Let’s be honest, building a startup can feel like sprinting through a maze while juggling flaming torches. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed, unsure, or completely out of your depth, you’re not alone. No matter how polished those pitch decks or Twitter threads look, every founder is fighting their own quiet battles behind the scenes.
After being in this world and working closely with early-stage teams, I’ve noticed the same challenges pop up again and again. If you’re facing any of these right now, take a breath. You’re in good company. Here’s what I’ve seen trip up most startups, and a few thoughts on how to navigate it.
When you’re the bottleneck
- Doing everything yourself can help in the beginning, but it eventually holds you back.
- Leadership means learning to delegate, trust, and focus on what only you can do.
In the beginning, it makes sense to do it all. You wear every hat: CEO, product manager, support rep, even part-time QA tester. But eventually, doing everything yourself stops being heroic. It becomes a liability.
You don’t scale by doing more. You scale by letting go. Building a strong team, trusting others, and making space for you to focus on vision, culture, and strategy is what moves the needle. Delegation isn’t weakness, it’s leadership.
The elusive product-market fit
- Product-market fit means solving a real problem that users care about deeply.
- It often requires tough calls, big pivots, and listening more than talking.
Product-market fit is the holy grail, and probably one of the most misunderstood concepts out there. It’s not about having a “cool” product. It’s about solving a real problem for real people, in a way that clicks.
You’ll know you’re close when users start saying things like, “I’d be pretty upset if this disappeared tomorrow.” Or when they keep coming back without needing a reminder. Getting there takes humility. You have to fall in love with your users’ problems, not your own ideas.
Sometimes, you have to throw away months of work to get it right. That sucks, but it’s worth it.
Who builds the product, and how
- Choosing between in-house and outsourced development is about trade-offs, not one perfect path.
- What matters most is setting clear expectations and maintaining open, honest communication.
The build vs. buy decision, do you hire in-house or outsource, is one of the biggest forks in the road early on. In-house teams give you more control and cultural fit, but they’re expensive and slow to hire. Outsourcing can move things along faster, but not every dev shop is created equal.
The truth? There’s no perfect answer. Just trade-offs. What matters is clarity, communication, and trust, no matter who you’re working with. Start small, set expectations early, and check in often.
Going it alone
- No one has all the answers, advisors help you think, not just tell you what to do.
- Even one or two trusted voices can save you from painful, expensive mistakes.
There’s a reason experienced founders surround themselves with advisors. The best advisors don’t just tell you what to do. They help you think. They ask questions you’re too close to see. They point out the risks before they bite you.
If you don’t have people like that around you, find them. You don’t need a whole advisory board. One or two seasoned, honest voices can be a game-changer.
Scale: Sooner or later, it gets you
- Build simple, flexible systems early on to avoid scaling pain later.
- Don’t overbuild too soon, but don’t wait until things are breaking, either.
A common trap: building something that works great for 10 users, and then it breaks the moment you get 100. The other trap: trying to “scale” before you even know what people want.
Healthy scaling happens gradually. Start simple, but build with flexibility. Use infrastructure that can grow with you. Don’t overengineer, but don’t ignore the signs that it’s time to level up.
Agile isn’t dead—It’s just misunderstood
- Agile works when you focus on people, learning, and feedback, not process for process’s sake.
- If your process slows you down, simplify. Get back to the core: ship, learn, improve.
Agile was supposed to make things easier. But somewhere along the way, it turned into a checklist. Standups. Sprints. Backlogs. It’s easy to go through the motions and still feel stuck.
Real Agile is about staying curious, listening to feedback, shipping fast, and getting better every week. If your process feels like it’s slowing you down instead of speeding you up, strip it back. Focus on the people, the conversations, the learning. That’s the magic.
Don’t skip testing
- Bugs break trust. Even basic testing early on can save a lot of pain later.
- QA doesn’t need to be fancy, just make it part of the process.
Look, I get it. Launching is exciting. Testing? Not so much. But skipping QA because you’re in a rush? That’s a recipe for disaster. A buggy product breaks trust, and trust is hard to get back.
Bake testing into your process early. Even basic sanity checks are better than nothing. Your future self (and your users) will thank you.
The AI question
- Don’t use AI for the sake of it. Use it only if it actually helps your users.
- If AI adds value, showcase it. If it doesn’t, leave it out.
Should your startup be using AI? Maybe. But here’s a better question: will AI actually make your product more useful for the people you’re trying to help?
If the answer is yes, awesome. Talk about that value. Show it off. But if it’s just a buzzword that sounds good in your deck? Don’t force it. AI can be powerful, but only if it’s solving a real problem. Otherwise, it just muddies the message.
Final thought
There’s no perfect playbook for building a startup. You’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to have days where you feel like you’re flying, and days where you feel like you’re falling flat on your face – that’s normal. What matters is how fast you learn, how close you stay to your users, and how willing you are to adapt.
You don’t need to have it all figured out. You just need to keep going, stay open, and surround yourself with good people. Progress over perfection. Every time.
Jozef Antony, CEO at Opusadvice