What decisions have improved your business results?
If you're an entrepreneur, you make countless decisions every day.
And if you're just starting out and have limited experience, a lot of it is trial and error.
Most decisions won't lead to outstanding results (and sometimes they won't work at all).
But I'm sure there are a few that changed the direction of your business for the better.
Speaking for myself and the projects I've been involved in:
For Minimalist Phone (B2C segment):
Hiring an external team that knew how to run performance marketing campaigns.
Growing our internal team with specialists. Having experts focus on what they do best led to much better results.
Meeting in person twice a year. It strengthened our relationships and made remote collaboration much smoother.
For my personal brand (social media/marketing industry):
Having occasional calls with people from my community. They got to know the real person behind the content, which made them much more supportive.
Starting to promote my paid services more. Before that, people expected everything for free.
Saying "no" to more opportunities. Staying focused has been far more valuable than trying to do everything.
What decisions made the biggest difference in your business?
Replies
The best decision I made this year sounds backwards: I stopped trying to make more, and started trying to decide better.
I'm launching my product on Product Hunt today (a rough, exciting day 🙂), and building it forced three decisions that changed everything:
1. Killing features instead of adding them. Every founder instinct says "add more." But every feature I cut made the product clearer and the message sharper. Subtraction was harder — and more valuable — than addition.
2. Talking to users on WhatsApp, not through analytics. Dashboards tell you what happened. A voice note from a real user tells you why. My best product decisions came from messy conversations, not clean charts.
3. Betting on the opposite of the trend. Everyone in my space is building tools that produce more content, faster. I bet that the real problem isn't production — it's judgment. Deciding what's worth making before you make it. That contrarian bet became the entire product.
Funny how your list and mine rhyme — "saying no to more opportunities" and "cutting features" are the same muscle. Focus is a decision you have to make daily, not once.
Your point about calls with your community hits home. Doing exactly that today and it's humbling.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@marius_stoicescu So tell us, with how many people you called! :D :)
@busmark_w_nika honest count: about a dozen real conversations during launch week. First answers are always polite — the truth shows up when you ask 'why' the second time. Two of those conversations changed how I think about the product. And one, last night, genuinely made my day brighter 🙂
These are great insights. I'm still building, it's helpful to see decisions that had measurable impact. Thanks for sharing yours - especially the part about staying focused. Following to see what others add.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@shikha_shandilya Thank you for being present here! :) I am so happy that more people build for LinkedIn! :)
One of the best decisions we've made was building in public.
Instead of waiting until everything was "perfect", we started sharing our progress, asking for feedback, and talking to users every week.
It completely changed the way we build Abroad Life. Some of our best product decisions came directly from conversations with migrants, not from our original roadmap...
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@camila_hiriart Can you somehow track how many users you reached?
The biggest one for me was accepting I could not be the expert in every room. Once I brought in people who actually knew care compliance and hospitality operations better than I ever would, and stopped trying to weigh in on every call, the quality of decisions across the board went up, not down.
Second was building the habit of writing down how a decision got made, not just what we decided. Months later when a similar problem shows up in a completely different part of the business, having that reasoning on record saves so much re-litigating.
Saying no to opportunities that looked good on paper but would have added another thing to juggle made a bigger difference than any single yes did.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@stacywycof83995 hahah, the second point is valid. I should do it too, because I do not remember why I am doing certain things :DDDDD
@busmark_w_nika Haha, glad I'm not the only one! 😄
a few that made a real difference for me:
1. showing up consistently before having anything to sell.
2. building presence, sharing how i think, engaging genuinely.
by the time there was something to talk about, people already knew who i was.
3. stopping myself from doing everything. early on i said yes to too much and spread thin across things that didn't compound. learning to say no and stay focused changed the quality of everything i was working on.
4. and honestly, being in the right rooms. not just online but physically. the conversations that changed my direction most happened at events, not in DMs.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@riya_pariyar All points are brilliant. I need to practice more on point No. 4 :) Haven't been to the conference for a while :)
One of the biggest improvements for us was talking to users much earlier instead of waiting until we thought everything was polished. That feedback helped us prioritize the right features and avoid spending weeks building things people didn't actually need.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@worksforme How many users is ideal to talk with?
For me, one decision has consistently paid off: building products around problems I've personally experienced.
When you've lived the problem yourself, you understand the pain much better, build faster, and know exactly who you're building for.
The second was learning to say "no" more often. Every exciting opportunity comes with an opportunity cost, and focus usually wins in the long run.
I'm curious, if you could go back and change just one business decision you've made over the years, what would it be and why?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@md_khayruzzaman I love this! :) Wehn you know the problem, you exactly know which features to build! :)
Three decisions that changed everything for auriko.pro:
Keeping it completely free. Every time I thought about adding a subscription I reminded myself why I built it in the first place. Free meant more kids could actually use it.
Talking to real users early. The first few people who tried it told me things I never would have figured out on my own. Changed a lot about how the app works.
Saying no to features. I kept wanting to add more but the best decision was cutting things and making what existed actually good.
Still early days but those three made the biggest difference so far 💛 auriko.pro.
Hi Nika,
I'm new to the Product Hunt community. Until now, I've been hunting products the old-fashioned way – through word-of-mouth. Which is a pretty good strategy for avoiding feeling totally overwhelmed by the online information floods.
So many products, not enough time.
As a founder, I think you have to make the decision every day to keep building and doing despite the noise.
Before I became a founder, I spent three years letting that same noise dissuade me.
Reflecting on your post:
I still haven't hired external marketing support but I think about it daily - decision TBD (please, nobody cold email me)
I swear by working with people who are decent, kind, and curious over the brilliant b***ards. I stand by that decision.
We started out fully in-person, which was definitely the right way to kick off. Good decision.
I haven't learned to say "no" yet... deciding what not to do is often the hardest.
_
One of my favourite metaphors on this topic:
Three frogs sit on a lily pad. One decides to jump in the water. How many are left?
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Three. Deciding to jump is not jumping.
Early-stage view, so a smaller scale than yours. The decision that changed the most for me was starting to show up in communities BEFORE the product felt ready. I had months of quiet building with zero feedback loops, and two weeks of daily conversations have moved the product and my own conviction more than a month of code. Second: writing every decision and its reason into one plain file. Sounds bureaucratic for a solo builder, but it ended the re-litigating of old choices, which was quietly eating my evenings. And the third one I stole from your earlier thread: asking for feedback instead of support. It changed how every conversation about my product feels, on both sides.