What are some common bottle-necks for early founders

As someone trying to start their first startup, I've found that getting people to trust you and your product is very challenging. Finding my first users is tough.

P.S. I'm working on a website that will allow people to swap their books. https://www.swapiverse.com/

Not having an audience or backing from an accelerator. It is amusing to see people, even on HN, get excited over a backed startup making the equivalent of half a feature in our product.

It's amusement instead of bitterness because we're already, and have always been, profitable doing machine learning projects for large organizations in different sectors and industries and we just happen to be building our machine learning platform to solve real problems we have first hand experience with. I suppose I'd feel differently if this were our "startup idea" and our success depended on that traction/audience.

However, we're always interested in people who do machine learning for a living [not just blogging/YouTubing/Mediuming/Tweeting/Audiencing about it] using our platform[0]. They may be dealing with problems we haven't seen, working on interesting projects, and it's always a blast to talk with these people.

- [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25802764

Not knowing your advantages as an early company.

For example: you get a huge boost in rankings when you first launch an app in the App Store. Not enough to be #1 above a Calm, but certainly #1 for medium-difficulty keywords. Once this advantage goes away, you'll need a strong ASO strategy and money to spend on ads to boost keywords.

Some of these opportunities are tough to overcome after you missed them. Press is very similar: reporters will cover a newly launched product, but new features likely won't get a feature.

The tech stack is far down on your list of concerns before you have established that there is a real product and a market for it. Use whatever you already know/are best at.

Money to play with. In order to experiment fast you need some money to burn. Everything came at cost.

Focus on content marketing to find product fit and gain a following to be your first users.