, your early investors aren't going to have an opportunity to cash out. A company that could have been a huge success as an independent company is now a huge bummer for everyone.

That's not to say that venture investment is an unequivocally bad choice for every company. Not at all. Sometimes it's absolutely necessary. But you should really know what you're getting into before you take that money.

I am no marketing expert which is why finding help was important! I’d say start looking for help and/or network with marketing communities (online/offline). I find the book Traction to be a good overview of digital marketing if you are looking for educational resources. Also there’s the #growth IH channel! ;)

I was thinking of ways to integrate certain software, software error issues, CSS that breaks the website. I would research and learn how to fix it but can take weeks of reading and trial and error. On Fiverr, I found someone who's an expert in the computer language and reputable. He fixed the error in 5 minutes. Another guy integrated an idea, create a tool that count individual post, he created exactly as I had in mine in 10 minutes. Cost was only like $10.00 each time.