What would you do differently in your next startup?
Hey!
Doing things solo is the hardest part of any startup journey. Looking back — what you would have done differently?
Hey!
Doing things solo is the hardest part of any startup journey. Looking back — what you would have done differently?
I would focus on finding the right people that can help. Me and move to the next level as quickly as possible. Speed is more important than money.
Like your advice, wish that would be easy! How can I start w/o existing network? COVID made things even worse.
If you have some revenue or a small budget already, starting to hire contractors remotely is a great way to scale. Or if you have a large budget, hiring a good tech lead would be a good first step
In case you don't have the network or tech interviewing skills I'm happy to help for free
B2B instead of B2C.
When you're talking to customers about the problem your product will solve and they keep bringing up a different but related problem... pay attention!
Five years ago my first startup was a product to help with employee onboarding and all the HR people I talked to only cared about interviewing. I desperately wanted to avoid competing in that space because it was so crowded, so I politely kept trying to steer them towards describing their onboarding practices.
The mistake there was that not I didn't pivot towards interviewing, but instead that I didn't appreciate that employee onboarding was not a burning problem for these companies. If it wasn't a burning problem they were not looking for a solution. Worse yet, there was true burning problem (interviewing) for them that was sucking all of the oxygen out of the room that didn't allow my little flame to even be noticed! While I did end up learning a lot about employee onboarding, it was a wasted effort.
The other thing I learned from that experience, which was just as important, is that I actually wanted a lifestyle business and not to build an aggressive-growth company. I am perfectly happy making side-projects that I could conceivably run on my own. Of course, I do have the secret hope in my heart that they could become financially self-sufficient or even profitable... but I am just as happy building things as a creative endeavour.
Building solo sucks!
I got my motivation going up and down, which resulted long time breaks and neverendless MVP building 😡As you get over with the coding, you start to realize how much more time you need to input into the strategy, copy, marketing, contacting people and list goes on. I'm out!
Prove me I'm wrong please!!!
You just need to find motivation for eating your immediate next bite of bread. Don't do 100 things together, just do one per day (or better, one per hour) and you'll do better than most others. Don't try to chew your whole bread in one go.
There is no feeling like accomplishing milestones. The secret is to - Break your journey into smallest pieces, and conquer one at a time.
Do you know what your next bite of bread look like?
Nothing can replace a great co-founder, in my experience. Not just for motivation, but also for keeping your limited experience and biases in check - the more different from you the better!
One of my rules atm is "validate, validate, validate — start doing only after".
I'm also doing things solo. The key for me was intrinsic motivation to keep working. With my first startup attempt, I focused on building a product for others. But it was hard to get past the "no one is interested yet" phase.
My current product is something I needed. I have used it every day since the day I built the MVP. The utility it provided me gave me the motivation to keep going. Fortunately it has received a decent amount of interest from other people, but even if it didn't, I'd still be working on it.
Thanks for sharing Professor! =)
We know our own pain points very well. Building an internal solution has proven to be worthy in 99% of the cases. I started building my own tools in 2009 and everyone from our business circle loved them. Back in the day, we were too humble to promote our products to the world. We never understood importance of the marketing enough.
dynomantle seems like a really needed project. With some polishing it's ready to go!
— The more different topics you need to cover as a founder or entrepreneur, the more organized your work plan should be. I found dynalist.io(simple task lists) very useful in my workflow. This really helps me to stay organized, save notes from anywhere (via screenshot or imgur). Never used that search function, good file structure helps me here. It's not perfect, but the market and the need for such tools exist.
Yeah, the organizing bit is the toughest. I struggled with notes for a while because I kept getting stuck on how to organize them.
Dynomantle focuses more about light organizing and just taking notes in general. Most notes end up being transient and don't need to be organized. I'm still revising this aspect of it, but I think Dynomantle already does a better job of separating transient notes from permanent ones.
I would build from scratch and not acquire a product.
What went wrong when you acquired a product?
The code itself wasn't written too well. Lots of shortcuts taken. Had to spend a lot of fix it up. Also Zlappo looks awesome :) I'm looking to create a social media scheduling tool. Always a solid product!
I would:
Find customers (or at least people willing to sign up to a waiting list) before building a product. Too often, I build things just to end up with no one using them.
Choose very boring, well established technology. Been using AWS serverless, their infrastructure as code, and other services. It's been a hell of a lot of fun to learn and the benefits are enormous but I could have come to market with my ideas much sooner.
Interesting to hear this. I stuck to my guns and used very unfashionable technology that I know. I figured I had enough to learn building and marketing a problem and I think it was the right call.
Time-box it
Working solo has been great for me. I can make decisions quickly and build accordingly.
I would have put a bit more time in earlier in the process to do things as neatly as possible technically. Now nearly 5 years in I have some technical debt. I will get through it but I wish I’d spent a few more weeks back in 2017!
It definitely takes experience to know what technical pieces will pay off down the road and are worth spending more time on up front vs which ones aren't. It's a lifelong learning journey.
Many products have failed because they spent too much time perfecting technical details and did not get to market and find customers fast enough. I personally find it stressful knowing that my work has hacks and non-scalable code, but it can also be viewed as a great milestone if you ever make it to the point where you have enough users that these issues have to be fixed.
With every new project I start (the latest being BotMeNot) I more and more see the value of properly executed marketing & community building. I think that wise investments (both time & other resources) in these fields always pay back.
I don't regret doing it, but next time I would not go all in (full time work + investing money) on the idea from the start.
Really owning a topic and building an audience (long before the product exists) will make a huge difference I'm convinced.
I would have read "Blink!" earlier, and listened to my gut feeling.
Definitely I would work on my brand since day one.
I have 300 recurrent paid customers but I only have 1 single post on my blog from 5 years ago, 2 post on Facebook in the last 5 years, 1 post on Instagram in the last 5 years and not even a Twitter account.
I definitely failed at "building in public" and creating/sharing our journey.
Just a week ago I hired someone to do it. For some new visitors I'm sure we look suspicious (or inexistent) because of the mentioned mistakes we made.
We would never catch up with the quantity of followers and likes some of our competitors have.
Standardize your processes
Hire as soon as you can (I was stuck in a "I don't want to manage people" void which led me to having to do everything. And this is not sustainable)
Surround yourself. IH, Reddit and other places to find cool and caring people who're going through the same.
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
Seen really cool campaigns in Tiktok, but not for a startups or maybe I'm more on the B2B side 😳. Ezhan do you have any cool examples to share?