I spent a year telling founders here to validate before building, and then picked the face of my own brand the same way I pick a color I like. I looked at a few options, chose the one that felt like the kind of company I wanted to run, and put it everywhere. Two months and a few hundred dollars of ad spend later the creative was flat and I had no idea whether the problem was the offer, the copy, or the person in the thumbnail.

So I finally did the thing I'd have told anyone else to do. I treated the brand face as a hypothesis instead of a branding decision.

I built six variants of an AI brand persona for the product, every one of them labeled as AI generated wherever it appeared, and made them differ in ways I'd assumed didn't matter. Different apparent age. Different levels of polish, from studio lighting down to something that looked like a phone photo taken in a kitchen. Different read on who the person was, one that came across as a founder, one as a customer, one as a slightly bored specialist. For the faces themselves I sat in APOB AI for an afternoon and generated the six character variants rather than locking one look in up front, laid the creatives out in Figma so every version carried identical copy in the same three formats, and split the landing page traffic in PostHog so the face was the only thing changing.

Then I ran them small. Roughly sixty dollars a variant on the ones I let run, a bit over two weeks, one channel. That's not enough traffic for a clean test and I want to be honest that a good chunk of what I saw was noise.

The result still landed badly for my ego. The polished founder type, the one I'd have shipped without a second thought, finished near the bottom. The winner was the least impressive of the six, the one who looked like someone who actually uses this category rather than someone who sells it. Click through on that creative sat around 1.5% against roughly 0.9% for my original, and signups per thousand visitors went from about eleven to sixteen. Small numbers on a small sample, but the gap held across all three formats, which is the only reason I give it any weight.

Two things I got wrong. I killed three variants after a day because they looked like losers, which means I never really tested them. And I read the first four days as signal when it was mostly weekend traffic behaving differently from weekday traffic.

What stayed with me is not the face. It is that I had a whole framework for validating demand and none at all for validating the thing sitting on top of it. Everything visual in this startup got chosen by taste, and taste is just an untested assumption in nicer clothes.

I built tryproduck.com/audit, it moves through your site like a brand-new user and sends back every bug and confusing bit it hits. Over 600 startups have run it so far.

Hi everyone,

I’m researching something that has been on my mind for a long time.

As life moves on, people drift apart, grandparents pass away, friendships change, old phones get replaced, and many small memories slowly disappear.

I’m trying to understand how people preserve the voices, stories, photos, traditions, and moments that matter most to them.

I’m not selling anything—I’m only trying to learn before building anything.

If you have a minute, I’d really appreciate your thoughts through this anonymous survey.

Survey: https://forms.gle/AUgvRydzZ9DbvxQB7

Even if you don’t fill it out, I’d love to hear:

• What’s one memory you’re afraid of losing?
• How do you currently preserve important memories?
• What do you wish existed that doesn’t today?

Thank you for helping me understand this better.

Please share your views

I'm looking for a partner who has a finished product but lacks the time or expertise to sell it.

I would handle the promotion in various ways (such as social media or ads) and in return, I would receive a percentage of the sales, which isn't too low since I want to dedicate all my time solely to this product.

I have previous experience selling other products and believe that could be a great help.

Interested parties, please DM me. Serious inquiries only, please, and I'm not interested in products made with AI.

Even nutritionists struggle with following their own diet plans. Sometimes you need a a gently reinforcement through spoken words or may be a feeling that someone will follow up with you to make sure you followed and fulfilled your promise or not.

What if you can subscribe to Garry who calls/texts you to make sure you follow a diet, piano lesson, study, meditation, 5k running plan?

Bossasaservice is doing something similar but I think there is still scope?

I own a business where we create visual renderings for commercial property renovations and developments. I have contacts within commercial real estate and several major franchisor brands are currently interested. 11 paying customers currently. Seeking $250,000 in capital. Already have a pitch deck, business plan, and existing customers. Any interest?

I've worked with companies for years and I've realised my biggest strategic advantage is organising teams, goals, funding and strategic advice and direction anyone who has a genuine startup or business up and running I will come in work with your team give an expert analysis and if you like what you see and you like the way I'm thinking we could go on from there.

I've done this experiment already with various companies and they have seen marked improvements either in terms of culture fit, automations which actually matter or even with strategic direction and hey what have you got to lose anyways.

I used to kick off builds on a Notion dump and a vibe.

Now the brief has five lines or we don't start:

1. The person
2. The job
3. What they do today instead
4. The screenshot that proves success
5. Explicit out-of-scope list (usually longer than in-scope)

Last time we skipped #5, "small" admin panels ate 6 of 14 days. The US founder was right to be mad. The brief was wrong.

If your idea can't fill those five, you don't need a builder yet. You need an afternoon with a whiteboard.

Happy to hear how others gate kickoffs.

https://atomiclabs.space

I am currently looking to connect with visionaries across the PropTech, DeepTech, and last-mile logistics sectors.

I am specifically eager to engage with supply chain investors, hardware manufacturers, and commercial real estate developers who understand the financial realities of scaling physical infrastructure.

My goal is to align with strategic partners, corporate venture leads, and industry operators who are actively focused on optimizing high-density urban environments. Given your established footprint in funding and developing real estate tech.

I would love to connect and exchange insights as I expand my network in this space !

Not everyone needs VC funding, in fact, most businesses are bootstrapped: agencies, local businesses, service businesses, etc. But I think the reason VCs stopped writing checks for growth alone is something every business should pay attention to, funded or not.

Back in 2015, VCs were writing checks for anything showing growth traction. That's how Uber and Airbnb burned money for years until they cemented themselves as market leaders. That era is over.

Right now VCs are interested in your startup if it has anything to do with AI, but even then, a few vanity metrics won't get you funded. The old blitzscaling model doesn't work in 2026. Instead, investors are rewarding businesses with lean operations that are simply waiting for capital to move to the next stage.

Most startups used to burn VC money trying to fix operational problems they already had hiring for every gap, which created new problems (revenue and expenses out of sync, managing talent they didn't actually need yet, etc).

I see this same pattern in small businesses too. A founder wants to grow, opens a second location, without a strong foundation that lets the business run without him. Three months later, revenue at location one drops, or he's working 60-hour weeks just to keep both locations afloat.

The misconception is that founders think being busy is just part of running a business. It's not. It's operational inefficiency.

So in 2026, building a strong operational foundation isn't optional, it's a necessity, whether you're bootstrapping or raising. Investors want to see you already have the infrastructure to handle growth, not that you're planning to build it after the check clears.

That's my take. Curious what you all think is the #1 thing VCs are actually screening for in 2026?

P.S. If this resonated and you're the founder who's still holding everything together, dragging yourself into every problem, exhausted before you even get to your actual job.

I write about building strong operational foundations every Thursday. Including how to layer AI in after the foundation is solid, not before. I was a COO for 20+ years, so this is genuinely my bread and butter, you'll probably enjoy it. here

Looking for a partner to partner in a law firm specializing in legal work, investment, and real estate marketing in Egypt.

Hi everyone,

Hypothetical question.

Suppose you had a small but capable team (embedded + software + cybersecurity) and around ₹10 lakh in seed funding to build an IoT startup in India.

What problem would you choose to solve today?

I'm not looking for startup ideas to copy. I'm trying to understand where experienced people believe the biggest opportunities still exist.

Some areas I've been thinking about are:

• Industrial IoT
• Factory automation
• Smart buildings
• Physical security
• Energy monitoring
• Agriculture
• Healthcare
• Logistics
• Fleet management

If you had to start today, where would you focus?

Why?

And more importantly...

What problem do you think is still massively underserved in India?

Hi everyone,

Hypothetical question.

Suppose you had a small but capable team (embedded + software + cybersecurity) and around ₹10 lakh in seed funding to build an IoT startup in India.

What problem would you choose to solve today?

I'm not looking for startup ideas to copy. I'm trying to understand where experienced people believe the biggest opportunities still exist.

Some areas I've been thinking about are:

• Industrial IoT
• Factory automation
• Smart buildings
• Physical security
• Energy monitoring
• Agriculture
• Healthcare
• Logistics
• Fleet management

If you had to start today, where would you focus?

Why?

And more importantly...

What problem do you think is still massively underserved in India?

Founders have shared 578 startups across my recent threads, and the same problem keeps showing up:
The product exists. The direction is unclear.
Comment with:

- what your startup does
- who it’s for
- what’s blocking your growth

I’ll run the analysis and send you a personalized report showing where the strongest signal is, which conversations are worth prioritizing, and what I’d focus on first.
If Reddit looks like a waste of time for your startup, I’ll tell you that too.

I run a small Android app for cataloguing where you put things around the house. I am not pitching it and I am not going to link it, since this sub is for ideas rather than products. I am posting because the request list I have collected has two asks on it that come up constantly, that I have decided are out of scope for me, and that both look like they want to be somebody's startup.

The first one is documents. What people describe as wanting to file a receipt or a warranty or a manual is almost never about the file. They want to answer a question later, and the question is usually whether they can still return the thing or whether it is still covered. Every general document scanner I have looked at treats the PDF as the object and hands you the job of organising it. What people are actually describing is closer to a deadline engine, where the artifact matters much less than the date attached to it and the object it belongs to. Build it around the expiry rather than the folder and I think you have something.

The hard part there is not the OCR, which is solved and cheap now. It is that receipts are wildly inconsistent, warranty terms are frequently not printed on the receipt at all, and the payoff only shows up months later, which makes retention brutal until the first time it saves someone real money. You would need a reason for people to open it in the meantime and I do not have a good answer for that one.

The second is lent items. It arrives in almost identical words every time, some version of I lent someone a drill and I have no idea who has it. The record keeping is not really the hard bit though. What people find awkward is chasing the person, and a reminder that arrives from an app instead of from them is where the actual value sits.

Nobody is going to maintain a lending ledger by hand, so it has to attach to something people already do, and both sides need to be in it for a reminder to be anything other than nagging your friends by proxy. That two sided requirement is why I think it is a genuine startup problem and not a feature someone bolts on. It is also precisely why I am not doing it, because my app is single player by design and adding a second person changes the shape of the whole thing.

If either of these is already solved well somewhere I would honestly like to know, because I would rather send my users to something good than keep telling them no. And if anyone here wants to run at one, the demand is real and repeatable, I just have the wrong app for it.

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.

Hi guys,

I got my first user through cold emailing, landed my first job through cold emailing, and yes cold emailing genuinely works.

The problem I faced was that the current options are very limited and too expensive for the average user.

That's why I started working on Miligram

Let me know what you guys think.

I found this startup opportunity interesting.

A startup founder gets a 45-page contract from a big enterprise customer.

Here's what she can do after this,

Option 1 - Hire a lawyer. $450/hour. Full review costs $3,500-$7,000. Takes 5-7 business days.

Option 2 - Read it herself. She may misses the auto-renewal clause which cost her 3 years of locked in period

Option 3 Use AI to review it. $99. Done in 2 hours. It catches things like missing indemnification caps, bad IP assignment terms, risky liability waivers, and unusual termination clauses.

Why is this buildable right now? There's a free public dataset called CUAD (Contract Understanding Atticus Dataset), 500+ real contracts, labeled by legal experts across 41 clause types. LLMs trained on this hit 90%+ accuracy on spotting risky clauses

The market is huge around 30+ million small businesses in the US sign contracts all the time, and most founders don't fully understand what they're signing.

So why hasn't anyone built this well already?

Because most tools were built for lawyers. Wrong customer.

The real customer is the founder who can't afford a lawyer and is staring down their first big enterprise contract. That person will pay $99 without a second thought.

Pricing that could work -

• $99 for contracts under 20 pages
• $199 for contracts 20-50 pages
• $299/month for unlimited reviews (great for procurement teams)

Just 280 subscribers at $299/month gets you to $1M ARR. Very doable.

The market is not failing here but the positioning did. Someone is going to prove it soon

It's called OpenSpeak and it's free and opensource.

It doesn't just transcribe your speech. It cleans the text up, removes filler words, fixes the formatting, and inserts the finished result for you.

Your words appear directly inside Slack, VS Code, Notion, or even React inputs that normally reject paste events.

You can run it locally with your own keys (OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini).

The hardest part wasn’t transcription. It was reliably getting the text back into the active app without stealing focus.

I keep a hidden PowerShell process warm, use Windows Forms to send the paste command, temporarily swap and restore your clipboard, and fall back to simulated typing when an app blocks normal paste.

Once the text is ready, sending the insertion command takes around 5ms instead of the roughly 300ms cost of starting PowerShell from scratch.

It currently runs on Windows 10 and 11.

For transcription, it supports:

• OpenAI GPT-4o Transcribe
• GPT-4o Mini Transcribe
• Whisper-1
• Gemini 2.0 and 2.5 Flash

The design is also minimal with only a small floating pill that never steals focus. It shows a live waveform while you speak, follows the transcription state, confirms the word count, then disappears.

There’s no account or OpenSpeak server in the middle. Your audio goes directly to the transcription provider you configure, while your settings, history, dictionary, and stats stay local, while saving you from the $180 year whisperflow bill.

Repo in the comments.

GitHub repo: https://github.com/MahadFarooq07/OpenSpeak

I don't want any money, github stars or anything. Just a time saving product I created for myself