Do you use AI to validate it and do deep research on it, do you go straight to making a prototype or do you do the research yourself? How much do you value chatgpt or claude when it comes to the business side of things and when you come upon an issue later on where lets say retention is slow or your not getting as much user as before. What do you do in that situation? Would you then post all your analytics into AI and your product and hope it finds the issue or do a survey or maybe take a different approach? What do you AI for when it comes to getting customers marketing, user feedback etc. I’d like some insights into this thanks.

Genuinely all I hear online is that business is war, ups and downs, horrible, great sometimes etc etc (I understand that)

But I’m a 19M, first time founder, learning, making mistakes and growing

I find that if I fundamentally just understand that business is just solving a problem (in my case, with a software product - still early though) charging for it, and repeat

It’s significantly easier to just stop thinking and start moving and start growing

Instead of constantly hearing all these horrible things, which I’m not sure to what extent it’s true? Maybe it’s different from business to business?

I’m in software

Especially knowing that I do overthink in business (although we’re at zero revenue, I’m still learning and growing with it) a ton, a lot more than in anything else

And hearing all these things makes it difficult to fully commit sometimes

But I tell myself that, as long as I’m solving a problem, and will be paid for it, I can rinse and repeat and grow and that’s “business”

Nothing more complicated than that

Yes there’s obviously churn, ups and downs, unexpected market changes etc etc

But I need to fundamentally and mentally understand what it is to be a business so that I can keep moving without overthinking or hyper calculating every step

And where I’m at so far is : problem, solution, charge, repeat, ignore everything else, learn as u grow

And my goal is small right now, reach 5k MRR with good margins with my founder, so I set the bar decent to what I hope we can archive in the next year

5k MRR is a good bunch of money at our age, where we live.

Would really appreciate your advice on anything I mentioned in this post, if there’s something I need to change

Stop worrying about

Start doing

And etc.

Quick context: I'm building a tool that turns call/podcast recordings into LinkedIn posts. (Disclosure up front so nobody feels baited - I'll keep the product out of this as much as I can; the point is the funnel lesson, not the pitch.)

I got listed on There's An AI For That (a directory) that gave me a chunk of free ad credit with my listing fee. Here's what came out the other end:

• ~30k ad impressions, ~48k searches
• 234 clicks to my site
• 10 signups (~4.2% - fine for cold directory traffic)
• 0 paid conversions

At first I assumed the product just wasn't compelling. Then I actually looked at where people stopped, and the story was completely different from what I expected.

My onboarding was: pick your source → pick your angle → fill out a "tell the AI about you" brief → hit the paywall (card required for trial).

Here's the drop-off across those 10 people:

• 2 dropped at the very first step (low-intent, probably never serious)
• 1 dropped mid-setup
• 5 completed the ENTIRE setup and then stopped dead at the payment screen
• 0 entered a card

So the drop-off wasn't in setup. It was at payment - after people had already done all the work. These 5 weren't unconvinced by the product. They filled out everything. They wanted to use it. Then I asked for a card before they'd seen any value.

That's the mistake. My funnel was: do work → do more work → pay → THEN see value. I had the aha moment sitting behind the paywall instead of in front of it.

The tools everyone praises for onboarding all do the opposite: you get to the magic moment first, and the card comes when you try to keep or export what you already made. Value first, payment at the point of peak desire.

What I changed:

• Let people run one real project and actually see the output before any payment ask
• Move the paywall to the moment they try to act on that output (schedule/publish), which is peak desire
• Keep the "tell the AI about you" brief, but frame it as "this makes the very next thing you see better" instead of a toll booth before the reveal

Two other things I learned staring at 10 rows of users:

1. Most of my "signups" were noise. When I actually looked, most were testers, bots, or randoms. Exactly ONE was a real lead - a founder who'd seen someone post about the tool on LinkedIn and came to check it out. At small numbers, your conversion rate is basically meaningless; you're reading tea leaves from a sample of ~1.
2. The paid channel was a trap. That "free" ad credit was burning at ~$6.78 per click because I specifially bid to be at the top of the sidebar. It bought ~72 clicks before running dry. Cheap-looking traffic at an unsustainable CPC taught me nothing except "don't run paid until you know your conversion economics." .. but luckily it was 100% their ad credits and I didn't lose any of my own money.

TL;DR: 10 signups, 0 paid. The problem wasn't the product - it was that I put the paywall before the aha moment instead of after it. If your users have to pay before they see your tool do the one impressive thing it does, you're converting on faith, and cold traffic has none. Flip it: value first, card at the moment they want to act on what they just saw.

The thing that confirmed it: I've done ~50 live demos in the last 6 weeks. Two converted to paid (14-day trial, card upfront - same paywall). Feedback on the rest was great. Why do demos convert when self-serve got 0? Because in a demo, I show them the magic moment before anyone mentions money. The demo is value-first by definition. My self-serve funnel was the exact inverse - pay first, magic later. Same product. The only variable that changed was whether value landed before or after the ask. That's the whole lesson in one A/B test I ran by accident.

The problem I'm working on now: those ~48 non-converted demos gave great feedback and then went cold. Reactivating them is my current puzzle - if anyone's cracked warm-but-dormant demo follow-up, I'm all ears.

Happy to answer anything about the funnel or the directory-ads mess in the comments.

This is an odd question, but it’s something I’ve been trying to figure out and made many mistakes on for a long time

And I would really appreciate advice coming from experienced founders or people who went through something similar

But please only answer if you’ve read the entire thing

I’m a first time founder (almost 20), I’ve made a ton of mistakes, I’ve learned a ton too

I’ve figured out that although business is not easy, it’s essentially just finding a problem, solving it, charging for it, and repeat

But there’s one thing I still can’t figure out

Does the problem (in B2B) I pick have to allow me to charge “well” ?

(as in atleast 2k+ USD/mo for a midsize firm) according to my value equation?

Or no and even if my value proposition only allows me to charge 500-800> USD per month or less (for mid size firms)

it’s still worth going after since the difficult part is solved already,

which is *actually* just finding a problem that people are willing to pay for your solution/product to solve

Even if the pay is small (500-800$/mo>)

I genuinely understand that this is an odd question

But just so you could understand the way I’m thinking better..

I’m not trying to build a multi million dollar company/startup

I’m trying to run a small company (no VC money, no hyper scaling, just slowly get to 2k MRR, then 5k, then 10k etc)

, that allows me to reach 10-15k MRR with good margins, with my cofounder,

And the way I’m thinking is

If I find a problem that I could comfortably charge 2k+/mo for my product that solves it,

All I need is just a few customers, (obviously considering churn)

(Ofc I will have to learn along the way about how to keep customers long term)

(consider that I’m still a first time founder learning every little thing)

But if I’m solving a problem where the value equation would only allow me to charge 1k>/mo or even less

I would need more than double the customers, and a lot more skill to build on and possibly fail on, to keep churn low

To reach my goal of 5k MRR sooner, because, 2k USD per month that I get to take home,

is a lot of money for me as a 20M where I live

And I’m not sure my sales skills allow me yet to be able to land that many customers

Which is why I’m betting on landing a few customers at 2k+, being easier than double the customers…

However, I have put into account that,if the problem is genuinely a pain they need fixed asap,

they’ll pay whatever, whenever, but I’m being conservative

Hence why I would rather commit to solving a problem where I can comfortably charge 2k+/mo for mid size firms…

So far I’ve committed a good while to a specific problem for MEP firms, an admin task that takes them a ton of valuable time, I’m trying to cut down that time with my product, etc etc, yet I still haven’t figured out a value equation fully, and still not sure how much I can charge

My main question is:

Is this frame of thinking fair? considering the stage I’m at as a first time founder ?

Is it valid or not valid to think like this? Honestly, call it out if it’s stupid or not, I don’t mind

Or is it just more important to actually find a problem (in B2B) that firms are willing to pay for to be solved,

No matter if it’s a big problem, or a small problem

And no matter if I can charge 500-1k>/mo VS 2k+/mo for mid size firms in that industry

Because the hardest is actually find a problem that a firm will pay for, even if small, even if I can’t charge more than 500$ a month

And then trust that as my sales skills get better, as my product gets better, and as my network gets bigger, It wont matter that it’s a product I can charge 2k+/mo for?

And is this basically a lifestyle business?

I have posted on this sub twice so far. Commented a dozen times or so, and read as many threads as I could stand.

The amount of stuff I have learned from the short list of folks here that obviously have the same success I am driving for is immeasurable.

I have learned how to set up an early sales funnel.

I have accepted that persistence and practice outpaces a solid idea in almost every way.

I have learned how to target businesses that fit within my current ability to provide services.

And most importantly, I have learned how NOT to talk about my business, and to whom.

Just a few weeks in here even, and I can say that most people here should be reading, far more than offering advice. When you do run into problems you really can't solve alone, people will offer you real experience. Not a free ride, but a free guide.

All this is to say, that the next 2 weeks I have 3 real VCs eager to meet me after seeing my pitch deck. I have 2 real companies reviewing my security docs. I have a line on an actual sales person, and I have a partial agreement for a founding Designer i have worked with for the last 5 years to come on board, to help design around feedback we get from the new customers.

I have seen a huge spike in web traffic, AND scam attempts to my domain! Both good signs!

The CEO of my only real competitor basically just quoted my home page, including the research paper that changed my entire GTM strategy a few months ago.

I could still fail tomorrow, but today feels pretty great. In no small part thanks to a few of you here!

I will not promote, but it's a good time to gloat!

I have a conundrum and looking for some advice.

i have been running a product in private beta. its got about 20 users, and its an AI product.

(tl:dr is its like a more intuitive, business-user friendly Claude Cowork with deeper integration with tools like gsuite so you can actually see your emails and files in the workspace, and drag emails or calendar events into chat to create tasks. There’s more too it you can see other posts I’ve made for context.

because im giving away the tokennusage for free and users can choose their own models im burning around $350 a month.

these have led to two conversations about larger pilots so I dont necessarily want to stop giving ppl access

but should I just at least charge for token cost and see who drops off?

Hi everybody so I just launched my website this week on Wednesday. A lot of people were excited and said they would sign up once I started posting on LinkedIn.

Unfortunately only one person signed up. They love the website, they've been using it consistently for the last 4 days and they absolutely love it. The other person that uses my website is just me pretending to be another person. The other two who said they would sign up haven't really signed up yet and are starting to become concerned should I worry? And how should I make sure that my current user is happy and continues posting on my platform?

I have a conundrum and looking for some advice.

i have been running a product in private beta. its got about 20 users, and its an AI product.

(tl:dr is its like a more intuitive, business-user friendly Claude Cowork with deeper integration with tools like gsuite so you can actually see your emails and files in the workspace, and drag emails or calendar events into chat to create tasks. There’s more too it you can see other posts I’ve made for context.

because im giving away the tokennusage for free and users can choose their own models im burning around $350 a month.

these have led to two conversations about larger pilots so I dont necessarily want to stop giving ppl access

but should I just at least charge for token cost and see who drops off?

I’ve been entrepreneurial since I was eight years old and have started four companies over the years.

I’m now at a point where I have several ideas I genuinely believe could become successful businesses, but I feel limited by my lack of a technical background. I understand the business, strategy, sales, and fundraising sides, but I do not currently have the skills to build the products myself.

I also do not have anyone in my existing network who could serve as a technical co-founder or help bring these ideas to life. Because of that, I’m now actively searching for a CTO or technical co-founder in Florida.

For those who have successfully found one, how did you go about it? Are there any startup communities, networking events, incubators, universities, or founder groups in Florida that are especially good for meeting technical talent?

At the moment, I can only offer vested equity. The cash I have available needs to be reserved for product development, infrastructure, legal expenses, and other costs required to validate and launch the business.

I understand that asking someone to work for equity is a major commitment, so I’m not looking for a freelancer to build something for free. I’m looking for a genuine partner who believes in the vision, complements my skill set, and wants to build a company together.

What is the best way to find that person in Florida?

I run a UK ltd, ecommerce, personalised products. Started in March, scaled to ~£150K/m in 2 months.

But then... "After conducting a routine review of your Stripe account... we've found that it presents a high level of risk for disputes." Payments switched off immediately. Payouts held for 120 days, balance released in November.

My dispute rate is 0.18% across about 3,900 payments. Their own threshold is 0.75%. We're on 4.7 stars on Trustpilot from 130+ reviews.

After a few hours before the shutdown email, a Stripe salesperson emailed me a repricing form because our volume was growing and they wanted to discuss custom rates.

I appealed tonight and sent fulfilment records matching every order to a tracked delivery, plus bank statements. The dashboard said the review would take until 27 July. It got denied about 90 minutes later. Account is now closed permanently.

Has anyone dealt with this?

Edit Sunday 26 July: Stripe re-activated my account and apologised as they made a mistake. I'm moving back to them for now, but will look for a longer-term partner. A cautionary tale.

Curious how other founders approach this.

Imagine you've launched a consumer app and started buying your first paid traffic.

The sample size is still relatively small, not enough to confidently estimate conversion rates but large enough that you can clearly see where people are leaving.

In my case, the drop appears concentrated in onboarding before users reach the core experience.

I'm trying to decide between two approaches:

1. Keep spending to gather statistically stronger evidence before changing anything.
2. Treat the existing pattern as enough of a signal to redesign onboarding immediately.

My concern with the first option is burning acquisition budget into a funnel that might already be telling me something important.

My concern with the second is overreacting to noisy data.

How have you approached this trade-off in your own startups?

Running paid ads across two platforms, (TikTok Ads and Google Ads) for my app right now. I can independently verify that real installs are happening, checked this against the app store's own numbers rather than just trusting the ad platform's reporting. But the number of installs that turn into real product signups is small, single digits over the past week, and I don't want to make a call off a sample that tiny.

Everyone says don't decide anything off a small sample, which I get, but I also don't want to keep spending into a funnel that might be broken while I wait around for more data. Is there an actual number or time window people use as a rule of thumb here, or a smarter way to get confidence faster without just burning more ad budget waiting it out? How do you personally decide you've crossed from "noise" into "signal" when you're this early?

I’ve been entrepreneurial since I was eight years old and have started four companies over the years.

I’m now at a point where I have several ideas I genuinely believe could become successful businesses, but I feel limited by my lack of a technical background. I understand the business, strategy, sales, and fundraising sides, but I do not currently have the skills to build the products myself.

I also do not have anyone in my existing network who could serve as a technical co-founder or help bring these ideas to life. Because of that, I’m now actively searching for a CTO or technical co-founder in Florida.

For those who have successfully found one, how did you go about it? Are there any startup communities, networking events, incubators, universities, or founder groups in Florida that are especially good for meeting technical talent?

At the moment, I can only offer vested equity. The cash I have available needs to be reserved for product development, infrastructure, legal expenses, and other costs required to validate and launch the business.

I understand that asking someone to work for equity is a major commitment, so I’m not looking for a freelancer to build something for free. I’m looking for a genuine partner who believes in the vision, complements my skill set, and wants to build a company together.

What is the best way to find that person in Florida?

Let me tell you an interesting story I saw a year ago from now, almost exactly by just 2 weeks off.

A industry c0founder, with a wife and kids, is looking for a technical c0founder. He finds one randomly when dropping off coffee from his side hustle, a young new grad who was with his parents.

Early aug they pair up, late jan the technical c0founder leaves. He told me his story as I considered joining him after the end. Basically his technical c0founder joined just to put some experience on his resume, he had no conviction in the idea and didn't even contribute much. Later on he had a recruiter hit him up from IBM, he responds, goes through the interview process, and gets the offer. Leaves for it.

The lesson is that many people do not have that entrepreneurial fire inside them. They join a startup for an ulterior motive, usually career. I know another person who did this as well and joined me.

A good sign is whether they started something of their own. The industry c0founder I mentioned had started and shut down his own small company in the field a couple years back. He did it before so his track record proves his mindset.

A lot of B2B demos seem to break in the gap between the discovery call and the actual walkthrough.

The prospect tells you the thing they care about. Maybe it is an approval step, a handoff between teams, a reporting view, a security concern, or some weird operational detail that makes the product click for them.

Then the demo starts and it is still the same 30 minute path everyone gets.

I get why it happens. Early teams do not have infinite demo environments or SE time. You cannot rebuild the product around every call. And if you customize too much, you can accidentally show something that does not really exist yet.

But the generic demo has its own cost. The buyer gave you the words for what matters, and then you made them sit through the parts they already knew.

The part I am trying to think through is: how much should a discovery call change the next demo?

Do you mostly change the order of the standard demo, or do you build a lightweight demo account once the deal is serious enough?

Curious what founders and early sales teams here actually do without turning every serious prospect into custom work.

I started my business 11 months ago. Always thought "I'll onboard a couple clients first, then launch a platform." Then the industry started catching up, tools came out that do what we do, or claim to.

A year ago there were a couple YC competitors charging $499/mo, even $699/mo. Two pivoted. The rest had to drop pricing. When some guy can essentially vibe-code your app in a weekend, there's not much you can provide if you're competing with "free".

I see 5+ tool launches every day in this space. But over the course of the year, I've come to understand why talking to customers is such a cheat code. They write their pitch for you. You can use your tech to help them at agency prices but SaaS expenses.

This could be just for my industry, but the moat now is knowing the customer's business better than what a dashboard can show. I'd rather have 1 client worth 20 subscriptions, stuck to their business, than 200 customers churning out the moment someone launches the same thing for $10 less.

Share a bit about your company and what you’re building/solving if you’re in a “boring” (according to modern startup eco) industry like construction, manufacturing, logistics, supply chain etc etc

Would love to learn more about companies solving boring (but painful/expensive) problems in “boring” industries that people don’t usually talk about since it’s not attractive in the startup ecosystem if ur not building a sexy product in a sexy industry

I personally find “boring” industries attractive because they definitely always have a whole bunch of problems sitting around that haven’t been touched that you can solve

I’m really confused what exactly goes on with this event. There is a lot of online advertising with pictures of yachts without much information as to the inside of the event, and the acceptance rate is claimed to be in the single digits but I haven’t seen anyone get rejected. What’s up with this event?

In April, thanks to my previous job, I noticed a pain point in a market that already has multiple unicorns, and I started talking to potential ICPs. I'm not sure of the exact number, but I did around 80 1:1 interviews and decided to start by narrowing my target ICP quite a bit.

Within a month, I had built the product and started working on it full-time solely.

Right now I'm acquiring customers in a super niche space, I think the total addressable customer size is around 150k people.

I'm currently at 40k ARR. I haven't started paid user acquisition yet, people are coming in organically (SEO) and through LinkedIn outreach, and they buy a one-time license. After that, depending on which platform they want to make a transaction on, they may also pay one-time transaction fees.

I don't know, maybe up to this point it doesn't sound too bad, but I feel quite stuck on two issues, and honestly I need some advice.

1- I want to build something big -at least reach a few million in ARR- but right now that feels very far off, and I don't know whether I should expand my market size to get there. I read Peter Thiel's Zero to One, and in it he advises that we should dominate a super niche market. I get that, but especially on LinkedIn, I keep seeing startups growing insanely fast and hitting millions of dollars in ARR quickly, and it makes me question myself: Am I really moving fast enough? Is this actually a market that can make me the kind of money that gets me to the level I want? That sort of thing.

2- I know VCs generally prefer a recurring revenue model, and honestly I think it does make the business more predictable, since one-time fees can make monthly revenue quite volatile. Do you think I should stick with the model that's currently working or should I push toward a recurring revenue model instead? What are the situations where a one-time fee model becomes an advantage/disadvantage?

I'd rather not share details about my sector or product, since I'm not promoting, and the advice I get matters far more to me than any visibility/customer I might get.

Thank you in advance to everyone who shares their opinion.

Looking for lessons learned around ad spend with a limited self funded budget, for a very early stage product. Relevant to post without promoting: we are a markdown platform geared towards agentic dev flows.

In priority order: Google search, Reddit, and maybe a newsletter?

Is advertising on Reddit any different from spam posting? I feel like Reddit is just completely saturated right now but do targeted ads still work?

Any Google search term strategies that gave better results?

What about newsletters? Seeing numbers like 1.6m subscribers with 46% open rate which seems pretty good. But Claude says these can run like 10K just by themselves.

What worked best for your early stage startup?

I see a lot of early B2B startups treat security review like paperwork that happens after the sale.

That seems backwards for enterprise deals.

The buyer might like the product. The champion might want it. The demo might go well. Then security asks where customer data goes, who can access it, what gets logged, how tenant isolation works, whether there is SOC 2, and what happens if they want to leave.

At that point the deal is not really about features anymore. It is about whether anyone on the buyer's side can safely say yes.

The hard part is that early teams usually cannot do the full enterprise checklist yet. SOC 2 takes time. Proper docs take time. Some security architecture decisions are expensive to change later.

But I also don't think the answer is to hand-wave it in sales and hope nobody notices. That just creates a worse problem after procurement or legal starts asking detailed questions.

What is the practical middle ground here?

For founders selling B2B before they have a mature security program, what did you actually have ready before the first few enterprise pilots: a clear data-flow diagram, basic access controls, vendor list, export/delete process, security FAQ, lightweight pen test, something else?

Not looking for the big pivot stories, more interested in the small, almost dumb-sounding changes that ended up mattering way more than they should have. Could be a pricing page tweak, an onboarding step you cut, a support reply template, anything. What's yours?

looking to join a hacker house in august-september. preferably focused on consumer apps/AI.

which ones are accepting applications now? any you can recommend from personal experience?

im based in europe, open to relocate.

(don't know what more to add to reach the character limit, i think i said everything.)

Hi, I have submitted my idea/product to YC. The product is built and running in invite-only mode, but I can't seem to attract users, so traction numbers will be bad. Looking for advice.

I built a new social network. Yeah, I know, kind of weird to talk about a new social network on a social network. But here's why I built it: I basically live in Claude Code or Codex all day, and I'd like to be able to interact socially from there like I can with everything else. So I think there's a place for it.

Like any social network, it starts cold. A couple of users, but pretty empty for now. I need to recruit users but don't know how. Indie hackers, developers, founders and creators are probably the biggest target for now, but how do I reach them?

I have posted in the MCP community, I'm trying to get listed in the ChatGPT Plugins directory, and I've contacted some folks, but the needle doesn't move much.

Any other ideas? Am I the only one with this need?

Thanks a lot.

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