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Becoming a successful entrepreneur inevitably means facing a series of challenges. Merely getting through them is a character-building experience, but there are plenty of people who have gone through exactly the same hurdles. You might want to know what some of them are before you face them.

1 – Building the right technical team
Everyone is looking for developers. The demand is so much higher than the supply, job postings are hanging around the web, unanswered. How do you make your idea appealing to someone when they have the opportunity to work on their pick of projects? You have to make it appealing for them by putting yourself in their shoes and asking yourself: what do they gain from joining your company? Equity? Flexibility? Growth opportunities? Make sure you have answers to such questions.

2 – Getting Proper Feedback
Today many people claim to be a mentor, an expert or a serial entrepreneur, and they all want to give their advice and feedback. But how to you find the right person for your idea? The first step is identifying who has experience in your field. They’ve “been there, done that” and know the challenges your idea is facing. It doesn’t mean that other people’s advice is not valuable, but that you might want to pick and choose whose recommendations you follow.

3 – Cash Flow Management
Whether you’re using personal investment, friends and family money or a bank loan, it can be hard to know how and where to channel this money. Even more daunting if the money is not yours. This is where good cash flow management comes into play. Maybe you’re not that experienced with cash flow and you’re focusing on developing your product and you run out of cash before you know it. Therefore, proper planning is key here: map out exactly how much you need, what for and do your budgeting accordingly, always accounting for buffers. Things rarely go to plan in the startup world.

4 – Rolling out a product quickly
Nowadays first to market can be just as important as the idea itself. Which is why you shouldn’t worry about releasing the perfect product, worry about getting as many people to try it early to gather valuable feedback. You have more to gain more from releasing a minimum viable product (MVP) and iterating on the comments you receive than waiting till you think you have something perfect. Ask yourself tough questions like “What are the functionalities my product can work without?” This may seem like a massive compromise on your vision but you might be surprised by the response you get from people.

5 – Marketing
You’ve built a great product and now it’s time to get the message out but you don’t know how. Your budgets are small so you think Social Media is the best way but which platform do I use? The trick here is to not over-reach. Create a simple yet concise marketing plan that accurately identifies your key target audiences, key messages and the unique selling proposition of your product. And with the metrics offered by the social platforms, you can always be testing and learning until you find the right mix.

This article was written by the UK Lebanon Tech Hub, who have just launched The Nucleus, a venture building program specifically designed to tackle the challenges above, and a lot more.