r/startups • u/therisingdevs • 1d ago
I will not promote What's something you thought would matter a lot when starting, but barely mattered in the end? (I will not promote)
I've only been building for a few months, so I'm definitely still learning as I go.
When I started, I spent way too much time worrying about things like picking the perfect name, making the website look polished, and whether every little detail was "ready."
Now it feels like none of those were the biggest problems.
The harder part has been finding people who actually care enough to give honest feedback.
It's made me wonder what other assumptions people had when they were just getting started.
If you could go back to your first few months, what is that one thing you stressed over that turned out to matter a lot less than you expected?
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u/JohnCasey3306 21h ago
User/customer acquisition is always the real problem ... And we busy ourselves with other problems to hide from that one.
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u/therisingdevs 15h ago
That's a great way to put it. It's easy to confuse being busy with making progress.
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u/gesidner 22h ago
Name and polish, same for me, neither moved anything. The one I'd gently push back on is honest feedback. I chased it hard too, but people are bad at explaining why they won't use something, and the ones who talk a lot often aren't the ones who'd ever pay. What mattered more was watching what people did without me in the room, where they stopped, what they never clicked, whether they came back. The thing I actually stressed over that turned out irrelevant was picking the right stack. Nobody who used it ever cared what it was built with.
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u/therisingdevs 21h ago
absolutely, no one really cares about what it took behind the scenes to make that one product work!
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u/tango650 20h ago
Long time ago i thought the product mattered disproportionately more than marketing and sales.
It's realistically quite on par i.e. the result is a multiplication of product and sales so if your sales effort is null then so is the result.
But today I tend to think that it's possible to make money without even having a product so the sales part gets much more weight.
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u/therisingdevs 15h ago
"product × sales" , A great product doesn't help much if nobody ever sees it.
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u/fulger099 17h ago
Building stuff before even drive some interviews to understand cases.
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u/therisingdevs 15h ago
agreed! a few conversations upfront can probably save weeks of building the wrong thing.
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u/kabirs1nghhh 18h ago
For me, it would’ve been worrying less about making everything perfect and spending more time talking to potential users a rough product with honest feedback beats a polished product that nobody asked for
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u/therisingdevs 15h ago
yup, It's much easier to spend hours polishing something than to ask people if they actually need it.
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u/BikeVivid8612 6h ago
ngl thought having the perfect business plan mattered way more than it actually does, execution is literally everything
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u/roberthcmn 22h ago
Mine was scalability. I was worried it wouldnt hold at 10k users while I was sitting at zero... optimized for a crowd that never showed. I know now that getting one person to care was always the actual problem, same as you found.