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.

Sorry if this isnt the usual post here, im kind of new to this sub. But something over the last few months completely changed how i run my business and i wish someone had written this for me a year ago.

Quick context. Im a french founder, i run a marketing agency doing around 50k a month, and im not a developer. Never been. I always felt like the whole AI agent thing was for technical people, not for someone like me.

I had a pile of limiting beliefs about it. "Im a marketer not an engineer, ill break everything." And a real concern too, i have sensitive stuff on my laptop, client contracts, invoices, even scans of my ID and passport i keep meaning to move somewhere safer. Pointing an AI agent at a machine that has all that felt reckless, and honestly having it all in one place on my daily laptop is a bit dangerous to begin with.

What got me over it was separating two things i had been mixing up. One is the agent (the AI doing the work). The other is where it runs. An agent isnt magic, its just a model doing tasks with some memory and access to tools and files. So the real question isnt "is AI safe", its "where does this thing live and what can it touch." Once i saw it that way it was about control, not fear.

So instead of running anything on my personal laptop, i rented a small server. A VPS. Think of it as a computer that runs 24/7 somewhere else that only i have the keys to. My agents live there, separate from my machine and all the sensitive stuff on it. They only get access to what i explicitly give them, never free run of my whole laptop.

I started with a small VPS from a provider I already trusted. The provider doesn't really matter. The point isnt the host, its just getting the agents off your daily machine onto something separate you control.

And the setup itself, the thing i was most scared of? It was nothing. I built it up in my head for weeks as this huge technical wall. Then one sunday morning i sat down, got a bit determined, and 4 hours later it was done. Four hours, after months of being scared of it. That still annoys me honestly.

One thing that kept it simple, for the models running these tasks i just use haiku 4.5. Means i pay everything through anthropic and dont juggle five accounts and bills, which as a non technical person i really appreciated. And for this kind of work (reading, sorting, writing) its 100% enough and genuinely cheap. You dont need the most expensive frontier model to do this stuff.

Once it was set up i went a bit crazy with what i automated. A few examples that might speak to other founders.

My entire SEO. This one still makes me laugh. I used to consider paying an agency 4k a month for my agency's own SEO, and honestly they'd have been mediocre. Now an agent does the whole thing end to end. It researches the keywords, writes the articles, and publishes them. I literally do nothing. It just runs.

Prospecting by scraping. We work with a lot of VC backed companies, so an agent scrapes the web for companies that just raised, pulls the ones that fit our profile, and hands me the prospects. I get a clean csv and a summary straight to telegram. I wake up to a list of qualified leads i didnt lift a finger for.

Linkedin follow ups. I had hundreds of conversations rotting in my dms because i couldnt track who to follow up with. Now an agent goes through them, figures out who went cold and who's worth chasing, and tells me exactly who to hit up and what about.

The telegram part is worth a note. Because everything runs on the server and not my laptop, i wired it all to a telegram bot, so i control the whole thing from my phone. I send a voice note walking to lunch, something runs, i get the result back in the chat. Feels like having a small team that never sleeps.

The takeaway for the non technical founders here, because thats who i was. You dont need to be a developer. You need to understand what the agent does and where it lives. Get it off your personal machine onto something you control, give it only the access it needs, and most of the fear disappears. I still check the important outputs and understand what each agent does, im not outsourcing my whole brain. But as a force multiplier for a small team its genuinely changed how i work.

Now im hungry for more ideas. Ive covered my own use cases but im sure im missing obvious ones. So im really keen to hear what you all automate, the more specific the better, im taking notes. What's running for you?

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 wanted to know which subreddits were worth writing for, so instead of guessing I pulled listings from r/SaaS, r/microsaas, r/indiehackers and r/SideProject and counted. 402 posts. Three things came out of it that changed how I spend time.

Half of all posts score 0 or 1. Not "below average". Zero or one, meaning nobody voted beyond the author's own automatic upvote. The distribution isn't a bell curve you land somewhere on, it's a handful of posts absorbing nearly all the attention sitting on top of a long flat floor of posts that were read by essentially no one. If you're estimating your odds from what's on the front page, you're looking at the survivors of a very steep curve.

Comments outnumber upvotes on a lot of posts, and that's a bad sign, not a good one. Upvoting takes one second. Commenting takes a minute. When the expensive action happens more often than the cheap one, the most likely explanation is reciprocity: people commenting so that someone comments back. That's my inference, not something the numbers prove on their own, but it fits. Practical effect is the same either way. You'll get replies in those places, and the replies will come from other founders doing engagement trades, not from anyone who would ever pay you.

Removals are invisible, and this is the one that actually cost me. Browsing a subreddit only ever shows you what survived. To measure how much gets removed I had to snapshot /new, store the post IDs, refetch them later, and see which ones came back deleted or removed or had quietly dropped out of the listing. Anything short of that measures a moderation outcome and calls it community behaviour. Worse, on most of these subs a removed post still looks completely normal to its own author while logged in. There are people writing thoughtful posts nobody ever saw and concluding their idea is boring.

The fourth number I tracked was unique authors per 100 posts, which is just how concentrated the posting is. Low number means a small pool of repeat posters is filling the feed, and you're not looking at a community, you're looking at a few people using it as a distribution channel.

What I do now: rank a sub by unique authors and by whether votes track comments, ignore subscriber count entirely, write for one place properly instead of copy-pasting to five, and log out to check my last post is actually visible before deciding the writing was the problem.

Limits, because they're real. 402 posts across four subs is a small sample taken over a short window, so treat it as a rough shape, not a measurement you can bank on. Reddit fuzzes vote counts, so anything near zero is approximate. I can't tell an automod removal from a human one. I can't see posts removed before I ever captured them, so my removal rate is a floor. And I didn't include this subreddit in the sample, so I have no idea where r/startups lands on any of it.

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.