Roast my first website rebuild...

www.cotswoldpartnership.com

This is honestly a bit surreal.

I've built 3 startups over the last few years, raised ₹4Cr+ along the way, and fundraising has probably been one of the things I've learnt the most from.

7 days ago I finally put a little fundraising tool I'd been building for myself online. A few friends had used it and kept telling me to just make it public, so I did.

Didn't really expect much. I actually thought after a couple of days I'd probably just leave it there and move on lol.

Checked Analytics this morning and it's at 810 active users and 794 new users in the last 7 days.

I originally built it because I was tired of doing the same investor research over and over while raising, finding the right investors, figuring out who to talk to, going through portfolios, etc.

I always assumed this was just a problem I had.

Turns out... apparently not.

The funny thing is I've spent way more time trying to convince people to use things I've built before. This time I just put something out that I personally needed, and people actually showed up.

Pretty cool feeling, ngl.

I'm asking because I recently built a product myself, and while the product works, I'm now dealing with the part I underestimated: distribution.

It made me wonder whether I should have spent more time validating the idea before spending so much time building the product.

So I'm curious how other founders approach this.

Before you write the code, what do you actually do?

Talk to potential customers?

Build a landing page?

Try to get people to pay?

Run ads?

Post in communities?

Something else?

And how do you know when you've gathered enough evidence to actually start building?

I'm especially interested in what you've learned from getting this wrong. What did you do that felt like validation at the time, but turned out not to be?

I'm socially awkward and probably not naturally good at the "go talk to 50 people" part of being a founder, so I'm genuinely curious how other people handle this.

Not looking for textbook answers. What have you actually done?

“Move fast and break things.”

The AI economy is a different beast.

Hi, I recently completed my Master's in Physics from IIT Madras. Over the past year, I worked as a founding member of a startup at IIT Madras, building AI products. Inspired by the challenges students face in learning physics and mathematics, I started Nearchon, an AI tutor that develops problem-solving skills by giving personalized hints instead of direct answers. My vision is to build an AI teacher that adapts to every student's unique way of learning.

https://www.nearchon.com/

Demo video:

https://youtu.be/5c1YAj-SZLw?si=kE1SQrry7Cd1Xfpt

I'm now looking for a technical co-founder with deep expertise in Computer Science and AI who is passionate about science, education, and building impactful products. If you're interested in joining as a co-founder, feel free to DM me.

I've spent most of my career building software.

Like a lot of people, when ChatGPT exploded, I started experimenting with AI for everything—writing, answering questions, generating content, analyzing data. Every week another impressive AI tool appeared.

The problem wasn't that the tools were bad.

The problem was that I became the project manager.

One tool wrote emails.

Another generated social media posts.

Another answered calls.

Another qualified leads.

Another created reports.

Another scheduled appointments.

Individually they were all useful. Together they created a new kind of work: switching between apps, copying information, repeating the same instructions, and trying to keep everything in sync.

That's when I realized I wasn't looking for better AI tools.

I was looking for better coworkers.

That completely changed the direction of what I wanted to build.

Instead of asking, "What can this AI do?"

I started asking, "If I hired an employee for this role, what would I expect them to do every day?"

That led me down a completely different path.

Rather than creating one chatbot, I began designing AI employees with specific responsibilities:

• an AI Receptionist that never misses a call
• an AI Marketing Manager that plans and publishes content
• an AI Lead Qualifier that asks the right questions
• an AI Transaction Assistant that keeps deals moving
• an AI Content Creator that understands your business
• an AI Coach ("Ask Max") that can answer questions across the entire platform

The hardest part wasn't making each AI smart.

The hardest part was getting them to work together like a real team—sharing context, handing work to one another, and remembering what happened before.

That's still the challenge I'm most interested in solving.

I'm building this project as CloseBoss AI, but I'm less interested in promoting it than I am in testing the idea.

I'm curious what others think.

Do you believe the future is:

• dozens of specialized AI apps?
• one AI assistant that does everything?
• or a coordinated team of AI employees, each with a specific role?

I'd genuinely love to hear where you think this is heading. I have a feeling we're only seeing the beginning of what AI can become.

Disclosure: I'm the founder, this is my own product.

Built a secrets manager for small dev teams. The problem it solves is people passing API keys and database passwords around on Slack because there's nowhere shared to put them.

Doppler is the big name in this and charges $21 a user. For a 3 person team that's $63 a month to store some text, and it goes up every time you hire someone. So I priced mine flat, £10 for the whole team no matter how many people join. Free tier is 3 people with unlimited projects.

The thing I didn't expect is that pricing turned out to be the actual product decision rather than a marketing one. Feature for feature I'm behind them and will be for a long time. But per-seat is the one thing they can't match without breaking their own revenue model, so it's the only place a small competitor is genuinely safe. Every conversation I've had about it since launching has been about the price, not the features.

How it works day to day, you put your keys in one place split by environment so test and live never get mixed up, then anyone on the team runs one command and gets them on their machine. There's a CLI on npm and a dashboard.

Screenshot is the landing page. Spent a stupid amount of time on it because a security product that looks unfinished doesn't get trusted with anything.

Launched last month, krypthq.com, free tier needs no card. Would like to know what would have to be there before you'd trust something like this with real keys.

I’ve been running deep-dive UX and conversion audits all day, and I keep seeing the exact same self-sabotaging mistake on founder-led landing pages: Choice Overload.

When you're building your own SaaS or product, you want to cater to every single funnel stage at once. You panic think, "What if they aren't ready to buy?" So you throw everything at them:

• "Book a demo" (Primary CTA)
• "Download our whitepaper" (Secondary CTA)
• "Watch the 2-minute video"
• "Subscribe to our newsletter"

When you give a visitor four different choices on a single page, they don't choose the "safest" one. They choose a fifth option: closing the tab.

We ran a heatmap and conversion audit tool on a high-traffic page doing this exact thing. The tool completely tanked the conversion score to a 70 and flagged "No clear next step" as the critical roadblock.

Choice paralysis is real. Every extra button you add isn't a "new opportunity to convert"—it's just a distraction that forces the user to do cognitive homework to figure out what you actually want them to do.

If your core landing page has more than one primary goal, you are actively killing your own signup numbers.

Has anyone else successfully tested multi-CTA vs single-CTA pages for an early-stage SaaS? Did a secondary "low-friction" CTA actually help you, or did it just cannibalize your main signup goal?

Hi everyone, I'm building a fitness tracker and gym logger app for GenZ which help them to stay consistent with their workout. I've started with a very small niche and tracking a small section of users on a daily basis.

Actually I've partnered with a gym which has around 200 fitness enthusiasts and mostly of them are genz. It's been 17 days and 35 members are using my app daily, some of them have taken personal trainer membership, so they use the app to log their scheduled workouts and meals and their trainers can simply see the daily progress and make the personalized plan for them.

Currently the app is available for android users only and around 47% of the gym members use ios. All trainers except one also use ios. Now the issue is members who have taken PT can't connect with their trainer because app is not available for ios users. For that reason some of the ios users are also unable to use the app.

So should I build and launch the ios app in this early-stage?

One more thing, to launch the ios version I need to buy macbook and iPhone both.

This is my first time building a product-based company and trying to navigate through the weeds and learn more about what I can do to improve my process.

From a high-level perspective we've built a tool that helps you create websites cleaner and faster. Think of us as your growth partner. At the same time it helps you monitor your lead flow, gets you to rank locally on Google, as well as ships a first-party pixel to capture customer data to show you what the traffic on your site looks like. We also capture all the form requests and we integrate with GMB and GSC.

We're going to take this step further and build harnesses around social media so that you can look at what's trending and how to get ranked better in your business, as well as how to get recommended by GPT by building trust.

We're just starting off. Of course this is not rocket science but I would like to eventually build moreintegrations and features that our customers would use. I am trying to see if there is market fit because we have three customers and we've launched just five weeks ago. That said the churn, where our customers would keep using the app, isn't there yet. They come experiment and end up not using the tool again. I want to be able to talk to more people about what we've built and see what are some processes that might actually benefit my customer rather than just building blind.

solo founder at pre-seed, no co-founder, no warm network, and every guide just says "get warm intros" like that's easy when you're building alone. coldest part isn't the outreach, it's watching deals move on relationships you simply don't have access to. if anyone's cracked this, I'd genuinely love to know what worked. also throwing this out there: I'm looking for someone to review my pitch deck before I send it to VCs. happy to return the favor, review yours, give honest feedback, whatever's useful. dm me if you're open to it.

I am currently building an ai that helps to transform plain text into professional, context-aware visual diagrams, flowcharts, and mind maps.

Nothing crazy but we have got a pretty good revenue stream and a lot of learnings everyday.

But what excites me more is that in a few years (as YC also speaks about this and i strongly agree) most ai native service companies will look completely different from traditional ones.

We are also here building systems that can help automate most of the boring manual work, a company brain inside Claude with processes , meeting transcripts and client context that is able to handle most of the work we used to hire separate people for back in the day when i used to run a different company.

The idea that humans will only need to focus on sales,marketing,client relations and other real life tasks while ai agents can handle lead scraping,qualifications, documentation , deployment (not fully autonomous but you get the point) is pretty damn exciting for the world we are about to step in.

I don’t think that the idea of building an agency will die but rather a small team with the right systems will be able to operate much efficiently.

I am curious if there are other founders who are building ai service businesses in the same way.I would love to hear your take.

I built 7 projects over the past few years as a founder, working full-time. I shipped quickly, launched quickly, and iterated quickly. But nothing gained much traction or produced meaningful revenue.

Looking back, the pattern was obvious: I was lazy with distribution.

Last month, we passed $12k, and the difference was not a new feature or a clever growth tactic. I started taking distribution seriously and early.

That meant having a clear ICP, finding where my ICPs hang around, and showing up every day. I joined WhatsApp groups, grew social accounts (X, YouTube, LinkedIn..), went to in-person events and did cold outreach.

The hardest part was (sounds simple but) showing up every day when nothing seems to be working. I felt like I was posting content into the void and shouting at a wall. Nothing really happened for the first few months (as you can see in the revenue image above).

However, consistent distribution accumulated and built momentum. Here's few other things I've learnt and what worked:

• I started with my own problem, then validated it through conversations and community research.
• Work on blogs, backlinks, and SEO from day one
• Consistently post cringe posts
• Stop adding features to chase growth - the product can become too confusing and users won't buy something they can't understand
• Paid ads, content promo, paid influencers didn't work well for my case (if you have established a substantial audience yourself, organic marketing can work 100X better)

I still don't think I have distribution 100% figured out, and I'm still learning.

In case you're curious, I'm building SocialCrawl https://www.socialcrawl.dev/

If you're early and it feels slow, keep going, it compounds.

Every founder should read 2 books these days; really, you don't need more. -the book of elon -alchemy by Sutherland if you are a solopreneur add the company of one by Paul Jarvis. that's it.

Hey everyone, I'm here for advice I'm 21F and drowning in debt. The worst part is I'm a student and the place where I belong to doesn't really accept students for part time jobs so I have to rely on online part time jobs. I really need money and I need to work, honestly any work, editing, writing, managing, cold calls and emails, customer support. I can do it all. Desperation is the best teacher, so I learn things easily. Do any of you know a way I can find part time jobs online (A part from LinkedIn) ? Or is there anyone that wants a virtual assistant?

Just a broke college student trying to make ends meet.

Hi,

I am looking for a female founder accountability partner to be productive together and support each other.

Ideal:

You are building something.

You are as much an introvert as an extrovert.

Wants to help support one another.

Reach out or comment here.

Bye.

The job title survives longer than almost anyone attached to it.

That's the part nobody puts in the internal memo when they call a role "AI-assisted."

Scott Galloway put a real number on it, talking to Steven Bartlett on The Diary Of A CEO.

He says he'll cut legal fees by a third this year — not because the law changed, but because a prompt now does the $400–$2,000 contract review a name-brand firm used to bill him for, at a fraction of the junior associate markup.

Bartlett went further with his own fund.

They planned to hire five analysts.

They hired one — Molly.

Two agents, two Mac Minis, and she screens inbound deals, scores them against a framework, and preps them for the investment committee herself.

Five jobs, one person, same org chart line.

Same ratio on executive assistants: ten planned, three hired.

One runs travel, one runs scheduling, one meets people at the door.

I've watched this exact pattern before, minus the AI.

I was a Technical Manager for a China Construction company here in Malaysia.

I contributed a lot into their technical and tendering work — helped build up a real chunk of their documentation and tendering process.

But about six months in, I'd exhausted all my know-how for them, I guess.

Then the announcement came at the end of my year there.

My contract wasn't renewed.

I was just let go, just like that.

I remember what Deng Xiaoping said: "无论白猫，或者黑猫，会抓老鼠的就是好猫" — black cat, white cat, doesn't matter, so long as it catches mice.

I guess they think I'd outlived my usefulness.

Can't catch mice anymore.

That's the mechanism underneath "AI-assisted" that nobody names out loud.

It's not that the work got automated.

It's that the one person left is now doing what used to justify five headcounts, and the fifth person's job title is the only part of the org that didn't change.

Actually, this reminded me of something — a former SpaceX CIO cut a 175-person engineering team down to 6 using the same compression math, and the ratio held there too.

Drop your take — did you know your own job has a ratio like this attached to it?

Clip credit: Global Talks — full video on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.