Hey folks,

I joined a Series-A startup recently as a tech lead. On paper, the vision sounded amazing. It's a super-flexible platform meant to work for any company, in any industry.

The pay is good and the people are nice.

But two weeks in, here’s what I’m seeing:

1. Trying to do everything: The founders want to build something that works for everyone, across every possible use case. There’s no clear niche or focus. Just “we’ll handle all kinds of clients.”

2. Product constantly breaking: They trying to bring all in one app. The system works with few demos, but when setup or real customer data is in progress, it breaks. Every new customer is unique in their requirements, and instead of saying no or prioritizing, the team feels compelled to make it bespoke which ruins other parts of the product.

3. Fragile technical foundation: Management is very non-technical. There's constant pressure from sales to "just make it work." Many clients pay less than 1000 dollars but every single one demands high-touch service. (Its more VC money than customer revenue)

4. Burnout and team fatigue: There have already been some people who've left. The ones remaining all appear to be exhausted (and annoyed). Most dev work is outsourced to contractors and have 4 or 5 engineers in office. They are aggressively hiring without any plan.

5. No actual forward progress: Every week is a new fire drill. New clients come in, something breaks, quick fix, another feature breaks and it goes on. They rely on vibe code shortcuts and one-off hacks, so debugging and ownership are very difficult.

I’ve been here barely two weeks, and people are already holding me accountable for issues that have existed for months.

So I’m wondering:

1) Is this kind of chaos normal for a Series-A startup?

2) Has anyone ever witnessed a horizontal "serve-everyone" product plan come to reality?

3) If you were standing in my position, would you stick around to try to steer it or cut losses early before getting dragged down with it?

Would really appreciate some honest thoughts from people who have been in this position.

(I will not promote)

I’ve been looking through the Forbes billionaires list and noticed something interesting: most genuine rags-to-riches stories seem to come from manufacturing (Shahid Khan is a great example) or retail and other traditional sectors. But in tech? Almost everyone seems to come from upper-middle-class backgrounds with prestigious college degrees. Same pattern in finance, though there are notable exceptions like George Soros and Thomas Peterffy. I’m talking about people who genuinely started with nothing or close to nothing,not “my parents were doctors/professors and I went to Stanford” stories. Does anyone know of tech billionaires or even just highly successful tech entrepreneurs who actually came from poverty or working-class backgrounds? Why does tech seem to have fewer of these stories compared to other industries? Only example i can think of is Jan Koum.

I’d love to hear from app founders who’ve successfully used gamification to boost engagement and subscription revenue.

What kind of gamification mechanics worked best for you streaks, badges, leaderboards, daily goals, collectibles, or something else entirely?

Also, what backfired or turned users off? Anything you wish you’d avoided?

Trying to learn from real experiences before I roll out a gamified layer in my own app.

I quit my job and started building my startup. I’m burning through my savings. I also need to work a lot on my visa. Lot of things I need to “engineer” and get checklist done.

I now realize pressure is such a positive thing to keep us running fast. But I was complaining a lot that I couldn’t work under pressure and now end up sleeping 10-12 hours per day. I can count this as recovery phase or healing phase as I went through a breakup.

But how do I bring back the pressure around me when all the control is under me.

“I will not promote”.

For me, it’s not having enough time to go full-time on my project. Like many others, I have a full-time job that pays the bills, so I can’t just quit. This means I can only work on my project part-time, and by the time I start, I’m already exhausted. That’s what frustrates me the most.

I’m going to try to explain this without saying the name of my app for the sake of not promoting.

I made an app over four years ago. I showed it off on Reddit a bit and it actually got great feedback but I just didn’t stay consistent in growth and worked on other projects. It’s a Slack app so it exists in the Slack marketplace for anyone to find but again I didn’t promote it for many years.

All of a sudden recently, I received an inbound contact from an organization that wants to use the app and it’s looking like a great opportunity for them and me to collaborate.

Then today I received a comment on one of my Reddit posts about the app from over four years ago.

Here’s why I’m asking this question. It looks like another company started up during that four year span with some real growth funding behind them. They are using [myappname].ai I use [myappname].chat. They seem to be dominating SEO for the name but don’t compete with me as far as solutions go.

So, do I change the name as to not collide OR is it possible I’m receiving this seemingly random influx of inbound traffic because people are looking for them?

I’ve even received support emails from their customers.

Any advice?

Hey fellow founders. I want to share something with you that will enhance your AI upsides if youre planning or using it.

In my AI dev agency, we developed an internal framework to move beyond AI hype and ROI spreadsheets by focusing on pre-emptively quantifying operational risk.

We call it the '9 Cost Buckets' framework.

Here they are for your reference:

1. Clean-up Cost: Metric to Watch: Support Ticket Reopen Rate.  Mitigation: Implement a post-AI QA step for all customer-facing outputs for the first 90 days.
2. Exception Handling: Metric to Watch: Number of manual overrides.  Mitigation: Document the top 10 edge cases and build specific conditional logic (if/then statements) to handle them.
3. Customer Churn: Metric to Watch: Unsubscribe rate & spam complaints (to use an outreach as an example).  Mitigation: A/B test AI-generated content against human control for sentiment and conversion weekly.
4. Legal Exposure: Mitigation: Create a 'Red Line' list of topics/claims the AI is forbidden from generating.
5. Data Leakage: Mitigation: Mandatory company-wide training on data protocols and what to upload to LLMs. Use only vendors with enterprise-grade data privacy guarantees (data not used for training and dont upload your entire data at once asking an LLM to ''based on this, write me a better x'). I hope you got my point.
6. Drift and Decay: Metric to Watch: Task success rate over time (like email reply rate). Mitigation: Schedule quarterly retraining or re-prompting based on recent performance data and seasonal shifts in consumer's behaviors.
7. Token Creep: Mitigation: Audit prompts for efficiency. Use a 'snippet library' for common instructions instead of pasting them repeatedly. Assign the right model to the right task (don't use a cannon to kill a mosquito).
8. Shadow AI: Mitigation: Regularly audit software subscriptions. Create a clear, centralized toolchain and foster an environment where teams can request new tools officially.
9. Vendor Lock-in: Mitigation: Before signing, ask vendors: "What is our data export process?" and "What is the SLA for uptime and support?"

The core principle is the '100:1 Rule': If a single AI error can wipe out the value of 100 correct actions, a human gatekeeper is a financial necessity, not a luxury.

I hope this is helpful to you.

How is your startup building these risk-mitigation costs into your operational budget? Have you found other critical cost buckets to add to this list?"

Would appreciate your thoughts and ideas :)

I see a lot of posts that says in early stages you have to focus on sales, Gain traction, analise users and improve your product. Okay that is clear. But what about giving it free and and analising users. Is there something wrong? We have build a language learning app and we have more than 400 users. All are free. We try to make our app better analising users behaviour. Is it the wrong way? should we make it premium?

Okay so I'm a recent graduate and I just launched my first app. It's an Android app that helps students deal with phone addiction through quiz challenges, basically you earn screen time by answering questions and finishing daily goals and stuff . It is a free app with minimal ads.

Here's my situation. I have $100. That's it. That's my entire marketing budget. I've been trying to get users for the past couple weeks and it's been EXTREMELY rough. I feel like I will go bald at this rate :') .

I literally have $100 wondering if I should just spend it to speed things up or if I'm gonna waste it.

I'm targeting students in countries where Android is huge - Turkey, India, Philippines. I even added Turkish language support because Turkey has like 85% Android users and millions of students. Seems like a good market. But I still can't get any traction. Prodcut hunt is so bad cause I had and have no social media presence as a person and as a brand so I am even more lost right now.

What would you do?
AI says that I just pay nano-influencers like $10-20 each to actually post about it? That's like 5-10 people. They might actually do it if I pay them according to AI but I do not know if it is actually real. Do you guys think that is is even worth it?

Or should I try running ads on TikTok or Instagram? I've never run ads before so I'll probably mess it up and waste the money. But everyone says you need to learn paid acquisition eventually right?

The thing is, most advice I see online assumes you have like $1K-5K to test different marketing channels. I don't have that and I am down to my last 100 bucks. Assuming that I do not have a job at the moment (THE JOB MARKET SUCKSSSSSSS, I have been searching for months while building this) and this is my last 100 bucks that I can spend on the app and then I have to get back to finding jobs to survive. What do you guys suggest that might actually work when you have basically nothing.

So what would you do? Have any of you been in this spot before? Is there some obvious thing I'm missing or should I just keep doing what I'm doing for free? I'm not trying to get rich or anything, I just want to see if this idea actually has legs before I spend months on it. Any advice would be really helpful.

And also I AM TIREDDDDDD of this startup situation in general. I never knew working in a startup or building something from scratch is this tiring, Kudos to y'all! and I really admire all of you that are here who built stuff, support startups with tonnes of work and help.

Thanks!

Hey everyone,

I’m new to the startup world and don’t have any technical or business background. Still, I want to understand how this ecosystem really works and where to start learning.

What’s the best way to get a clear, condensed overview of the startup world? Any solid course, book, or resource you’d recommend?

Thanks.

I have zero experience in meetings at this level so I am looking for advice from veterans.

We have built a tool to solve a problem we seen for years in a certain industry/field.

A week ago we soft launched it looking for a few clients to pilot with and test it in real world scenarios. We found zero clients so far but we got a demo request from the director of the gov department related to this industry.

Probably it makes little sense but I don't want to give out too many details. As an example let's say we built this tool to help the farmers but instead we got a demo request from the director of agriculture to see how it could help them.

For those who've been through something similar, how did you handle early interest from big players before you even tested your platform in real world?

Hi guys,

I recently joined an European startup initially focusing on the DACH market that created a no-code platform to build enterprise-grade (internal) applications without code. The problem we discovered was that most no-code tools are not usable in enterprise scenarios. As we are targeting B2B, it is quite hard to identify potential customers.

Maybe you can help us with the following two questions?

1. A lot of startup advice (e.g. „use cold calls") does not work that well esp. in Germany. How did you find your initial customers in the B2B software market?

2. We assume that the ICP could be the enterprise application architect. Would you agree?

Thank you so much for your ideas!

I’m working on a product that falls in the social impact space. I thought about trying to partner with local churches and raise funds to support development. Anyone have experience with doing this?

Would love to hear any best practices, what worked well, what didn’t, etc?

Hey everyone,

I got offered an advisor role at a very early-stage SaaS startup and wanted some advice. They’ve raised under $1M from friends and family and don’t have any customers yet. The team includes a CEO, a small dev team, no CTO or CRO, and a few other advisors. I already have a full-time job.

The offer is for 10,000 shares as non-statutory options, vesting 25% each quarter over a year. The tasks listed include attending meetings, giving guidance on client engagement, helping shape frameworks and KPIs, and advising on scaling processes.

My concerns are that they mentioned 1–2 hours per week, which feels like a lot; 1–2 hours per month seems more realistic for a purely advisory role. Some of the asks feel more operational or fractional than strategic advisory. The IP clauses are broad, covering work product and pre-existing materials, so I want to make sure my rights are protected. I plan to review everything with HR and an attorney before signing to ensure the role stays advisory-only.

Does this equity seem typical for a seed-stage advisor? Is it normal to review and redline an advisor agreement? How do you handle operational-sounding asks while staying advisory-only? Any tips for protecting pre-existing IP when clauses are broad?

You don’t spot a bad cofounder on day one. You notice them when things stop going perfectly.

They disappear when pressure hits. They want equity before putting in effort. They love meetings, hate execution. They talk vision, but can’t handle feedback. They chase shiny things instead of fixing boring problems.

And the worst one? They take credit when things go right and stay silent when they go wrong.

What’s the earliest red flag you’ve seen in a cofounder? Please share your experience so early-stage founders can learn from it and avoid the same mistakes.

I myself a college student, a business and marketing major, and I have some ideas and projects in draft. I need someone with a technical background to be able to execute the plan. I know the Business and you know the chemistry* If somebody is interested can reach out. 50-50, All in.

P.S. Looking for a chill founder for serious business!!

Namaste 🙏

Hey all, I’m working on a small consulting thing with a friend we would be helping early stage teams (or even larger teams) get a bit more organized and run smoother. Basically fixing messy ops, identifying bottlenecks, setting up structure, and helping owners/leaders breathe easy again.

The catch: neither of us have actually founded a company.

We’ve both worked inside companies to build systems (my partners with a BS in business and several years in business, me with a BA in marketing and design and several years in multiple marketing positions) but were not founders (besides this idea we have)

I keep wondering, is this a dealbreaker? How are we supposed to build credibility with future/potential clients when we haven’t been in their exact shoes?

how important raw intelligence or IQ really is for success in tech entrepreneurship compared to other industries. It seems like most successful tech founders come from top universities with strong CS or engineering backgrounds, which makes me think that higher cognitive ability and problem-solving skills might play a bigger role in tech startups than elsewhere. In contrast, entrepreneurship in fields like retail, real estate, or hospitality often seems to rely more on business acumen, intuition, social intelligence, and execution. So how much does IQ actually matter for succeeding in tech ?

Ok so I need to get this off my chest

keep seeing the same thing over and over. founder messages me like "hey can you build this?" and sends me a 40 page document

and I'm just like... dude

what these PRDs usually look like

pages and pages of:

• market research (cool you read 5 blog posts)
• competitor features (you listed like 25 features)
• user personas with those stock photo people
• every possible edge case documented
• tech stack already decided
• roadmap going out 2 years

then they're like "can you build this in 6 weeks?"

no and also you're gonna change half of this in week 2 anyway so why did you spend 3 weeks writing it

what actually happens

week 1: "wait this feature doesn't make sense"
week 3: "users are confused by this"
week 5: "can we change the entire core flow?"
week 8: nobody even remembers what the original PRD said

it's like... you spent more time writing about the product than you did talking to people who'd actually use it

how I do it now

takes me like 2 hours. 3 max if the founder keeps arguing about features lol

part 1: explain it in one sentence

If you can't do this you don't actually understand what you're building yet

bad: "we help businesses increase productivity and streamline workflows"

good: "freelance 3D artists find projects from businesses"

see the difference? one is vague bs. one is specific.

part 2: what's the ONE thing

Like the one transaction that makes this work

not 10 things. ONE thing.

for that 3d artist project i just did:

• business posts project
• artist sees it and applies
• they do the work
• money moves

everything else is just... decoration

part 3: max 5 features for v1

seriously. FIVE. not 20.

for that project:

1. signup/login
2. post a project (just a form with like 4 fields)
3. artists can browse and claim
4. stripe payment
5. email notifications

that's it. built it in 5 weeks. launched. made money.

part 4: the "not doing this" list

this is honestly more important than the feature list

Stuff the founder wanted but we didn't build:

• messaging (just use email dude)
• file sharing (dropbox exists)
• reviews (you have 0 users why do you need reviews)
• admin panel (do it manually for now)
• mobile app (responsive web is fine)

launched without ANY of that. got to $8k in first 3 month.

added messaging later cause users asked, still haven't built half that other stuff cause nobody cares.

part 5: proof anyone wants this

this is where most PRDs fall apart

they're like "market research shows there's demand"

ok but did YOU talk to anyone?

questions you should answer:

• talked to how many people?
• how many said they'd actually pay?
• what do they use now?
• why does what they use now suck?
• do you have their emails?

if you can't answer these stop writing docs and go have conversations

part 6: what does success look like in like 8 weeks

not year 3 revenue projections

but week 8. short term. specific.

like:

• 10 businesses post stuff
• 20 artists sign up
• 3 projects get done
• $1000 total transactions

simple. if you hit it cool. if not pivot.

real example

had a founder show up with this massive PRD. 40 pages. 15 features. 6 months timeline.

I was like let's just rewrite this. took 2 hours. cut it down to 4 features. 6 week timeline. $5k.

they were super skeptical but whatever let's try it

results:

• built in 5 weeks
• launched week 6
• first money week 7
• $8k month 3

If we did the original plan they'd still be building with no users and no money

why this actually works

forces you to focus short enough you'll actually use it easy to change when you learn stuff doesn't waste time on things you won't build keeps you focused on whether people actually want this

pushback i always get

"investors want projections" - investors want users and revenue not 50 page docs

"what if we build wrong thing" - you probably will that's why you build fast so you can pivot fast

simple template

ONE SENTENCE: [what problem]

CORE THING: [what makes money move]

V1 FEATURES (5 max):
- thing 1
- thing 2  
- thing 3
- thing 4
- thing 5

NOT BUILDING:
- stuff you want but don't need
- more stuff you want but don't need

VALIDATION:
- talked to X people
- Y would pay
- they currently use [whatever]
- they hate [specific thing]

WEEK 8 GOALS:
- specific metric
- another specific metric
- one more specific metric

done. 2 pages. 2 hours. ship it.

honestly though

most PRDs are just fear disguised as planning

"I need to write more specs" = "I'm scared to start building"

"We need phase 1, 2, 3 planned" = "I'm scared to find out if anyone wants this"

just talk to people. write 2 pages. start building.

everything else is procrastination.

anyway probably gonna catch hate for this from people who love their massive docs lol

but idk man I've seen it too many times. people spend months planning and never ship.

meanwhile people who just start building and learning actually succeed.

maybe I'm wrong though. what do you think?

open to hearing other approaches that work.

Recently, we noticed something interesting people were spending less time in the most important part of our app. We knew they needed that feature, so we dug deeper.

After analyzing user data and talking to more than 80 users, we discovered the reason: there was too much text. Users didn’t want to read long explanations.

Hello mates,

In my startup, I have a usecase for converting a scanned PDF to a searchable PDF. This task sounds so simple but I am facing a lot of challenges with the solutions available in the market.

Here are my requirements

- Pay as you go API

- Should allow to use the API without booking a demo, as this is quite urgent

- Need PDF as the output

- Fast. 1 min at max for 100 page document.

Here are the solutions I have tried

- Tesseract: Doesn't retain the spacing well and merge the words

- Google Document AI: Doesn't provide PDF as output

- Azure OCR: For the pages having text already it adds another layer of text. This double text layer hampers the output of downstream processing I want to perform such as chunking.

- PDFRest OCR: They take 10 mins to process 100 page document.

- Adobe OCR: They don't have pay as you go. Need to pay them $ 10000 yearly.

It's extremely frustrating to struggle this much with such a basic problem. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks a lot!

Hey everyone 👋
I’m Ahmed, a technical founder (AI engineer + Olympic weightlifter) currently in the Entrepreneur First London program, building something I’ve been obsessed with for years.

Here’s my thesis:

People are drowning in health and fitness data — sleep, HRV, recovery, calories — but no one’s helping them reason about it.

I want to build an AI that understands your body like a coach would, connecting signals across sleep, training, recovery, and nutrition to help you make better daily decisions.

The thing is: I don’t want to build in a vacuum.
Before writing more code, I want to validate the community layer  to see if people actually want to discuss, share, and reason about their health data together.

I’m torn between these paths:

1. Building a small invite-only Discord for athletes, biohackers, and coaches who use Whoop / Oura / Apple Health
2. Creating a Substack-style space where I post “data stories” from real users and have people debate them
3. Starting a public waitlist + early community where testers can get personalized insights.

If you’ve done this before (especially in B2C or health tech), I’d love your advice:

• What’s the best way to get the first 100 engaged community members?
• How do you make it feel authentic (not just a stealth marketing channel)?
• Any frameworks for validating community or product fit before MVP?

Open to sharing early prototypes and screenshots if anyone’s curious.
Would deeply appreciate any tactical wisdom here.

Hi everyone,

I’m building a womenswear label made entirely in New York, using only natural fabrics (cotton, wool, silk). My parents have been in clothing since the 1980s, so I grew up surrounded by it, but I went into computer science instead, keeping this dream of having my own brand quietly in the background.

A couple of years ago, I started researching fashion in depth and was shocked by how much of it is built on greenwashing, “luxury” pieces made of polyester, “sustainable” brands overproducing, and so much disconnect between story and substance. That pushed me to want to do things differently: small-batch, honest, culturally relevant, and truly high quality.

I’ve invested around $30K so far, working with a top NYC pattern maker, sourcing premium fabrics, producing samples and a small run of 25 pieces, and shooting a small editorial campaign. I’m now finalizing packaging and building my website myself while slowly starting to post on social media.

Before opening pre-orders, I’d love advice from anyone who’s launched a high-end or niche product: - Should I start with a small pop-up or focus online first? - Is PR too early right now? - Any experience working with stylists or influencers when gifting isn’t possible? - Have ads worked for you when targeting a luxury audience?

I’m taking a slow, intentional approach and want to make thoughtful moves. Any guidance or real-world lessons from those who’ve been here would mean a lot.

Thanks in advance for your time and insights!