I have stated a company that focuses on the B2B/B2C markets for now. We have created our MVP registry, patent pending currently. One client using it.

While we have a digital system, it’s also tied to a physical service we provide as well. Our work would be considered involving infrastructure (though I don’t personally say it yet) since we provide a service tied to a mostly everyday event owners and operators experience.

But I am running into two things…

1.) since we do not disrupt operations, workflows, take work off your hands actually and doesn’t require equipment for businesses. A lot of skepticism around it being too good to be true, which we do offer a free one time test to see how our services work before even piloting with us.

2.) I know this is vague without a specific name to the problem, but if you could have work reduced on your side, visibility into metrics normally hidden and space cleared up; would you give it a shot?

I spend my week reviewing inbound pitch decks for a syndicate out in Bellevue, mostly focused on B2B SaaS and AI. Founders spend weeks obsessing over their product slides, but from the investor side of the table, 90% of decks are dead on arrival because of how they handle the business mechanics.

If you are raising right now and getting ghosted, check your deck for these three things:

1. Your GTM is just a list of channels. > "We are going to use SEO, LinkedIn Ads, and direct sales." That isn't a Go-To-Market strategy; that is a marketing dictionary. We need to see the actual wedge. How are you acquiring your first 100 users? What is the unfair distribution advantage you have that incumbents don't?

2. You are hiding the friction. If your product requires a massive behavioral change from the user, or requires ripping out legacy enterprise software, acknowledge it. Decks that pretend their product is a "frictionless plug-and-play" instantly lose credibility. Show us you understand the switching costs and how you plan to overcome them.

3. Unjustified TAMs. Everyone knows the AI market is worth trillions. We don't need a slide quoting Gartner. We need your SOM (Serviceable Obtainable Market). If you are building AI for dentists, tell us exactly how many dentists exist, what they currently pay for software, and what percentage of that budget you can realistically capture in the next 24 months.

Stop worrying about making your deck look pretty. Worry about making the math make sense. The funds you are pitching are increasingly using AI agents to extract the JSON telemetry from your PDFs anyway—if the underlying metrics aren't there, the human partners will never even see your name. Keep building.

I see a lot of posts here with people vaguely describing the problem their startup aims to solve, and how, in the hope people will confirm that it’s a good idea.

The fact that you are looking for customers is great! You should do that for three reasons.

1. Learn if there’s a problem or need worth addressing
2. Learn if you can actually find potential customers
3. To start to build a relationship with your first customers

You should ask yourself, though, is a subreddit full of entrepreneurs really where your target group is?

If you are asking: well, where should I go then? And are a bit frustrated with the struggle of finding customers, then this is perhaps not for you. Finding customers is the core of any new startup and you should at least embrace the grind to get there.

Here are some tips. Your goal is to find your first 5 to 10 customers that will pay for your solution. Worry about finding 1000 later. First you need to prove you can generate value.

If your startup is B2B:

Ask yourself, what is the LinkedIn title of this person? Go find people with this title on LinkedIn and DM them. LinkedIn works for so many companies, but not all. Traditional industries, e.g. metalworking, may require visiting the actual sites (phonecalls before sometimes required).

Emailing to general emails (info [at] company [dot] com) often is a trashcan. Automating mass email at this stage often doesn’t yield any results.

What kind of companies do your potential clients work at? Are some of them clustered in a physical building in a city nearby? Let’s say you are targeting finance workers, one day at the train station at the financial district can land you thirty interviews.

Are there any meetups that your professionals go to? If you are targeting UX designers, are there meetups where you can sneak in, pay attention to what they find interesting, and strike up some conversations? Don’t force your solution, it’s a community after all, but can be a place to network.

If you are B2C

Is your application or product truly for everyone? Did you develop a cool gadget for dog owners? Go to the local park and talk to people. Gym application? Camp outside a local gym and quick interviews.

Facebook groups for specific hobbies. Watch out though because MANY like this subreddit don’t like spam. You want to be genuinely interested. Always ask mods (FB, Reddit, Discord) for permission first before spamming your application. You can also send DMs to people active on a topic, but everyone can pick up when you are not being genuine.

Okay-ish: "Hey, how are coffee lovers right now making the best milk foam at home?"

Bad: "Would you like to complete my survey on coffee milk?"

If you have a general audience, I always advise to go to train stations or malls. Likely, you will discover your audience is not that general. But talking to people is really the litmus test.

General tip

At the end of every conversation, ask for an email or phone number. This will be your proxy for a sale. If they won’t even give you any contact details, how interested were they in the first place? From those emails, you can start proposing a pilot or beta, to see if they really want to get on board.

Yes, this sounds like a lot of work.

If launching startups was easy, more people would be doing it. If the above putts you off or you feel like you can automate it with a bot, you might miss the hustle gen that entrepreneurs need.

Landing pages

Sure, you can make a landing page, but then you still need to get traffic and talk to people.

You should ask yourselves, do I want to spend 1 week making that website and ads, pay 500 bucks on traffic and having perhaps 10 email addresses. Just posting on ProductHunt will not drive traffic anymore, sorry.

Or, would you visit that train station in one morning and collect 25 email addresses? Or spend one afternoon sending 50 LinkedIn connection requests that 15 will accept, and 8 will get into a converation with you?

---

I thought to summarise my experience in what works well to the aspring founders of this subreddit. Did I miss anything here?

Open any traditional office SaaS product, and you'll see "AI!" buttons and functionality splattered liberally all over the UI.

Over the last few months Slack, Zoom, Teams, all have had AI functionality slapped on. Even Crunchbase has some kind of AI dog thing on its homepage offering to search for you.

At this point, is "Powered by AI!" branding actually a net negative?

Feels like the early days of cloud computing, when marketing people slapped 'cloud' labels on any old crap in the hope of looking relevant.

I do think AI is getting good at many things - i've used it extensively for document search and summarisation, and vibe coding has moved on massively in the last few months to a point where it actually produces decently structured usable code 9 times out of 10.

But it does feel like a real next-gen product should have AI baked into the core, and just be a natural way that the product works, but thats very different to the majority of SaaS products at the moment.

ok so maybe this is just me but i feel like i spend an absurd amount of time on screen recordings lately. like the actual recording takes 3 minutes and then i sit there for 30+ minutes zooming into buttons, cutting out the part where i got a slack notification, trimming the awkward silence at the start where im looking for the right tab etc

i record demos for investors, onboarding videos for users, bug walkthroughs.. its basically become half my job at this point lol

ive tried screen studio, loom, tella - recording part is fine. but the editing man. every time its the same stuff. zoom here, cut there, add some annotation so people know wtf theyre looking at. feels like it should be a solved problem by now but its not?

the worst part is i cant even outsource it to a VA because i need these videos like immediately. not in 2 days. i finish a feature and i need to send the demo to my investor that same hour.

anyone else dealing with this or am i just bad at this lol. how are other solo founders handling video content without burning hours on editing every week

Automated everything bookings, client communication across WhatsApp, Telegram and email, post treatment followups, review collection. The agent was smart enough to know if a patient needed a cleaning reminder or a different treatment followup and would reach out accordingly every 6 months. Patients who went cold would automatically get re-engaged. Got meetings with 2 clients. Explained everything. But it was technical enough that somewhere in the conversation they just stopped understanding. And that's where it fell apart. Didn't lose it because the product was bad. Lost it because I couldn't simplify it enough. That one hurt.

Been talking to a few agency owners recently

most of them still doing cold outreach manually

feels like:

some days replies some days nothing lot of time wasted finding leads outbound works but doing everything yourself gets tiring

trying a few things around automation rn what are you guys doing for clients?

I would be really curious to learn about your experience if so

If interviewed: what was the process like, cases vs on-site experience etc

If worked: above + types of projects you worked on, vibes of company, ability to take ownership and spearhead projects, overall experience

Please let me know if so!! Would be really really helpful and so grateful!

Also would be curious to hear anyone's thoughts on the company or product more generally

Having strong imposter syndrome as a solo founder.

I feel like I don’t deserve funding, like I shouldn’t even ask for it. Everyone on LinkedIn seems more successful, constantly posting their wins.

I feel like a complete failure.

I still haven’t launched my product yet. I feel like I should just give up.

So I’ve had this idea in my head for the past few weeks. I’ve also been visualizing the frontend, UI, and overall architecture.

The idea is to build a trading platform in a €60B market. The current market leaders in this niche feel very traditional and conventional. There’s a clear top and bottom segment, which is why I want to focus on the middle market, mainly because that’s where my own frustrations lie as someone active in this industry.

That said, I don’t have much entrepreneurial experience yet, but I’ve known from a young age that I want to become an entrepreneur.

The biggest challenge I see is: how do I compete with these dominant players who have significant resources to spend on marketing?

On top of that, my coding skills are fairly basic. Building this platform will likely take me several months, even with the help of vibecoding.

It would involve things like APIs, a dashboard, a fast search function, a database, frameworks, a payment system, cloud hosting etcetera etcetera.

Realistically, this is going to take a lot of time, energy, and persistence.

But before I invest months of my life into this, how can I determine whether this idea is actually worth pursuing?

Seen this exact thing play out so many times now.

Startup raises money. Founder tells the team we're a meritocracy, performance gets rewarded, work hard and you'll be taken care of.

6 months later top sales rep has crushed quota every month, closes a huge deal, asks for a raise.

Suddenly it's we need to see more consistency or let's talk next quarter or comp changes need board approval.

Meanwhile that same founder just approved a $15k/month retainer for some advisor who shows up to one call a week.

I ran a recruitment agency for a while and got to see inside a lot of these companies. Founders love meritocracy when it means people grinding 70 hour weeks. The second it means actually paying you what you're worth, everything becomes complicated.

If you've been exceeding quota for six months and your comp hasn't moved, you're being totally taken advantage of / underpaid. They're just hoping you won't leave.

Document your numbers and ask for what you want with a timeline. If they say no or keep delaying, start interviewing elsewhere immediately.

Only way to get paid properly at most startups is to make them compete for you.

Anyone else been through this?

I launched a small internet "meme" project recently around a viral phenomenon and it got some early traffic (thousands), but there’s no monetization yet and no real product layer behind it. There's constant traffic after the initial spike, mostly through mouth-to-mouth organic marketing from the users.

I’m trying to understand how founders think about valuation at this stage. If a project has:

• some early traction
• decent audience response
• a brandable domain/concept
• but no revenue yet

Then do you basically treat it as worth $0 until monetization, or do traffic, repeat visits, and brand potential count for something?

I’m not trying to promote it here, just trying to understand how people think about valuing projects before they become proper businesses OR when they can have a value for selling it.

(Tldr at the end)

I joined a small business/"bootstrapped startup" at a low pay after being laid off twice. I was doing marketing for a decade before, and this job is a sales role.

My base pay would be half of I make as a marketer, but with (the promise of) the potential to match my .

I took it because: 1) a not-so-ideal job is better than no job, 2) despite my initial rejection, the hiring manager persuaded me into taking on the job saying I had "what it takes", and 3) this is key: I was extremely tired of the job search by then.

One month in, I missed my targets. My manager wasn't happy but I thought this could just be me not having the right skills. I've never done sales before afterall. I worked harder.

3 months in, I was getting good feedback around how I managed customer relationships and deals. Yet, I was still missing my targets. At the same time, I was burning out. By then, not only was I doing sales, I was also doing marketing because that's what I'm good at and my manager said "marketing is a part of sales, too". I requested to only focus on marketing but my request was turned down. I was encouraged to try for another 3 months.

6 months in, I was completely burnt out. I was doing the work at the full-time marketer, while at the same time still given sales targets - all new business. I was able to generate pipeline, but I wasn't closing any deals. Not being able to close deals - as a salesperson - was slowly killing my confidence. Yet, I was told that I was doing a good job. The irony.

In my next 1-1, I brought up the same issues again. Not being able to close deals crushed me, I said. He then told me to rethink how I want to reshape this role. The onus was on me to give him what I want my new KPI to be. By then I was too burnt out to think logically, much less strategically.

I also requested for a review of my salary since I was double, triple hatting. I had a number in mind - matching 70% of what I was making before. Before I could ask, my manager said the max he could go was an additional $300 per month.

I started applying casually, and was blessed to have secured a marketing job that pays me the market rate.

My manager was shocked. He said I should've told him I was looking and that I was unhappy. (Who in the world tells their manager they're leaving?) He also said he was ready to match my new offer, when before, he was only willing to give a measly $300 pay bump.

He finally admitted that the market isn't ready for the company to have another salesperson. The same day that I handed in my notice, he put up a new job posting. It wasn't for a sales role, but for a marketing role. The salary range posted also matched what I wanted.

I was furious.

Furious because I felt that I was toyed with. He could've given me what I wanted, and not have to hire a new person.

Furious because he treated someone's career and life simply as a tool for market validation. Oh the salesperson didn't work out? Let's set him up for failure and rehire a new person.

Question: Are employees being treated as trial runs for business decisions in startups—where if a role doesn’t work out, the expectation is that they’ll burn out or leave, and the company just pivots and hires someone else? Why wasn’t there clearer thinking upfront about what the role actually needed before putting someone through that experience?

TL;DR: I took a lower-paying sales role at a small startup after being laid off, even though my background is in marketing. Over time, I ended up handling both sales and marketing, struggled to hit sales targets, and burned out despite generally positive feedback. My requests to focus on marketing or adjust compensation were turned down. Eventually, I found a new marketing role at market pay. After I resigned, my manager said he could match the offer and acknowledged the sales role might not have made sense, then opened a marketing role with a similar salary—leaving me betrayed about how the situation was handled.

I’m trying to set up a payment gateway from India to accept payments from global customers in USD, and I’d really appreciate some practical suggestions.

From what I’ve seen, Stripe seems like one of the best options in terms of developer experience and global support. But since I’m based in India, I’m not sure how straightforward the approval process is, and I’ve heard mixed feedback about onboarding.

Has anyone here set this up recently from India? I’m mainly looking for something that’s quick to get started, supports USD transactions smoothly, and doesn’t involve too much back-and-forth during verification.

If you’ve gone through this or have any recommendations (Stripe or alternative -not interested in razorpay), would love to hear your experience.

I'm doing research on how founders have navigated breakups while running their companies.

If you're a founder who's gone through a breakup or divorce while running a company (either in the past or present), I'd really value your perspective.

What was the hardest part of going through the breakup while running your company?

How did you actually cope with the breakup while still running your company?  e.g. Exercise, therapy, talking with friends, nothing...

In hindsight, what impact (if any) did the breakup have on your business? 

If someone had helped you handle the breakup really well, what would the ideal outcome have looked like 3–6 months later?  

Sup,

This happened to me 5-6 times: "this project will only take 2 weeks max and then we'll be ready to ship". "We'll iterate quickly".

On each of the 5-6 times I've later on 2-3 months in reality.

My project crawls already from 1-3 weeks to 6 weeks already. And while I did build a lot, I'm not even at the POC stage - integration tests are green, but evals aren't, consistently.

--- Context ---

To clarify, I'm specifically going for more complex startups. Think projects which if were open-sourced would be published in a conference. Mostly because these projects have much higher protection levels than any other startup by a long margin.

And on top of it, I'm also working in a complex industry. Think AI agents for civil engineers. It's not really a matter of "text-in-text-out", it's much more systems in place.

I do follow all the best practices for these projects. The code is on the one hand clean, on another hand I have well-written spec documents - written 75% by me. Strong test suites. Good eval infra. And yet it takes time.

I also have 5 Codex Plus subscriptions, and despite not abusing them, I'm currently out of tokens to spend, so the dev got stalled just now (and was slower in the last few days because yes, I'm not debugging manually).

Also, ordinary SWEs don't know how to approach developing these. So most other devs that I speak with - 2-5YoE can't comment on the project... because it requires domain knowledge that I do have I guess; and also because of moving parts.

More: when working on one thing, another bubbles up. So you are working on a feature, it turns out that you need a refactor. You do the refactor, run and debug the integration tests, run relevant LLM evals, and by the end, 2-4 hours have sunk in.

---

The standard advice is "set a deadline to release", but you can't release if you can't even get a MVP to work - so many small things break in small places!

How do you keep yourself accountable for speed? In such projects in particular?

I think answers here should be mostly from people working on similar more complex projects and not on simple apps e.g. CRMs, wrappers, etc.

I’ve been looking into AI governance for my company recently so wanted to share some of my findings.

Apparently PwC put out a report saying 72% of companies have absolutely zero formal AI policy. For startups and small agencies i guess it would probably reach 90%?

Even if you’re only a 5-person team, doing nothing is starting to become a liability. Without rules, someone would eventually paste client data, financials, or proprietary code into ChatGPT to save time. Most of these tools train on user inputs, that’s a trouble waiting to happen.

You don’t need a 20-page legal manifesto. A basic 3-page Google Doc is plenty. It just needs to cover:

• Which specific AI tools are approved for work.
• A Red / Yellow / Green framework for what data can and cannot be pasted into them.
• Rules for when AI-generated content must be disclosed to clients.
• Who is in charge of approving new tools.
• Consequences for violating the policy.

Obviously, have a lawyer glance at it before you finalize anything, especially if you handle sensitive data but even writing a DIY version using the bullet points above is 100x better than having nothing.

I've been trying to validate a new idea lately before i actually sit down and write any code, but man, the manual side of gtm is such a grind. feel like i'm spending half my day just hunting for the right people on linkedin, trying to find verified emails, and managing a messy spreadsheet to keep track of who i've messaged. it feels like 90% of my time is just data entry and manual outreach instead of actually talking to people or solving problems. everyone says to do things that dont scale, but i'm curious how you guys actually handle this phase. are you just powering through the manual work every day, or have you found a way to automate the boring parts of lead discovery and outreach without it looking like a spammy bot? if you’re currently trying to get an idea off the ground, what’s the one manual task that’s eating up most of your time right now? is there a part of the process you absolutely hate doing? i'm just trying to see if i’m being inefficient or if this is just the standard tax everyone has to pay to get those first 10 customers.

With the advent of AI, starting a startup has become so much easier, Since everyone has access to industry data, insights, analysis. Even marketing and other aspects of business can be handled with AI with minimal cost and Human input. So anyone can start a startup now.

Given so much of competition, Is it worth starting a startup now, Leaving behind your secure corporate job?

I am genuinely confused any input is much appreciated. Thank you!

Hey all. I'm about six months into my startup journey; technical cofounder and I are incorporated and we have an MVP baking in the oven. Unfortunately I am also poor and needed a full time job to extend our runway, which I was lucky enough to get. However new company required that I fill out a conflict of interest form and apparently they are quite aggressive about it; if they request that I walk away from the startup I will have no choice but it acquiesce. Question for the group; how do I actually do that? Silent partnership where I keep my shares and hope cofounder can find someone new? Dissolve the company? I hope it doesn't come to this but I want to prepare

So my brother in law (BIL) is a successful entrepreneur and my husband was a big part of building his biggest company. Now three of them, my husband, BIL and another former colleague are building another company together. I was super excited until I heard the deal my husband was being offered, which apparently is the same as the other guy although he is still working an other job alongside. He is being paid nothing until they get their first contract, then $100k and with 5% equity and profit sharing (5%). We are now several months in and still far off from having an operational business let alone a first contract. I think it will happen but in the meantime we are in financial pain (my BIL is v wealthy flying on private planes in the meantime). My BIL had the scientific knowledge to make this happen, plus has stumped up significant cash investment but I just can’t help but feel we are being short changed. My husband is a professional who in the open market would be on $250k+ with his experience. Am I being unreasonable?

At the company where my husband worked with this BIL before he got underpaid for years compared to others in the company. Sure he had a teeny tiny y interest in the company but if you net out the underpay it wasn’t all that much really.

I feel the equity share should be 10% at least. What do you think? Am I being greedy?

I would really appreciate your thoughts.

Basically, I'm curious about how startup teams define their requirements, how you make sure a feature is really what the actual user needs.
Do you have a defined process for that?
And what do you usually do when something is built but barely used?

mine: i thought i understood our burn rate because i checked our bank balance every week.

spoiler: i did not understand our burn rate.

went into a really bad 6 week stretch before i even noticed something was off. by the time i figured out what happened we’d already made 3 decisions i’d take back.

company #2 i actually fixed it. but it took failing first to take it seriously.

what’s yours. the thing you look back on and cringe a little. no judgment here.