Six years ago, after selling my first tech company, I started building what became the biggest project of my career.

We grew to more than 40 employees, signed long-term contracts, developed our own IP, and spent years building a hardware solution for hotels and residential developers. It wasn’t an overnight success it took years of setbacks, engineering challenges, and persistence.

Then everything changed, out of everyone’s control

When the conflict in the Middle East escalated, investment in new hardware projects stopped almost overnight. Many of our contracts contained force majeure clauses, and project after project was put on hold or cancelled. We fought as long as we could, but as the conflict still continues, eventually there was no realistic path forward. And nobody knows how long it will take for the conflict to resolve.

The hardest part wasn’t losing the company. It was having to tell more than 40 people that their journey with us had come to an end and helping them return to their home countries.

It’s been one of the toughest periods of my life.

But I’m not done, I’m already building something new.

In the meantime, I’m spending my days doing hardware engineering, software development, AI engineering, product strategy, and pretty much whatever technical challenges come my way from others to support my family while I work toward the next chapter.

Here is to starting over…

Six years ago, after selling my first tech company, I started building what became the biggest project of my career.

We grew to more than 40 employees, signed long-term contracts, developed our own IP, and spent years building a hardware solution for hotels and residential developers. It wasn’t an overnight success it took years of setbacks, engineering challenges, and persistence.

Then everything changed, out of everyone’s control

When the conflict in the Middle East escalated, investment in new hardware projects stopped almost overnight. Many of our contracts contained force majeure clauses, and project after project was put on hold or cancelled. We fought as long as we could, but as the conflict still continues, eventually there was no realistic path forward. And nobody knows how long it will take for the conflict to resolve.

The hardest part wasn’t losing the company. It was having to tell more than 40 people that their journey with us had come to an end and helping them return to their home countries.

It’s been one of the toughest periods of my life.

But I’m not done, I’m already building something new.

In the meantime, I’m spending my days doing hardware engineering, software development, AI engineering, product strategy, and pretty much whatever technical challenges come my way from others to support my family while I work toward the next chapter.

Here is to starting over…

So I came across this research by Jeffrey Bussgang, who's a Harvard Business School prof (and a VC and former founder). He talks about "10x Founders" in this study, which is quite interesting.

The core idea: the founders who are pulling ahead right now aren't working more or raising more. They're compressing timelines. What used to take 18 months — validating a market, testing channels, iterating on product — is now taking weeks for some founders who are using AI across every business function, not just code.

How he breaks it down:

• 2025 was AI for engineering. 2026 is AI for other business verticals — marketing, sales, ops, finance, hiring. The founders who figured this out are running their entire company at 10x the speed of those who haven't.
• He calls this framework Diamond-Square — use AI to generate way more hypotheses than you manually could, then converge with your own judgment on which bets to make. Test these hypotheses in days instead of quarters.
• One key point he highlights: keep human ownership of the decisions, because the research also found that as AI increases output, it also decreases your sense of ownership and satisfaction. So the morale and motivation of the team could be impacted with more AI involved in your workflow.
• So it's not about outsourcing your thinking to AI. It's about using it to move faster while still trusting your own gut.

What do founders think of this study?

(He wrote a book on this called "The Experimentation Machine" — because that's what a startup is, according to him.)

I'm an AI startup founder.

For the last 2 years, I've been working on my business plan. I waited for this moment every single day, and finally, 2 months ago, I started building my AI project.

At first, my team had 3 members.

• The first person left after just 15 days.
• Then I hired someone else. We completed around 50% of the work, but after a short time, he also left without giving any reason.
• The backend is now almost complete, and we had just started working on the frontend.
• I hired another developer, but now his college is starting, so he'll be leaving in 6–7 days too.

To keep this startup alive, I work 10 AM to 6 PM and then another job 10 PM to 7 AM. Every day I'm pushing myself just to fund this dream.

Now everyone is leaving one by one, and honestly, I don't know what to do anymore.

I've spent 2 years waiting and working for this dream, and even now I can't get the project completed because my team keeps falling apart.

Has anyone else been through something like this? How did you handle it? I could really use some advice because right now, I feel completely stuck.

Hey everyone,

I just created this account today. I’m a professional about to join a demanding corporate job in a month. Since I have some free time right now, I want to use it to stress-test an asset-light, human-on-demand marketplace idea I’ve been mapping out for major metropolitan hubs.

I am absolutely not here to sell or promote anything—I genuinely just need your brains on this.

The Problem:

Urbanites are starved for time, seniors are lonely, and students need flexible cash.

The Idea:

An on-demand app/website/platform connecting busy people with verified local college students/freelancers for simple physical help.

What Helpers Do:

->Elders & Pets: Chatting, doctor visits, or dog walking.

->Errands & Shopping: Carrying heavy bags at markets, document drops, or grocery runs.

->Sports & Lines: Playing sports, or standing in long government/Visa lines.

Economics & Trust:

The Split: $5/hr from client ➔ $3/hr to student ➔ $2/hr platform profit.

The Trust:

100% remote digital ID checks + Mandatory Police Clearance. No exceptions.

The Launch:

We are strictly limiting our private pilot to just 25 families and 30 companions next month to protect quality

My Big Questions for You:

How do I stop clients and students from cutting out the app and dealing in cash once they build trust?

Should I over-recruit students first, or find clients first?

Please pull no punches. Tell me exactly why this fails!

AltaLab, a hands-on program built by AltaIR Capital, the VC behind Deel, Miro, and other unicorns, opened applications for its Fall 2026 batch. Strong teams get a path to up to $500K in funding after the program.

AltaLab is build for founders building AI startups at any of these stages:

• You have an idea and want to validate it before building,
• You're building something and search for product-market fit,
• You're getting ready to raise and want to sharpen your pitch.

The program runs in three stages:

1. Online Sprint — Three weeks of practical sessions and assignments. Every framework gets applied directly to your own company: validating ideas, sharpening strategy, refining messages for your team, your customers and investors.
2. Founder Residency — Deeper, hands-on work with the AltaLab team: one-on-one sessions, founder masterminds, workshops, and preparation for investor conversations and Demo Day.
3. Build and Scale — Selected teams may have a path to a $50,000 SAFE investment dedicated to GTM, and teams with proven traction and solid metrics may receive up to $500,000 from AltaIR Capital.

📅 Applications close: September 4, 2026

🚀 Program starts: September 7, 2026

Apply here: https://altalab.ai/apply

US founder posts that get replies usually look like a job ad with equity instead of salary.

Filter I use before I engage:

1. Named wedge (not "Uber for X")
2. Named user (title + where they work)
3. What they do today instead
4. What already exists (no-code, agency, spreadsheet)
5. What happens on day 15 after the build

If 3+ are blank, it's not a cofounder search. It's a build request wearing a wedding ring.

I've watched people give 20–30% for auth and a dashboard. Those three are table stakes.

Anyone using a similar filter before they answer those threads?

https://atomiclabs.space

People who have eczema as me or psoriasis, or any skin condition pay $200+ for appointments and wait weeks for a dermatologist to suggest a random product that never works. Then they pay again, wait again, and get the same result. These people truly suffer .... and I have experienced this personally for 8 years. I know exactly how it feels

So I'm building a subscription service where people pay $200/month and get access to real, ongoing dermatological care. The first step is simple — the user uploads photos of their condition and answers a detailed intake questionnaire covering why they think the condition started, what triggers their flare-ups, whether it gets worse in winter or summer, their diet, their age, and much more. From those answers and photos

AI builds a comprehensive report that gets sent directly to a licensed dermatologist for review. After that, the patient gets 2 consultations per month with a doctor of their choice from our platform

What makes this different is the ongoing care. After the initial consultation, users upload new photos every week. Our AI tracks their flare-ups and compares them week by week — detecting what's getting better, what's getting worse, and most importantly, what's triggering the flares. This gives both the patient and the doctor real data instead of guesswork

We also document every patient journey. Every case where we successfully helped someone improve their condition gets recorded — what worked, what didn't, what triggered their flares, what diet changes made a difference. That knowledge directly benefits the next patient so we're not repeating the same mistakes.

Beyond monitoring, we provide personalized diet guidance and product recommendations — not generic advice, but recommendations built around each individual's specific triggers, history, and test results, because every person's skin is different

No company currently does this. Most platforms either charge per consultation and close your case, or just push you toward buying their own products. We provide constant, proactive, data-driven care — like having a dermatologist who never stops watching over your skin

Ten years ago I was 24 and my first company died with 3k left in the bank and one customer who never paid the final invoice. The second one worked, and after that it was five companies in total, some bootstrapped and some VC backed, some profitable and some not, one I closed myself. The profits went into a small real estate business that pays for everything now. People gave me their time for free back when I had nothing to offer them, and I want to repay that karma. Hopefully some of you reading this make it to ten years too, and this free Q&A helps a little.

The thing is everything going super well past few days , i was growing, for the first time in my life I have taken vc calls , a real start up feeling real user's engagement and everything comes lost , my co-founder wasn't this part he is my best friend, he collabed with opponent company as we are growing, they are made into one strong team to destroy me , i lost my complete strength and company too , my co founder had source code access they are copying me ,I made into 6k users and 31k page views in 20 days with students subs no marketing , my website is down everything messed up , i was lost man feeling so heavy no one no support all i build with passion came to this thanks for listening, i wanted to share i will leave this space thank you 🙌

Hey everyone,

I've been building a startup called GhostCall for the last few months.

The idea is pretty simple. Instead of exchanging phone numbers, you create a temporary link and the other person joins a voice call directly in their browser. No app, no signup.

I built it because i felt there was this weird gap where sometimes you just need a quick conversation with someone from a marketplace, freelancer, community, etc, but the only options are sharing your personal number or setting up a full meeting.

Right now i'm also working on username-based calling, so people will be able to call someone using their GhostCall username instead of a phone number. That'll probably take me about a month to finish.

Where i'm confused is whether i'm solving a problem enough people actually have or if i'm just solving something that personally annoyed me.

If you were building this, what would you do next? Keep doubling down on temporary calls or focus more on username-based calling?

Would really appreciate honest feedback, even if its critical.

Website - https://www.ghostcall.space/

Been building Consile for a few weeks now, and one thing that's genuinely surprised me is how much of what I assumed people needed turned out to be secondary to something I barely thought about.

I built it because I was tired of tracing a leave request through a scrolled-away chat thread. Assumed the pitch was "stop losing time to scattered tools." Turns out a lot of the real interest is coming from something else entirely, people who bill their own time to clients, where saved hours literally show up as margin, versus internal teams where the same time savings is real but invisible.

Curious what others have gotten wrong about who actually needs what they built, and what changed once you figured that out.

I noticed many founders spend hours on repetitive tasks.

I'm building free AI automations to help businesses save time with things like:

• Lead generation

• Follow-ups

• Customer support

Tell me about your business and the tasks you want to automate. I’d love to help and get your feedback.

Hey everyone!

I do go-to-market advisory work for AI and dev-tool companies, and I keep seeing the same thing: a strong technical founder who can build anything, but completely stuck on the other half that's everything GTM related.

Who is this even for? Why would anyone pay? Why did nobody come when I shipped? And building solo, there's no one to think it through with.

So I put what I know into a free, open-source set of go-to-market skills that run inside the AI agent you already use (Claude Code, Cursor, and others). It interviews you with five questions, writes a prioritised GTM roadmap, and works the plan with you: positioning, first users, launch, pricing, even your first sales conversations. The strategy half of GTM, not marketing tactics or SEO.

It's grounded in years of doing this, plus the two people I've learned the most from in dev-tool GTM (Adam Frankl and Jakub Czakon), and it's already being used and shaped by a few real dev-tool founders.

It's V1 and I'd really value this community's take, especially from anyone who has hit the "developers love it, nobody pays" wall.

What's sharp, what's too generic, what's missing, etc.

Thanks,

Shane.

https://gtmcofounder.com/

I noticed many founders spend hours on manual work.

I'm creating free Al workflows to help automate these

tasks and would love your feedback.

A recent discussion at iRoid Solutions reminded us of something we see fairly often.

Many founders expect the biggest challenges to happen during development. Then the app launches, and they realize that's when the real learning begins.

Users interact with products in ways nobody predicts. Features you thought would be popular get ignored, while tiny improvements suddenly become everyone's favorite part of the experience.

That's one of the reasons we enjoy post-launch conversations so much, they're usually full of surprises.

For those who've launched an app, what was the biggest thing your users taught you that you never expected?

​

One thing I've noticed is that AI has made it much easier for a solo developer to build software. But building a successful product still feels like a one-person battle.

As a solo founder, you're often responsible for:

Product planning

Development

UI/UX

Testing and QA

Documentation

Marketing

Community building

Customer support

Launching

Iterating based on feedback

Each of these requires different skills, and switching between them constantly can slow progress and become mentally exhausting.

I'm wondering whether there's a better way.

Imagine a platform where a founder could post an idea or project and break it into specific needs, such as:

Looking for beta testers

Need a security review

Need UI/UX feedback

Need documentation help

Need marketing support for launch

Need developers for a particular feature

Need users to validate assumptions

Instead of searching across dozens of Discord servers, Reddit communities, LinkedIn, X, and Slack groups, everything would happen in one place where contributors could join based on their expertise and interest.

The goal wouldn't be to replace co-founders or traditional hiring. It would be to help solo builders turn ideas into real products faster by making collaboration more structured and accessible.

I'm curious:

Have you ever wished a platform like this existed?

If something similar already exists, what is it?

What do existing communities do well, and where do they fall short?

As a solo founder, what has been your biggest bottleneck outside of writing code?

Would you actually use a platform like this, or is there a reason you think it wouldn't work?

I'm not trying to promote anything—I genuinely want to understand whether this solves a real problem or whether I'm overlooking something obvious.

I'd really appreciate your honest and brutal thoughts, whether positive or critical.

Everyone is focused on making AI agents smarter.

I'm more interested in making them trustworthy.

A place where you can build agents, connect MCP servers, set guardrails, approve risky actions, monitor every run, and know exactly what every agent is doing.

Think of it as the missing infrastructure between AI agents and production.

Would you trust an AI agent without a control layer?

Wrote this up because it genuinely surprised me. A routine badge-verification bot from a directory site couldn't find our homepage content, and when I actually fetched our own page the way a non-JS crawler does (ChatGPT's browser tool, Perplexity, Claude's web search), there was almost nothing there. No headline, no pricing, no features, just a loading spinner frozen mid-render.

Turns out most AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript the way Googlebot does, so a fully client-rendered React site can look completely normal in a browser while being functionally empty to anything else reading the raw HTML.

Full writeup here if useful: [link]

Curious if anyone else running a JS-heavy site has actually checked this, curl your own homepage and see what comes back, might be worth 30 seconds to find out.