Hi, I’m Ahsan from the UK.

I build software. I have SaaS products live and I’m running Google Ads, but marketing is clearly my weak spot.

For those of you who brought in a marketing partner or co-founder:

• Where did you find them?
• Did you start with a trial period, revenue share, or equity straight away?
• What made it work, or not?

Any advice welcome.

I have read so many inspiring posts from all of you and I cannot stress how much I commend you all for having the balls to follow your dreams and launch something that you put so much time and effort into, without knowing how it will turn out. The success stories inspire me the most.

I have worked tirelessly (literally) on my niche aggregator that solves a real cultural problem, yet I cannot stop thinking of everything that can go wrong or like I will be the laughing stock of well......myself since I barely told anyone about it.

Any tips to help get me through the vomit fest that is week 1.

I launched my app about 11 months ago and have done everything myself: building it, the tech, design, social media, and marketing. I didn’t start with a huge vision, but I’ve always had a clear sense of how I want the product to look and feel, and what the content should be.

About a while ago I met my now cofounder at a community event. She has a law background, a little entrepreneurship experience, and no tech or marketing experience, but she’s great at talking to people and getting things done, so I gave it a shot. When we started, I was clear about what I own (marketing and social included) and what her role would be. She handles things like outreach, logistics and basically all networking.

The problem is she keeps getting involved in marketing. She gives feedback, says “it’s your call,” but words it so that her way is clearly the right way, and pushes back on each post and wants to put input on each post. She also has very high urgency, where everything feels like it needs to happen right now. It’s gotten to the point where I dread working on something I used to love.

A recent example: we did an event, she volunteered to take all the photos, and I put together a photo dump. She pushed on photo order, which people were featured, adding music, and eventually said she wants to be in the posts because she feels “invisible” and her effort isn’t seen. Since she was behind the camera, the only photos of her were a few posed ones that didn’t fit the post in my opinion. I also never envisioned for my business to showcase the founders, it's mainly community driven and I prefer that no one really knows whose behind it.

The thing is:

• Neither of us is named or featured on the brand account. I deliberately keep it faceless and focused on the community and product. I genuinely think brands are stronger when the founders aren’t the face (unless they are creating personal social media content).
• She lists herself as cofounder on her personal profile and signs every email as cofounder.
• I’ve offered her ways to be more visible on the brand (sit-down videos to go with the writing she does, being part of video ideas), and she’s said she’s not comfortable yet.
• She’s also brought up wanting “IP,” and I’m honestly not sure what she means.

To be fair to her, some of her feedback has merit (showing real users sells the product), and she does say “your call” a lot. But it’s constant, it slows everything down, and I don’t understand what she actually wants.

How would you handle this? Is this a fixable role clarity issue, or a sign the partnership isn’t a fit? And for those who’ve brought on a cofounder after launch, how did you handle ownership and equity?

As of Oct 2026, AI agents are relatively well understood among the technical community and it seems like "every" AI engineer is building agent (see the famous YC meme). And I am interested in discussing the business side of AI agents.

I am personally running two agent products - one cloud specialist finance agent (commercial product), and a desktop agent harness most for myself and my surroundings. That's why I thought about this subject for quite a well.

In general, I am thinking about the market in three categories:
-Generalist agents for the enterprise market, we have the big harness: codex/chatgpt work, claude code/claude, grok bot, and copilot. OpenAI, Anthropic and XAI (cursor) all own their models. Microsoft is the exception, that has to pay other providers for the models (I am not counting the small models trained by MS, they are not competitive).
-Specialist agents for the enterprise market, inside, there are two categories: 1. Startups building specialists agents, like legora for legal, which just raised half billion USD at 8Bn valuation. 2. Agents built on top of the existing platforms like Box agent, SAP's Jule, Opentext's aviator, etc. Most of them don't own the model layer, at least not any competitive ones.

-Consumer agent, chatgpt and muse, both have wide distribution, both own their models

I think effectively, it's really hard to compete with the big harnesses: codex/chatgpt, claude code/claude, muse, grokbot. They own the models and they are subsidizing their plans heavily.

200 USD plan from Claude will get you 11K equivalent API usage (Opus 5.5) from Anthropic. 20 USD plan will get you 500 USD (opus 5.5) usage. There is no way any startup can compete on this while themselves have to pay the API to the labs.

We see this from Lovable which is targeting mainly the prosumer markets + enterprises. They optimize the max models costs through routing. So is Legora. What's more, customers don't get the best models for their work. You can clearly see this if you use Lovable.

This also has an impact on the unit economics and finance. It's reported that Legora is losing money on per customer level - VCs are financing the costs, even if their customers don't get to use the frontier models.

I think for users, especially power users, there is no question, just go with the big labs. You get the max value while they are still subsidising their plan. Once I told a customer just go and use Claude 200 USD for their legal due diligence, with 200 USD, you can audit thousands of contracts several times before you engage the due diligence lawyers in a month.

For people who want to make a business out of agents, this is both interesting and challenging. We are still at the very early stage, most of the economy doesn't know what's possible, what's frontier, what the best models can do. Both Lovable and Legora are benefiting the information asymmetry and build their business around the workflows to have customers lock-in. They both demonstrated that it can work despite the heavy subsidy of the big labs. On the other hands, themselves are heavily funded by the VCs.

What's your take? How would you guys compete?

When I started, "a lesson on any topic, built just for you" sounded like a product. Now a competitor with a $16M round lets you generate courses for free, and every chat assistant will teach you anything if you ask.

So I've stopped leading with that. What's left is the part they don't do: the product picks what you learn next, so you don't need to know what to ask, and the lessons are hands-on, with simulations you can play with instead of walls of text.

I'm not sure that's enough. "You don't have to ask" can sound like a weakness to people who know exactly what they want.

If your main feature became free somewhere else, what did you end up positioning on?

Ran the numbers on my creative tests from this year last weekend. 214 variations tested, 11 winners. The thing that stuck with me wasn't the 5% hit rate. It was how many of the 203 losers never had a chance, and not because they were bad. The tests were too small to prove anything either way.

Reframe for this post: creative testing is a math problem first and a creative problem second. Here's how I size tests now.

1. Set the kill rule before you launch. Mine is 2.5x target CPA per creative. Target CPA of $40 means each creative gets $100 before I judge it. Five creatives need a $500 test budget. If you've only got $150, you test one or two creatives, not five. Every extra creative crammed into an underfunded test is one you'll end up killing on vibes.

2. One variable per test. New hook, same body, same offer, same landing page. I once tested a new hook plus a new offer plus a new landing page all at once. It won. I had no idea why. Three weeks to unpick it. Boring single-variable tests are the only ones that teach you anything.

3. Read nothing before $75-100 per creative or 3 full days, whichever comes later. Day 1 numbers are mostly noise. I've watched creatives look dead on day 1 and become the account's best seller by day 4. The number of winners killed on day 2 by impatient buyers is honestly depressing.

4. Judge on the deepest event with real volume. Purchases first. Add-to-carts if purchases are thin. Never CTR alone. A 5% CTR with zero add-to-carts means the algorithm found professional clickers, not buyers. My order: cost per purchase, then cost per add-to-cart, then cost per landing page view. CTR is a diagnostic, not a verdict.

5. Kill fast after the threshold, and replace immediately. Past 2.5x CPA with nothing to show, it's dead, no funeral. The part people skip: a testing ad set should always hold 3-5 live creatives. Winners fatigue, usually in 2-4 weeks on broad audiences. If you don't feed new tests in constantly, your account fills up with dying winners and you wonder why performance decays every month.

6. Keep the lab separate from the retirement home. Testing happens in a testing campaign. Winners graduate to the scaling campaign. Never test inside the ad set that's carrying your revenue, because every failed test drags its average down and you'll start killing good tests to protect the number.

Rule of thumb: test budget divided by target CPA. If the answer is under 10, you're not testing, you're gambling. Raise the budget or cut creatives until the math works.

Hi guys correct me if Im wrong - ive researched that a startup building is done this way

1. User acquisition - People to find and sign up for your product

2. User activation - Them to actually use it and see the value the first time

3. User retention - keeping them coming back instead of leaving

4. User revenue - turning them into paying customers

5. User referral - Them telling others about it [optional]

(I may be wrong about this list)

So in this context whats the biggest hurdle for you right now?

P.S. im particularly interested in saas startups

I want to know if you check your COD orders remittence and is there any way I can match the payments with my payment gateway orders. Currently I have all the orders on razorpay but the remittence reports are from the courier services, so have to separately check the prepaid and COD orders.

Which gateway + courier service do you use and how do you check your COD payouts ? have you ever found a short payment by any courier service ?
Also I heard shiprocket lets you have the reports automated to some email ?

When you first started selling your product, how did you figure out what worked and turn it into a repeatable process?

What were your biggest challenges? And how did you eventually build a system that someone else, like an SDR or AE, could follow?

Did you document everything yourself, hire someone experienced in sales, or bring in a GTM engineer/operator to help build the system?

Would love to hear how you approached this, especially in the early stages.

Hi, Seeking some advice here from people who have already built similar initiatives....

As the title suggests, and perhaps this is a little niche type of initiative, for context, I'm trying to build a community of enthusiasts around the theme of mindfulness in tech/ai products, business models (micro), and larger economic setup (macro). It is based on the the concept of Sustained Growth and Digital Wellbeing, and an opportunity to grow the community of like-minded people (especially in Corporate, Startups, Wellness Domain and Academia) to organise conferences, talks, events, (physical and otherwise), content channels, merchs (meh!). [which will in turn be the revenue sources]

Right now, I want to ask for your (human) inputs (Al always seemingly gives false positives), and if this is something that you'd consider interesting?

Bit about me, My background has been in Technology Adoption and Digitalization, with a strong focus on creative narrative strategies. Over the past few months, I find myself frustrated with the whole polarized discussion of Al Use-it-or-loose-it FOMO .... OR.... AI being a catastrophy..... And that made me want to build such a community. Ofc, it may not be a new idea (and thankfully so!), but that's the entire point.

Solo founder, applying to YC Winter 2027. I'm not a dev. I don't write or read code, AI agents in Claude Code write everything. What I do is decide the product and the architecture, and nothing gets built before I approve it. Then I test everything using it, I use it every day.

The application says a technical founder "can build the product without outside assistance". Nobody outside built anything, it was only me with AI. But I'm not a programmer.

I'm also looking for a technical cofounder, but most people I talked to want a good salary and security.

In my place, would you check "technical founder"?

as the title says, i closed my first b2b pilot today after my first ever demo and i'm very hyped. is this good signal and what should i focus on now on the pilot period?

i've only been cold calling like 20 leads i scraped, not actually even that targeted leads and i got 3 demos booked. what other channels should i try for outreach?

also, feel free to give me tips how to move forward with my b2b saas! :)

context: it's a niche SaaS for service businesses

EDIT: the pilot i offer is 1 month, forgot to mention

I think people are making this stuff more complicated than it needs to be.

Sometimes you just need an API call, a few rules, and an LLM for one specific step. Instead, people build multi-agent systems that are harder to debug, more expensive to run, and somehow still need a human to check everything.

Obviously, some workflows do need agents. But figuring out where autonomy actually makes sense seems like the harder part.

Where do you draw the line?

Disclosure up front: I build a pre-post checker for Reddit, so I've spent a lot of time reading how removals work. I will not promote it here. No name, no link.

Something I see a lot in founder subs. Someone posts their product, gets two upvotes, and decides nobody wants it. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes the post got removed and they never found out.

Reddit says a post removed by mods is "only visible to the original poster (OP) and your mod team". So you can still see it, and you may never get a message, because sending a removal reason is optional for mods.

The check I use now:

1. Open a private window and stay logged out (old reddit needs a login now, so use the normal site)
2. Open the sub, sort by New, and look for your post
3. If it's not there, open the direct link. "[Removed by moderator]" means a mod or AutoMod took it down
4. If your posts are gone everywhere and your profile doesn't show when logged out, the account itself may be flagged for spam. Reddit's help center points you to its appeals form for that

As for what removed it, it's usually one of three things.

Reddit's own spam filter. Reddit limits how often people can post in a community, and its help center says new, low-karma accounts "may be hitting this spam filter". Commenting in the community first can help. The spam policy also lists "mass-posting repetitive content for the purpose of exposure or financial gain", and dropping the same launch post in 6 subs in one day fits that.

The sub's automation. Reddit's transparency report for July to December 2025 says 68.6% of what mods removed was handled by automated systems like AutoMod. Some subs also turn on a reputation filter, which "does not filter based on the post content, but instead on the user behavior of the account". It scores your account on karma, verification and other signals. When you create a post, Reddit shows which requirements you meet and don't meet, but the exact numbers "aren't disclosed at this time to deter potential misuse".

Then there are the human mods and the written rules. I went through the rules of 33 subs founders and marketers post in. 20 of them either ban promo posts or only allow them in a designated promo thread. 11 ban AI-written posts and 3 more restrict them. Even this sub only allows sharing your startup in the pinned share thread. And the SaaS sub doesn't allow promoting SaaS built for ads, outreach, lead detection or content generation at all.

Reddit also has its own Post Check now, which uses an LLM to flag likely rule problems before you submit. It only covers the community's rules, not sitewide ones, and Reddit says it "may make errors".

Also read whatever the submit page tells you. When I pasted this post in, it warned that this sub doesn't allow links. My first draft had links in it.

Has anyone found a reliable way to tell an AutoMod removal from a human mod's? That's the one I still can't call with confidence.

Hi reddit, this is my first step towards i don’t know where i end up. Its all about tech ai and all. I am lead dev with 9y exp and an ex MNC guy. So basically i am thinking to start an AI excellence startup which helps companies or businesses adopt ai in their day to day. And need advice to move in this direction.
So i am curious, are there any problems that can be productised.

Update: posted again today and got 35 more signups in a day, so about 60 now. A lot of the early drop-off was setup bugs I’ve since fixed, so I’m less worried about “does anyone want this” and more about “how do I reach the right people consistently”. Would love advice on that!

hey all, looking for some honest advice

I’m a student and I’ve spent the last few months building a desktop app on my own. It’s an AI assistant that sits next to your cursor on Windows/Mac.

The building part I’m ok at. The getting-people part I’m clearly not lol

Where I’m at right now:

posted on r/SideProject, r/imadethis, r/SaaS and a few others, got 28 signups (mostly on day one)

21 of them actually used it, some asked 20-40 questions, then most stopped after a day or two

7 signed in and never asked it anything

emailed every single signup personally and got 1 reply

TikTok got views but basically no clicks

my budget is tiny, like £50-100 total, because student loan

Stuff I’m already planning: Product Hunt, Microsoft Store listing, AlternativeTo, and fixing the setup since that’s clearly where people drop off.

What I’d love to know:

If you had ~£100 and zero audience, what would you actually do first?

Is it even worth paying for ads at this stage, or is that just burning money?

For anyone who’s launched a desktop app, where did your first 100 real users come from?

How do you get people to come back after day one, rather than just signing up?

Cheers!

I’m creating an app with two of my friends and I’ve been tasked with the marketing. I am a paid media manager for a large sports brand, so I do have a background in marketing. However, I have only ever worked for established brands and never started something from the ground up. My work also revolves around ad spend and using assets created by other teams.

I have all the socials set up but I’m hitting a wall on content. I’ve tried carousels, vlogs, and just speaking to the camera and nothing is landing. I’ve watched so many videos on how to create content, but I feel like everything is over edited and I’m not confident it would land. I also can’t do any photography since it’s a digital product.

I would love any advice or suggestions. Thank you!

Hi all,

Wanted to share an interesting experience I had past year or so.

I've always wanted to find a good SaaS / startup idea, like most other people. But never came up with something really useful that people wanted.

The past year or so I took a complicated part time office job, my main role was fixing processes and setting up automations, without realizing it, my day to day work slowly formed a full on SaaS.

It was first an excel file, with another shared linked excel file for other staff to run reports etc. iterated and iterated till excel was not good anymore for the job. It's now a full on web application, and the users go wild for it.

I honestly plan to redo this approach in other industries, it worked.

Thanks for reading my story :)

Good luck.

Hi everyone,

I've recently advanced through the initial rounds of a fairly well-known startup accelerator and have been invited to live interview rounds. Part of the interview will focus on my startup's product and traction. I have several potential collaborations coming up that could meaningfully strengthen my application, but they may take a few weeks to materialize. The program has interview slots available over the next two months.

Would you recommend scheduling an interview within the next 1–2 weeks, or taking more time to see whether these opportunities turn into concrete results before interviewing?

My main concern with waiting is that I might lose momentum in the application process, or that the team might be less engaged by the time I interview. On the other hand, going in with stronger traction could make a meaningful difference.

For anyone who has gone through accelerator interviews or admissions processes, how much does interview timing matter compared with demonstrating additional traction?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, I have been searching far and wide for a relatively small community of Latino founders. I’m part of Techqueria and it was an awesome community until it got sold/acquired and I dipped. I am looking for something like what Techqueria fostered, but focused on startups and Latino indie hackers, bootstrapped or funded

Anyways I have not been able to find a community like this and I am curious if maybe it’s because they are not publicized and they are invite only - does anyone know of any? FWIW I find plenty of other communities for like women founders for example so I hope there is something out there.

Here is what I’d ideally want in a community like this:
- I want it to be small, being part of a group with 5k members does not appeal to me, I prefer small where relationships can flourish
- I’d like for it to be Latino focused, kind of like Techqueria was built for folks working in tech
- I want to join a community that vets its members, I don’t want to be in a group where we are getting pitched to every day by a marketer or other founders, we support each other but it’s not “hey try my product” type of constant sales pitching
- I want to be able to help problem solve, I’m a Product Manager by day so I know I can help others solve problems and brainstorm
- also looking for accountability, a place like WIP.co

Maybe I am describing a unicorn but hey thought I’d ask.

I'm a bootstrapped B2B founder gathering info on how serious startups are actually hosting there software (frontend, backend, database, etc), deploying to it, monitoring and alerting on it, etc.

Most I've talked too these days fall into a few different cohorts

• Build it yourself (spin up an ec2 or similar in the early phases)
• I well funded so I hire an infrastructure person or pay a contractor / don't worry about this shortening my runway
• Pay a managed PaaS (Vercel, Netlify, Lovable, Cursor, etc)

What about monitoring/alerting? Free tier Datadog/NewRelic? Open source stack? Don't care about monitoring until a bigger funding round?

What about deployments? Github Actions? Gitlab? Self hosted?

What about AI in this space? Has Claude (etc) been able to bridge the gap for the early stages for you or are you kicking SRE problems down the road?

Let me know your thoughts! I'd love to know what I'm missing

Are there any non technical founders here that received funding for an app or Saas?

If so, can you share your journey, such as how did you get funding, how much funding you received, from who, what was the idea, why you, etc?

I am building a saas and have some traction, but Im feeling apprehensive about applying for funding while being a non technical founder. I am vibe coding, but I'm not completely fresh, I'm about 50% technical. I've always had an affinity for tech, Ive dropped out of university twice for computer related degrees. But I hate coding and wouldn't be able to do it without AI.

Appreciate any insights. Thanks, guys.

What makes a P99 product engineer now? Code generation, and review to some extent, is becoming less important with agentic coding. This will increasingly become the case.

What attributes are important? System design, architecture, taste, user experience etc?

Basically as the title says.

How do you approach potential clients? Whats the strategy? How do you reach the right person? What happens when you get the chance to meet the right person? How does the process typically go?

Do I make a spreadsheet and then just start cold emailing and cold connecting?

What are the best approaches to reaching the right person? Cold email? Cold phone calls? LinkedIn? Any other methods?

Doing everything on my own atm.

I’m building a developer tool that checks whether code changes break existing functionality. I’m comfortable with the technical side, but finding people willing to try it is where I’m stuck.

For anyone who’s launched a dev tool, where did your first users come from? Direct outreach, developer communities, technical content, or something else?

I’d also love to hear how you earned enough trust for someone to connect a tool to their codebase. What worked for you, and what turned out to be a waste of time?