What are some challenges you faced when you started working on your product?
Qudsia Ali
58 replies
Working on a new product can take an immense amount of planning and dealing with challenges before you even get started designing! What are the one or two most significant challenges you faced when putting your product together? Was it finding suitable funding? Deciding who you would work with or anything else.
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Manoj Ranaweera@manojranaweera
Actually NO. I had the original idea for the predecessor of skilledup.life (free talent for tech startups) on 1st April 2020. Went live by the 7th and had the first paying customer by the 20th I think.
We stopped it at end of July, handed the money we made to charity and went live with SkilledUp Life on 1st Aug 2022.
I did everything myself without having to code. I was on my own from 1st Aug 2020 to 11th Nov 2020, when I hired my first employee.
Today, we are still on proof of concept until we get to 100 customers, £10k MRR revenue and 11,000 volunteers.
The stats on today is 14 customers, £393 MRR and 5,811 volunteers. In the process, I have spent less than £10k in investment. All self-funded.
No business plan was created. No financial forecasts. I did create a Lean Canvas just to amuse myself.
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@qudsia_ali what issues are you facing?
Bootstrapping a team without funds. I have found it hard to recruit top talent by just offering sweat equity.
WorkHub
@jsteneros I believe equity is a good way of finding the right people whose interests are aligned with your business.
@qudsia_ali Yeah this is the only way for sure. It is still hard though to find top talent like that. Most people also want a salary compensation to start with.
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It can be a very difficult proposition to find a person willing to invest his time and effort in the pursuit of a business, but if one can find even one such individual, he will make sure that the business succeeds.
Gift Hunt
The hardest thing for me was to say no to another "great feature" I wanted to add to the mvp. This killed many of my ideas even before I showed it to anyone.
WorkHub
@feriforgacs I know it's hard to hold on to yourself when you want to add so many features to your product, but you have to choose only a few for your MVP
@feriforgacs Totally agree with this. Momentum is very important you just need to release it and take it from there.
Layoffs Tracker
I had a lot of struggles with discipline and prioritization in the beginning. Which used to make me feel that the startup has a lot of chaos.
Now, the chaos is still there, it's just I learned how to deal with that! 😃
WorkHub
@designerdada Adjusting to a startup's routine is always challenging. But in the end, we always grow if we are willing to learn, and our discipline and efficiency will eventually improve.
Things take a lot longer than you expect, getting funding/investment often increases this as at that point you'd likely be looking at moving away from MVP or first versions of things and into more robust builds of your project.
Finding the right people! I've been blessed with my team, but I often hear horror stories of teams not working well together. Spend time finding good people, that work well together. This can make product development super fast, and easy. I'd take a lower skilled team-player over a highly skilled but arrogant person any day of the week.
My main challenge has always been that I'm a non-technical founder!
WorkHub
@maxwellcdavis Yes, this might have been a great challenge for you, but you must have been able to contribute a lot in the non-technical domains like marketing and planning, etc.
Covid xD
A remote working solution.
There were a lot of them and some are ongoing. Taking a walk down the memory lane I'd mention:
1. Launching the product soon after the COVID pandemic broke. There was still a lot of confusion and fear so encouraging the team to be productive took our founder extra work.
2. Educating prospects on why they need our product: the benefit behind our solution (a virtual office) isn't immediately obvious to everyone so we had to find ways to explain how the platform benefits teams.
3. Working as an international team - getting used to time zone differences and language barriers took some time.
4. Hiring: we had to scale fast so the pace of looking for and onboarding new talent was (and still is) crazy.
WorkHub
@maya_ovice That's a lot of challenges. Wasn't the pandemic helpful in promoting your virtual space?
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Assuming that you've already found a hypothesis of good product/market fit and an unique value proposition for your product (i.e. the "secret sauce" that only you can offer) there are two continuous challenges I always had to cope with:
1) during the implementation phase, validating the product and constantly refining/adjusting it, based on the feedback given by potential users: hard to find users and even harder to collect meaningful feedback and insights
2) promote your product to reach the right audience. SEO, Marketing Campaign, Paid Adv, PR, etc., etc. they represent an ocean that always takes a lot of time and work, and is difficult to navigate
I was short of working hands. The business plan and the entire strategy were well thought out, of course, but I had not thought about the performers. So I decided to use the team extention model to hire qualified personnel. It is a cost-effective solution that provides you with a technical expert without the need to build your own team. My business is much better now.
Building a product is hard. I still remember in the initial days when we were building Findz ( https://www.producthunt.com/upco... ), we were literally knocking our heads off to decide the features we want on the app and the ones we don't.
We are finally ready with our releases and looking forward to launching Findz this month. I will really appreciate if you can take a moment to check out the app. Are you working on something? I would love to know more about it.
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@pritam_nanda92 I have checked Findz. What a great idea! A super helpful tool—good luck with your launch. I am working on Bravo (https://www.producthunt.com/upco...), and we will be launching it soon.
Make the business plan, budget the feasibility study, find a good business model
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@fares_aktouf All of these are of enormous importance, and I know you must have put a lot of effort into them. If you would like to share which product you are working on.
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Marketing. We are both technical founders so we had to split up and one had to learn how to market a product, while one focused on building
WorkHub
@dylan_merideth I can feel it because I, too, had to opt to learn at least some essential marketing.
@dylan_merideth I'm working on improving my marketinng skills as well. I must say it has not been easy so far.
Choosing the right web design tool :D
Before you start planning, you must clearly understand what goals you want to achieve, what and who you need for this, and how much time it can take to implement. If you have an idea about this, you can roughly estimate how much funding is needed. And already based on this, you can understand where or from whom you can find financial support.
WorkHub
are@new_user_11620223ff4de5436 From what I got, planning and having a complete understanding of your industry is of utmost importance, and it can be a challenge at the start.
Doing something no one has done before is quite challenging, and of course fun. The biggest challenge we noticed is productivity is like a vitamin, and not a pain killer. It takes more effort to sell vitamins, but we are positive that once the teams get used to them, it will make their lives better.
If you do not have an existing audience related to the product you are building, then validation can be difficult. Blogging about related topics, product benefits and getting organic traffic is the way to go when you have $0 marketing budget. But it' slow and the ride is bumpy. Getting early adopters for http://tinysitetools.com/
Aimful
To understand the real user problems and needs so I can build working solution for them. The difference between what people say and how they later behave is often surprising.