Founders, what growth struggles do you go through daily?

Sharath Kuruganty
16 replies
Seek help from the community or offer your expertise to people who need them in this thread.

Replies

David J. Kim
Nailing our persona to a T. That's tough, and the way we're doing it is talking to as many people as we can and zooming in on those who are most receptive.
Mekkie Bansil
Trying to figure out where the growth problem is: is it PM fit? distribution? time?
Andrew E
Where to focus efforts - divide into 5 projects or do one at a time. Where to focus time: oversee and manage work or DIY. Where to spend money: marketing or tech.
Andrew E
@rdnckky it's a slog. Over time, it gets a bit clearer where the best ROI is for time and what tasks can be delegated out. But at the early stage, it can be quite unclear.
Lalit Pandey
@rdnckky @andrew_lvlf I have worked with several founders and I feel the ones that succeed have a clear sense of what to delegate & when? As a founder, your biggest struggle is to know what's of priority right now? So, if you can create a system where you can delegate tasks to someone trustworthy and it shall only come to you when it needs your utmost attention or understanding what can be pushed back for now. You only have 24 hours in a day and if you're obsessing over a feature that is just an eye candy while product is not doing the core task, well, that's a waste of your time.
Andrew E
@rdnckky @lastyprsfe It's easier said than done when deadlines and targets get missed and timelines shrink. In those cases, it can be hard to know what will move the needle the most for the next stage. It's not normally about feature creep. It's usually about moving multiple big rocks up a hill at once vs one at a time in the order that helps the most. Here's the type of example I'm referring to: You have VC meetings lined up in 2 wks but the developers were late on a release and as a result, your latest monthly growth numbers went south. Do you a) focus on getting ready for the meetings to ensure better success rates or b) put more effort into marketing, ignoring some of the meeting and document prep, in an effort to gin up numbers in advance of the meeting?
Xiao Lu
Growing awareness and engagement through social media. Tech founders gravitate toward formulas, but this is more like navigating through a moving maze!
Ng Fang Kiang
get people to sign up
Edgar
Marketing the product on social media as it's still getting built! We have a product that doesn't have quite a product market fit but what we believe based on talking to users will take another 2 months.
TL Robinson
The biggest difficulty is finding ways to increase our exposure to promote growth.
Satya N Murthy Kalluri
Resistance to build that feature just because writing code comes naturally. I had to nurture myself to not jump into coding. Instead, talk to customers about what they need, distil and infer the feedback, prioritise NEED.
nilova.pande@qinaps.com
Finding users and then paying users. Market the product and get users to give feedback. Growing the lead pipeline. Pricing the product as a note-taking application or as a technical documentation solution. Waddling through the entire universe of different automation software, and then the perennial challenge of building relevant content. Going freemium or charging for POC? How to keep the company afloat by bootstrapping. I think it's pretty much everything about a start-up.
nilova.pande@qinaps.com
@qinapsworkbooks we are taking baby steps to grow the business. We have some paid users. We are thinking of pivoting our approach from a note-taking generic tool to a more specific technical documentation application. But again we need more feedback to build in the relevant features.