What are your biggest challenges as an early stage founder?

The right problem to solve. I would say that is pre-early stage :)

My biggest challenge as an early-stage founder is to find good product ideas. I know I have to validate any product ideas/hypotheses/assumptions to find the most important thing for potential customers/users. But how can I find those product ideas to validate? That's my biggest obstacle now. =)

USERS!

I think distribution and generating leads are the hardest at this stage. It's a vicious cycle where prospects want to see testimonials so it's hard to convince them before you actually have a client base. Once you get the first few clients, you can get their feedback and use it to convert future prospects. Also, considering how organic distribution is very much dying (social media reaches have been steadily lower and there's a pressing need to invest in ads), building a community without investing in paid promotion is a challenge.

Personally, I find that finding early adopters is the biggest struggle. Hopefully, our product hunt launch on May 11th helps move this along www.producthunt.com/upcoming/fresco 😉

To go past your Early Adopters so that you can Scale Up without being disturbed by competition

Managing my time between everything that I need to do, trying to be a jack of all trades with a million balls in the air.

We are constantly planning to launch the product on the foreign market. Application? Mission Impossible. The competition is fierce, but we are not giving up.

a mix of the first two options I guess

I guess the biggest challenge is to choose the right battle... What's the priority of the day is the hardest question each morning.

There so many topics that have early been mentioned but I didn't see product market fit. Customers are floating in pockets and finding the pocket where you customers are is one of the biggest challenge. Especially now more than ever where people are in several different communities and getting their attention is tough. It's from here that I feel startups start getting their first early adopters and things start to roll forward.

I would even add something different: finding the right people for your team or co-founders. Especially when you have a deeply technical product. But if you have a good team, validating your idea + finding early adopters is the hardest.

understanding how to market effectively is a huge challenge for us as we are both more more technical leaning than sales oriented. This has been a change we have made, with one of us trying to learn and own that function so that some expertise can acrue

There's a nexus where these all meet but I would word it slightly differently. We tend to keep users but seek to drive engagement deeper & broader - more frequent visits and more intense usage as a measure of delivered value. Early it was hardest to get users through the onboard funnel as there's a trust issue and those that did come through were often 'tire-kickers' - presented with less enthusiasm (click around but don't do much). Luckily for us, they keep their accounts though and swung back by periodically (often after a nudge or two) and as we've rolled out more features we've been able to increase engagement for many of them.

Difficult question Druv - As always it is very difficult to answer because it depends from what you are building, the sector and the stage. First of all I think that comunication is a big barrier even if sometimes we don't recognize it - Both with with users and investors, having a clear valeu proposition is crucial, sometimes it's even more effective than the quality of the product itself in converting users. So I would say finding the value porposition to attract the ideal customer, the ideal VCs, and the ideal people you want onboard with you!

Users ... definitely. Spent a lot of time strategizing, designing and building the product. Somehow neglected the "build the community of early adopters" part and now struggling to reach them to move to next step of iteration/improvement.

It takes a ton of searching and testing to find great distribution channels, work them, and respond to what they need. When they come and stay though, it's the most motivating thing :)