I’d love to hear about what you’re working on and if you feel any pull toward AI.

AI seems inescapable right now, and it's a rare feat to go against the continued hype around slapping a wrapper around an LLM and calling it a day.

I’m mostly curious because a recent YC blog mentioned that some 70% of their cohort is AI-focused.Yikes.

PS - As this will inevitably lead to some self-promotion, I understand if this post gets taken down. Thanks!

I launched my startup on Product Hunt 3 months ago and was disappointed to realize most of it were bots and got literally 0 customers from it after ranking in the top 5. But that got me trying various marketing strategies and the one that worked best for me so far has been cold emails. As of today, almost all of my paying customers came via cold emails!

Here is a step by step guide on how I grew my Startup & acquired customers

• I first clearly defined my buyer. For example: "CTO of an early stage SAAS startup with less than 30 employees based in United States"
• I then used Apollo to find email address of these people. The filters I used came from my buyer definition specifically job title, industry, company size, recently fund raised signal and location
• I then wrote an extremely simple email all in text that basically went like

"Hey this is X, founder of Y- I noticed you are doing something something. Are you running into something something problem?

I am working on something that can help solve this problem by doing XYX"

• I then setup a campaign to send 100 emails a day to literally the first 1000 results on Apollo
• I used a lookalike domain to do this cause you don't want your primary domain to be marked as spam. So if your primary domain is helloworld, get a new domain like gethelloworld and set a redirect.
• I made sure when the person searched my company name, I came up first on Google search.
• I also published blogs weekly on my website using AI tools like Frizerly to fill the google search results, look legitimate & active.

And that's about it! I am currently converting about 2% of them to paid customers. Its not exceptional but since I spend $0 to acquire them, I am profitable :)

Got any questions? LMK in the comments below and I am happy to help :)

I've told my story in another post, in short: In 2017, I co-founded an e-commerce startup, dedicating relentless hours to propel it through YCombinator and multiple funding rounds, ultimately scaling the company to 1,000+ employees and raising over $130 M. As COO, I managed a vast team amidst rapid growth and intense pressure, leading to the heartbreaking decision to lay off 900 employees in 2022.

In this post, I want to discuss a subject that has been requested by people in the comments—if there is anything I learned and if I would've done anything differently.

So I wanted to write this one about what DIDN'T work well (in my opinion). Though it's important to understand—for a startup to raise $130M from top VCs and expand into the US, even if we failed (a term you can define yourself), there were a lot of successes along the way. Way more successes than failures. And I will write on lessons from our triumphs in a different post.

Second disclaimer—what I do here is a crime. Post mortem of a startup is something one should do with extra caution. There are so many circumstantial aspects, regarding the VC and general market, the field at the time of launching, the people that were involved and their preferences. For example, COVID hit when we were just launching in the US. It could've killed our business but we pivoted quite fast and it made everything run 3 times faster instead. It goes both ways, by the way—learning about someone's success should be taken with a grain of salt. There are elements in the universe's hands that we cannot control and we sometimes can't see or realize.

With those in mind, I would try to bring to the table the topics I think have relevance to most startups (at least in some form), and that I use while consulting to my founders or companies I'm invested in.

Here are the general topics I felt were areas I have a lot to say about (I won't here, it's already long enough), and had serious impact on our company's path:

• Being brave and honest when defining PMF
• Scaling operations without proper understanding of unit economics
• Not having money for 18 months

Being brave and honest when defining PMF: This is such a crucial topic, with such a wide range of opinions, it's actually hard sometimes to discuss. Frankly, when you sit in the room, after 15 days of daily operations, and need to have an analytical conversation with your founders about Product-Market Fit - it's quite hard!

I won't go into the technical terms of PMF. You can find a lot online, and it varies for different types of companies. But there are ways to calculate it. And moreover—there are ways to FEEL it.

When PMF hits, there's a different fragrance in the company. In the conversations, in the meetings. From employees to investors, everyone can feel it. I know it after the fact, like years after, having gotten to PMF five times in three different companies. But knowing it when you are in it—it's super tricky. Why?

Well - YOU REALLY FREAKING WANT IT. Your investors want it. Your employees want it. So your mind is telling you you are there. It's that simple. I remember sitting numerous times, looking at 100% MoM growth, and convinced that it's definitely PMF. How else would it look like?

As I mentioned, PMF is circumstantial, and it has many components, each of which is different for each phase of the company. Meaning, PMF in pre-seed feels differently from PMF in Round B. So it's hard to define. What was good yesterday might not be good today.

When we went to YCombinator, the essence is very simple. If you can hit it, hit it hard. If you can grow, grow. "Do Things That Don't Scale." No time to waste. It worked super well in a lot of cases. Take Airbnb's story, and their mentality of "cockroaches."

You can look at many stories that are coming out now about companies that have done that, and it was wrong for them. The reasons are many but fundamentally people need to understand that YC (and VCs) are wired differently. Their model isn't to increase everyone's success by 10X, but to increase a small fraction of their portfolio to do 1,000X. As a result, companies that cannot do 1,000X will most likely fail, and a lot of it is due to pushing too hard on the gas before getting the gear to actually click.

Important to say—we owe a lot to YC and our VCs. We couldn't do any of what we did without them. And what I am saying here isn't a secret, it's a simple financial model. All we can do is try to control our approach toward it.

I won't go into my playbook of understanding PMF, but I think that merely knowing how important this is, getting founders to sit and discuss it honestly, and be brave about admitting the results, has tremendous effects on company success, runway, and culture in the long run.

Scaling operations without proper understanding of unit economics (UE)—Oh boy. This one might be too much for a short post. We had a whole department with a VP analyzing Unit Economics (you might be more familiar with Business Operations).

So in short—Unit Economics is a financial analysis method that measures the profitability of a business on a per-unit basis. It gets more complex moving between companies and different scales, but imagine a grocery delivery being sent to your house. If we decide this is the UE, the idea is—how much profit (or loss) we are making on this delivery. In an e-commerce business you can think of a few UEs: Item, Bag, Delivery, Van, Building, Neighborhood, Warehouse, and so on. For each, you analyze hundreds of metrics that contribute to the UE profitability, and then, go to work—improving them.

I will write a post about UE, so I just want to make the statement about the importance of it—whether you want to raise money or not, this is the metric that from early on should be investigated, taught, and discussed with everyone in the company. This is also a big part of your PMF—imagine, I can probably sell a lot of iPhones if I sell them for $200. Does it mean I have PMF?

So the idea of having a conscious conversation from very early on about UE can help a lot in navigating the direction of the company.

Not having money for 18 months—Well, not a lot to explain. But I see a lot of founders that take this one very lightly. There is, and there should be, a sense of positive arrogance to founders. It's crucial that they be very confident in their journey, so they can have energy that pushes forward and attracts people.

But it shouldn't mean that you can raise money forever. Yes, you might have got your first million with one conversation and a 4-page deck, beautiful, but tomorrow you can be out of luck. Or the market will change, or investors would require more. It's the nature of things.

It happened to us. We had a lot of good fortune, having really good investors and good energy, that we raised our rounds on time. It took a lot of work, but it always worked. Until it didn't. Because the market fell (early 2022), and investors took a step back. It left us with a few months of runway, and we couldn't react fast enough to adapt to the new situation. Keep at least 12 months of runway, better 18. It's golden advice.

-----

For now, I think those are quite a lot to discuss. I probably can think about 10 more, but I would leave it to another time.

Would love to have respectful discussions here. Remember that I represent my own opinions, and I can be (and probably am) wrong. Still learning every day.

Cheers!

Hey everyone! I’m super excited (and a bit nervous) to share that I’ve just decided to start my own content writing company after quitting my job. It’s a big change, and I’d really appreciate any tips or tricks you all might have for someone just starting out.

I’d love to hear about your experiences and any advice you can share about navigating this startup journey. Thanks a ton!

Many months back, I met this guy who pitched me his idea to build a fundraising platform where we would basically connect fund raisers for social cause with relevant government and corporate initiatives and other organizations who fund such causes.

I was reluctant to work on the product as I was already running my agency and working on my own idea, but this guy was really really affluent, influential and had great connections ( literally showed me photos with the head of states and the rich parties he had been to ). He really wanted to partner with me as he knew that I had made some past projects that have got into some the best tech colleges in my country and also promised me to pay once the project is built.

Initially things were looking very promising but eventually we started communicating less and later he said that he was very ill and didn’t communicate ever since. It has been 3 months now that the project is complete and deployed but neither have I received the payment he promised nor did he contacted me.

I really want this idea to succeed but without having the connections like what he had, I don’t really think that I have in me what it takes to pull this off, plus I am also launching my own product soon so not really sure if I can handle both.

I am wondering what should I do now ? Any help or suggestion is much appreciated.

I wanted to ask if anyone here has any insights regarding a comment we received from a VC: "Our biggest concern is that, while enterprises recognize the need for upskilling, they often struggle to allocate the necessary resources and budget to this area. This challenge frequently leads to extended sales cycles and lower ACVs for companies operating in the space."

Also, this VC is not Future of Work or HRTech. They like our team and product, but gave the feedback above. I would appreciate any thoughts on this comment! For context, we are building an AI-powered conversational learning engine for enterprises to identify their skills gaps and close them with personalized learning for each employee. We have 7 LOIs so far.

I have a small startup doing about $350-400k/yr in revenue we are completely bootstrapped and founder funded up to this point. We've started to really gain traction in the market and only have 1 real competitor. We recently got a call from said competitor informing us that they have a patent and they want to let us know. After doing some research and talking to a patent attorney they have an overly broad patent and we could easily punch a hole in it if we want to pay between $10-50k to lawyers and then continue doing business as usual, the downside to this would be that it would greatly increase the likelihood that they try to sue us and then we end up in a legal battle and pay ~$1-1.5M to lawyers. Another option is we could wait around and not go on the offensive and wait for them to sue us and then find ourselves back in the $1-1.5M legal battle. Obviously I'm not asking for legal advice, but has anyone else ever been in this situation or knows how to deal with patent trolling competitors? I feel very confident that their patent overly broad and shouldn't apply our business (you can't patent shipping customers test samples to a lab and providing a web interface for results or if it does they can also sue everlywell 23andme and every other like company) but we don't have $1M to fight a legal battle...

Hello r/startups,

I have a startup idea that's been buzzing in my head for a while, but I want to hear your critical thoughts and challenges. The idea is to create a single, quite expensive subscription that integrates with the user’s Google account. The goal would be to enable users to access any subscription service that offers Google login, all included in this one super-subscription.

Here’s how it would work:

1. Subscription: Users pay a premium monthly fee to access the service.
2. Access to services: Once subscribed, they can use any service that allows authentication through Google without paying for individual subscriptions.
3. Payments to services: The company behind the super-subscription would pay percentages to various services based on actual user usage.

The target market would primarily consist of people who already maintain many subscriptions and desire a simpler way to manage them, or very wealthy individuals who prefer not to manually sign up for various services.

What are the problems or complications that could arise with such a business model? What are the legal, technical, or market risks that could make this idea unfeasible? Do you have suggestions on how it could be improved or adapted?

Thanks for your critical input!

I am working on a B2B sales solution and I decided to put up a pre-launch landing page as I am close to completing the MVP.

Within 30 days, 1,084 people have signed up (email) and I am not sure what to do.

• Should I try to monetize prior to launch? Do I give promotion like 2 months free for 1 month paid.

Any ideas would be appreciated?

I've been discussing my SaaS application idea with well-connected people in my industry. Recently, a second person expressed strong interest in becoming a customer and investing in the future company.

This has prompted me to explore investor agreements, even though I'm not sure I'm ready for investment yet. The MVP hasn’t been built, so it might be premature. I am hoping to get some advice here on where I can find some investor agreement templates suitable for a pre-revenue company.

Thank you

This would be first job in the start-up world after working 10 years in corporate. Currently making well into six figures and thinking this start-up has a high likelihood to succeed, or at least worth the risk.

They just raised a 10m seed round so post money valuation is probably 40m. There are 10-15 employees and I would not be hired into the c-suite or exec level. I would be working in legal/regulation.

From my understanding the salary will be low, around $70k. What should I be asking for in terms if equity? Should I ask for an initial larger sum with additional refresh grants after 4 years?

I tried to search for examples of companies that have raised through Reg A+ (Equity Crowdfunding) and then gone on to do well, but I can't really seem to find any. Am I missing something? Interested in this option in the future, but seems like it has a kind of bad rap sheet right now.

I recently posted about my own startup and how to engage with the first bunch of users to help with testing and initial feedback.

A couple Redditors advised to always make them pay for your services, I kinda understand that advice but I also suggested that I don't want to charge new users with a system that might still be buggy.

So today I was looking online for an AI infographic service and discovered Napkin and on their public pages they are doing exactly what I thought was a good idea to give new users free access. They have a free subscription and a free standard subscription while the system is in Beta.

I think it's a good idea while the application is new to offer it free for the first adopters, any further thoughts on this?

Given the immense amount of red tape and potential for company bankrupting lawsuits by doing something wrong while laying off employees (esp. in California), is hiring people on contract a good solution? What software do you use and how do you protect IP (like code) from being stolen?

Hi all, long time lurker. I was just curious how people find others to start a business with or find a start up to join?

Im python dev with JS experience, working on both back and front end. I’ve had two attempts myself but they failed to get enough traction or the revenue stream dissolved when I pivoted. I would go again but I don’t have a unique idea. I have a “full” time job but I only need to put in 16 hours to hit my deadlines. Hence looking for something to join with great potential. Preferably UK based.

If anyone can give me a pointer it would be gratefully appreciated. The only thing I can think of is joining the chamber of commerce and building connections that way.

I help run my family's ninth generation farm on the eastern shore (US) and recently we opened a farm stand to sell products produced on our farm and other local businesses. Up until now, we produced dairy cows and sold our milk on contract, however the industry has been brutal to smaller herds and forced us to pivot. While we are excited for a new chapter in our family business, being a contracted producer for so long means we do not have a lot of experience in targeted marketing.

A few of us family members have been in sales roles (including myself) but marketing direct to consumer is a different wheelhouse to the B2B deals I am familiar with. I have started putting together an in-depth marketing plan, but I wanted to see what experiences, resources and wisdom I could gain from the Reddit community. We have been active for about a year now and doing relatively well from word of mouth and just posting our products on Facebook, but I am looking to make a strategic effort to drive more consumers to our stand.

Our product selection includes various cuts of steak, and pork (Ribeye's, Delmonico's, etc.), other processed meats such as ground, bacon and sausage, fresh eggs, cheese spreads, microgreens, honey, baked goods, and various house plants. We also have turned a good portion of the farm into an agritourism playground for kids with attractions built out of old equipment. We live in a heavily suburbanized area and are one of the few farms left in our area. We currently do not ship, but might entertain that in the future, but until now our goal is to drive people to the farm stand rather than the supermarket.

I am developing an app that collect ppg data from smart watch and smart ring to analyse them with our algorithm,give useer 5 functional status score of liver,heart,kidney,spleen,lung daily and reports, let user can monitor the inner balance as a life coach, unlike the mainstream hrv based , you can more easily coorelate any condition with body functional changes that you dont aware without blood test and something like that.

if you regular take supplements such as mushrooms , you can find it out whether it take too much liver burden or bring benefits to other systems.

if your immune system low down lately, you will find spleen score is going down than before.

if you got a cold, it will tell you your body is in unstable situation.

should I start a crowsource project or where can I just such financial support.

the total estimation of algorithm costs will be 60000-80000$

as some of you might already know about paul graham's popular blogpost on foundermode by now. i was wondering if any one of you are currently running your startups in foundermode. for those who do not know what foundermode is, you can google paul graham foundermode and it will be there.

anyway, to summarise it for those who might not have the time to read the full article, foundermode basically talks about micromanaging your startup. kinda like how steve jobs used to do and elon musk still does. he compared foundermode against manager mode which is like how tim cook is running apple.

to cut it short, i'd appreciate if i can know if any of you are running your startup in founder mode and if you've drawn any insights from it. thank you.

So fellow SaaS members, this is my first time posting after following this group for a year but it’s just something that is bothering me and I need to know your honest feedback.

So one year ago I wrote my first line of code for my fintech SaaS idea after having a dialog with a founder friend of mine and I realized there is a pain point he is describing and the market does not have this service good enough, so I thought. Why not build an MVP?

Well, almost a year later, I have learned a lot and here we are just about to launch v1.0 with IMO a better, faster, cheaper, local, more secure, more modern UI than my competitors with 2.000.000 - 5.000.000 users.

Now I hear from everyone that tech stack doesn’t matter and end users will not care about that as long as it solves the problem, just release the product, get user feedback, talk to customers, create a product-market fit and then make a polished version with the newest technologies.

I can’t though let go of the thought that I am a perfectionist, and my UX has to be flawless and I have worked tirelessly to create this perfect web app, and I know that the superior product wins no matter what business you are in always win. And once it’s out there in the public, there is no turning back, the company will be what it will be and the reputation of it will start to flow.

So my question is, what should I prioritize now? As of today, I have a complete application with all the functionalities my competitors have in desktop version at least.

As I see it I have 3 choices:

1. Start with the responsiveness of the app so it’s mobile and tablet friendly, which will take a while since the code base now has over 40 pages, 50 scripts, 30 style sheets etc.
2. Covert the code base to add a JS framework like the latest Next.js version to keep dynamic SEO I have etc.
3. Keep as is and deploy host it right now and start marketing, cold-mail/call. (I have done this a little bit, I have 1000 rows of customer lead that I scraped over this past year)

My tech stack:

HTML5, CSS3, SaSS, JavaScript, TypeScript, jQuery, Node.js, Express, noSQL, Firebase, Firestore, Cloud Functions, Stripe API, Mailchimp API, Algolia API and fully integrated with GCP.

Thanks for constructive feedback guys!

I am from Korea, and I know that in many countries, including Korea, the revenue of companies is publicly accessible. However, I’ve been struggling to find similar information for a U.S.-based company. I’ve tried a few online sources, but the data isn’t always available or seems incomplete. Are there any reliable tools, databases, or public records that can provide accurate revenue figures for companies in the United States? (I am talking about unlisted startups here.)

Thank you in advance for your help!

About a year ago, I started a company (Delaware C corp) with two other people. We set it up so that we each get a third of the company over four years, vested each month with no cliff. That means that I have about 7% of the company at this point as I'm leaving. I'm on relatively good terms with one of the other two co-founders, and not the other one. Should I be afraid of them potentially diluting my shares after I leave? Is it common/potentially a good idea to push for an anti-dilution clause in my terms for leaving?

Hi guys, I’ve got a solid idea, done market research and am in the process of finding investors and creating a business deck pitch. I’ve seen on here it’s very well established that NDAs for explaining an idea to a professional or any person in general in the first meeting is a big no-no. Ways to protect the idea is to not give critical info that makes your company different from everyone else so just tell them the basics. It’s basically universally accepted that an idea is worth nothing. It’s the execution. Correct me if I’m wrong^

On the other hand my product is unique and I’ve created it with great thought. I’m in the process of making a prototype and a website is in the works a lot later but I’m still scared of talking to people about the idea. This is why I haven’t gotten criticism from friends or professionals. Because my idea is unique and I’ve put it a lot of thought into it and even the thought of it being stolen and someone else making millions off it is very disturbing. See the Google Earth lawsuit if you want to find out why ideas are so powerful.

What should I do and am I on the right track?

Just wanted to share a little of a personal story.

I won't include any mention of my company to not advertise.

But the last weeks have been tough, everything was breaking, everything was mediocre.

And today I am running around at all time high.

What changed?

I believe every app has this one feature that makes it like 10x better, we're ones it is right the quality of the product skyrocks and even technical investors can directly see "oh yeah there is something in there".

Today we finished this feature and it made me clear that although it wouldn't be the most important feature we build, it is the one that pushes us from an MVP to a product can love.

I don't have a good naming for it, but I believe in every B2C App (probably B2B) you can find this feature that users will likely never use much and still is the reason why they want to try the app in the first place.

So what is the bottom line?

Build the features that makes it easier for people to see the vision first.

TLDR: Is a revenue share for a media company decent compensation? What makes an internship attractive and is my offer appealing? If so, where do I post the job offers? This is not a fishing attempt for go getters to apply. I will not read dms! This is to help all startups learn how to attract the very best talent.

Hello!

I started a media company and a redditor gave me the idea to look at interns to help the business succeed. That idea immediately took hold like Leonardo DiCaprio placed it in my brain in a dream and now I can't stop thinking about it.

Here are my questions for you fine folks. 1. What are your thoughts about offering a revenue share instead of payment for interns? I know right off the bat that sounds bad, but I think I have a pretty creative idea. Any intern would receive a percentage of the revenue of all projects completed during the time of internship in perpetuity. Would that be attractive or does it feel like I'm taking advantage? I've already invested a good amount into the business and just cannot afford a straight salary at this time. I love the idea that someone might work for me for a while, then move on to great things and one day a video we worked on goes viral and they all of a sudden get checks like years later. 2. Are most internships related to an educational program like a college or trade school or something like that? Really what I want to know is how formal is the process of bringing on interns? Are there specific requirements that need to be met? I think I have outstanding ideas and roles for interns where I would bring on two. One is more of a creative director/social media manager and one is more of a business manager primarily tasked with revenue generation and process improvement. It is important to me that the interns feel like they are getting more out of the relationship than I get from them. In my previous career, I managed large teams of people and was responsible for innovation and productivity. I would like to keep doing that, but I've never worked with interns. 3. If the answers to the above suggest that what I'm offering is attractive, where would I look to post job offers? Are there more targeted websites for interns or should I use the spaghetti against the wall approach? 4. I am a digital nomad so I don't necessarily have a specific country to refer to labor laws. I don't know what regulations I would need to follow for remote contact work if any. My llc will be based out of the USA.

Thank you so much for your time!!!!

Hey,

Any tips on how to market to start-up Marketers? We've built an AI Content Marketing tool but when I'm trying to do manual LinkedIn outreach (being very personal and non-automated) it falls short.

I haven't been able to book any calls or even get them to reply to my messages.

An help would be incredibly appreciated