gettyCloud infrastructure, AI-powered development tools and more accessible funding channels have made it faster and cheaper than ever to turn an idea into a working tech product. But while the barriers to building a tech product have dropped, the barriers to building a durable business haven’t; in some ways, they’ve only been stacked higher.With more new companies entering the market and more products competing for buyers’ attention, tech startup founders have to think beyond launch speed. Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share which parts of the startup journey have become harder in recent years and how founders can navigate those challenges more effectively.Fundraising And Staying RelevantTwo things have genuinely gotten harder: fundraising and staying relevant. The VC market that funded AI demos in 2021 now demands real revenue. Global VC funding dropped from $681 billion in 2021 to $285 billion in 2023. And speed kills: When AI companies ship a new AI model, startups built on the previous version scramble to stay competitive. Founders must build on durable problems. - Manas Chaudhari, MetaCustomer Clarity Amid Competitor NoiseBeing immersed in the market to deeply understand customer needs is the cornerstone of delivering sustained value. What’s become more difficult is the noise and confusion that “pop-up” competitors create for customers. Customers are demanding more value proof points and true turnkey solutions, which require upfront investment in partnerships and integrations to ultimately deliver value. - Brian Reshefsky, EDGEForbes Technology Council is an invitation-only community for world-class CIOs, CTOs and technology executives. Do I qualify?Defensible Differentiation And PositioningBuilding got cheaper. Differentiation got harder. AI made every founder a competent builder and every pitch deck pristine, so buyers default to assuming everyone is at parity. The fix: Stake one specific, falsifiable claim the AI-built crowd won’t. Three years from now, your moat isn’t your product. It’s the position you owned before the herd caught up. - Varun J. Vincent, FalconFirst AITrust-Based DistributionDistribution has become the hardest part. Anyone can build, so the advantage has shifted to who can earn trust at scale. In healthcare, that is actually a hidden opportunity: Trust is hard to win but nearly impossible to displace once you have it. Founders who obsess over the first customer’s outcome rather than the next customer’s signature build something that can’t be copied easily. - Venkata Ramya Ganti, OproxEarly Customer AcquisitionGetting the first 10 customers is harder than ever. Everyone has a landing page, an AI-generated pitch and a “revolutionary” product. The noise is deafening. Distribution used to be the moat. Now attention is. And you can’t buy your way in like you used to. - Ivan Kan, HackindiaEarning Credibility And TrustEarning trust has gotten harder, not easier. Buyers are flooded with AI-generated pitches, deepfake demos and vendors that vanish in a quarter. Skepticism is the new default. Founders should overinvest in proof—reference customers, transparent security posture, real performance data and founder visibility—because credibility now takes longer to build than the product itself. - Nitin Agarwal, LuminaceBuilding A Committed TeamThe bottleneck is no longer building the product itself. The most important thing is building a team with enough trust, energy and belief to keep going and give 100% every day. Technology can accelerate execution, but it cannot replace shared ambition. - Benedetto Biondi, Folks FinanceOperational Discipline And DocumentationThe hardest part is not building; AI has made that faster than ever. It is discipline. Founders let hero culture creep in without realizing it: one brilliant developer who knows everything, owns everything and becomes impossible to replace. It feels like an asset until it is not. Build systems, not dependencies. Document everything. Make sure your architecture can survive the loss of a single person. - Timmi Ryerson, Smart Property SystemsAlgorithmic DefensibilityIn production, the hardest part is achieving algorithmic defensibility. When autonomous models can instantly generate apps, surface-level software has zero moat. Founders must stop building fragile API wrappers and instead engineer proprietary execution graphs, mathematically bounded agents that competitors cannot simply prompt-engineer away. - Dhyey Mavani, Amherst CollegeProduct-Market Fit And Sustainable ScalingAI tools have made launching an MVP easier than ever, but the hard parts of building a startup remain unchanged: finding product-market fit, scaling and becoming sustainable. This easier and faster go-to-market capability only means more startups, more noise and tougher competition. Founders must stay focused on one thing: finding and offering the unique value proposition the market truly wants. - Michael Tyrimos, Capacitor PartnersStrategic FocusWhat’s harder now is staying strategically focused. AI makes building cheap, which creates dangerous optionality with too many features, pivots and adjacent markets. Founders should treat capital and attention as scarce, pick one painful problem and build a moat around workflow ownership, not feature velocity. - Shuchi Agrawal, SMBC GroupLong-Term Software ArchitectureWhile the speed of an initial release is exhilarating, it often blinds founders to the long game. Software architecture is a journey rather than a static blueprint of software components; it’s the lifeblood of product evolution. So, winning solutions come from treating developers as partners, not ticket takers. - Kostiantyn Gitko, Devox SoftwareAudience ReachBuilding is the cheap part now: AI writes your code; Stripe handles payments. The hard part is the next 10,000 people. Every channel that worked five years ago is saturated—LinkedIn is performative, cold email is filtered, and SEO is an AI war zone. Stop treating distribution as a launch task. Treat it as the product. If you can’t reach them, you didn’t build anything. - Hastimal Jangid, Coozmoo Digital Solutions, Inc.Medium- And Long-Term StrategyThe hard part for startups solving near-term issues is the rat race, because everyone is trying to solve them. Founders should be focused on mid- to longer-term strategy. For example, products should be fluid enough to be adapted to multiple industries and thus become the core layer for every future innovation. - Anisha Manvatkar, NVIDIAFounder Restraint During ScalingThe hardest part of scaling your startup is knowing when to pull back. Successful founders often fall into a dangerous trap: listening to their instincts instead of staying curious and not allowing their teams to become leaders by always having an answer for them. My advice? Practice the courage to do less. Ask hard questions before big decisions and create space for your team to lead. - Shanthi Shanmugam, CasapCross-Domain SynthesisAI gives every founder the same tools. Speed and cost advantages compress toward zero. The part that’s gotten harder is building something machines can’t replicate: synthesis across domains competitors haven’t connected. That’s not a product decision. It’s a design decision made on day one. - Joseph Byrum, Consilience AISustaining Users’ AttentionThe hardest part of building a startup today is earning sustained user attention. Consumers are overwhelmed with new products and AI-generated experiences. Founders should focus on solving painful, specific problems exceptionally well instead of trying to build broad platforms too early. - Mahati Kumar, Meta Platforms Inc.The ‘Knowledge-Utility Gap’Founders now face a massive “knowledge-utility gap” where building is trivial, but knowing what to build for long-term retention is harder. When AI automates the “how,” the market floods with high-speed, low-conviction features. Founders should adopt a “manual-first” validation phase, solving the problem with human service before writing code to ensure they aren’t just automating apathy. - Jagadish Gokavarapu, Wissen InfotechEnterprise Procurement ReadinessBuilding got cheaper, but procurement got harder. With SOC 2 audits, vendor risk assessments and security questionnaires 300 questions deep, the compliance cost of landing your first enterprise deal has exploded. You can build in a weekend but spend six months getting through procurement. Budget for enterprise readiness from day one, not after your first “yes” turns into a legal review. - Denys Vorobyov, EltexSoftCustomer Problem FocusWhat’s harder is staying true to the customer problem your business is solving and not being diverted by technology trends that can pull you off course. As a repeat tech startup founder, this has been essential in an industry now waking up to the power of unified data and the strategic use of emerging technologies, such as AI, to improve decisions that shape customer experience and sustainable growth. - Robert Clark, Cloverleaf Analytics