What was the hardest thing you've experienced in business?
Everyone perceives entrepreneurship completely differently, and the weight of certain challenges varies from case to case. You always see things differently depending on the stage of life and business you're in, because your position is different each time.
When I was a teenager – my biggest problem was "What will people think of me when I will start doing this?"
In my early twenties – my biggest problem was "What if I can't figure out accounting, taxes, legal stuff?"
Now I have a different problem – how do I scale something?
The reasons can vary in nature: legal (taking someone to court), financial (convincing investors), or even existential (where legal costs can put your personal assets at risk).
What was the hardest problem you've faced in business so far?
Replies
I think its hiring for me. Unless I have a team that collaborates well, is on the same page I wont be able to work on a solid product. Once I have the solid product then its scaling :)
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@alihabib_ According to what you have chosen the right people into your team? :)
@busmark_w_nika I love my team :D
They have the right attitude to work, they enjoy life, they know when to step up but make work fun as well.
They don't panic when problems come rather sit, delegate and fix it. They want to learn more, be more.
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@alihabib_ Can I be part of your team too? :D
@busmark_w_nika Absolutely :D
Hello Inbox
Hi Nika, yes, definitely scaling. I have no issues coming up with ideas and building, but scaling, marketing, is definitely the biggest challenge. Back in the early 2000's when I started my first business I was using Overture (which became Google Ads). Those were the days. $0.05 to $0.10 per click, I was spending $3000 per month and doing a million plus in sales. Since then I feel like paid marketing channels have become too expensive for startups. Really depends what you're selling and you have to spend a lot of money to find out what does or doesn't work.
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@ismaelyws Like yes... those promoting companies have also grown; they ask too much money. It was definitely easier 10 yrs back to be discovered. Now, we are pushed to upskill ourselves.
Being a bootstrapped founder with a decade of experience in managing global tech teams, the programming part is easy but the marketing part is hard. Especially when you don't have as big of a marketing budget as other companies. Therefore, my biggest challenges as of now is definitely the discovery and visibility of the product.
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@aggie_ho How do you approach marketing? How do you distribute?
@busmark_w_nika I am still trying to figure that it out actually. I've been trying different methods of advertisements but so far it haven't gone very well. I've been also networking with marketing experts to learn from their experience and then trying it out. I'd love any suggestions to try if you have any that's worked for you. How have you approached marketing for your business?
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@aggie_ho Speaking for the app company – we first used only good optimising for Google Play – Images, ASO, videos, then started collaborating with PPC company and are currently trying to talk with bigger media outlets. It is like building the respect from inside first, then earning respect from the external sources.
@busmark_w_nika Thanks Nika for your insight I'll try that out!
I’m still early in my growth journey, but one of the hardest things I’ve experienced so far is managing execution under pressure.
When you’re preparing for a launch, there are so many moving parts at once — positioning, outreach, community building, design assets, SEO, and team coordination. The hard part is not just doing the tasks, but keeping everything moving without losing focus.
It has taught me that business challenges are often less about one big problem and more about handling many small uncertainties at the same time.
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@sylvialane I would say that big problems consist from small things :) That's why I like to have a look at details and analyse them :)
I can relate to this. Building the product feels straightforward compared to getting people to discover it. My biggest challenge has been distribution: finding the right channels, getting attention, and consistently reaching the people who would actually benefit from the product.
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@li_yujie Which channels were good for you?
@busmark_w_nika I'm still figuring that out, to be honest.
X and ProductHunt have been the most useful so far for getting early feedback and visibility, but neither has become a reliable acquisition channel yet.
For me, distribution is still very much a work in progress.
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@li_yujie what will be the product?
@busmark_w_nika It’s called PouchVerse.
A local-first file hub that brings all your files into one searchable place across mobile, desktop and TV.
It’s already built and I’m currently refining how people discover and use it.
Here’s a short demo if you’re curious:
https://pouchverse.com/demo.html?video=1
YouTube：
https://youtu.be/Npla0DFtpbQ
For me it wasn't legal or financial, it was credibility. I'm 18, built AIDAL solo in 14 days while still in high school, and the hardest part has been getting a compliance officer at a real fintech to take a cold email seriously when it's signed by someone who could be their intern. I've stopped trying to hide my age in outreach and started leading with it instead, since the people who reply are the ones who find "built this in 14 days during finals" more interesting than off-putting. Still figuring out if that's the right call long-term.
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@anthony_widjaja I am wishing the successful launch, it will be okay! :)
@busmark_w_nika Consistency
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@semi_hayat Period! 🤌
For me it is not one event, it is structural: being the only person in the company. I build a multi product portfolio alongside a full time job, so the scarce resource is never money or even time, it is judgement under fatigue. No second person catches a bad call before it ships.
The specific hard part is deciding what not to do. Every product wants more features, every channel wants more attention, and a solo founder can say yes to all of it for a while on adrenaline. Then quality drops everywhere at once. Learning to kill my own ideas, and to leave good ones unbuilt because they are not for this quarter, has been harder than any technical problem.
Your staging holds. The teenage version was fear of being judged. The solo version is the opposite, too many things I could credibly do and no one but me to choose between them. Scaling looks like an org problem, but underneath it is a focus problem first.
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@oshylabs How can I know which of my ideas I should kill? 😅
@busmark_w_nika I use three tests, in order.
One, demand. Has anyone asked for it twice, unprompted, or am I the only one excited? My own excitement is the least reliable signal I have.
Two, reversibility. If I ship it and it flops, how cheaply can I pull it back? Cheap to reverse means I can let the market decide instead of me. Expensive to reverse needs real evidence before it gets built.
Three, focus cost. Not what the idea earns, but what it takes from the one thing already working. Most of my bad calls were not bad ideas, they were good ideas that stole attention from a better one.
The honest part is you rarely know for certain, so I kill on opportunity cost, not on the idea itself. The question is never is this good, it is would I rather have this than the thing I would drop to build it.
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@oshylabs The thing is... I also want the project to be very close to me, and I should have a passion for that, because if I do not have it, I will not be there for so long.
@busmark_w_nika That is the right instinct, and it does not fight the kill tests, it feeds them. Passion is what keeps you in the chair through the boring months when nothing is working and no one is watching. The two only conflict if you confuse passion for the idea with passion for the problem. Ideas are cheap and disposable. A problem you actually care about survives ten pivots.
For me that problem was lifting. A decade in and still no tool that adapted training to recovery instead of just counting sets, so I built one. On the flat days the motivation is already there, because the problem is mine and I do not have to manufacture it. Pick a problem close enough that you would still poke at it unpaid, then stay ruthless about which ideas you spend on it.
Propane
vote farms on Product hunt.. 😮💨
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@atherkildsen i still cannot get that business work anyway.
Propane
@busmark_w_nika lol
The hardest thing wasn't a moment: it was a mindset shift.
Going from "what will people think?" to "what does the market need?" sounds simple. It took me years.
Building QuizzR as a solo founder, the hardest thing has been the silence. You ship something you're proud of. And then... nothing. No validation. No rejection. Just silence.
Failure gives you data. Success gives you momentum. Silence gives you nothing to work with — and that's the hardest thing to push through.
What I've learned: the entrepreneurs who survive aren't necessarily the smartest or the best funded. They're the ones who got comfortable making decisions in the silence.
The scaling question you're asking now is actually the good problem. It means someone said yes.