Building a startup is a wild ride. Your daily life becomes highly intentional, yet completely unpredictable. You have days where you crush it, and you have "non-days" where you push hard but see zero external progress. You reach out to people, and no one replies. You launch a feature, and crickets chirp.
Then, completely out of nowhere, something clicks. That unpredictable jump from nothing working to something finally taking off is the most exciting part of the journey. It is the romance in the chaos. Here is a look at what we are learning as we navigate this early-stage unpredictability, from finding our growth levers to designing onboarding flows that actually connect with people.
When you are trying to find product-market fit, you do things that don't scale. Sometimes, you build things specifically to impress a single partner.
Early on, we built an integration with Framer to get a specific partner on board. We pushed it live. Nobody used it. It sat there doing nothing for a while. But then, a random backlink inside the app got indexed by search engines. Suddenly, that forgotten integration started driving inbound traffic and new discoveries.
You cannot perfectly model that kind of growth. You just have to put enough hooks into the world and see what catches.
The same goes for your analytics. You might look at your dashboard and think your product is failing. We saw terrible retention numbers initially. Then we realised a core messaging feature had a bug and was not actually sending messages. Once we fixed the bug, retention drastically improved. You have to constantly ask yourself if you are even looking at the right data before you panic.
It is easy to overcomplicate the difference between selling to businesses and selling to consumers. Ultimately, they are both just groups of people with goals and frustrations.
The real difference lies in relationship depth. B2B allows you to build very deep, high-touch relationships with a small number of users. B2C requires you to build relatively shallow relationships with a massive group of people.
Regardless of the model, the core challenge is the same. You have to figure out what people actually need. This is often very different from what they explicitly tell you they need. If you can solve a high-value problem for a major enterprise team, you build a halo effect around your product. A single successful deployment with a well-known design team can validate your tool and make it much easier to attract everyone else.