What are your top challenges while building a new product and or a feature?

Building a new product is innovative! It might have some troubling thoughts and sleepless nights but the pain is worth it. Initially, the dilemma was about the success or failure ratio of the product. The next challenge I faced was finding a team of like-minded people; it is time-consuming. Once you get the right team, you can not immediately start working. You have to explain the procedure, take their inputs, and be part of discussions, sometimes an entire team gets tangled in doing a SWOT analysis of the product and strategies. Launching a new product is time taking process, we can not hurry it! Eventually, if you have planned everything well with some backups and have funded every step rationally, there are chances that the end result will be positive!

Balance between "it's working" and "it's perfect"

For me, as simple as it sounds, validating the product hypothesis quickly is a big challenge. I've used resources like the MOM test by Rob Fitzpatrick to improve my customer interviews, but sometimes it's hard to predict whether the product is a hit or a miss in its first few versions. Especially if it's in a new product category.

Finding a co-founder can be tough. I'm technical but often times not technical for everything I want to build

Finding the right no-code tool to build my app. I’m going solo and don’t have much programming knowledge. There just isn’t a comprehensive guide to what you can and can’t do with the available no-code tools out there.

Building a team from scratch

From the little experience I have i would say one of the biggest challenge is getting that motivation to improve the product after most of the work is done. Maybe it is the 80:20 rule, but once the product is almost ready, you would think. The pace of development and progress decreases and so does the motivation and then it is a vicious cycle.

I find it particularly hard to get enough quality beta users to validate the product or feature ideas. When I was developing my latest product, the Personality Reveal, I didn't know whether people will like it at all. The beta user feedback was critical. I tackled this by launching into beta very early and tried to acquire as many beta users as I could through direct chat messages in Instagram. I found out that only if you build a personal relationship with someone on Instagram, they'll answer your surveys and give you the feedback you need. Mass mailing, betalist.com or other methods never really worked for me.