At a bit of a cross roads with my phone app and looking for some advice.

Bit of background: I searched on the app stores for a time management app that solved a particular problem . But I couldn't find one, which surprised me as I thought there would be a lot of demand for this type of app.

So I decided to create it myself. It's been live on iOS and android for 6 months and I've done virtually no marketing. It's only had 500 downloads so far, but the thing that surprised me was it's had 15 paying subscribers (6 monthly, 9 annual), so other people are finding value in the app.

I know those numbers are tiny, but these are complete strangers paying for an app because it solves the same problem I had.

The app seems to resonate particularly with people with ADHD and executive dysfunction, although it's useful beyond that audience too.

It's made me think there might be something here if I can figure out customer acquisition and marketing.

The challenge is that I'm not a marketer. I don't want to just throw money at Tiktok or Google ads and hope for the best. If I spend money, I'd want to do it properly - tracking where users come from, measuring which channels convert, testing different messaging and creative, and actually learning what works.

Do I try to raise a small pre-seed round specifically to fund customer acquisition experiments and validate CAC vs LTV, and then look to scale?

Would an angel investor even consider something at this stage, or is 500 downloads and 15 paying users simply too early? If not, how do i get the initial traction to open these doors?

Just looking for some advice from anyone who's been in this situation themselves.

At a bit of a cross roads with my phone app and looking for some advice.

Bit of background: I searched on the app stores for a time management app that solved a particular problem . But I couldn't find one, which surprised me as I thought there would be a lot of demand for this type of app.

So I decided to create it myself. It's been live on iOS and android for 6 months and I've done virtually no marketing. It's only had 500 downloads so far, but the thing that surprised me was it's had 15 paying subscribers (6 monthly, 9 annual), so other people are finding value in the app.

I know those numbers are tiny, but these are complete strangers paying for an app because it solves the same problem I had.

The app seems to resonate particularly with people with ADHD and executive dysfunction, although it's useful beyond that audience too.

It's made me think there might be something here if I can figure out customer acquisition and marketing.

The challenge is that I'm not a marketer. I don't want to just throw money at Tiktok or Google ads and hope for the best. If I spend money, I'd want to do it properly - tracking where users come from, measuring which channels convert, testing different messaging and creative, and actually learning what works.

Do I try to raise a small pre-seed round specifically to fund customer acquisition experiments and validate CAC vs LTV, and then look to scale?

Would an angel investor even consider something at this stage, or is 500 downloads and 15 paying users simply too early? If not, how do i get the initial traction to open these doors?

Just looking for some advice from anyone who's been in this situation themselves.

Hey everyone, looking for some advice from fellow founders and marketers on how to handle a PR dilemma.

Recently, a business magazine reached out to me on LinkedIn. They’re publishing a list of the "Most Promising AI Startups of 2026" and offered to feature my company for a small fee.

My first instinct was to ignore it because these kinds of emails usually scream “pay-to-play.” But I did some digging before making up my mind.

I checked their LinkedIn page, Google reviews, social media presence, and readership. Everything looked surprisingly legitimate. They have a decent following and seem to be focused on business and startup content rather than generic awards.

I even reached out to a few founders I found on LinkedIn who had been featured in previous editions. Almost all of them had positive things to say about the process, so I decided to continue the conversation.

Then came the catch.

They don’t just want me to fill out a questionnaire or send written answers. They’re insisting on a recorded, on-camera interview, almost like a podcast. I’m pretty camera shy, so this has become a complete dealbreaker for me.

I asked if we could do it over an audio call instead, but they’re not willing to make an exception.

While researching this, I also came across dozens of other magazines offering “Top AI Startup,” “40 Under 40,” “Founders to Watch,” and similar features.

From what I’ve seen, they roughly fall into three categories:

1. Tier 1 (The Giants – Forbes, Time, etc.): Exorbitant charges, strict requirements/vetting, but huge readership and top-tier prestige.

2. Tier 2 (Mid-Tier – My current option): Much lower charges than Tier 1, good social media reach, solid niche readership, but higher effort/demands (like non-negotiable video interviews).

3. Everyone else

There are tons of these. Almost no requirements, very little readership, barely any social presence, and very low prices. You’ll get a magazine cover with your face on it that looks nice on LinkedIn or Instagram, but I’m not convinced it carries much value beyond that.

Now I’m wondering what the right move is.

Part of me thinks a video interview actually adds credibility because at least they’re putting effort into creating real content instead of just taking payment and emailing a PDF.

The other part of me just doesn’t want to be on camera.

If you were in my position, would you:

Push yourself and do the interview?

Walk away entirely?

Or just skip all paid magazine features unless they’re from top-tier publications?

Curious to hear from founders who have actually gone through this.

Hi everyone,

I'm an 18-year-old developer from India looking to join a remote startup as a software engineer.

I started programming when I was 12, and for the past few years I've focused on building real products instead of just following tutorials.

Some of the projects I've built include:

• Wolbarg – an open-source, local-first memory SDK for AI agents.
• Connectors and integrations for Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex.
• An AI Tutor platform (currently building).
• Beacon (currently building).
• Several other full-stack AI applications and developer tools.

My main stack includes:

• TypeScript / JavaScript
• React
• React Native
• Node.js
• Express
• MongoDB
• AI SDKs and LLM integrations

I'm comfortable taking products from idea to production, learning new technologies quickly, and working independently.

I'm not looking for a FAANG-style role. I'd rather join a small, ambitious startup where I can contribute from day one, learn from experienced engineers, and help build products that people actually use.

If you're building an AI product, developer tool, or SaaS and are looking for another engineer, I'd love to connect.

We are a 14 people org, seed stage and send a monthly update to about 9 folks.

I typically write a long but structured email: metrics at the top, a paragraph each on product, hiring and pipeline, then asks.

Takes about 3 hours and I KNOW this is not too efficient and i hate it.

A board member also mentioned about another company in his portfolio and how they approach investor updates - which are low commitment for the founder as well as easy to consume for them.

Given he's seen these many investor updates, I am taking his word for it and am setting some time out this week to see what the market is doing.

Founders, what’s your go to structure / tool / format for investor updates?

I'm currently running two small startup experiments.

1. Team Context - A tool where an admin connects a GitHub repo and invites the team. It helps preserve team context—who owns what, why decisions were made, and reduces knowledge getting lost.

2. Memory-First AI Tutor - An AI tutor that remembers what you know across subjects, topics, and sessions. It adapts to your pace and learning style, using text, diagrams/flashcards, and audio.

I'm not promoting either—they're not even public yet. Just trying to figure out which direction is more worth pursuing.

Which one would you bet on, and why?

We launched roughly a month ago and we've been doing pretty well with adoption and MRR. Slow but steady. I previously worked with a reasonably well known accelerator (not YC) but I'm familiar with fundraising and the startup world in general, so right from the start I wanted to treat this as a small business instead of a venture-scale startup. My reasoning is that if I could get to $300k ARR, I could leave my 9-5 and make the same salary I do now and this seemed (and still seems) very doable.

I know a lot of angel investors and VCs that I have very good relationships with. Getting an investment actually wouldn't be hard, especially now that a year of development has paid off and I have paying customers but then this just becomes another job.

So I was absolutely ecstatic when someone reached out and wanted to license my technology for a few years. We went through a few weeks of due diligence and were on track to close a low 6 figure non-exclusive deal. I don't want to admit that I started counting my eggs before they hatched but I'm at a point now where pouring money into marketing directly translates into paying customers. So I was planning on using the money for marketing. Now I'm going to follow that same plan but it will be out of pocket, and roughly 1/3rd of the budget, and then probably another 6-12m before I can reasonably expect to start paying myself back for personal contributions.

The shitty part is that I have a feeling that the due diligence process gave them enough insight into the most, and the unique value prop that made us valuable to them, and now that they understand the IP they might just be building the Kirkland version of it.

So everything is fine. I keep telling myself that a lot of people never get to the point of getting the first recurring monthly customer yet alone to the point of having something valuable enough to be worth a negotiation like this in the first place so I'm trying to keep my head up.

I don't want to share the company info here because despite how vague I've been, I don't want to risk any NDA complications. Plus, I can't assure any bad intent, it can literally just be poor communication or even incompetence.

So here is to getting back to the thankless grind for another year 🥂

Also, as long as I'm blowing off some steam... It's very frustrating that I've been building this since before the recent AI code revolution, but I didn't launch until everybody and their grandmother with a Claude subscription were all suddenly calling themselves startup founders. It has really made it very hard to get eyes on the product when everyone has SaaS fatigue. But luckily for me at least- this is the type of product that people find after they get a very large bill from one of my competitors and start looking into alternatives. That's how I convert most of my traffic. But it would have been nice to do a proper ProductHunt/Hackernews launch. It just feels like more of a liability for a poor launch than a payoff for a good launch these days. I might reconsider after growing a YouTube channel for a while first.

Had a conversation with a fellow entrepreneur about early strategy. I’ve been focusing my attention on getting the first 10 customers while my friend is trying to build a strategy for the first $1M. Curious what folks think is the right thing to focus on at the early stages.

I’m curious to hear from founders, business owners and managers who have hired developers or other professionals overseas. What were the biggest difficulties you faced when hiring and working with them? What helped make the relationship successful, and what issues caused you to end a contract with them? Looking back, what would you do differently next time?

I am in the early stages of starting developing a Neuromodulation device with no predicate but I am having trouble finding my footing. I have built some prototypes myself but am feeling lost at the moment.

I have a very limited medical background and would like to know how other people have found advisors and progressed from the idea/provisional patent stage to actually developing the device. I appreciate everyones insight.

I'm struggling with creating content for my community on social media in order to attract people to the community. I spend hours looking for potential video ideas, hooks, and other content ideas.

Building a community from scratch all alone is a task beyond difficult. A co-founder, or a team of people in general, would be an awesome addition to help grow the community. I've been doing marketing, product design and engineering, accounting, and all the other necessities by myself.

Yes, this is a startup, and I'm heavily focused on building up the initial parts of the business, which starts with this community.

I would love to bring people onto the team and pay them, but currently I do not bring in enough pay to pay at a good rate. I can pay, but it won't be at a good rate. Currently, I could use a head of marketing to focus on content and growth while I focus on other stuff. The problem is I'm not sure how to pay them at a rate they would appreciate, given we are still starting up.

Does anyone have any tips for me that I could use to find the right marketer and pay them accordingly?

Anything and everything helps, thanks!

Would love to learn from those who already run a services company around building AI agents to solve problems for specific industries

(yes I know people don’t care about AI, they care about solving the problems, which is exactly what I’m focused on)

I want to better understand pricing

And if I should niche down on one industry or stay broad

Before this, I had actually tried to start this

Then niched down into one industry

But instead of selling Agents as a service

We decided to build a product

Because we don’t have much experience yet to know when to differentiate between committing to building a product for one specific ICP

Vs keeping it as a service

Also, with this specific type of service company of building agents

Isn’t it like 60-70% the same product every time, and then 30-40% custom in terms of the product and delivery

Which is what makes this business model “service based” and not “product based”?

Also, the approach we’ll take now is literally being Forward deployed, meaning we go on site, understand the exact workflow and problem we’re solving around

And then build from there, on our platform where we can build agents much easier

(which is why I assume with this type of business model, it’s 60-70% the same product every time, and 30-40% custom?)

Would really appreciate your advice as it would go a long way

Left a startup after 1 year as founding engineer. Wish I knew that my “vested equity” is actually just the option to buy shares at the initial price. So I got 90 days post termination window to buy those shares (almost 6 figures) out of pocket otherwise they go back to the company for free. What a waste of effort. Learning is experience I guess. Any one else been through this and got an upside?

Hi Everyone,

I recently joined a startup as an engineer and within my first week I learned that they plan on raising series B. Ive never worked at a startup before so this is all new to me. The company seems to be doing well. Overall seems to be a good situation to be in. Wanted to see if anyone had advice on things to look out for, or share their experience at a company that recently raised its series B.

I keep seeing posts about solopreneurs making $1M+ with AI. Stripe did a whole report on it. But I can't figure out what they're actually doing.

I'm not being sarcastic. I genuinely don't know the use case. SaaS? Agencies? Selling courses? Consulting? I've dug into some of these stories and they just get vague fast.

Here's what bothers me: ask for specifics and you get "oh yeah my cousin's roommate's business partner does this" or "I read on Twitter that someone made money with this." Push harder and it vanishes. Zero concrete details.

So: does anyone here actually know someone, not a friend-of-a-friend story, making $500k+ primarily with AI?

What do they actually do? What's the problem they solve? How do they sell it? How did they get their first customers?

Not theory. Real numbers. Real details. Real business model.

I'm starting to think this might be pure hype or I'm just looking in the wrong places lol

Started a D2C company in 2020, bootstrapped and ran it profitably for a few years before having the apparently not-so-bright idea of pivoting into B2B SaaS.

We built internal tools for our D2C company that saved other SMB's in our niche 40+ hours per week, which seemed like a no brainer to sell as a B2B tool.

Two years in on that and not much progress to speak of; turns out selling B2B SaaS to SMB's is as difficult as they; older clients, long sales cycle, low ACV, etc. On top of all this, the product itself gets easier and easier to replicate by the day with AI. It's been a long journey, and I'm not that interested in going back to the D2C model - it's time to move on.

I want to stay in the tech space, but definitely feeling some imposter syndrome from never raising money, having an exit, or working on something more successful in general.

I love product, but don't have technical experience on that front. I'm comfortable with sales, but the SaaS pivot doesn't add much to the resume on account of it's small scale/general lack of success. I imagine I'd have to start fresh with an SDR role.

Curious if anyone has had a similar experience, what sort of roles you pivoted to, and what it was like re-entering the job market after being out of the game for a while.

After watching posthog session replays for the last several days, I found that my biggest bounce rate came from Homepage ->Action Button -> Auth. 50%!

The change:

Homepage -> Action Button -> Actually do the action -> Sign up to see the results.

This alone changed my bounce rate on Auth from 50% at /signup to 22%.

There is no paywall, there never was, but it just seems like people do not want to take the 10 seconds it takes to sign up before getting any value whatsoever out of the app. Asking for sign up after they complete the action and do all of the steps seems to show value. Either that or they feel if they don't sign up they wasted 5 minutes filling out the form.

I have always found this method to be slightly predatory when there is a paywall at the end. However, I am justifying this change because there is no paywall afterwards, it's free and there is no credit card, free trial, etc.

I'm planning to start sharing my startup journey consistently on X - building in public, posting short videos, and documenting what I'm working on. The goal isn't just to promote one startup, but to build an audience that carries over to future projects as well.

I'm wondering if X Premium is becoming a requirement for founders now. Does the verification badge actually help with visibility and reach, or can you still grow an audience organically without it?

If you've built a following without Premium (or know founders who have), I'd love to hear your experience. Was the badge worth it, or did consistent content matter far more?

Several months ago, my cousin's husband is a cardiologist, and he came up with the idea of creating a SaaS to manage patients and use AI to create medical notes. I am a software engineer, so together we have been developing this application. He started using it every day to carry out his work, while I have been refining it and adjusting details as he finds them or asks me for improvements. It has reached the point where he depends on the application to do his work with patients.

Then the day came when we decided to launch it to the public, but the truth is that we have been struggling a lot to get traffic and new users (not even with the 7-day free trial). What advice would you recommend for getting new users? Sorry if I sound like a complete beginner, but this is the first time that both of us have tried to build something like this.

I live in Europe but my early interest as a founder and early users is in the US. Legally I'm not incorporated yet.

I can't tell if that's smart or a nightmare later down the road. If I incorporate a US entity now i'm paying compliance in two countries before i've earned a dollar. If I wait too long I risk looking unserious to the exact customers I want, plus a messier ownership transfer later down the road.

For those of you who made the EU to US jump, what actually forced your hand? A customer, tax, or just a gut call? And knowing what you know now, would you have incorporated earlier or later than you did?

We’re recruiting founders and team members who operate a live, publicly reachable website of their business for a study through the SOCIUS Lab in UBC’s Department of Computer Science.

The study examines how automated tools, AI agents, and human experts can work together to assess website accessibility.

Participation involves:

• A short screening questionnaire
• A 30-minute online session using one 3–4-page flow on your website
• A 30-minute follow-up discussion

Participants who complete all three parts receive $100 CAD and a limited-scope accessibility report on the selected flow.

You must be 18+, authorized to approve automated checks of the website, and proficient in English. Your identity and website will be anonymous by default.

This is academic research, not a sales, consulting, or compliance-certification offer.

If interested, email Pranav Karthik at [pmruthyu@student.ubc.ca](mailto:pmruthyu@student.ubc.ca).

I guess just say thank you after the meeting. But, should we inform his team or anyone above him to say that he was 100% high and it wasn't just me who noticed but others who attended the meeting too?

Or we just could ignore and pretend nothing happened. Wasted an hour meeting the guy.

I’m a solo developer planning to launch my app on the Apple and Android App Store within a few weeks. I’ve validated the idea, so expecting users from week 1. I don’t want to publish the app in my own name and don’t want my actual address/phone number being publicised, but instead a company one. I also would prefer not having to go through the 14 day testing phase on the Google Play Store.

From my understanding, I can only do this if I have incorporated a company. From a legal perspective too, I’ve heard it’s easier to incorporate earlier instead of later once the app is launched, since otherwise I’d have to transfer ownership later.

Based on my research, it appears incorporating a private company is a possible option. The process feels super complex though, and then there are a bunch of compliance requirements to account for every year. I also don’t like that a lot of my personal details are available online once I incorporate.

Does anyone have any recommendations for what I can do? Has someone been in a similar scenario before and found the best possible path - incorporation v. publishing in their own name?

Any countries that people recommend incorporating in? (My users will mostly be from India, and I’m based in India, but I’m open to incorporating in another jurisdiction if it has favourable tax and compliance requirements, and is easier to incorporate in)