What's been your biggest technical bottleneck as a small startup lately? | Hacker News Reader

What's been your biggest technical bottleneck as a small startup lately?

8 pointsdevralcomp14 comments

I'm doing some research to understand where small teams and early stage startups are getting stuck, especially around:

Launching landing pages quickly

Frontend performance issues

Building simple MVPs (e.g., with Next.js)

Adding AI agents or automation tools

If you’ve hit a wall in any of these areas (or others), I’d love to hear about it. What’s been unexpectedly hard or frustrating recently?

Appreciate any insights

trying to get a clearer view of where I can offer the most value.

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when I was building my own side projects my biggest bottleneck was everything around the product.

   - polished landing page
   - SEO
   - marketing and branding materials
   - setting up social accounts: Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn 
   - preparing basic CI/CD to be able to quickly deploy changes
   - setting up ads across many ad services like Google, Facebook and etc,.
   - setting up CNAMEs, records for email deliverability

Totally feel this, the non coding parts of building a product can be way more time consuming than expected.

Iterating quickly. Basically you want to get something out there for people to comment on and play around with. But the engineering structure to get something out is not necessarily the structure to modify quickly.

I once launched a recipe app. People wanted diet recipes, so I added calorie data. Turns out diet was low carb and specifically they wanted a list of things below 5g carbs or so.

Then they hated the categorization UI. They were used to FB's style of having a wall, so they wanted cards and not a list.

They would add things to cart, but before making a purchase, they wanted to talk to a human on WhatsApp or something they could trace the number to. So I need to design the purchase flow with this in mind.

They wanted a community to support each other for dieting, so I gave them a single chat room lol. But massive public chat rooms are not a community, so we had to segment this into rooms.

You get the picture. AI is just great for these kinds of things but I feel like it's an incomplete solution.

Totally get this fast launch ≠ easy iteration. Users teach you what they really want, and AI can help, but can’t replace that human feedback loop. But i loved how you keep responding to what your users want. Great Work keep going

My hurdle on my startup is marketing.

I know for sure my threatfeed is high quality and worth the subscription. I know it functions; it's a working project to be sure.

Gumroad does all my payment processing and taxation stuff for me.

But i've gotten 100 views in a month and 0 customers :(

http://mapleintel.ca

marketing is a real struggle specially for Tech Builders

I'd recommend learning about marketing basics and speaking to your target audience /ICP. From the website, it's not entirely clear what I would utilize the threatfeed to help protect my network and what are the benefits of using your threatfeed vs others.

here's some communities you can check out to spread the word / trying to get your initial users: https://www.pluggo.ai/sites/mapleintel_ca

I’m working solo, nothing insane just a project management app.

Maybe I should have picked something simpler, because in order for the app to be useful, it has to actually work and solve the problems I’ve faced with other software.

And those are hard to implement. Doable, but takes time. Figuring out how stuff works, then getting it to work with my app, and finally ensuring I don’t break other stuff.

AI is somewhat helpful although it is only helpful in the initial stages of quick overviews. Actual implementing it just breaks or takes way longer.

Usually the problem is when collaborating with other people, it's hard to give them access to stuff and track what they can access, to make sure collaboration works ok (e.g. many tools don't support 2 people editing the same content with conflict resolution).

Absolutely agree, access control and real-time collaboration are huge pain points

Getting feedback and handling (potentially automating) social media

The gubernment.

How much to spend on Reddit ads.

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