I wish someone had told me how much time it would take. I was so naive when I started my company, thinking that it would be easy to get off the ground and make a name for myself. What I didn't realize until later is that there's so much work involved in building a business and so many things that can go wrong. I'm grateful for my experience now, but if I could go back and tell myself something about starting a company, it would be: "Don't expect things to go smoothly. And if you had to pivot... PIVOT!"
I have struggled with bad sleep my entire life, but I have found a way to manage it that works for me. I take melatonin to help me fall asleep and stay asleep through the night. It has made a tremendous difference in my overall well-being and ability to manage stress.
Hey everyone! After listening to Airbnb CEO and Co-Founder Brian Chesky's story about the early struggles and outrageous demands from investors on the "This Week in Startups" podcast, it got me thinking... What was the most challenging experience I've had as a founder? For me, it was when an investor told me that no one would ever use AI assistants in their daily lives - this was just before ChatGPT came into existence, mind you! Unfortunately, our entire business was built around this idea. What about you? What's the worst investor meeting horror story you've experienced? Let's hear it!
We wanted to build an AI-powered productivity assistant. Prior to development, we launched a simple email newsletter and landing page to collect leads. We promised daily emails with habit suggestions, which we coded in 5 days. (Check out Insumo 1.0 launch at my Profile) We obtained ~1000 organic leads with launching on Product Hunt, BetaList, and Reddit to generate interest. With the traction gained, we secured a pre-seed funding round from investors. With the funding we launched our iOS app, as our target audience and 80% of paying users are on iOS. We did Performance marketing on Facebook, Snapchat etc and brought in 25K+ more users. With paid traffic also resulting in organic traffic which bumped us to 35K users. We later started playing the SEO game, wrote content in various platforms and mostly on our website www.insumo.io. Kept creating content on social media, created podcasts called "Habit Talks" and kept talking with our active users which helped us to gain 10K users. Our focus was to acquire mostly free users, learn from their behavior and needs, and launch our AI-powered web app. Now We're preparing for the public beta launch of our web app.
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