What have you learned from your experience as a solo founder?

Junior Owolabi
4 replies
The lessons I learned: - I should have broken down workload (by utilizing tools like Jira), instead of working 20 hours a day random tasks (eventually making mistakes). - I should have prioritized tasks differently from multiple founder startups. As solo founders, we think we can multitask sales/marketing/development (we can't). - I should have tested my idea with friends and colleagues before spending a year developing my MVP without customer input or interest (eventually pivoted). - I shouldn’t have used paid acquisition to get my initial users (unless every other channel failed). - I should have gathered a following for my startup, before launching (it is overwhelming developing a product and having no one interested). What experiences did you have? (We may I still be making the mistakes you experienced)

Replies

Jamie Gilman
Yep, some familiar ones in there! I would have figured out my exact target audience and the marketing channels for how I was going to reach them before I started the project - I had a good number of users from Product Hunt but that's slowly dropped down now. I would have spent more time writing supportive content for the site to have some content marketing and looked more into SEO techniques from the outset. I also would have had a longer public beta period to get more users onboard and generating more feedback. It's all good stuff to take into the next project though!
Lucas Le Ray
Thank you for sharing your experience! About me, I should have spent more time talking to my target audience
Samantha Robinson
Thank you for this information because it really opened up the gate that i do not need to pay funds at this moment to get users.