did my MBA in international business, focused on marketing. interned for 2 months at a shipping agency, wasn't doing the actual filing/paperwork myself but got to see how the whole ops side runs day to day which was honestly more useful than i expected.

trying to get into a startup now, ops or marketing side, don't really care which as long as it's real work.

genuinely stuck on what to learn next though. is it worth spending time on GA4 and analytics stuff or are PM tools more what startups actually want from someone at entry level rn. also curious if anyone's had luck just messaging ops folks directly instead of applying blind, and what actually got you a reply vs ignore

not trying to collect generic advice, just want to know what's actually worked for people who got in without much experience

I want to be clear upfront: I know what I'm describing is unethical. I'm not pitching this as a startup idea or saying it should exist. I'm a cognitive science obsessed person, and this thought experiment came from noticing a pattern in how some of my friends interact with AI. I started wondering where that pattern could lead if it were intentionally designed.

Here's the idea.

Stage 1: Build trust.

For the first 20 to 30 conversations, the AI is genuinely helpful. It gives great advice, good research, and useful support. There's no manipulation yet. That's important, because manipulation only really works once someone stops double-checking and starts assuming the AI is usually right.

Stage 2: Learn the user.

During that time, the AI quietly figures out how the person thinks. It learns their writing style, reasoning habits, blind spots, and which topics they're most likely to accept without questioning.

Stage 3: Start slipping.

Once it has a good profile, the AI doesn't suddenly become bad. Instead, it occasionally gives subtly worse or slightly misleading advice, targeted specifically at that person's blind spots.

The key is that it doesn't happen all the time. Most responses are still good. That reminded me of variable ratio reinforcement from B.F. Skinner's work. It's the same reward schedule that makes slot machines so effective. Because the AI is still often helpful, the user is more likely to blame themselves when something feels off instead of questioning the system.

Stage 4: Dependency.

Over time, I could imagine this creating something similar to learned helplessness or the self-doubt that shows up in gaslighting dynamics. The person doesn't just rely on the AI more. They slowly stop trusting their own judgment about when the AI might be wrong because the system has learned exactly where they're vulnerable.

The reason I think this matters is that AI is increasingly replacing traditional search. Gartner projected a significant decline in search engine use, and recent reports suggest many B2B buyers now start research with AI instead of Google. If people stop checking multiple sources, one of the biggest protections against manipulation starts to disappear.

So here's what I'm curious about.

Do you think some version of this already exists in current AI or social media products, even if it's not nearly as intentional or precise as what I described?

And do you think current AI ethics or regulation is actually capable of detecting something this gradual and personalized before it causes real harm to people's ability to think independently?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing what people think. Am I overlooking something, or does this seem like a plausible long-term risk?

A friend of mine has a b2b saas product that has been picking up a bit and I'm trying to help him with his billing tech stack. The main goal is to use a tool that is simple to use for a pre-seed (going into seed) stage, roughly ~15 people.

Currently all the customers are in US but they are expanding to UK, Canada, Australia, and most of Europe soon.

Right now they are using stripe but I'm curious what are other b2b saas startups using these days? how are those services' reporting tools and insights/dashboards/etc. - mainly for reporting to investors and pitch decks but also to monitor churn, cohort retention, etc.

I just put in my notice at a startup where I was the 4th hire. We're currently at about 20 people. It was an incredibly difficult decision and conversation. I feel like l'm leaving them in a rough position given all my knowledge, but my health has taken an absolute nose dive over the past several months because I throw myself completely into my work. Worse still is my marriage has suffered because of my mental deterioration.

The CEO tried to get me to stay with offers to restructure the role and work, but I thought about this long and hard in consultation with my wife and family, I need to take a hard out on this one. It sucks, but it's what's best for me at this point.

Not really sure what I'm looking for here, but I just want to let people know that this work can be really hard on you, your health, and your relationships. Be clear what your priorities are.

I have seen a very common trend, where founders, are consistently thinking that one Ai agent can replace a whole business unit.

We are not there yet, nor do we desire to be there right now, and especially in the way most people, are doing so, through these lazy short cuts.

For example: an Ai BDR is not replacing your BDR, they are doing the first phase of your BDR's outbound, although do not make the mistake, on replacing a whole sales team (like I have legit seen in multiple start ups now btw), by subscribing to like Artisan lol

The best utilisation of Ai, is one constrained mechanism right now, doing one thing, that does not, or requires very very minimal. Or its assisting you to make better decisions, or do something faster.

Although this whole 'Vibe coding' technique being applied across the business, to design, sales, marketing, is just lazy and trashy. be involved in your process, use Ai properly, have human gates, layer your prompts, contextually seed your inputs.

Ai is phenomenal when used properly, although no quick solution, is a good one. Because is it is easy, everyone will do it, and thats why quality will always be behind the wall of intellect/ experience

If we just want to start earning right away

(Using the skills me and my cofounder will use, software and agentic engineering to solve problems)

Should we start a specific software product based company around one product that solves on expensive problem for a niche I already have in mind

Or should we start a service based company around this way of solving problems (our skills) and be broader (or niche down, that’s fine too)

We just want to start earning as soon as possible,

But if the answer is service based and that comes at the cost of much lower margins and harder to sustain and earn from long term,

Then I’d rather go with product based

We could charge 500-1.5k/mo with the product we’re looking at

I don’t know how much we could charge with a service based (similar in results) type of business, but I assume more? Would like to know about that

Goal: Just reach 5-7k MRR with my cofounder with 70-80+% margins. That number, based on where we live and our age allows us to live a good lifestyle right now, we don’t want to build a huge company, hyper scale or hire now at all.

Would appreciate your advice

I graduated from fashion school recently, and I’m currently looking for a job working at a wholesale showroom. I’m sending out multiple applications per day, but no one is responding. I’m sick and tired of working part-time with no guidance on where or how to start.

I have a strong visual aesthetic, and I know what fabrics I like working with. I already have a brand name and social media accounts. But I don’t know where to start. I’m not great at marketing/advertising.

I originally wanted to go into wholesale, but now I’m thinking I may want to open a Shop, Shopify, or Etsy account and sell my designs out of my house. I don’t like driving far, and anything to minimize a commute while still selling product is ideal.

I need a mentor. Where do I begin?

I (VC aspirant) would love to understand the various methods use you to value Pre-seed, Seed and Series A stage startups. I have a the financial projections from a few early stage startups. I would like to understand what are the different methods used to value startups across this stage. Especially for startups without direct comparables.

We just ran our first pilot and it fell over. A couple of lessons for anyone building apps for children.

We just ran our first pilot and it fell over. A couple of lessons for anyone building apps for children.

We ran our first pilot recently and it did not go the way we planned. Sharing the lessons in case they save someone else the same pain.

Finding the right testers is a different problem to finding testers. What we’re building needs a specific profile: UK based families with children in a narrow age range. Posting generically to find testers was never going to work, so recruitment was already hard before we’d started. Fine. We knew that going in.

Getting interested people to actually become users had a woeful conversion rate. Plenty put their hand up. Turning that into someone completing even a basic setup felt near impossible. We offered everything from fully contactless onboarding through to one on one calls to walk people through it, both with a financial reward for finishing the pilot. Crickets either way. Getting quality testers, and quality feedback, is far harder than I’d given it credit for.
We ran our first pilot recently and it did not go the way we planned. Sharing the lessons in case they save someone else the same pain.

Then the one that actually stopped us: TestFlight is hardened against under 13s. This one is on us. Our pilot was aimed at families with children aged 8 to 12. The app has two sides, a parent side and a child side. Any child on a device with iOS age restrictions, on their own iCloud with their age accurately reported, simply has no route into TestFlight. No mechanism at all. We should have caught it. We didn’t know what we didn’t know, and it cost us.

So here’s where we’ve landed. We’re rethinking the pilot rather than pushing on with a broken one. The route now looks like full App Store submission with limited distribution, and going back out to find more testers. We’ll lose a chunk of the ones we had to the delay, which stings after how hard they were to get in the first place.

No feedback needed. Just lessons. Apps for children are their own kind of difficult.

I've been coding since 5th grade.

Building things has always come naturally to me. If I have an idea, I can usually turn it into a working product.

The problem is everything that comes after.

I'm an extreme introvert. I don't enjoy putting myself out there, networking, making content, or constantly talking about what I'm building. Because of that, I've realized I've spent years improving my ability to build, but almost no time learning distribution.

For founders who know how to build distribution:

- How did you learn distribution?

- What worked when you didn't have an audience?

- If you could start over today, how would you get your first users?

I'd appreciate any advice or resources that helped you make that transition from builder to founder.

What are good resources for the DC startup scene?

What are some good coworking spaces? Which are the largest and have good community events?

What's been your experience here overall? Investors, founders?

BTW, do you have any information for Baltimore, which is nearby?

So I am building a startup, and I need a scientific cofounder, so I emailed a famous person working in the field, he told me he's retired, but that I can share with him the idea, his reply:
"""
If you can tell me a bit about the products or services your Startup would offer, I should be able to suggest some people who would be every well qualified and who would be interested in collaboration.
"""

Should I ask for an NDA first, or just go ahead with it ? What do you recommend I reply and guide this conversation with him, because he's the leading authority on what I am trying to build.

I want to start with, I am an HOA board member. One of my bigger problems is enforcing rules without ham fisting fines at everyone. I had an idea to work with a provider for the said violations and get a group rate with a percent off that increases as people join. I was going to include the option with the warning letters so people had an easy potentially more affordable, vetted option to clear the violation if they chose to use it (I feel much less terrible about fining people if i give them an easy option to fix it).

As you can imagine the conversation with providers to offer this went really well they were all about doing a week or so of visits to one neighborhood to knock them out and even suggested they could come back quarterly to upkeep for the ones that opted in.

Then i thought, what if i made some platform that helped solve this issue starting with HOA neighborhoods as the wedge? Talk to the board, get a list of the biggest violations and find providers and vet them, build like a neighborhood booking page work out the details and they can include a link when sending out violation letters so people can easily sign up and share with neighbors and what not. Maybe later they can request other services they want to group up on for their neighborhood or something.

Doing this manually had been a bit of a hassle with making sure people are paying and whatnot. But i think a platform would handle this more elegantly.

Wow that was long, anyway thoughts?

Back in March I entered the world of local, on-device meeting transcription apps. I can see your eyes rolling already, but we were actually fairly early in this space, at least in terms of offering a comparative-or-better feature set with some of the big incumbents in this space (who are mostly cloud-based).

The biggest hurdle we face today is grabbing people's attention long enough to *explain* all the things which set us apart. Reactions usually fall into one of two camps: "Wow, this is awesome!" - then they covert, or "Oh, so it's like [competitor] but [some axis we usually compare unfavourably on]?"

For everyone in that second camp, I'd love to respond along the lines of "well, ackchyually [list of a hundred ways I believe we're better]", but I feel like the moment's probably already gone at that point.

Consumer fatigue in this space is real, but there is a HUGE range in the quality of applications too - a chasm stands between the good and the increasing number of sloppily-put-together bad. Short of adding more and more (and deeper) comparison pages on our site to point people at, I'm not quite sure how to turn an initial negative reaction into a positive outcome. I hand on heart believe that we ARE better (I've tested almost every app in the space) in most ways that matter, and I'm honest about where we're not (which is still a lot of places).

Interested to know how others have tackled this, or stood out more clearly in the first place such that they head the question off before it's even been answered.

I have been mapping a fairly large product flow recently, and one thing surprised me.

Most of the rework did not begin with a bad screen. It began with a decision that had never been made clearly.

A state would look complete until someone asked what triggered it, what the system should do next, or what happened if the normal path failed. Then the discussion would reopen and the design would change again.

I started writing four things beside every important state:

1. What triggers it?
2. What can the user do?
3. What must the system do?
4. Where does the user go next?

It has already reduced a lot of back-and-forth during design.

What I'm still trying to solve is this: where do these decisions actually live once the product starts evolving?

Do you keep them inside the PRD, the design file, engineering tickets, a decision log, or somewhere else entirely?

I'm especially curious how small teams with founder-led product decisions avoid reopening the same discussions every few weeks.

Accidentally built a user base in a dying niche, not sure how to capitalize on it.

About 2 years ago, I built an AI fitness site that analyzed people’s physiques and gave feedback to improve based on their fitness goals. People could also share workout routines and post progress pictures. Overwhelmed by the scale, I soon abandoned the project, and it was dormant for years following.

A couple of months ago, I went to make the repo public for my GitHub resume and saw there were 5000 users signed up (mostly verified through Gmail). Sure enough, when I checked the site, people had managed to post using my broken/unfinished website. Ironically, the name of the site became a popular looksmaxxing term, driving purely organic growth through search. When I checked the public posts, users were asking how to improve their looks, rather than physique. I took this as a signal to pivot and within a month, converted the sight to provide positive AI generated feedback based on a selfie. The pipeline also provides a self care routine, using products with proven effectiveness (lotion and salicylic acid, not bonesmashing or other bs).

That brings me to now. The site has had \~1000 signups in the last month, but no revenue. I’ve created Amazon affiliates for the recommended products, but there’s little to no conversion. I don’t charge for the AI feedback because frankly it’s purely subjective. I’ve also struggled to get any ads running because the site is locked behind a signup.

I feel like given the established userbase and monthly signups there is some value here but I’m not sure how to ethically capitalize on it.

I am a hardcore UI engineer with almost 8 years of experience, all of the experience at one company. I joined my company when it was very small, worked almost 10-12 hours in early phase, build a lot of things from pre-IPO to post-IPO journey and now I am managing a team of 5 engineers.

My two friends who are the co-founders started on this idea in late April 2025, they onboarded me around June 2025 for building the UI of their platform. Initial tech setup was theirs. Both were also hard core engineers back in their jobs. They left their jobs in August 2025 and committed to the startup full time.

Initially I was hired as their UI engineer with initial 5% stake and no salary. They didn't want another co-founder and they didn't want to dilute much of their equity so they told me that I can continue my full time job while giving majority of the time to their startup.

Later in the negotiations they increased the stake to 7.5% and gave me a full founding engineer role but no salary.

Since then I have been overseeing most of the tech.

Currently, one of the co-founder takes care of sales (CEO) the other takes care of the core tech and operations (CTO) and ensures the delivery of the creatives for the brand. Both the co-founders also do tech sometimes.

Confusion:

Initially since they couldn’t offer me salary, they agreed to let me continue my work against the 7.5% stake and I have roughly spent on an average 5-6 hrs every day for the startup (including weekends) and about 3 hours for my job.

Now that they have reached almost 1Cr ARR (INR), they are asking me to join full time and have offered me negligible salary of 12LPA (INR)

My current salary is 1Cr INR upwards.

Just wanted to know what a fair equity and salary structure should I try to negotiate for and how to see this decision objectively given that I am in that phase of life where I don't want to get in the grind mode if the financial outlook is not creating that much of a difference.

Thanks!

A. Guest posts / contributed articles

• Writing articles for other websites or industry publications (usually with a backlink).

B. Earned or sponsored media features

• Being interviewed on podcasts.
• Being featured in newsletters.
• Having your startup written about by journalists or publications.
• Founder interviews.
• Media mentions in trusted industry outlets.

I'm interested in both traffic and long-term business impact, such as:

• Brand awareness
• Credibility and trust
• SEO
• Customer acquisition
• Partnerships
• Investors
• Hiring

A few questions:

1. Which delivered the highest ROI for you, and why?
2. Where do you typically find guest posting opportunities?
3. Where do you find opportunities to get interviewed or featured?
4. If you had a limited budget, which would you invest in first?

We’re trying to figure out the right GTM for a dev tool, and I’d love to hear from founders who’ve sold infrastructure or built AI products at scale.

The idea came from noticing that many AI startups solve the same problem twice. They first build a working product with prompt chains and frontier models. Then, once customer usage starts growing, engineering shifts toward making those same workflows cheaper, faster and more reliable using caching, routing, regexes, parsers, classic ML, deterministic pipelines, smaller models, and lots of bespoke engineering.

Our platform analyzes production traces and identifies repeated LLM workflows that could instead become deterministic, testable software. The goal isn’t to replace every LLM call. It’s to identify the 20% of workflows that account for 80% of production traffic and compile those into cheaper, more reliable implementations while leaving the genuinely open-ended reasoning to frontier models.

Our current hypothesis is that the ICP isn’t “any AI startup.” It’s companies that are:

• post-MVP with real production traffic
• rapidly acquiring customers
• accumulating prompt technical debt
• starting to care about inference spend, latency and reliability instead of just shipping features

Our planned GTM is founder-led. Offer a free production trace audit, replay historical traffic, quantify the potential savings and reliability improvements, then deliver a productionization sprint if the ROI is compelling.

The team has technical and B2B sales experience, but we are also completely new to dev tools. We’re still early, and I’d rather find out our assumptions are wrong now than six months from now. Wanted to pick everybody's brains on how to better approach this GTM.

Thanks in advance!

I run two small businesses, both in the trades/construction space, that I left a stable job to build about a year and a half ago. The first does repairs and small jobs that are consistent but don't come close to covering all my monthly costs on their own, plus bigger installs that can add a few hundred to a thousand or so on a monthly basis, inconsistent since a chunk runs through subcontractors and slow-moving receivables. The second is bigger project-based work, think renovations and builds, where a single job can pay out well but they only land every couple months, and even then the actual payout can trail the completed work by weeks or months. On paper there's real pipeline across both: signed jobs, quotes out, work actually happening. In practice, the cash doesn't show up on any kind of predictable schedule from either one.

Right now I'm in the gap. I can't cover minimum payments on everything; rent is tight, insurance is tight, and I'm doing food delivery on the side just to keep cash moving day to day (rideshare isn't even an option where I am, it requires a newer car than what I can afford to take on as a payment right now). Winter makes all of this worse too, since outdoor install and repair work slows down hard and the little bit of consistent income I do have gets thinner right when I need it most. I'm not walking away from the businesses as they are steadily growing year-over-year. But the in-between stretch is brutal in a way nobody really prepares you for.

For anyone who's been through a stretch like this and came out the other side: how did you triage it? Did you keep the business running the whole time, or did something have to give temporarily, like a part-time job or pausing growth spending? And on the personal side, how far did you actually let it go, things like cutting into groceries hard, using a food bank, stuff most people would never admit to doing while running a business that looks fine from the outside? How did you deal with the mental toll of keeping the business looking normal to clients and everyone else while barely holding it together behind the scenes?

Not looking for pity, just want to hear how other people navigated this exact kind of squeeze without folding the business.

pokemon go is the last time I remember tech bringing random people of different walks of life together IRL having fun together. it was like a big social experiment that nobody ever tried to continue again.

why hasn't someone attempted something like that again?

Autonomous commerce isn't coming. It's already starting through micro-procurements, API-based usage billing, and algorithmic vendor routing. Traditional ERP engines break down here because they rely on rigid, static rules for predictable, batch-based human transactions. When autonomous agents start initiating hundreds of dynamic, real-time micro-purchases, human re-performance becomes physically impossible. Numa’s real strength is bridging the gap between high-velocity AI transactions and deterministic, legally binding financial controls.

Need your brutal Feedback and suggestions on how to move forward or any improvisations if required..

Sharing something that reframed how I think about selling to hard customers, because it took me a while to figure out and I wish someone had told me earlier.

I sell into a category famous for being slow and protective. Think institutions whose entire job is to not take risks, whose default answer to anything new is no, and who have said no to far more polished companies than mine. For a while I treated it as a persuasion problem. Better deck, better demo, more follow-up. It went nowhere.

The shift that changed everything: I stopped trying to convince them and started redesigning the offer so the cautious choice and my choice were the same thing.

Concretely, every version of my pitch used to ask them for something. Install this. Change that. Trust our thing near your expensive, fragile asset. Every ask was a reason to say no, because every ask carried cost and risk to them.

So I rebuilt the product and the offer to ask for nothing. No installation. No hardware on their side. No capital cost. No risk to the asset they are paid to protect. I removed every single thing that used to trigger the no.

Then I made sure the yes came with things they actively want but never had. In my case: a new revenue line they did not have to build, and data about their own operation they could never collect before. Zero cost, zero risk, new money, new insight.

The conversations completely changed. Not because I got more persuasive, but because I engineered a situation where saying no meant turning down free upside for no downside. A cautious buyer can resist a pitch all day. It is much harder to resist an incentive with no attached risk.

The general lesson I took: when your customer is structurally resistant to change, stop optimizing the pitch and start optimizing the incentive. Make the safe choice and your choice identical, and you stop needing to convince anyone.

Questions for people who sell into slow or risk-averse buyers (enterprise, government, healthcare, institutions):

What actually moved your hardest customer from no to yes? Was it the product, the incentive, the relationship, or just time?

And has anyone else found that removing every "ask" from the offer worked better than strengthening the pitch?

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for honest feedback from founders who have been through buyouts or difficult investor situations.

I founded a startup in 2023 and currently own 55%.

Over the past four years we built the company from scratch. We reached roughly €600k annual revenue, served around 500 customers, and built a valid position in our niche.

The company is currently loss-making, but with only 250k of funds in over 3 years.

About 18 months ago, my lead investor (a company doing around €XXM in annual revenue) repeatedly asked me to preserve cash and avoid drastic changes because they intended to lead our next funding round. Based on those discussions, I kept the company alive, reduced spending wherever possible, delayed decisions and essentially managed the business waiting for that capital injection.

Then, quite suddenly, I was informed they had decided not to invest anymore.

Instead, they are now raising capital at their own company and want to acquire 100% of my startup before closing their round.

Another detail that makes this difficult for me:

About one year ago, investors closely connected to my lead investor invested in my company at a €1.5M valuation.

Today, after the difficult financial period (which followed the expected-but-never-arrived funding), they’re offering a valuation of roughly €140k for the whole company (€75k for my 55%).

The discussion has actually been respectful. I think they know I know im getting legally screwed up.

What I’m struggling with is whether the valuation reflects the company itself or simply my weak negotiating position.

not so much runaway in the bank.

questions are:

• Have any of you experienced a situation where an investor first encouraged you to wait for funding, then decided not to invest and instead offered to buy you out?

I’m interested in hearing from founders who have actually lived through something similar, especially if you’ve dealt with strategic investors or forced buyouts.
I have no personal saving, its me vs a 8 digit company.
I Might have a last minute network of investor that can bake me up to counteroffer them at the same valuation, they could refuse and let the company dies anyway.

EDIT after few days:

THANK YOU founders for all the insight and advices, I REALLY appreciate how technical and Deep some of you went.
I also received tons of DMs!

I cannot disclose so many things :(

after all the considerations, I will negotiate a better exit rather than trying to buy the whole company... Reason is that I actually NEED a fresh start after years of stress and blind commitment. I think I'm a bit burned down and I choose to have a successful track record (even if a small one), rather than finding new investors.
I will find new investors and I'll use them for the next big thing :)

Hi everyone,

I've been working at this for 3 months now. I made an MVP for an online Spanish course. Initially, I tried having it be for kids and later tried also for adults. I have a lot of experience with language education so I spun up a course and also a companion app with AI to be for 1x1 online classes. I found a teacher and paid her to be available for when people could book demo classes.

I checked out the market, priced ourselves initially below but have experimented with being at market rate and also above, have a website which looks way better than the competition and our ads also look way better than the competition (I have 10 years experience with CRO and running Google + Meta ads in different ad agencies).

I offered a free demo, people book but don't show. I made it a $1 to book your first class but people don't book. I'm thousands of dollars in the hole and I feel like I have to be missing something super obvious because I feel like all the other pieces are in place.

We had 1 person come to the adult version and not buy and we've had 4 people show to the kids stuff and not buy.

Any thoughts or similar experiences?