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I’m planning to work with a few startups to get them from 0 to 1 and help them scale from there. I might invest capital, but they’re getting my time and more likely than not I’ll be doing some heavy lifting on the front end. Do I set up a SAFE agreement with them? Or is there a better option to use?

Hello, since I was 13 I was always interested in investing - saved $100 a week for years, built up a mid six figure stock portfolio, bought my first investment property, and landed a job as an equity trader out of college. I want to eventually start a firm with what I have learned. However, I see problems with everything, and if anyone has gone down a similar path, would love some advice. The core problem: Young high earning people tend to be unfamiliar with investing and make suboptimal inves...

Quick background: Slate is a free iPhone app for personalized movie recommendations. Swipe-based feed, learns from your ratings, Letterboxd import, friends feature, leaderboard. Solo dev, 4 months in. I’m posting here to seek feedback from people who have more experience with this type of app. First, I’d like to discuss the app’s positioning. While Slate is genuinely different from Netflix recommendations because it’s built around your own history rather than popular content, the concept of ...

I am trying to do a pilot for an EdTech product for a university in the US, and I am proposing to have a limited amount of students be part of the pilot. I want to also come up with some metrics to be able to make sure that if I achieve those metrics, I can pretty much bind them to a paid program upon the completion of the pilot program. However, the objective really is just getting feedback. That's my biggest concern at the current moment. My question really is centered around the behavior o...

i want some honest opinions from people who have done this before. I 'm literally new to this, I have been mainly an employee (founded my own business but without any partners in the past), so startups are completely new to me. There's a founder I know. He is not a technical person, and he wants to start a company where I help him/be partners. It's going to be an app kind of like a marketplace and it's for the Middle East market. He got around 6 to 8 people together and asked me to be the tech...

So right now I'm an unemployed college student. A couple months ago I decided to launch a startup. My family is okay with it as long as I'm not spending any money on it ( lol I did) and I'm applying for jobs. I showed the company to my friend and he said he really liked it. The next day he showed it to his friends. 5 made accounts and one started a free trial this morning. One person also started sharing it. I am really grateful. I mean these last couple of years have been horrible for me and I ...

Hello hello, I am a self taught developer who has done a few business types before, and would appreciate some insight from you guys on how you guys handle your marketing sites for your Saas products / businesses I’ve done a mobile app startup, a ticketed social events business, SAT/ACT tutoring, and currently working on a automated SEO blogging tool to help myself automate create automated blog posts and product / SEO strategy relevant pages to grow my businesses. Researched online but there...

The single biggest decision I made was not about the product. It was deciding we would never run our own customer acquisition. I want to lay out the reasoning because I think it generalises beyond my category, and I'd like the holes poked in it. The standard consumer playbook is: build something good, then spend to acquire users, and hope retention and LTV eventually outrun CAC. For a lot of categories that math is brutal right now. Paid acquisition keeps getting more expensive, and for any pr...

Tried maybe 20 different phrasings, they're in almost every answer, we appear in like 2. Our SEO is objectively fine, we outrank them on google for half these terms. Someone told me to get an llm seo tracker to see what sources the AI is pulling from but the agency focused ones look like overkill for one brand. Whats the lightest way to figure out why an LLM prefers a competitor... is it reddit, listicles, something else? Feels like losing a channel I cant even see. submitted by &#32...

Been doing social media content for our startup for a while now. last week spent close to 2 hours on canva for one instagram post. resizing, realigning, changing fonts, the whole thing. felt like a lot for one graphic. Started looking around for something faster. came across Bit Studio, it's an AI graphic tool where you basically feed it your headline, subhead, CTA and a pinterest image for the vibe you want. generates a platform-specific graphic from that. Reached out to the founder on link...

I am building a SAAS from a country where stripe is not available. So I had to find another way. Everyone says that stripe is the best to use for software products and it is the standard. it is just not the case for a lot of people including myself. Contacted an agency to setup an LLC myself as well. it costed around $400 from my country to setup an LLC. since I am just starting out, I had to look for alternatives and MORs. right now I am on pocketsflow since I know the founder and is reachable ...

I just started working on an enterprise AI idea for investment banking workflows. I have a decent prototype and next step is finding a design partner. I have 4 years of experience but it was at a Bulge Bracket bank and it’s the compliance barrier is too high there so don’t want to start there. My plan is to start with small boutique banks in London but what’s the right approach other than a cold LinkedIn DM? And what should this DM contain? I was thinking of sending over a 1-pager explaini...

I just started working on an enterprise AI idea for investment banking workflows. I have a decent prototype and next step is finding a design partner. I have 4 years of experience but it was at a Bulge Bracket bank and it’s the compliance barrier is too high there so don’t want to start there. My plan is to start with small boutique banks in London but what’s the right approach other than a cold LinkedIn DM? And what should this DM contain? I was thinking of sending over a 1-pager explaini...

I built an app (that solves a pretty specific problem for a small savings bank. I originally demoed it to a branch manager thinking it’d just be a “cool side project” convo. Instead… he just asked me to present it to a group of directors. Now the gears are turning in my brain. Who knows if this is something that could generate an income for me. Here’s the situation: I am an experienced programmer 25 years+. I designed the architecture and built all the backend/database logic mysel...

I have noticed 2-3 things about few founders I got in touch with They are not able to admit they don't know Are they afraid of doing this? because they invest so heavily in creating their understanding Please if you are a founder, do let me know

Enjoyed the recent Startup Day 2006 back in early May. Are there other startup events of note for tech founders in the Seattle area that people would like to share? Would enjoy meeting with other founders, would like to go to an event with founders, investors, and advisors. I think I have a killer product, would like to practice pitching.

Enjoyed the recent Startup Day 2006 back in early May. Are there other startup events of note for tech founders in the Seattle area that people would like to share? I'm including AI in my app as a value add but it's not an AI app. Would enjoy meeting with other founders, would like to go to an event with founders, investors, and advisors. Would like to discuss the pros and cons of seeking investors, the challenges of marketing. I think I have a killer product, would like to practice pitching. ...

Aren't founders given access to experts, resources and time from seed and series A, - VCs? Many forms of marketing, product, and sales expertise. Why do 97% of founders who raise series A, not become unicorns? Do they get these services as paid add-ons? Just a network which is not host to your problem space and can't be depended on for implementation? Many experts but not freely available? Limited Network even if present compared to millions of professional with different expertise? ...

If you reply to this post do it under the assumption that I’m a total noob, and don’t make me regret **not** using AI for my answers. Thank you! Ok so as far as I can understand a company can either be bootstrapped or self financed or the money can be earned from selling parts of that company to other investors (which is called Venture Capital). Now, does that money go to the original owner and then that owner has the option to reinvest them and hence the scaling part or am I missing somethi...

Been thinking about this a lot lately. At some point a company has a CRO, RevOps, CS, AEs, SDRs whole team owning the revenue motion end to end. Pipeline, retention, expansion, forecasting, all of it. But pre-Series A, pre-first-hire, it's just you. So who's doing all that? You? Partially? Nobody? Like genuinely when you're heads down building, who's following up with that warm lead from 2 weeks ago? Who's catching the customer that's about to churn? Who's figuring out why your win rate ...

genuine question for all… Of all the career options or whatever choices you have, why are you working to start (or started) a company? What are the actual reasons? What do you think would have happened if you chose otherwise? I’m asking to understand people’s reasons and psychological stance. Thanks

Last year I went through a breakup and honestly the hardest part wasn’t even the breakup itself. It was trying not to text them again after. I kept restarting no contact over and over and it got mentally exhausting after a while. At some point I started looking for apps that could help, but most of them either felt super clinical or weirdly cheesy and disconnected from the actual experience. So I started building something for myself. That slowly turned into a small app called afterly no...

I’m the founder of a student productivity web-app. We’re at 3,080 users, but only 2 premium trials (still ongoing, with credentials) and 1 lifetime purchase. The app has a free plan and a Premium plan. The problem is that the free plan seems to be attracting users, but not converting them, and costs are getting too high. I’m considering either: making the app premium only with a 14 day trial heavily limiting the free plan (even more) keeping free but improving the upgrade flow (tried...

I used to think build-in-public meant posting updates. Built this today. Launched this feature and fixed this bug. That stuff is fine. But it is also the least interesting version of building in public. The posts people actually remember are not the updates. They are the ones that show the thinking behind the work. What tradeoff did you make? What did not work? What assumption changed? What did a customer say that made you rethink something? I notice the same with content. A polished &qu...

Building something on my own and I'm at that weird stage where the product is basically done but I'm scared to actually put it in front of real users. Funny thing is I've validated the idea, I know it solves a real problem, and I still catch myself stalling. The fear isn't really "is it good", it's "what if I ship it and it just doesn't land". For anyone who's been here: how did you push past that? Did the fear go away after the first real user, or did you just learn to s...

I’m starting a new creative role at a seed-stage startup that’s growing quickly. I’ll be their first designer/creative hire, which is exciting but also a new environment for me. They responded really well to the fact that I work across multiple creative fields, and from my side, I feel good about the pay, benefits, team, and overall direction of the company. I do believe I’m qualified for the role, but since this is my first time working at a startup, I want to make sure I’m thinking about t...

Everyone says: "AI will kill SaaS." Wrong diagnosis. Users don't want AI. Users want outcomes. The winners won't be AI companies. The winners will be companies that combine: SaaS workflows AI reasoning Human control AI becomes a feature. Workflows remain the product. User needs results so let's discuss how to deliver it rather than selling AI to them.

Incorporation seems to be dead simple. I am not allowed to add a link to the Delaware certificate of incorporation but just google it. Summary: A. 5 lines to fill out. B. One line requires a registered agent - no getting around that. C. Another line requires an Incorporator Address. None of the registered agent (Northwest, etc.) or incorporation tools (Clerky, etc.) seem to provide the ability to add an incorporator address that isn't your own. So that leaves two solutions for the prob...

I had a bad business partner who almost destroyed my life. Worst experience of my life. It got so bad, that years of therapy couldn’t fix it until I met the right therapist, which took a lot of time. Now I do stuff on my own and hire freelancers. If you have been in the same situation, I did EDMR therapy to forget that traumatic experience. Anyone who goes through trauma, try it. It’s hard to find a good business partner. My friend is working 100 hours a week for a startup where she gets stock a...

I’m trying to understand how these founder networks / accelerators actually work in real life, not just from the marketing pages. TL;DR: For founders who got into YC, South Park Commons, Entrepreneur First, a16z, NVIDIA Inception, Alchemist, AWS/CrowdStrike/NVIDIA, or similar programs: what did you actually have before applying? Product, prototype, users, revenue, cofounder, architecture/system design, strong founder profile, or just a serious problem + rough direction? Also curious how real...