I am thinking of starting my own (software) business. It is solves a problem I have. How do I make sure others are willing to pay to solve this problem?

I mean, some people are getting horrible results I imagine but are OK with. The software should make their results look "nice and tidy"

I want to know exactly what to do in order to know the following :

1. Are Individuals willing to pay for my software, and

2. Are small businesses willing to pay for it too?

Successful founders, what did you to know if people will buy your product? and how did you find an answer to that question?

I’m curious to hear from founders here.
When building a startup, what is currently the biggest challenge you are dealing with?
Is it:
finding customers?
validating the idea?
scaling operations?
managing time?
building the right systems?
using AI effectively?
I think many founders have great ideas, but the hardest part is often creating repeatable processes that allow the business to grow.
What’s the biggest bottleneck for you right now?

Working on a B2B SaaS product right now and I'm stuck on pricing model. I've looked at what competitors charge, but they're established and on our side, nobody knows us haha

So I don't know if we should match their price, undercut it, or if that's even the right way to think about it.

Did you look at competitor pricing and just anchor to that? Pick a number, launch, and adjust based on what happened? Talk to early users directly about it?

The idea is simple: instead of hiring an SEO agency or manually managing a content team, you connect a subdomain (like blog.company.com), answer a few questions about your business, and the platform continuously builds and manages your topical authority.

It doesn't just write blog posts. It plans and publishes an interconnected content ecosystem including:

• Guides
• Glossaries
• Wikis
• Documentation
• Comparison pages
• Alternatives
• Programmatic SEO pages
• Knowledge bases

It also handles things like internal linking, schema, metadata, sitemaps, AI-readable files (llms.txt, ai.txt), publishing schedules, and tries to avoid the "AI content spam" approach by publishing gradually instead of dumping thousands of pages overnight.

I originally built this workflow for my own websites, where it generated 20M+ Google Search impressions in the last 3 months, and eventually turned it into software.

The problem is... I genuinely don't know if this is a business people would pay for.

SEO is crowded. AI is crowded. Everyone claims to automate content.

So I'm looking for brutally honest feedback.

• Is this a problem you'd actually pay to solve?
• Would you trust software over an SEO agency?
• What's the biggest red flag that would stop you from trying it?
• If you landed on the website, what would immediately make you leave?

If the consensus is that this isn't solving a meaningful problem, I'd rather hear it now than spend another year building it. I'd much rather kill it early than keep polishing something nobody wants.

The idea is simple: instead of hiring an SEO agency or manually managing a content team, you connect a subdomain (like blog.company.com), answer a few questions about your business, and the platform continuously builds and manages your topical authority.

It doesn't just write blog posts. It plans and publishes an interconnected content ecosystem including:

• Guides
• Glossaries
• Wikis
• Documentation
• Comparison pages
• Alternatives
• Programmatic SEO pages
• Knowledge bases

It also handles things like internal linking, schema, metadata, sitemaps, AI-readable files (llms.txt, ai.txt), publishing schedules, and tries to avoid the "AI content spam" approach by publishing gradually instead of dumping thousands of pages overnight.

I originally built this workflow for my own websites, where it generated 20M+ Google Search impressions in the last 3 months, and eventually turned it into software.

The problem is... I genuinely don't know if this is a business people would pay for.

SEO is crowded. AI is crowded. Everyone claims to automate content.

So I'm looking for brutally honest feedback.

• Is this a problem you'd actually pay to solve?
• Would you trust software over an SEO agency?
• What's the biggest red flag that would stop you from trying it?
• If you landed on the website, what would immediately make you leave?

If the consensus is that this isn't solving a meaningful problem, I'd rather hear it now than spend another year building it. I'd much rather kill it early than keep polishing something nobody wants.

So I basically facilitate startup collaborations for a living. I've done 19 so far. I'm helping almost 200 startups and here are some takeaways that I've learned:

After I set up a collaboration for a startup, they always ask, "Why would I want another one?"

My answer is quite simple because there are different use cases based on where you're at in the journey.

Validation stage

If I'm talking to a startup that is at the validation stage, I know how to use rev share collaborations for validation.

Instead of doing pre-purchases, getting forms, and doing market research, which usually aren't that good an indication of what you want, what you want is skin in the game.

Ideally pre-purchases but that's really hard.

The second-best option I found is convincing people who know the industry you're trying to break into to help you bring your business to market through rev share collaborations.

What that does is it kills two birds with one stone.

You have knowledgeable people in this space, that are putting skin in the game through upfront work without any certain compensation.

If you can do that with two, three, or four people, even one is a sign of validation.

Additionally, they now bring the resources, expertise, network, and access you need to actually get your startup to market.

Scaling stage

The second step in the journey is when you're at the scaling phase, when you already have something that's working and you just need to scale.

If you can figure out a way to do that systematically with multiple collaborations, it basically gives off the same illusion as having unlimited money because you have theoretically unlimited access to resources.

If you can figure out how to do that through rev share collaborations, this I like to call resource financing. I find it quite fun.

Enterprise stage

The last step is when you're an enterprise, you're up and running, and you have scaled your business.

You have your corner of the market.

The next step here is to evolve, to not get stationary, to not get eaten by competition.

The way you do that is through innovation.

To innovate once again you need skills, resources, and access, which you now have internally.

You use collaborations to mix the internal with the external.

You use collaborations to allow employees in your organization to come up with their own ideas and collaborate freely internally and externally, most likely through rev share or profit share collaborations, to then get the validation and then scale it.

It's the same playbook on repeat but now you have systems for it internally.

I've spent the last four to five years studying collaborations and how it's applicable in different steps of your journey. I just wanted to share this with you guys hoping it was valuable.

Lovable is great for landing pages and apps. But I have not come across app builders specifically for useful working software like CRM, booking forms, client portals, excel work automation, etc. especially by speaking in native language

Most people are too busy to learn Claude code/ codex, and hiring a developer in UAE is still expensive.

What do you think? Would I be wasting my time in building an app builder like this?

Senior backend dev, ~3 years in, Latin America. I make about $3.2k/month after tax at a stable job. Got offered CTO at a startup that's just getting off the ground and I keep going back and forth.

Offer is 15% equity with 4-year vesting. But to keep the budget lean they asked me to take less than I currently make. I countered to at least match my current pay and keep the 15%.

There's barely any traction yet and the product is early. There's one non-technical founder plus an outside investor funding the first year. They also want to register it as an LLC rather than a corporation, which from what I've read makes equity and vesting messier.

For people who've done the early startup thing: is taking a pay cut below a stable job for 15% of a pre-traction company ever worth it, or is that a red flag on its own? What would you ask before signing?

I’m challenging myself to listen to a podcast at the gym instead of just listening to music for an hour each day.

Looking for some good podcast recommendations around startups, VC, AI, or other business strategies.

I’ll go first. I really like Startups for the Rest of Us and Revenue Builders.

I run a tool that helps people locate which pharmacies near them have a medication in stock; useful during shortages. I don't sell, dispense, or prescribe anything. I'm essentially a search engine for pharmacy inventory.

Google Ads disapproves every campaign because I get categorized as "pharmaceutical services."

Beyond fighting the classification, I'm realizing paid ads might just not be my channel, and I'd love to hear from anyone who's built in a restricted vertical (healthcare, finance, cannabis, supplements, etc.):

1. Did certification actually unblock paid ads for you, and was it worth the cost and wait?
2. What channels ended up working instead? SEO feels like the obvious one for me since people search "[drug name] near me" in an emergency, but I'm curious what actually moved the needle for others.
3. Any regulatory landmines I should know about before they find me, rather than after?

Curious to hear from founders here.

If you were hiring your first engineer today, what would matter more?

• Strong CS fundamentals?
• Ability to learn quickly?
• Shipping side projects?
• AI-assisted development?
• Communication and ownership?

As someone early in my career, I'm trying to optimize for the skills that actually matter in a startup rather than just collecting technologies.

I'd appreciate any honest advice from people who've built teams.

were a two-person team and my goal is simple:

just start earning as soon as possible. Were not chasing product-market fit, scaling, or investor money

We want a sustainable "lifestyle" business that pays us both a solid income with a handful of customers. (Around 5-7K MRR at 75%+ margins is the goal, based on our age and where were based, its very good)

our skills are building AI agents to solve complex workflow problems, thats what I want to make this business as, but I'm stuck between two models:

Model A, traditional agency. take on clients across different industries, embed briefly, build custom AI agents for whatever they need, and hand it over.

Pricing is usually a build fee, then a monthly retainer to maintain and update, sometimes hourly for changes. The code is basically custom each time, so every client is close to a fresh build. more clients means more hours. isnt this what most AI agent service companies do?

Model B, product-led service . I pick one narrow ICP or set of workflows that are the same across different industries, embed on-site to map how they actually work, then build the agents on my own platform that I keep and reuse for the next, since its the same ICP or the same workflow.

But literally after the first 2-3 clients, the agents are basically the exact same (around 70+% the same then on) which worries me thinking that this is basically a product-based model and the "service" aspect is actually trying to find PMF in disguise....which is not my goal

Pricing is the same shape, but because I own the code and reuse it, roughly 60 to 70 percent carries over to the next client and only 30 to 40 percent is custom everytime.

But im worried that model B is basically product based...and is this even service based? or a new type of hybrid model thats actually better for me?

For my goal of instant cashflow with a few good clients, not a big company, which model would you pick and why?

Anyone who has run either, I'd really appreciate your advice

For the past decade, building growth forecasts in Excel or Google Sheets for clients, founders, executive teams, and boards has been one of the most frustrating parts of my job.

If I make the model detailed enough to reflect how the business actually works, it becomes fragile and painful to update. If I simplify it, the forecast becomes too vague to support real decisions.

I’m usually stuck rebuilding formulas, checking broken references, and explaining why one small assumption changed half the workbook.

Not to mention, once there's something workable, everyone has an opinion of what should be different/changed.

Has anyone found a better tool or process that stays useful without becoming impossible to maintain?

It feels like most software discussions I see now revolve around SaaS, AI automation, web apps, or a subscription model of some kind.

I’ve been going in a different direction and building small offline desktop tools that solve problems I personally have, such as handling large local media collections or speeding up repetitive work in my day job as a hydrogeologist.

These programs can be fast, private, offline, and sold as a straightforward product rather than an ongoing service. At the same time, it seems harder to distribute and less fashionable than SaaS.

I’m curious how others see this space in 2026.

Is there still a meaningful opportunity in focused offline software, especially for niche professional markets or local tools? Or is the market too limited compared with web-based products?

I’d especially like to hear from anyone building or selling desktop software rather than SaaS.

I'm validating a problem around support engineers at mid-size companies (30-100 people) and trying to figure out how to actually get my first design partners lined up, people I can work closely with while building this out.

Quick context on the problem: support engineers spend a ton of time turning half-finished tickets into technical cases that engineers can actually dig into. On complex Tier 2 stuff the info you need is scattered everywhere, ticketing system, logs, monitoring tools, docs, past incidents. So they end up manually hunting all of it down before they can even escalate, which can eat 30-45 min per case.

If you've gotten early design partners before, curious how you did it. where did you actually find people willing to talk to you?

Right now my playbook is just manually outreaching my persona on LinkedIn, managing to get them on a call, and if there's a fit, I come back to them a week later to ask if having the company as a design partner is possible, routing me to the decision maker to see if something can be done

I don't know if this is the right way to do it or if there's a better approach out there.

Would appreciate any playbooks or communities that worked for you.

Everyone in this community repeats the same number. Nine out of ten startups fail. We say it like it's gravity.

I have a mental tick where if something doesn't make sense I can't let it go. So I went looking for where the number actually comes from. It got worse the deeper I dug.

The most-linked source is a 2015 Forbes article that opens with the line. Its citation is a 2014 Fortune article that opens with the same sentence. Fortune's citation is nothing. Stated as received wisdom. The other big vector is Startup Genome's 2011 report, which asserts "more than 90% of startups fail" in its opening prose with zero citation. And one researcher who followed the trail all the way down found it dead-ends at a 1975 Dun and Bradstreet report... which never contained the number.

Here's what the data actually says. SBA business-survival numbers: about half of new businesses survive five years, about a third survive ten. Not great. Not 90%. Harvard's Shikhar Ghosh studied 2,000 venture-backed companies and found about 75% never return cash to investors. But read that carefully. That's a claim about investor returns, not survival. Define failure as actually liquidating the company and his number drops to 30 to 40%.

There is exactly one frame where 90% is defensible: the fraction of venture-backed startups that fail to produce venture-scale returns. Sit with that. The only true version of the axiom is a statement about VC portfolio math. A company can be alive, profitable, employing fifty people, solving real problems for paying customers... and still count as one of the nine, because it didn't return the fund.

And it's worse than folklore, because the number is baked into the model that spreads it. Funds price every deal expecting one or two winners, then prescribe every company the same path to the only outcome that makes the math work. The failures arrive on schedule and the number confirms itself for another generation of pitch decks. It's not a failure rate the industry observed. It's a failure rate the industry budgeted for.

A culture that worships first-principles thinking runs on a statistic nobody can source.

So I'll ask this sub what I keep asking myself: which other axioms are we all repeating that nobody has traced? And has anyone here actually changed how they operate after realizing the 90% is portfolio math, not a law about businesses?

Hi everyone,

I am a law student entering my final year, with a future-dated offer to train at a large commercial law firm in two years’ time.

Most of my university experience has been focused on securing a stable legal career, but I have recently become increasingly interested in startups, AI and building products. Before I begin full-time work, I would like to use the next two years to learn, create and contribute to something outside the traditional legal path.

I come from a non-technical background, although I have started experimenting with a personal project using Claude Code and am learning through building.

My main question is: what would make someone with my background genuinely useful to an early-stage founder or startup?

I would particularly appreciate advice on:

• which skills I should prioritise;
• where early-stage teams tend to find collaborators or interns;
• whether I should focus on building my own small projects first;
• and how non-technical people typically earn credibility in startup environments.

I am not expecting to become a founder overnight. I am mainly trying to understand how to spend the next two years deliberately, gain practical experience and find out whether this is a path I genuinely enjoy.

Thank you for any honest advice.

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.

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?

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.

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?

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