Is there anything you regret doing at your business's early stage?

My choice of co-founder.

I myself regret that I started taking the first steps without taking into account the opinions of experienced people. I had a lot of self-importance ((But I was lucky in that I chose my first site correctly - https://1xbet.com/en/ Maybe it did me good that I lost some money in the beginning. They say that this way the experience becomes much more valuable for a person.

Not solidifying a clear business plan and product development roadmap. Without either of these, it is extremely difficult to scale with new employees, projects, and strategies further down the road.

Yes sure, - Not Looking deeply int to the unit economics - Not to build a Data warehouse from day one - Hiring juniors.

Great prompt, @katyaveremeichik! Certainly have had a few regrets in Outdone’s early lifespan, and I’m sure there are many more to come 😅 Most recently I’ve been reflecting on mistakes related to giving up control over our product dev and design — mainly in the form of freelance support. This was a necessary evil for us, and one that certainly caused its headaches. In the future we’re going to be more critical about when we need to outsource support vs. handle things ourselves. Giving up control of our product design and build led to much longer timelines and larger headaches, which could have been avoided if we retained more ownership and accountability.

I wasted way too much time trying to make everything perfect. I learned business is a lot more about trial and error and fixing stuff along the way.

Underestimating how quickly competitors can replicate the model and use price damping. When I've launched my stand-up paddleboard rental station in 2016, I was the first and only in my whole country. I was keeping the prices high in order to make the highest profits and build a culture where consumers don't take this services for granted. And I was giving generous discounts to repeat customer who respected our safety guidelines, surfing etiquette and culture. In general, I was building a whole community and culture of consumption, where customers really valued all the effort we've put into safety, and high prices were used to make customer really pay attention to what we say and teach to them. But what competitors did the next year was just buying stand-up paddleboards, putting a very low price tag on rentals, and letting people use it with minimal guidance. It pushed me to decide to sell all I got and quit, because they've ruined the culture that I was trying to build, and I didn't like where it was all going and didn't want to be involved when things would lead to emergencies / injuries. Then there were many cases when sup-borders who rented from my competitors required saving by the coast guard, some where injured, some required special operations to save them from the open sea. But it happened 2-3 years after I quit. When I was operating, we had a strict rule of not going into water if the forecasted wind was over 7 meters per second in the direction off-coast or parallel to coast. 7 meters is the average speed that a rookie SUP-boarded can sustain, so any wind faster then that and blowing off the coast is extremely dangerous. We've 'lost' about 70% of days that we could operate and when customers demanded it, but I was strong in my decision and since we were the only ones back then, people had no choice but to learn how to use reliable weather forecasting tools and adopt this culture. But I regret that I underestimated my competitors neglecting safety rules and spoiling the market in terms of culture. They were and still are focusing on revenue only, making SUP boarding more and more unpopular because of bad cases they create due to this irresponsible approach. I regret overestimating customers and competitors ability to comprehend and evaluate the true risks of this activity on water.

Such a great question to ask and even more insightful answers from the community 🤩 Any "tiny" mistake can have huge and irreversible repercussions when the stage is so early - this situation with so much at stake is probably also what makes the adventure so addictive! I am not a founder myself, only a Maker :-D but my 2 cents would be: not surrounding yourself with the core key persons. As a maker, I can only stress out the tremendous impact of having the right handful of people gathering to build a new product. If that doesn't work (either for professional or human reasons), it feels impossible to achieve a successful business.

Lack of automation and software solutions. Even at the start of the business, I didn’t think at all that I would need it, and I did all the tasks manually. But only after studying the business rules https://codeeffects.com/Content/... and using a lot of software, I became more free in control management