What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned on your startup journey so far?

Focus on revenue more than growth.

It's important to remember that even if you believe your idea is brilliant, it may not be suitable for everyone. To ensure your product is successful, you should conduct market and user experience research, survey potential users, and ask their opinions

Be very adaptable. Things change very fast and almost nothing goes on according to the plan.

Don't underestimate marketing. It's going to be way harder than you thought. Talk about what your building with your audience, or create an audience around it.

Focus! The no's you say are almost as important as the yes. Chose your priorities and go for them

Doing every aspect of the business ourselves is much better than paying money to 3rd parties to do stuff for us

As a founder, you must be the biggest user and fan of your product. Not because you created it, but because it's useful. It is very likely that someone will need it too (for MVP stage).

Simplicity. It's tempting to think that adding feature after feature will take you to PMF but the need to add lots of features might be an underlying PMF issue. Choose a small number of things (one?) to change over incumbents and do it really well. Let that shine and be "enough" for your early adopters. If it's not, then choose a different bet.

One of my biggest mistakes has been to depend on too many people. I've learnt that it's better to understand and manage things by myself at initial stage. This gives a good understanding and hold over the product. Later on delegate the work to those who enjoys it.

Talk to the potential customers. Interact with as many of them as you can and really try to understand the problem you're trying to solve!

That I need to take care of many more roles than I signed up for? 🤣

I wrote my reply and read through the ones you all wrote. That's why I want to write another one... 😅 I think sustainability is the most important factor for a startup. All the decisions you make should be a decision to survive in the market.

My biggest lesson is the power of networking. It doesn't matter what type of business you have, a strong network is gold.

If you’re truly trying to bootstrap traffic/an audience from scratch, you need to spend time grinding on things that don’t scale (posting, commenting, etc.)

Understanding audience's problem and frequency is very very important

Great question Isa - and there are so many BIG lessons, but I guess my top 4 - 1) Start with a small target audience, don't think too macro; 2) Find the right 'hooks' for users to use your product and market the hell out of those; 3) Start raising money (or more money) as early as possible as this doesn't happen overnight; 4) Believe and back yourself and make sure you have some "cheerleaders" to support your journey

have faith on yourseslf

Persistence over anything else

Focus on going deeper into one vertical at a time. Start with 1 product/service and master it. You won’t have the resources to go horizontal for quite some time.

Do not believe everything a new hire says. Ask for more details, examples, references - some people are great bullshitters. Stick to hiring contractors for a while.