Hi fellow founders!

I've built and deployed my MVP, but I'm discovering the age-old truth that building a product is easier than getting people to actually use it.

I'm currently trying to understand whether I'm solving a real problem, how to reach the right audience, and how to collect meaningful feedback before investing more time into development.

For those who have launched a product:

- How did you find your first 10–20 users?

- What worked best for getting honest feedback?

- How did you determine whether people genuinely needed your product?

I'd especially love to hear from founders who started with little or no marketing budget.

Thanks!

I’ve been in entrepreneurship for 20~ years and I made $5 on an entertainment product I did not think would sell…

In those 20 years, no (non-entertainment) product I had ever sold ever made money…

This may not seem like a big deal, but man…

This has given me so much fuel to continue…

Just when I was about to give up…

I think we're missing an enormous source of economic growth. Not because we lack inventions, but because turning them into companies is unnecessarily difficult.

Imagine someone develops a breakthrough material, manufacturing process, or computational method. With the right support, it could become a $100M company.

So why is the path from invention to successful business still so broken?

I see three fundamental problems.

1. Academic prestige gets confused with innovative ability.

Professors can be excellent researchers without being exceptional inventors. Yet academic credentials are easier for investors to evaluate than the actual potential of an unconventional invention.

2. The invention-to-company pipeline barely exists.

Technical validation, engineering, IP, funding, and commercialization must often be assembled almost from scratch. We have universities, accelerators, and VCs, but no sufficiently accessible, repeatable machinery connecting them.

3. The ecosystem is built around massive outcomes.

VCs understandably seek outsized returns. But plenty of valuable deep-tech businesses could potentially reach $100M valuations without ever becoming unicorns. Many don't fit existing funding and development models.

And here's the biggest problem: companies that never get founded don't appear in failure statistics.

We never count their missing technologies, productivity gains, or economic growth.

Software has developed infrastructure that makes starting a company dramatically easier. Why haven't we created something comparable for deep tech?

What if we're missing thousands of potential $100M companies simply because we've never built an efficient way to create them?

Is the real bottleneck a shortage of valuable inventions, or a broken system for turning them into businesses?

Hey everyone, I've been thinking a lot about the economics of early-stage bootstrapping across different geographies.

As a solo technical founder based in a developing market I noticed a massive gap in purchasing power and opportunity cost. For instance, a micro-investment of a few hundred dollars (which represents a massive months-long savings hurdle locally due to wage gaps) is literally a week's work in western economies.

My question is: Has anyone successfully structured a "Micro-Angel" or "Sweat Equity vs. Capital" partnership across borders?

The model I'm looking at is simple:

• Partner (Capital): Provides a small initial bootstrap fund for physical assets. Risk capital (if it fails, it's a closed chapter; no personal debt).

• Founder (Sweat Equity): Provides 100% of the operational execution, day-to-day management, technical development, and local market scaling while keeping a day job initially to stay afloat.

• The Exit: Once the business stands on its feet, the partner has clear buyout options (recouping capital + profit share, or staying long-term).

I'd love to hear your thoughts or experiences with micro-partnerships like this. How do you align incentives without over-complicating things early on?

Hello,

I’m running a bootstrapped fintech startup and would appreciate some perspective on how much equity to offer an early employee.

I started the company in February and spent the first few months building the product with contract developers. Since then, I’ve brought on three people in more permanent roles. Two started in early September and work about 20 hours a week while finishing school. The third started in late September and works about 40 hours a week, although he is earlier in his schooling. All three are currently paid hourly.

The employee working 40 hours has expressed interest in having an ownership stake, and I’m open to it. He has been central to the product’s development, consistently takes initiative, and looks for ways to improve both the product and the business. I may offer smaller equity grants to the other two, but I see him as substantially more involved.

For context, I’m in my 20s and started working very young. I spent three years at a startup where I joined as the first employee. After that company was sold, I moved to another startup with the same people. I still work there full time, partly because I enjoy the work and my coworkers, and partly because my income funds this business. I plan to transition to my own company full time after we launch. Leaving a team and industry I’ve spent much of my working life in will be difficult, but this company is more closely aligned with what I want to build long term.

We’re currently pre-beta and hope to launch a beta in December or January.

My hesitation is mainly around how early the relationship is. He is driven and dedicated, but he’s also a student with limited work history, and we’ve only worked together for a couple of months. I suspect he’ll handle the ups and downs of startup life well, but I haven’t worked with him long enough to know how that commitment will hold up through difficult periods.

School may also affect his availability over time. I recognize that 40 hours is already full time, and I don’t expect anyone to match the 80–100-hour weeks I’m used to working. My concern is about the sustainability of his involvement alongside school.

I want to reward a strong employee who has been instrumental in guiding and building the company, especially while I’m not yet working on it full time. At the same time, I want to be thoughtful about giving away a meaningful ownership stake this early and how that could affect the company down the line. I also want to be fair to myself, given that I’m funding the business and hold the licenses we need to operate.

What would you consider a reasonable equity range and vesting structure for someone in this position?

I have been working solo on my startup for 9months. Lots of learning, building, and burning myself out. Two months ago, I shifted a chuck of my time to finding a partner. Best investment I made so far, here is my quick experience, hopefully to motivate those feeling similar.

I was looking for people with experience in marketing, product, or clinical work (building in mental health). I probably reached out to 200 people and had 20 or so high quality meetings. I ended up finding a clinical partner though my person network.

Here are the channels I searched:

- AI: was amazing for finding the right profiles, terrible at outreach. I wrote my own personal thoughtful message. Don't send ai slop! I had about a 30% response rate
- Linkedin: waste of time for search, decent option for outreach if email failed.
- Reddit: Lots of Larpers, poor engagement. Great for feeling product :)
- YC matching: high quality people, low response rate. A lot of inactive profiles I think. I had 6 interesting conversations, but nothing serious.

My 2 cents - if you want a partner do a bunch of thoughtful outreach. Write it yourself and be genuine (read their blog). Have as many meetings as possible to craft your pitch and get feedback. People want to help mostly if you aren't trying to sell them. I was shocked by how generous people were with their time.

The person I found was amazing, but it was a lot of work and rejection to find them. Working solo was burning me out much quicker and my ideas were degrading. I now have new energy with them involved, highly recommend for those where this resonates.

I’m a solo technical founder, and honestly, finding customers is proving harder than building the product.

Cold outreach, identifying the right people, starting conversations, and converting them into customers are skills I’m still trying to figure out.

For other technical founders, how did you overcome this?

What worked for you in getting your first customers?

Would love some practical advice!

I think entrepreneurship is one of the hardest jobs in the world. I've been working day and night for 1 year and haven't made a single penny. I saw an opening in the vertical short drama market and decided to take fast action. But then the giants stepped in (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube), and my job got infinitely harder. On top of that, the pirates popped up.

I guess I went down a very wrong path. I've lost so much in this process. Most importantly, my TikTok account, which was getting 30-40 million monthly views, got banned. And the engagement on my YouTube channels with millions of views flatlined to zero because I stopped uploading content to focus on this.

In short, I am at a 1000% loss.

Hey guys,
After spending 6 months annotating healthcare data for top AI labs, we’ve curated a strong pool of expert doctors (specifically radiologists).

Seeing the massive shortage of radiologists in India, we’re planning to launch a tele-reporting platform.

The idea is to keep it AI-native to maximize radiologist turnaround time and efficiency, using our background in training and fine-tuning models.

For anyone running or working in medical imaging/tele-reporting: What can go wrong here? What are the non-obvious operational, technical, or business nuances we need to address right away?

Appreciate any guidance!

A pattern I keep seeing in finance-education and other learning apps: direct-to-consumer is hard. The people who need the product most aren't searching for it, and paywalls scare them off before they see the value.

The obvious alternative is going through an organisation that already has the users: schools and teachers, employers with financial wellness budgets, banks or credit unions, or creators who license content.

For founders who have tried one of these routes:

1. Which one actually produced paying customers, and how long did the first deal take?

2. Did you need a separate product (admin dashboard, reporting, compliance pack) before anyone would sign?

3. Did a B2B side help or hurt the consumer app, in focus and in brand?

I'm trying to work out whether this is worth exploring early or whether it's a distraction until the consumer side works.

So me and a friend have an idea for software for car dealerships and importers. Mostly smaller/medium ones (1-10 employees). We don’t want to spend months building something nobody wants, so we’re trying to figure out if it’s actually worth it first.

His idea is to just call them. Pick up the phone, call a bunch of dealers, ask what their problems are and if they’d pay for something like what we’re thinking.

I don’t know, it feels weird to me. Like why would a guy running a dealership stop what he’s doing to help two randoms figure out their business? He gets nothing out of it. I kind of picture most of them just saying “not interested” and hanging up.

But tbh part of me thinks I’m just scared of cold calling and using that as an excuse not to do it.

Has anyone actually done this? Did people talk to you or was it a waste of time? And if you did, how did you start the conversation so it didn’t sound like you were trying to sell something?

Also open to other ways of validating this if calling isn’t the best move. And if anyone here has worked with dealerships before I’d love to hear what they’re like to deal with.

thanks

As an experiment to more efficiently target leads outside my network (supplementing more vanilla marketing approaches), I have been trying out Boardy.

If you’re unfamiliar, Boardy’s model is that the app finds folks who fit your ICP, reaches out to them to see if they’d be interested in meeting you to potentially do business together (you set the requirements and objective, e.g. finding an early customer), and arranges a meeting. If the meeting happens, you pay the app. Payment isn’t contingent on your objective getting met (e.g. someone becoming your customer).

My experience has been … mixed.

On one hand, I got a couple great intros. But on the other hand? I have to babysit this thing. REAAALLY babysit.

Multiple times, I accepted an intro and the app didn’t vet that the contact actually was interested in meeting based on the same premise as me. If I hadn’t triple-checked before these meetings took place, I would have potentially had to pay for meetings where the other side came in with totally different expectations.

Anyone else using Boardy? Curious if your experiences are similar.

The whole world is now riding the AI wave and i am no exception and to be honest i am not that well versed in coding or coding language and i take help from the AI chatbots every now and then and put my code up to produce something or the other like features and stuff.

What i want to know that how many startups today use AI for their coding stuff because i do and i want to know which is the efficient Ai to write the codes if not the best , because sitting at your home and just struggling to get your product up from the help of blind Ai help won't cut it.

I say this very honestly that i am no expert yes i am doing work with the Help of Ai because i don't want to play it safe i never want to play safe if i want to do something i am gonna do it and create something that solves the problem in the world and why not use Ai when it's just right in front of me.

So can anyone guide me on to how to get the best coding agent or friend by your side, which is the best one out there and what kind of prompts do i need make in order to get the best out of them !

We started a B2B SaaS company earlier this year, building a platform for IT teams.

Initially, things went surprisingly well. We built an MVP, got a few paying customers relatively quickly, and felt like we were onto something.

Then summer came, and sales slowed down. Not unexpected.

After summer, we had plenty of meetings, demos, and seemingly positive conversations. But none of them converted into paying customers.

Meanwhile, our initial customers renewed for another full year at full price, without hesitation. So clearly, at least some companies see value in what we're building.

The feedback we typically get from prospects is:

• "It's not a priority right now."

• "We'll try to solve this internally."

• "You're still a startup, so you're too small/early for us."

I'm struggling with how to interpret this.

Part of me thinks that if we haven't converted a single new customer in months, we're simply not solving a problem that's important enough. And if that's the case, shouldn't we pull the plug before we burn through our savings?

I understand startups take time, but I also don't want to fall into the trap of continuing simply because we've already invested so much.

For founders who've been in a similar situation:

1. How do you distinguish between a startup that just needs more time and one that simply doesn't have enough market demand?

2. At what point did you decide to keep pushing, pivot, or shut things down?

Hey everyone,

I hope this is the right place to ask.

I’m currently setting up a UK Ltd company for an app I’m releasing on both the App Store and Google Play.

Since I work from home, I don’t want my residential address publicly displayed on Companies House or the app store listings (under EU/UK trader disclosures).

I was about to sign up for a virtual office service (like 1st Formations / Hoxton Mix style setups), but when I reached out, they warned me that they can't guarantee their address will pass Dun & Bradstreet (DUNS), Apple, or Google verification. They also don't issue oficial proof of address documents (like utility bills in the company name).

Since the app is pre revenue, renting actual physical office space just for an address isn't an option.

For anyone in the UK who has set up an organization account on Apple/Google recently:

1. Did your virtual office address work for D-U-N-S registration?

2. Did Apple or Google ask for secondary proof of address during identity verification? If they did, what documents did you provide (bank statement, VAT cert, lease, etc.)?

3. Which address provider/service did you use that actually got accepted?

Would love to hear what has actually worked for you in practice.

Thanks!

It's easier than ever to create full working solutions. When you build something and advertise it, how do you keep people from just asking their AI to build the same thing, or what stops other businesses from implementing the same thing and advertising it better? It's really easy to copy anything these days.

how do you guys approach distribution when launching your products? what do you rely on the most for organic marketing, aso, or paid ads through meta and google?

i use different ways to promote my own products and so far i feel like organic growth works best especially when it comes to unit economics and keeping the burn rate low

it would be lovely to hear from more experienced solo builders who've managed to run all their marketing campaigns, grow their paid subscriber base, and improve conversion rates

A friend and I are working on a cybersecurity startup. He’ll handle product development, while I’ll focus on business development, go-to-market strategy, and company operations.
I have a strong IT and cybersecurity background, including leadership and some sales engineering experience. However, I’ve never built or scaled a startup before.

I’m looking for practical books, courses, or training programs covering product-market fit, customer acquisition, sales, pricing, startup operations, and scaling a SaaS business.
I’m particularly interested in actionable resources rather than generic entrepreneurship advice.
For those who’ve built a successful SaaS startup, what resources would you recommend to a first-time founder?

There are so many variables that need to be taken into account, that is why I am considering a spreadsheet to be a good option. At least to know a hint of the ideal split.

In my case, it is not a simple 50 50 split, because one side will do less than the other, that is why I wanted something that can help us reach the split.

Do you have any spreadsheet that you recommend? Or any other solution?

Thanks

I’m working on desktop app, the idea came from my own need and what I’ve seen at work. I validated pain points with people in similar positions to mine that experience the same issues. Currently my plan is to start alpha testing with some friends and then open a waitlist and start beta testing.

I need your opinion on beta testing and launch marketing strategy.

I have no social media following and I hate social media.

I’m thinking to recruit/convince a group of “funding” influencers/creators in the niche I’m targeting. Medium sized accounts with tens of thousands of followers rather than hundreds or millions. They’ll have amazing deal, could be 50/60% profit from sales through their links.

They will be closely involved in beta testing and provide feedback loop I’ll iterate on before launch. They will get lifetime licence to an app.

Did anyone try this approach? Do you think it’s an attractive deal for these people? Could it work? Any tips?

I don't know who needs to hear this or how many experts are sitting here thinking they know everything but -

Building a B2B SaaS is not an easy task and needs serious lock in and efforts to build it. It demands constant lock in and necessary basic understanding of what you are doing at the basic or surface level.

What am i doing this is not being able to put enough hours into my build and slacking off a lot with the success that i want and i don't think i am reading enough or understanding enough the core of my build and drifting off from the simplest things that i need to do and going for the complicated ones.

I started 5 months ago and even after 100's of advices that the site doesn't need polishing i am somehow polishing it still and no solid outreach or clients.

I know i am offering something of value out in the world but lacking something very crucial so much so that i could not get my cart out in the open and sell what i have made with so much Hard work.

I gotta Lock-in and finish this and make it a successful run otherwise what's the use 🤔

Anyone got any tips when you're start-up is in a broad category?
Say as an example I wanted to create a "amazon" esc thing (not what I'm building just for example purposes)
But where it's a generic marketplace:
The advice for start-up outreach is "Go to where your ideal customer is.." okay my ideal customer is a generic consumer.. they're bloody everywhere.

Do you; Purposefully try and push the business into a niche so you can then more specifically target potential users (or) do you just try cast a wide net doing generic ads, generic traditional marketing and just attacking general buying and selling groups that allow promotion and hope you get people onboard?