The struggle is the status quo of every startup

*Disclaimer before you read this: all of this content comes from my own thoughts and are brutally honest insights on starting a tech company, management, and the world of corporate personal brands. Magnettu is b2b software to promote and manage employees' personal brands, turning them into opinion leaders.

If a tech founder tells you that everything is going great, then something is being hidden.

Even if your startup is already a unicorn, as a tech founder you'll always be struggling. If it’s not money, then it’s not being able to recruit enough talent, a new competitor "stealing" your market, or even an OpenAI release challenging the real value of your company.

There will always be struggle, and you have three options:

1. Deny it.
2. Embrace it.
3. Quit.

It's that simple.

As I mentioned in my previous article , I'll be sharing some of our biggest current challenges and struggles in this one.

Branding challenges

As we grow, we see that our clients sometimes don't know how to pronounce our brand. But beyond this, we are in an endless process of curating our value proposition on our website so that anyone, in less than 3 seconds, gets what Magnettu is about. And believe me, this isn't as simple as it seems.

Product development

The product itself is a good challenge. I must say that it is getting better but harder. Better in the sense that everything we build right now is based on the needs of recurring paying clients...

That's a great north star to improve a product. However, the challenge is to prioritize what to build or improve considering that all your clients are asking for different things and you have limited resources to please them all. Every line of code that we write to solve a specific client issue or request is a line of code that we are not writing for clients asking for other solutions. Believe me, it is super complex to prioritize. What's good is that the prioritization is coming from real pains versus some startups that are still building based on hypotheses due to lack of clients.

Sales process

And last but not least, our sales process. Magnettu's clients come from inbound marketing (45% of them), partnerships (40%), and cold outreach (15%). However, the system depends on us having to run demos and frictioning the process with two or three calls before we close a deal (this can take from 1 to 6 months depending on the deal size). What's the struggle here? Finding a way to take advantage of more than 15,000 monthly unique visitors. Our traffic is growing by 35% month on month, and we are losing the opportunity to sell directly by signing up directly on our site and paying on the go.

The reason? Opening the platform for clients to pay without interacting with us would require implementations that we have not had the chance to execute yet.

The unseen struggles

All these are struggles, and I'm not even sharing some other things here such as clients coming and going, team management, and of course, having to work from Monday to Sunday and trying to harmonize your personal and entrepreneurial life.

I embrace this because, I love it and I know that the outcome (even if it's unlikely) will be exponential in terms of spiritual growth and the exponential business that we can become at some point.

Nothing that is worth it comes easy, and this is actually why founding a startup is that difficult: because it's absolutely worth it.

Cheers, Rafa