As a Founder, what has been the most challenging part of your business in the initial stage?

@vedranrasic I agree with you. It's hard to stay focused and grow your company when there are so many things pulling you in different directions. Trying to grow your company can be a lot of fun, but it's also a lot of work. For us at Notesally, getting early adopters for our product was difficult, but we tried a few different strategies that helped us get some traction. Our launch on Product Hunt was successful and gave us some leads, but now our biggest challenge is user adoption and retention. We'll need to continue trying different tactics to see what works best for us.

@maciej_cupial True! Focusing on the wrong things can be disastrous for a company. For us at Notesally. we didn’t need paid promotions in the beginning, but we did them anyway. We targeted LinkedIn and Capterra to get our first paid user, but it didn’t help. People would sign up but never use the product again. So instead, we focused on getting early adopters through Product Hunt, Twitter, and the Indie Hackers community by talking to people directly. And now what we see is that we have grown more organically than with paid marketing.

@qudsia_ali Very true! It's hard to overestimate the importance of a strong financial foundation for any business. When income is sporadic, it can be tough to stay on top of things and make sure your spending doesn't outpace your profits. We are fully bootstrapped so we understand it.

@mike_mcminn True. It's difficult to know what to work on first when you're starting a new company. Notesally is a great product, but we didn’t do enough research before starting development. We should have looked into whether or not a product like this is needed, and what features we could add. Once we had an idea, we found a competitor in the same domain that had raised several rounds of funding. We thought they have a user base, so our idea had been validated. We began developing our product without first understanding what our audience wanted or needed. We developed one feature and aggressively promoted it, without even talking to any potential customers. We wasted one year around this. Now finally after some organic growth after Product Hunt Launch, we are talking to people who are helping us develop the right features. Btw congratulations on 200K users!

@sueone Thanks for sharing this! I'll check them out.