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Ask HN: What is the biggest challenge you’ve faced when building your startup?

17 points by bozkan ↗ HN
Building startup is difficult. I am now trying to build another, but having similar problems as always, which annoys me: finding product-market fit & early adopters. What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced? How did you tackle them? (Or did you manage to tackle them?)

I am asking it because if there is a pattern about those problems, and if they still exist, maybe we should do something to solve those common problems first.

10 comments

[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 13.8 ms ] thread
billconan
finding product-market fit & early adopters.
bozkan
sometimes I wish there was a tool/personal advisor helping me to find those easily
dangerface
A marketing agency will do that.

Disclosure: I work at a marketing agency.

bozkan
agree but I have a very limited budget which doesn't allow me to work with an agency, yet.
spalmrich
I think one of the biggest problems I faced was honestly managing personal expectations and self-care. While finding PMF etc are hugely important, they're also difficult to do if you're not in the right mindset - meaning not only that you're thinking clearly and intelligently but also creatively. Managing time for exercise, friends and general relaxation proved more difficult for me during crazy startup times than any other job I've had.
bozkan
definitely agree. I was going to gym 3 times a week but for the last 2 months I have been working on my startup, I could only go once. Besides, # of arguments with my wife increased a lot, although she is my biggest supporter.
hitsurume
If you're having problems finding early adopters, this is a sign that you possibly built something no one wants. So ideally, the first step should be finding out a problem, hopefully your own, that someone needs solved and would pay money for it. If you're building a product on say, blockchain technology, because its cool and you think everyone should use it, you're going to get crickets because it doesn't solve any problems that people care enough to switch and adopt.
non-entity
I recently ran into a problem, and started to bring together and idea for a project that could help solve it, but I'm worried that the problem is born out of a set of unique problems I have that not enough people would care about.
dangerface
> What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced?

Finding customers

> How did you tackle them?

Marketing budget and plan. I know the whole bootstrap thing is in vogue but it's extraordinarily hard to do. You need to build a customer base big enough that word of mouth through social and SEO can take over, not the other way around.

You can do it all yourself on a shoe string budget if you have the contacts but building the contacts to do that takes years.

I think its often easier to find a market you can market too and then find a problem in that market, than it is to find a problem and then figure out how to market it.