Founders, where did you find real guidance early on?
As a first-time founder, figuring things out in the early stages feels like playing darts in the dark. Especially so when you're building something enterprise-facing or education-focused: it’s hard to know where to even look for non-technical direction.
We’ve mostly been applying to accelerators and incubators for mentorship and the occasional resource from university, but outside of that, I’ve realized I have no real map now that we're finishing prototyping our product.
Cold DMs help sometimes, and the internet’s full of advice but most of it either assumes you're a growth god or already funded. So i’m wondering, what's worked for you?
Where have you actually found guidance, mentorship, or even just honest direction (especially as you're beginning your journey building)?
Whether it’s distribution, feedback, or just about knowing which way is up — I'd love to hear what helped!
Replies
Product Hunt
What are you building and where are you stuck? I know this gets said a lot but a great place to find direction early on is to talk to users (potential, real, etc.). Often times I see that building for a small audience and truly solving an issue is a great way to start some momentum.
@steveb Appreciate the response! I’m building MoMoney, an educational platform designed to help absolutely anyone learn trading and investing seamlessly, all in one place. We use microlearning and quizzes, bring in AI for personalized help where users need it, and built our own in-house trading simulator designed to be a stepping stone to live markets.
We’ve actually done a ton of user interviews and feel like we’re maybe halfway to true product–market fit. After months of digging into user pain points and mapping the whitespace, one thing is clear: people who want to learn trading and investing just don’t have a smooth, confident path from zero knowledge to theory to actual market experience. We have our users' pain points nailed.
The thing we're beyond struggling with is distribution. We’re simply not in front of enough people yet. I’m learning a lot as I go, and we’re definitely doing better than we were last month (we finally have a tiny but non-zero user base, lol). But it’s been tough picking up these skills from scratch: things like branding, communication, marketing, and presenting all feel incredibly nuanced. Doesn't help that I’m still super new to all of this, and that’s really where this message is coming from.
Product Hunt
@dheerajdotexe Love it. None of this is easy and the way to do it is just go step by step. Every founder has done this to some capacity. You won't know anything about anything and then you do it every day and you learn slowly over time. The industry changes, you re-learn, and start over but you have some advantage. That's founderhood in a nutshell. :-)
My two cents:
Your post here does a better job of explaining what you do than the homepage. Even "learn trading and investing via quizzes and microlearning" is so much clearer than "The Ultimate Market
$andbox: Learn & Experience".
From the website "Learn with bite-sized microlessons"... learn what??
The first two sections of the website do not actually tell anyone what the product is or does or who it's for.
For distribution and getting people interested, try posting on Reddit/Twitter/etc looking for people who want to learn how to trade/invest via a beta tool. Then use a tool like @Octolens or just search for relevant threads and then cold DM people to get them in the door based on posts they've made. There's infinite relevant content in this sector, and you'll quickly see what's sticky and what's not.
@steveb Hey Steve, really appreciate you taking the time to check out our landing and spell this out. Genuinely helpful stuff. Funnily enough, I’m actually in the middle of rewriting the page right now, trying to phrase things like I’m explaining to a friend (someone gave me that same advice!) and this absolutely totally reinforced that.
And will try the distribution thing you mentioned, sounds great, it's a slight spin on our current approach. I'd love to pick your brain more if that's alright, totally cool if not.
Honestly, I felt the same way when I started my company without any prior work experience.
It felt like I had nothing to reference, no real baseline to compare or learn from.
Even the people giving me feedback at the time…
I wasn’t always sure they had enough experience themselves.
@bunzeewithai That’s so real, it feels a lot like flying blind without a baseline. I'm curious how you found direction in that kind of vacuum though, how'd you navigate it, what worked?