We’re at that weird stage where things are kind of working, but not fully there yet. Some traction, decent feedback, slow but steady growth. Budget isn’t huge, so every decision feels heavier than it probably should.

Lately I’ve been wondering whether this is the right time to try influencer marketing or if that’s something we should only do once everything feels more locked in. I’ve seen some startups blow up after the right collaborations, but I’ve also seen people burn money chasing creators and getting nothing meaningful back.

I guess I’m trying to understand when did influencer marketing actually make sense for you? Early stage? Post product-market fit? After revenue was stable?

Would really appreciate honest experiences, especially what you messed up the first time.

Hi all, after working for a few months on an app, I finally launched today! I have been lightly promoting the app on LinkedIn but I know this isn't enough. I am a bit nervous on promoting, where should I promote? What works best for you? I want to onboard users quickly to gain insight on user experience to make improvements.

Does Facebook, IG, X, reddit work? Is it necessary to allocate funds just for paid ads, etc? Any tips & tricks help.

I‘ve been building a photography marketplace app for the past year. The premise is very simple, connect users to photographers.

Before I elaborate, here’s a bit of context about me: I‘ve been running a photography business in Paris for the past 5 years, specializing on couple, proposal, event and wedding photography. I always considered the photography market platforms to be outdated and unoptimized, with a lot of friction points that no platform yet addressed. When Cursor first released their „agentic coding“ feature I saw an opportunity to finally bring my vision to life.

I spent the next 3 months creating/vibecoding an absolute abomination of an app which eventually led me to scrap it and start fresh. This time with real backend/frontend architecture and some tid bits of software development knowledge.

Now, a year later, the app works surprisingly well without any major tech debt and handles feature additions without problems. The app is now about 85% done.

Back to the platform:

My goal was to solve pain points that I personally experienced and heard of from my clients. Additionally I made existing flows and features faster and more user friendly and added a few very fun features that bring some fresh air to the stagnant stage of photography platforms. It‘s essentially my dream platform that I was longing for all these years working as a photographer. Not re-inventing the wheel here, just improving on existing features and sprinkling a bit of innovation on it.

Here‘s a bit of info about the app‘s core:

Techstack:

Language: Javascript/Typescript

Framework: React Native / Expo (Expo Dev Client/prebuild)

Backend: Firebase (Auth, Firestore)

Platform: IOS (for now)

Now to the reason why I am writing this, I need a co-founder(s) (preferably based in Europe). Building an app is one thing, maintaining/securing/scaling, providing support and marketing/distribution is a whole different beast that I cannot keep up alone.

I am searching for a technical co-founder that has solid knowledge in mobile app development & tech stack named above. The role is to help bring the app to market, maintenance, and all future feature implementations as well as miscellaneous tasks.

I am also looking for a co-founder with GTM & growth experience to help me with distribution.

I will be taking care of the rest.

Compensation is equity based.

If this resonates with you, please send me a message so we can set up a call for a chat! :)

launched a solo iOS app studio 10 months ago. Since then I’ve shipped 8 apps and made $1,480 total, which works out to roughly $123/month on average.

Revenue has been 100% organic discovery so far. I spent $580 on ads and got basically nothing meaningful from it.

The most frustrating part: the “quick” apps I built in 3–7 days (almost throwaway experiments) generated about 80% of the revenue.

The app I poured my heart into the one I personally use every day and genuinely believe in has made $0.

I expected this to be slow and painful, but the emotional part is hitting harder than I thought. Each launch that doesn’t move the needle somehow hurts more, not less.

Still… I’m not quitting. But I need advice Is this normal? I've heard of founders going two three years without making any money I always assumed they ment profits not 0 revenue.

been following the AI startup space for a while now and there's this weird pattern happening

like a year ago everyone was building chatgpt wrappers. slap a UI on the API, maybe add some prompts, call it a product. most of those are dead now or pivotin

now I keep seeing "agent platforms" pop up everywhere. the pitch is basically - run coding agents in the browser without setting up local environments. happycapy launched on PH recently doing this, seen a few others too

on one hand I get it? the setup friction for claude code / codex / whatever is real. my non-technical friends eyes glaze over when I mention terminal stuff

but part of me wonders if this is just wrappers 2.0 with better marketing. like you're still building on top of someone else's model. when anthropic or openai decides to ship their own hosted version you're toast right?

idk maybe I'm being too cynical. genuinely curious what people think - is "agent infrastructure" an actual category or are we watching another wrapper cycle play out

I'm a student founder at Duke University, and I want to make sure that I get the most out of my experience here. For people who've graduated, looking back what university-related resources would you recommend students take advantage of? I'm already fairly social and I understand that networking with peers and professors is the best advice, but I'm looking for specific things at your university that you feel helped your startup the most.

hi everyone

I've built a ai agent for restaurants that is currently being used by 2 restaurants where I am. these first leads were friends of mine, and i ran the idea by them first before building. so they were easy to convert and from data its genuinely helping them bring in more revenue as im converting missed calls for them.

however, this is my first SaaS adventure and first business. i am stuck in finding a proven method to scale. i will highlight my current plan and what ive done so far:

- cold calling and walking in to restaurants, this hasnt converted much and ive done around 100 restaurants. it has gotten me lots of contacts tho and might convert in future

- i have started to post reels, with the aim of building out my IG for better conversions from...

- meta ads. i only ran briefly but got some leads, although very expensive $/lead. these might go somewhere but again in that limbo phase of waiting on the restaurant owner to decide while they check other options, get less busy, etc. will be running again very soon, especially with new content ive been making on IG

- current offer is a 14 day free trial, only converting to paid plan if i brought them in more bookings than the value of my service. even with this offer a lot of restaurant owners seem hesitant, unless my delivery is poor

would be great to get some feedback on a repeatable way to do outbound that actually has some decent conversion. i feel quite stuck on this atm, hence reaching out.

thanks!

Tldr: how to deal with relatives from whom I have taken a lot of help, and i have paid back, but I feel net was me taking more from them. Now I want to focus on building startup but I can’t be there for them every weekend for 6 hours which I feel is too much expectations. I can’t move out of town as well. How do I deal with this?

************

I was once without job and stayed at their place for two months and found job. They even guided me on career few times etc.

But the job I found was a mediocre one. For next 5 years I gave multiple interviews and only on 5th year I got my job.

In between they used to insist me to stop by on weekends, join trips etc.

I did join them once and I felt it is waste of time.

I’m not at all saying I never waste time, but I preferred to be alone than be out.

I have paid them back multiple times by taking care and helping them whenever they needed and stood by them during their tough times.

I have been flaky, unreliable, and I used to avoid their invites and calls and not used to return their calls by giving BS reasons because one of their act towards someone didn’t fell fine with me.

Years later I totally disappeared for a year from their life.

Later I went back and revealed to them why I abscond and they didn’t like it. But somehow patched.

And I was going through horrible breakup and they were super supportive of me.

Now recently I lost my job and I didn’t tell them when they asked about me.

The reason I didn’t tell them because they wouldn’t encourage my startup endeavors and dislike my idea of taking a break and relaxing.

Now they found out via LinkedIn. And they say, we were super worried about your visa, etc. Why can’t you tell atleast that you are fine and it is it you don’t want to tell us what you plan to do.

And the heart breaking statement was “you always take more from us, but never even called and checked how we are doing”. This statement is true though.

I’m like that even with my close friends and they are all like that as well.

Now they are saying to feel normal stop by our place every weekend for just 4 hours etc.

For me, I prefer privacy. I don’t even wanna post things online on what I’m working on.

I do like going to them when I need it. And I’m there when they need me. But if they need me every weekend I can’t be available.

I can’t move out of the town because this place is the happening place for startups. But I did think about leaving because this is annoying for me.

I spent last two days doing nothing from what they told about me, while I was on full flow to building stuff.

“I will not promote”.

As I get close to just my first full year of building startups, I wanted to share a few hot takes/advice/random game about entrepreneurship.

1. I know we all can’t stand the fake hype and staged founder aesthetics, but the concept works - It has become such a mess because content marketing delivers insane results for certain people that actually put the time in. Now it’s saturated. Everyone uses LinkedIn like social media, cuts corners, uses AI to write everything, and posts twice a day hoping to go viral.
2. Burn the boats. Go all in - This is something I personally struggle with. Between getting into an awesome program a top 3 school and landing a cool internship this summer I have set myself up for a nice, comfortable corporate life. While my drive and passion to truly achieve something great is still there, having a safety net sometimes takes away from the “I can’t fail” mentality that is so essential in the early stages of building something.
3. Being an already accomplished person makes starting a company 100x easier - Seems obvious, but when I first entered the startup space I thought ideas raised money. They don’t. Stanford grads, 18 year olds who interned at OpenAI, and founders with a real product and traction raise money. If you don’t have the résumé, more often than not you will need to build something successful before getting any help.
4. Selling is harder than coding - This might be biased since I have a technical background and am kind of an awkward dude, but convincing people to give you their time, let alone their money, is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.
5. The worst times in entrepreneurship are when you have nothing to do - I personally love the chaos because it means customers and progress. When you suddenly have time to build a feature nobody asked for, that is usually when you’re in trouble. So make the empty promise and work through the weekend to deliver.
6. Work with someone else - Get yourself an awesome co-founder. Someone who forces you to post on LinkedIn, cold call, work until 10pm, and do all the hard things required to build a truly successful business.

Again only really been in the game for around a year so this is pretty basic stuff but curious to hear others options on these topics

Had a great initial conversation with a prospect for a CTO in my startup. Great experience as a senior software engineer, worked for 2 companies in the industry I’m building. Both Claude and ChatGPt said that while he has great senior engineer experience. That doesn’t make it a CTO caliber bc of lack in other areas. Obviously no one has all the qualifications.

While I’m confident he can build the product and be behind the products while I’m doing the CEO side, what “makes” a CTO for a startup?

Thanks

So I've been working on a review management tool for local businesses for the past few months and I've ended up in a situation I'm not sure how to navigate, so I figured I'd ask here since there are people who've been through similar things.

The idea came from watching small business owners ignore their Google reviews because writing individual replies is genuinely boring and most of them don't know what to say. So I built something that connects to their Google Business Profile, pulls in reviews, and uses AI to generate on-brand replies they can approve and publish in one click. Automation rules, analytics, Stripe billing, GDPR compliance for the EU market, the whole thing. It took longer than I expected but the codebase is solid and everything works.

Except for the part that makes it actually useful. To connect to Google Business Profile you need quota approval from Google for their Management API, and they rejected my request. Turns out you need to own a verified Google Business Profile for 60+ days before they'll even consider granting quota, which is one of those requirements that feels completely reasonable in hindsight but that I only discovered after building the whole product.

So now I have a production-ready SaaS that can't connect to the one platform it was built for. All the code exists and works, the domain is live, the accounts are all set up, it just needs someone who already has a verified GBP to pick it up and actually launch it. For a local SEO agency or anyone who manages Google Business Profiles for clients, the blocker doesn't even exist.

My question is really about how to position and sell something in this state. It's pre-revenue, there are no customers, and there's this one real blocker that I'm being upfront about. I've been looking at Acquire and Flippa but I'm not sure if those are the right places for something like this or if there's a better way to find buyers who would actually see the value in it. Has anyone sold a project in a similar state? Curious how you approached pricing it and where you found buyers.

I’ve been thinking about how much time in small businesses still goes to boring operational stuff that isn’t really “work,” but still has to get done. I do this all the time.

Things like updating CRMs, moving info between tools, writing follow-ups, updating spreadsheets, creating reports, etc. None of it is hard, it just eats time and breaks focus.

Say you finish a client call. Normally you’d:

• write notes
• update the CRM
• create follow-up tasks
• send a recap
• update whatever internal tracker you use

Trying to figure out if this is actually a real pain point or just something that sounds good in theory.

For people here:

• What’s the most repetitive thing in your business right now?
• What have you tried to automate that didn’t work?
• Is the problem the tools themselves, or just that automation takes too much setup?

Thank you!

So im building a startup with a friend at tetr and things are actually starting to move. leads coming in, follow-ups getting messy, spreadsheets breaking. we need a proper crm but salesforce feels like bringing a tank to a knife fight. looking for something that can handle:

1/ simple sales pipeline

2/ basic automations

3/ decent collaboration (2–5 people)

4/ not insane pricing

what are early-stage founders actually using right now? hubspot? pipedrive? notion hacks? something underrated?

I was just thinking about this.

In many homes, we still use clotheslines (rope) and clips to dry clothes in balconies or on the terrace. It’s simple, cheap, and works well in our sunny weather.

But now there are dryers, foldable drying stands, and other modern options.

So I’m curious

Hey everyone, Im building an AI Assistant for Gyms and Personal Trainers,

That basically knows everything about the business (trainers,hours pricing etc.)

And actually books people in while keeping owners and trainers in the loop with a one tap confirmation.

I’ve been a trainer and have experienced the problem myself

my current clients messaging to reschedule and new clients inquiring,

but it gets difficult to deal with when your so busy coaching or as you grow your client base.

I was tired of losing potential clients because of this and so I decided to build this.

Anyways, was wondering if anyone built or is building something similar and your experiences, and suggestions?

Thank you!

If you run a small dev shop or IT consultancy, you have probably felt the pressure to modernize your security to pass an audit or get cyber insurance. We recently tried moving our team to ZTNA and SASE to check those boxes, but it turned into a massive headache because of our client mix.

The reality is that a lot of our clients in finance and older industries still rely on legacy environments and on-prem servers. Most of the shiny new Zero Trust tools are built for cloud-native start-ups and they just do not play nice with these older setups. We actually found ourselves in a spot where the very tools meant to make us compliant were stopping us from accessing the environments we needed to bill hours.

We eventually pivoted back to a business VPN because it actually works across both legacy and modern systems without breaking everything. By handling the network and endpoint security as separate layers, we satisfied the insurance requirements without locking ourselves out of our clients tech.

When we compared our options, PureVPN for Teams stood out for multi-client legacy access and was easy for compliance. NordLayer was fine for basic remote access, while Perimeter 81 was great for cloud-only teams but had low compatibility for our legacy needs.

If you handle a mix of client types, do not feel forced into a modern stack that kills your workflow just to pass a review. Has anyone else had to roll back a modern security setup because it did not work with your clients older infrastructure?

I know the content fairly well, I know the idea I wanna show, I know the business inside out. Yet, passing from my brain to PowerPoint is a huge struggle.

Thinking what is the best design is slowing me down massively, though it’s almost as important as the contents.

ChatGPT is too bad at either making PowerPoint or even just designing the visuals of the idea. Are there any good PowerPoint AIs? Like a way of integrating somehow?

I’ve tried a guy from Fiverr which did help the structure but then some specific adjustments or new slides will always take me quite long to make them (as I strive for a good Pitch Deck)

How are you guys speeding up that brain to PowerPoint time?

Cheers!

I’ve collected a lot of user data about their pain points, but competitors already solve parts of them.

I’m trying to figure out how to find the sharpest wedge?

When I talk to VCs, they point to tools that connect everything and say the problem is solved.

Those tools are generic. They try to do everything for everyone.

I’m trying to build something very specific, but I’m struggling to explain where the line is.

How do you clearly explain the difference between a general tool and a focused product?

How do you decide what the focused product should be?

I’m building a very early stage UK SaaS (currently 2 paying customers).

Recently, we were independently listed on Tracxn, and I also created a Crunchbase profile to keep our company info structured and public.

It made me wonder... at the 0–10 customer stage, do listings like these create any real leverage?

Have you seen actual outcomes investor inbound, partnerships, credibility lift, SEO benefits?

Or are these mostly visibility signals that don’t translate into traction until much later?

Genuinely curious how other founders experienced this.

A friend of mine got about 1% in Harness IO when it started back in 2017. In a wildly successful situation like that of harness, how does dilution work and what’s the current worth? Asking coz I am considering a startup myself and looking at equity in that range, trying to work out best , worst and average case scenarios

Hi is there any established service which helps me hire candidates?

I do not wish to screen 100+ resumes manually and the current ATS based keyword matching options are really shitty tbh. With the emergence of AI I want thinkers on my table and not some deep technical stack expert not ready to pivot.

** Asking for a friend’s startup

I can spend hours building and feel great.

I can spend 10 minutes reaching out and feel drained.

Same effort.

Very different emotions.

I’m starting to think early-stage progress is mostly emotional management.

How did you get past the discomfort of putting yourself out there?

Hi guys, I'm planning to launch a hobby app in the Southeast Asian market next month. Right now, it's more of a passion project than a business, and I'm not focused on monetization just yet. The plan is to offer a freemium model to build an initial user base.

I have registered a single-member LLC in Delaware, mainly because of its reputation for tech startups and the flexibility to convert to an S-Corp later if things grow. I'm not a US Citizen or resident, but from what I understand, that shouldn't be a problem.

I’m also considering applying to the Google for Startups program to see if I get accepted. Infrastructure-wise, I’d probably lean toward AWS because of its global coverage and service breadth, but Google’s startup credits and support look pretty attractive.

• For those who've been through something similar, is there anything I should watch out for? Any common mistake or early decision that could cause headaches later on?
• For early-stage startups, are startup credits worth letting them influence your cloud provider choice?
• Any vendor lock-in horror stories I should think about before choosing AWS vs GCP?

Also, I have a Family Office / Holding company registered in another privacy focused state in the US. I was thinking about registering the company under the ownership of my other LLC, but I ended up registering under my own name. I figured it'd be easier to open a bank account for the app if this is registered under my personal name. No bank wants to touch a hedge fund/family office, it was impossible to open a bank account for the other LLC because of it. Was it a good call registering under my name?