What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned on your startup journey so far?

That I need to take care of many more roles than I signed up for? 🤣

Don't underestimate marketing. It's going to be way harder than you thought. Talk about what your building with your audience, or create an audience around it.

As a founder, you must be the biggest user and fan of your product. Not because you created it, but because it's useful. It is very likely that someone will need it too (for MVP stage).

I wrote my reply and read through the ones you all wrote. That's why I want to write another one... 😅 I think sustainability is the most important factor for a startup. All the decisions you make should be a decision to survive in the market.

If you’re truly trying to bootstrap traffic/an audience from scratch, you need to spend time grinding on things that don’t scale (posting, commenting, etc.)

Great question Isa - and there are so many BIG lessons, but I guess my top 4 - 1) Start with a small target audience, don't think too macro; 2) Find the right 'hooks' for users to use your product and market the hell out of those; 3) Start raising money (or more money) as early as possible as this doesn't happen overnight; 4) Believe and back yourself and make sure you have some "cheerleaders" to support your journey

Persistence over anything else

Focus on going deeper into one vertical at a time. Start with 1 product/service and master it. You won’t have the resources to go horizontal for quite some time.

Do not believe everything a new hire says. Ask for more details, examples, references - some people are great bullshitters. Stick to hiring contractors for a while.

Biggest lesson when hiring is figure out who can execute and prioritise all of the chaos - the adaptibility - knowing early when you need to pivot