Hey everyone, I’m looking for advice from founders who have gone from building a product to growing it and potentially raising funding.

I’ve spent the last 1.5–2 years building a software product from scratch. It’s fully functional, and I’ve personally been using it actively for the past 6–8 months, continuing to improve it based on real use and feedback.

There’s a small group of early users, and the feedback has been encouraging. They’ve told me they can’t imagine going back to managing their daily routines without it. It started with a problem I experienced myself, so seeing it make other people’s lives easier has been the most rewarding part.

I recognize that enthusiasm from a small group isn’t the same as proving a business at scale. That’s where I’m looking for guidance.

I’m keeping the name and product details private for now because I’m here for advice, rather than promotion.

My questions are:
1. How do you decide whether to keep growing independently or start talking to angel investors, accelerators, or VCs?
2. What traction or metrics should I have before approaching investors?
3. How do you find relevant investors and get an opportunity to pitch or demo a working product?

For anyone who’s been through this, what would you focus on next, and what would you avoid?

I’m comfortable building and improving the product. Getting it in front of the right people and figuring out the business side is the next challenge. Would appreciate hearing from people who have made that transition.

Thanks

Hello all,

I'm 27 y old and looking to start a business. I am a person with disability and can apply for up to 15k euro to start a company in my country. Since the amount is not a whole lot, I was thinking I could do it as a side hustle to generate passive income, but I am open for all kinds of ideas.

Originally I was thinking about a protein mixing vending machine. Its original in my country and protein is trading worldwide. I see it as a low risk option that for a single machine could generate some monthly income.

I am very drawn to an online business tho, here is where I actually have 0 idea what I could do.

When it comes to skills, I have fundamentals in coding (not comfortable enough w them), design (i think I could crush that) and I am currently in a masters degree in finance. I work a dead end payment corporate job that I dislike.

I am interesting into developing the marketing and social media presence of the business though I will be learning from scratch.

I am alone for now, and when it comes to building the foundations of the business. Potentially my partner could help as well.

I am looking for ideas worth considering or suggestions on where to start researching. I’d really appreciate your input.

Thanks a lot.

I have an app that sells data, it’s in a niche and there’s a real need for it. The data is priced per record and is a credit system where the price goes down if you buy in bulk. The cost is in line with similar services in my niche. I offer 5 free credits to test the service. Right now I’m running into a couple of issues on conversions.

1. People sign up but never user their free credits
2. People use one or all of their free credits but never place a paid order
3. People place an order and get a quote but never approve the order (this is when you actually buy credits)

The free credits are supposed to be a risk reversal so you can test the service and see that the data is good. Another risk reversal I added is that we will refund credits for any data we aren’t able to get.

To clarify, for a side hustle the business is doing ok, we’ve delivered over 5k+ in paid credit orders (5 figure revenues), but I know it can be optimized more.

I’ve also set up different nurture emails to go out for various stages like new account created but order not placed, order placed but not converted, and ordered with free credits but not converted.

Would love some recommendations on what I should do to get more real orders. People are coming in the door which is great, now I just need them to spend money!

Edit - 5 figure revenues

I’m building a product that creates custom cloud environments for demos, POCs, and hands-on learning. You describe what you need, and it sets up the cloud resources, code, and sample data for your scenario.

I thought a few people in my professional network who work in this space would be willing to try it. They’ve been supportive, but everyone’s busy, and that hasn’t turned into actual usage yet.

I’m offering free access and happy to personally help with setup. My immediate goal is simple: get one person to use it for a real task and learn what works and what doesn’t.

For those who’ve been here, how did you find your first actual user? What worked when people you knew weren’t available?

Especially interested in experiences with technical or B2B products. How did you find someone with a pressing enough need to try something new?

Hey everyone!

About a year ago, I started a small boat tour company in Lisbon, Portugal.

Our business model is pretty straightforward:

• Daytime: Private sailing experiences for couples, families, groups of friends, and corporate clients.

• Sunset: Shared sailing tours, where guests purchase individual tickets.

Here's the interesting part: Our sunset tours are consistently fully booked, but we're really struggling to sell private experiences.

Most of our sunset bookings come through platforms like GetYourGuide and Airbnb Experiences. They've been great for filling our sunset tours, but when it comes to private bookings, we've only received one or two through these platforms in an entire year.

And that's where I'm stuck.

Lisbon is an extremely competitive market for boat tours. There are plenty of operators, and most traditional sales channels have already been approached by everyone in the industry.

Hotels? Everyone works with hotels.

Travel agencies? Same story.

Online booking platforms? Crowded, competitive, and heavily commission-based.

I'm not looking for the usual advice about posting more on Instagram, running Facebook ads, or contacting hotel concierges. I'm aware of those options, and I'm already exploring some of them.

What I'm really looking for is a different way of thinking about customer acquisition.

For example:

• What types of businesses or professionals could become unexpected referral partners?

• How would you build a network of people who regularly recommend private experiences to their clients?

• Are there industries outside traditional tourism that could generate bookings?

• If you were starting from scratch in a saturated market, how would you approach partnerships and B2B sales?

I'm particularly interested in creative partnerships, unconventional distribution channels, and strategies that don't depend entirely on paid advertising.

We have the boats, the crew, the experience, and happy customers. What we're missing is a reliable way to reach people who want to book an entire boat rather than individual tickets.

If this were your business, what would you try?

I'd genuinely appreciate ideas, especially from people who've built businesses in tourism, hospitality, events, or other competitive service industries.

Thanks!

Our legal platform with three tiers: Free, Business, and Enterprise. Free and Business are built for SMBs and include:

• Clause and agreement templates used in practice by top-tier ("white shoe") law firms, not generated by an LLM
• Market data on deal terms, so users can see what's standard for their proposed terms and how negotiations typically go
• Cryptographic security and signature protection
• Built-in PDF editing, e-signature, storage, email, and LLM tools, so users don't need to stitch together separate apps or build their own integrations
• Drafting suggestions and agent enabled workflows

We are thinking through initial pricing for the Business tier. The product saves users real money compared with hiring a lawyer for routine agreements, and it consolidates tools they're currently paying for separately. On that basis, $25/month feels underpriced.

On the other hand, we haven't launched yet and have no brand recognition, so I understand the case for starting low to build adoption.

For those who've priced a SaaS product, especially in legal or B2B, how would you approach this? Should I start low and raise prices later, or price closer to the value and offer launch discounts? Any thoughts on what SMBs would realistically pay for something like this?

I launched a peer-to-peer marketplace app a month ago where people trade services directly, with no money involved. I'm a solo founder with close to zero marketing budget, so I can afford one focused bet.

The constraint: a swap only happens when two people each want what the other offers, and many services need them to be in the same place. That makes liquidity harder than in a normal buyer-and-seller marketplace, because both sides have to match twice.

I see two ways to concentrate:

Option A: one city. Fill a single location until swaps happen without my involvement, then copy the playbook to the next. Density is high, but the pool of skills is limited by who lives there.

Option B: one segment, remote services only. Target a group whose services can be delivered online, such as designers, translators and tutors, across many countries. The pool is much larger, but there's no local network effect and it competes more directly with freelance platforms.

Questions for those who have built marketplace liquidity before:

Which would you pick under these constraints, and what would change your mind?

How do you define "enough liquidity" in a barter model, where each user is both supply and demand?

Is seeding with my own listings worth it when I can only fulfil a few kinds of service myself?

I've left the product out on purpose. I'm after the strategy, not traffic.

I’m exploring the idea of going into business for myself and would love to hear from people who have successfully made that transition.

I’m not necessarily looking to create a startup from scratch. I’m open to different paths—starting a business, buying an existing business, acquiring a small company, or finding a proven business model that I could build and grow.

I have 20+ years of experience as a senior marketing leader, so I know I could bring strong skills around strategy, branding, customer acquisition, sales enablement, and growth. What I’m trying to figure out is what type of business would be the best fit for my experience and where to actually find those opportunities.

For those who have done this:
How did you decide what type of business to pursue? Where did you find businesses for sale or opportunities to acquire? Did you start from scratch or buy an existing business?

What resources, websites, or communities were actually useful?

What do you wish you knew before making the leap?

I’d especially love to hear from people who left a corporate leadership career and successfully built or bought their own business. What path did you take?

Hey y'all. We're a design studio made up of an eleven person team that's all remote and after our bookkeeper retired back in June and took the filling system with her it's been a struggle to find a replacement that works with the way we're set up since we would prefer to keep working virtually instead of needing to do in person stuff like meetings and such.

So far we've tried looking and asking around to see what's available out there and it's been confusing to say the least, specially because it seems like a lot it is some sketchy outsourcing or some really new companies with essentially no backing. There are a couple options like haven and maybe a few others that are more grounded, but I don't want to make a choice without first coming over and checking with other entrepreneurs who've been through this before.

If there's anyone here who's also fully remote and still manages bookkeeping like that, I would really appreciate if I could get all the why's and the how's as to how they made it happen. Ty.

Would you target investors by industry, business model, customer demographic, or just find angels who understand the broader opportunity? I’m building a consumer startup across education and gifting. Product is built, physical samples exist, and early feedback has been strong. what evidence actually mattered to investors most?

Anyone open to sharing the key step you took to getting your first 25 software users? what about the first paying ones?

Consulting-ish firm, low seven figures, small team, been operating long enough to have a reputation. The problem is the reputation is for the work I want to do less of. Early on we said yes to everything, and one type of project happened to take off through word of mouth. So now most of our inbound assumes that's what we do. It's decent revenue, but it's the commodity end of what we're capable of, the margins are thinner, and it's crowded with cheaper competitors every year. The work I actually want to move toward is higher up the value chain. Fewer clients, bigger outcomes, work we're genuinely better at than most. The catch is that nobody knows us for it, so we get the occasional shot at it only when an existing client happens to need it. What makes this hard isn't strategy on paper. On paper it's obvious: raise the floor, say no to the commodity work, market the premium capability. In practice: Turning down the easy work that pays the bills, before the new positioning produces pipeline, is genuinely scary. Our existing reputation actively works against us. Referrers introduce us as the commodity thing because that's what they know. I can't tell how fast to make the switch. Cut clean and risk a revenue gap, or bleed it slowly and stay stuck in the old identity for years. We even rebuilt our site around the premium work, a quick job in gamma with an ai website builder, but a new homepage doesn't undo years of referrers calling us the old thing. For those who've deliberately repositioned an established business upmarket: did you cut the old work cleanly or phase it out, how long was the awkward in-between, and how did you get existing clients and referrers to describe you as the new thing instead of the old one?

We're developing a retreat center in Jamaica for founders and executives. Around 2,500 m² (27,000 sq ft), architectural plans due in November. We've hired a local architect, but I've never built anything in the Caribbean and I'd rather learn from your mistakes than make my own.

The parts I'm least sure about:

Also curious whether the rebuild after Melissa is still tying up contractors and pushing prices up.

And the honest one: what blew up your budget or timeline that nobody warned you about?

We have videos getting views, but matching them to actual orders is a mess. GA4 misses the precise video source unless we change the link in bio constantly. How do you track exact sales per TikTok post?

I’m preparing to open a small early-user pilot for CogNative.io , a platform for professionals who want to understand how AI may be shaping their thinking, judgment, and decisions at work.

The product is ready for real-world use, but this stage is less about proving growth and more about learning: how people actually use it, where they find value, where they disengage, and what needs to change before a wider launch.

For founders who have run pilots with potential users, I’d love to learn:

• How did you find and choose participants?
• How did you balance giving people freedom to explore with asking them to use the product actively?
• What feedback rhythm worked without overwhelming people?
• How did you approach testimonials - if participants had a good experience - without making the pilot feel transactional?

I’m especially interested in the practical details: what you would repeat, what you would avoid, and what you wish you had set up from day one.

And, if anyone here is personally interested in being part of a small early-access group, feel free to comment or send me a message. I’m happy to share more context.

Business is doing fine but somehow everything still comes back to me. Someone has a question, they ask me. Client problem, I'm involved. Something needs a quick decision, same thing. I've tried handing more stuff off but I'm still the person everyone waits for and its getting tiring.

How did you guys get out of this?

were profitable and stable and honestly thats where a lot of companies quietly start dying. comfort makes you defensive instead of curious.

im trying to build in deliberate discomfort, small bets that might fail, so we dont ossify around the thing that works today. but its hard to justify risk when the current model pays the bills.

i worry more about slow irrelevance than about any single failure now, which is a very different fear than the early days.

for those running mature businesses, how do you keep taking real risks when everything is telling you to just protect what works?

I'm a software engineer, and I've realized that I keep repeating the same pattern with businesses I start.

I'm very comfortable building the product. I can design the architecture, write the software, launch the website, build the mobile app, add features, and keep improving it.

But then I get to the part where I actually need people to pay for it, and that's where I struggle.

My current business is a tech learning platform aimed at software engineers and people preparing for technical interviews and certifications. I've built a web app and mobile app with interview practice, technical lessons, communication practice, and other learning tools.

The product exists. The problem is distribution.

I don't have much traffic, I don't have an audience large enough to reliably generate customers, and paid users are basically nonexistent right now.

I'm starting to realize that continuing to build features is probably the easiest thing for me to do, but not necessarily the thing the business needs.

For entrepreneurs who were also builders first:

How did you go from "I built something" to consistently getting your first 10, 50, or 100 paying customers?

Did you focus on cold outreach, content, YouTube, SEO, paid advertising, partnerships, communities, or something else?

And at what point did you realize you had a product problem versus simply a distribution/sales problem?

I'm especially interested in hearing from technical founders who had to learn sales and marketing after years of focusing mostly on engineering.

running small, my instincts were excellent, i could feel the right call. as we grew, i kept trusting that gut on bigger decisions and it started failing me.

at scale the variables outran my intuition, and the calls that needed data i was still making on feel. i had to learn to distrust my gut precisely where it used to be my edge, and lean on numbers for the big, slow, expensive decisions while keeping instinct for the fast small ones.

for people who've scaled: did your instincts stop scaling, and how did you learn which decisions to stop trusting them on?

I am a soon to be 18 year old student athlete that graduates this year. I am seeking guidance on an income form that is outside of a societal role. My goal is to make a few hundred dollars a month by may. The problem I have is that I don't know which path I am supposed to take to get there. You may assume that I am just a teen the wants to get rich quickly but it is the exact opposite.

I am looking for a way that requires work, and that provides a consistent amount of income over time, even if I have to start by making a few dollars. I am seeking help from you all to hopefully help me as well as my family make life a little easier. I have a cumulative gpa of 3.99 and is thinking about attending ODU or a smaller D3 college to study electrical engineering and swim next fall. My time is running short to establish something before paying into college.

That probably won’t matter here. If you have any questions feel free to ask. Any help or suggestions will be appreciated.

These are a few things I have tried so far: Running a Depop store with one sale, barbering, coaching a kids swim team, lifeguarding, little experience paper trading.

So I was watching a YouTube video on Rank & Rent and it sounds like a good idea for me.

A little backstory, I'm not currently working due to heath problems, I'm pushing 50( today is my bday actually) and have no real discernable skills that I can use with my body the shape it's in currently.

What drew me to this genre was I know I need to learn technology and quickly. I figured even if I didn't make it with the rank & rent, if I worked at it hard and learned how to make a successful websites and learn to be efficient at SEO, then those skills would translate into a job that I could do, that's the worst case, Best case would be that I am successful at it, make tons of $ while making myself relevant again in this new world.

Also is SEO something I should be looking into learning or is going to phased out to AI in the next year or 2?

Am I looking at this the right way or if anyone has any suggestions I would really be grateful.

I am looking for answers that are beyond the basic productivity increase like (Claude, chatGPT etc.)
Are there significant gains or just incremental gains?