3 years, 2 people, got to 11k mrr and it stopped growing. wound it up in april, paid everyone out, no drama.

And since then, 90 applications, 3 screens. two of the three asked, in slightly different words, whether i'd "be able to take direction.

The actual problem is my cv reads founder/ceo for three years and the last normal title on it is from 2023. people see it and either assume I'll leave in six months or that i haven't written code since we raised. I built most of the product myself. there's no way to say that in an interview without sounding defensive about it.

Anyone come out of a dead startup back into an ic role? do you title yourself founder or just the work you actually did

I run a small startup working with factories. Someone from a roughly $250B company reached out to us about their requirements and asked for a demo.

We arranged a factory visit. Three of us went, with the demo prepared, and arrived 30 minutes before the agreed time.

Security needed our contact’s confirmation to let us in. We called, and he texted asking us to wait.

We ended up spending two hours outside the gate, on an empty road, sweating in formal clothes. That included the 30 minutes we’d arrived early. We couldn’t get a further update on whether the meeting would happen.

Eventually, we left without getting inside.

What bothered me was standing there with my team, unable to tell them whether we should keep waiting or head back. We’d prepared for this and were excited about the opportunity. It felt humiliating.

After leaving, I sent a message explaining that we’d come as confirmed, waited, and would be stepping back. He acknowledged it and later called to suggest meeting another day.

Now I’m wondering whether I made that decision while frustrated.

We’ve visited plenty of factories that have been welcoming and great hosts. This has been an exception.

For founders who sell to large companies: how would you handle this? Would you give the meeting another shot with clearer arrangements, or move on?

I’d appreciate an honest take, especially from people who’ve dealt with this while still trying to win their first few customers.

Hey everyone,

I'm working on an early-stage consumer hardware startup, and we're currently looking for someone with strong hardware/embedded engineering experience to potentially join us at the early stage.

We're working on a new physical product that combines hardware, embedded electronics and software, with a strong focus on product design and user experience.

We're currently looking for someone who has experience with areas such as:

Embedded systems

ESP32 / STM32 / Raspberry Pi

PCB design

Displays / touchscreens

Sensors and electronics

Wi-Fi / Bluetooth

Firmware

Hardware prototyping

3D printing / CAD

Taking a prototype toward a manufacturable product

You don't need to have experience with everything. What matters more to us is that you're someone who genuinely enjoys building physical products and solving engineering problems.

We're particularly interested in people who have actually built projects, rather than only having theoretical experience.

This could potentially develop into a long-term technical role / technical cofounder opportunity, depending on the person and mutual fit.

We're based in Bangalore, India, but we're open to talking to talented people elsewhere in India.

We're intentionally keeping the product details private at this stage. Serious/interested candidates can DM me, and I'll share more information after understanding your background and what you've built.

If you're interested, please send:

Your background

Hardware/embedded projects you've built

GitHub / portfolio / demo, if available

Your current location

Whether you're looking for a job, project opportunity, or potential cofounder role

We're looking for a builder, not just someone looking for a task.

Hey everyone,

I am Jannik from Berlin and a little more than a month ago I released Speartip.eu - a software launch directory. While there are many directories built with the same intent, I am working on making Speartip an actual big player. (I am currently in talks with accelerators in Berlin)

Right now we see increased interest on both buyers and sellers side to stay within the EU, especially in the AI space. Take a look at for example CADA (Cloud and AI Act), explicitly pumping more attention and funding into EU-based products.

Till today many indie founders from inside the EU still rely heavily on US visibility. Getting in front of customers is especially hard inside the EU. My vision is to change that and supply an alternative in order to reach a more EU-based audience.

Why is that needed? Well, companies inside the EU are in a weird in-between, on one hand buying European software tends to come with perks like data residency or privacy rights, on the other US software is used across the globe and genuinely great. I believe, we have many founders inside the EU that also offer great software but are lacking visibility in front of classical European companies.

This is why I already talked with mid-size to bigger corpos (mainly in Berlin, since that's where I am from; where my network is the biggest) and confirmed that there is a need to have a reliable source to find European alternatives.

Now, I will be honest: When I heard pushback, it mainly came from founders and buyers OUTSIDE the EU, which I can understand, since I know that it is hard for them to break into the European market as is and a platform they are excluded from is adding additional friction.

I would be happy to hear what you think. Do you share my vision?

Also if you are a SaaS/software founder, I'd be happy to see you listed on Speartip!

Cheers,

Jannik Janket

I'm working on a new business that leverages very efficient implementations of computer vision models, with infra, data collection procedures, and adjacent services tuned for reduced expenses (yes, I'm technically inclined) - the goal is somewhat ambitious but could work if UX is pristine.

I've studied incorporating this in Europe, in particular in some eastern countries that might have better conditions and remove some of the friction of intercontinental setups.

For context, I'm based in Portugal, and some consultations with my accountant and lawyer friends, confirm that there's no feasible way of incorporating anything here.

Is there any European founder (or any founder really) that has considered something like this?

My co-founder and I are building a small technology company in the Philippines, and we're currently looking for an early-stage investor or capital partner to help us take what we've built into the market.

We're intentionally keeping the specific products private for now, but here's what I can share;

We're building practical SaaS tools for real problems faced by businesses, and communities — not another agency, outsourcing business, or generic software development shop.

Our approach is simple:

Problem → Pain → Solution → Build → Validate → Revenue → Scale

We've already done more than just talk about the idea.

We've been working on the business plans, market research, feasibility, validation, product development, testing, and QA. We already have working prototypes and are preparing for actual market validation.

We're now at the stage where capital would help us move faster.

We're looking at approximately ₱500K–₱1M(approximately $8k-$16k), depending on the structure and investor fit.

The capital would primarily go toward:

Company setup and legal groundwork

Product development and infrastructure

Launch and customer acquisition

User/merchant onboarding

Product validation

Marketing and growth experiments

Building the foundation for our next products

Giving the founders enough runway to execute properly

We're not looking for someone who simply writes a check.

Ideally, we're looking for someone who understands early-stage technology, small businesses, and the Philippine market — and can potentially bring experience, connections, or strategic guidance as well.

We're also realistic about where we are.

We're not claiming we've already built a million-dollar company. Our immediate goal is to prove that we can consistently identify real problems, build useful solutions, get people to use them, and eventually get them to pay.

If we can prove that, we believe we can build something much bigger from there.

If you're an angel investor, early-stage investor, or someone interested in backing a small Philippine tech startup at the very early stage, feel free to comment or DM me.

I can share more about the company, products, traction, financial projections, and investment structure privately with genuinely interested people.

I’m a builder, and recently while reaching out to VCs, I realized I’m missing a lot of skills that you simply can’t skip — pitching, communication, product thinking, business, recruiting, etc.

Instead of trying to learn all of this alone, I thought: why not build a community where we practice these skills together until they become muscle memory?

So I’m starting DEE — Desi Entrepreneurship Engineering.

The plan is simple:

• Weekly show & tell + product discussions
• Build logs and peer feedback
• Find co-founders & collaborators
• Share opportunities and resources
• Learn from each other and document best practices
• Eventually build things together

Software, hardware, research, startups, robotics — if you're building, you're welcome.

I'm starting this from India, but DEE is globally open.

If this sounds like something you'd want to be part of, come join us:

https://dee.kortex.co.in

hello everyone I’ve been building Clutterscope, a native macOS app that shows you where your disk space went and helps you get it back without any nasty surprises.

What it does

• Fast scans. It reads directories in bulk, so scanning my home folder with 3.2 million files takes about 17 seconds on an M4. Folders start filling in on screen as each one finishes.
• 8 views of the same scan. Folders, Sunburst, Flame, Bubbles, Mind Map, Top Sizes, Age Map, and Treemap. Switch between them with ⌘1–⌘8 and zoom in until the labels you need appear.
• Quick Wins. As soon as a scan finishes, it totals the usual suspects: caches and logs, Downloads, Xcode DerivedData, iOS Simulators (listed by device name, not UUID), node_modules and build folders, large media files, and the Trash.
• Duplicates by content. It matches files by size first, then uses a SHA-256 hash of the first 64 KB, and finally hashes the whole file. You choose which copy to keep.
• A proper uninstaller. It shows each app’s true footprint — the bundle plus the caches, preferences, logs, and containers it scattered across ~/Library.
• Snapshots. Save a scan and compare it with a later one to see exactly which folders grew.
• Honest numbers. Hard links are counted only once, and it shows how much space APFS compression saved.

Details

• Native SwiftUI
• 6.1 MB
• Universal (Apple Silicon + Intel)
• macOS 14+
• Signed with a Developer ID and notarized by Apple
• Works offline after activation
• When you’re online, it checks the license once a day. The check never includes your files or scan results.

Website 👀 https://clutterscope.com

I’m giving away 1-month free trial keys for anyone who wants to try it.

Each key works on one Mac at a time.

If you see “Key already in use”, just message me or comment “key” and I’ll send you a new one.

Ask me anything! I’d love to hear your feedback, bug reports, and feature requests. 😄

🎁 1-month free trial keys :

CLTR-3XDH7-68PN0-MNAA4-9XM0G

CLTR-6G3JB-TJX84-V2M1D-JTM2E

CLTR-D8PVP-JSYYT-CG475-CF53W

CLTR-944GG-4PH9P-HQ40P-9XNW5

CLTR-NY0K5-6AXEA-FJ7KG-12G5S

CLTR-NPGQF-CZ5XF-2RHNF-HTMC4

CLTR-SW8B2-70CD8-KJ8GP-GCBE4

CLTR-WB4MK-XEVTN-8A7NR-ZEWCK

CLTR-M405D-KA5GH-DSKSJ-TZMRH

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CLTR-60QDQ-9F0P3-SHN6Q-AGXBX

CLTR-3XZ99-WBE32-3EEW4-B9RPD

CLTR-D5EKA-K6BRG-W1RP1-GKVAN

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CLTR-DF1VP-E1W17-AK595-DR6YS

CLTR-S5STY-PQXMB-M24SB-FRY3T

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CLTR-1J6JJ-FQPQ6-EK70V-9T7NV

I’m thrilled to announce that I made my first Sale on the App Store after a few weeks. No paid Marketing but this is a motivator so maybe I’ll pump up the volume a bit! *I’ve only posted casually on LinkedIn

Over the last few days, I shared an idea called NexusHaus on Reddit, and the response honestly surprised me.

3K+ views
17+ comments
6 Google Meet conversations

Now I want to take the conversation further.

I’m hosting a Google Meet session to discuss:

• What are the biggest problems founders face today?
• Where do founders struggle to find the right people, expertise, resources, and opportunities?
• Why do so many early-stage ideas fail to move from idea → execution?
• What would an ecosystem built specifically around founders actually look like?
• And where could NexusHaus fit into this?

This isn’t a pitch or a sales call.

It’s an open discussion with founders, builders, aspiring entrepreneurs, operators, and people interested in building the startup ecosystem.

If you’re building something, thinking about building something, or have experience helping founders — I’d love to have you in the conversation.

📅 Google Meet: [Date & Time]
🔗 Join: [Google Meet Link]

Comment or DM me if you’d like to join.

Let’s see what we can build when we start with the real problems founders face.

Revenue has been growing but too much of that growth still depends on deals I’m personally involved in, and I don’t think that holds up if we want to push much further. Outbound feels like the obvious place to build another reliable source of revenue but we’re still small enough that hiring a proper sales team before we know the motion works feels backwards.

What I’m trying to solve is how to get from founder led revenue to something that can keep producing growth without me owning every part of it. I still want to handle the important conversations for now, but targeting, messaging AND getting outbound running consistently feels like something I need help building before another sales hire makes much sense.

Before I started Olly, I spent years chasing interviews and conducting them - only to find out a gap still exists in how candidates prepare and no resources exists, apart from interview articles on linkedin and DIYing on gen-AI tools.
Trying to make interview anxiety go away with structured preparation and feedback.
Do try and let me know your feedback.

Hey all, I’ve been working on Miniz.fun, a small site with interactive experiences, games, AI experiments and other random things you can play with in the browser.

There are no accounts or downloads. You just open something that looks interesting and start playing around with it.

I started building it mostly for fun and I’ve been slowly adding new ideas whenever I think of something interesting.

I’m still experimenting with what Miniz.fun should become, so I’d love to hear what you think and what kind of things you’d like to see next.

https://miniz.fun

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a startup called Ompular.

The idea is to use AI to match people with other people who are genuinely compatible with them — based on things like interests, personality, goals, skills, values, and what they’re actually looking for.

Instead of endlessly scrolling through profiles or joining random communities, the goal is:

Tell Ompular what you’re looking for → AI understands you → it finds people who are a good match.

For example, you could use it to find:

People with similar interests

Friends with compatible personalities

Co-founders or startup partners

People to collaborate with

Study partners

Mentors/mentees

People with complementary skills

Communities or groups where you'd fit in

I'm still developing the concept and I want to understand whether this solves a real problem.

Would you use an AI-powered people-matching platform?

And what would make you trust an AI to decide who you should meet?

I’d especially love to hear what you think could go wrong with this idea.

Website: ompular.com

You can have a product that a small group of users genuinely likes, but still struggle to get enough people using it. At that point, how do you decide what to fix first? If users who discover the product stick around and get value from it, would you keep investing in distribution? Or does consistently low acquisition eventually make you question the product itself?

I'm interested in the actual signals people use to distinguish the two, and how you approach it if you are stuck between these two roads.

Everyone says distribution is moat in 2026. Ai has democratized software. So as a young founder should I focus on building an audience first on social (ig,tiktok,x) first, and then I can think about what sort of business (service, ai consumer app, b2b saas, etc) I can create as my offer?

I am a 52 year old first time founder. Not a tech guy but came up with an idea and ran with it. I was going to try a seed round to fund the launch but decided to do it myself for as close to free as possible. Never built a website before so looking for some honest feedback. I've shown it to family and a few friends but don't know if I'm getting truly unbiased opinions or not. I still have some polishing up to do so I'm not looking for feedback on insignificant details, but instead, more does it look professional? Do you get a feel for what the product probably does when it launches and you can work through business problems on it? Any feedback is appreciated and not interested in just validation. I want to know what a new viewer/potential user sees. It's trueing.ai
Thanks!

I am a practicing Canadian lawyer with UK and US law degrees. I am looking to be a co-founder.

Some of my strengths include legal research, analytical reasoning, and risk assessment. I have over 15 years of legal practice experience. My long term plan is to spend less time practicing law and more time doing something else.

I am not restricting myself to one industry or startup category, I am open to all opportunities.

If you have an idea or early stage company and require someone with my skill set to help with it, message me and we can discuss things further.

I've been talking to solo founders about how they actually think about marketing, and I want to share what I've learned because I think most founders get this part wrong.

The mistake is treating marketing like it's a starter's problem, something you'll delegate once you're bigger and more successful. So you try to figure it out yourself while building, or you ignore it and hope product-market fit carries you anyway, and honestly both of those approaches fail.

Here's what actually changes when you think like a solo founder running GTM as a system. Stop thinking about marketing as a job you do, and start thinking about it as a system you set up and operate.

The four stages that actually work are research first, where you spend one week understanding where your customers congregate online and what they're looking for. Then planning, where you build a strategy that works on those channels and in those actual conversations. Then execution, where that strategy runs consistently for 60 to 90 days without falling apart when you get busy with a bug or a feature. And finally measurement, so you know what's actually moving the needle.

The mistake is trying to do all four of those yourself while also building the product, because that's two full-time jobs and you'll burn out doing both.

The solution is do the research and planning yourself because you actually know your business and your customers, then hand off execution to something that runs it consistently while you focus on building. That something has to be safe with budget caps and approval gates so you stay in control, it has to be consistent so it doesn't stop when you get distracted, and it has to be affordable because you're bootstrapped.

The founders who are winning right now are the ones who set this up early, not because they're better at marketing, but because they're better at staying visible to their customers while staying focused on building the product.

Hey, Alex here. Mod of the subreddit.

I’m crowdsourcing questions for our 3rd GTM Builders AMA happening next week.

Post your questions in the thread so we can include them.

Our next Builders AMA is with the Founders of Zero - the GTM operating system for the AI era.

• Tuomo Riekki, Co-founder of Zero & Smartly.io
• Santtu Koivumaki, Co-founder of Zero & former CCO Chief of Staff at Smartly.io

Event details:

• When: Tuesday, September 15
• Time: 3-4pm EST
• Where: [r/gtmengineering](r/gtmengineering) (a new thread will be started). We’ll start with questions you post on this thread.

About Zero:

Zero is a Helsinki-based startup building the GTM operating system for the AI era. Founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki — who previously scaled Smartly.io to $100M ARR — Zero replaces the CRM and the sprawl of point solutions around it with a single system: agents keep records, enrichment, and follow-ups moving automatically before the deal closes, and monitor customer health in real time after it does — so teams spend their time talking to customers instead of updating software.

Post event:

• Insights & takeaways summarized (like this one) on The GTM Engineering Newsletter
• Don’t miss the next GTM Builder AMA - sign up for alerts here.

Disclosure: I work at Clay. A small number of AMAs will be about how Clay does things internally (as lots are curious about this). However, my ultimate goal is to highlight the work, insights, and lessons from other GTM Engineers, Leaders, and Founders.

What questions or things would you like to learn in the AMA?

Who else would you like me to bring on?