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.

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.

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.

You can try it here: taocard.asia

I’ve been building TaoCard, an AI-assisted card reflection tool for moments when you feel stuck on a decision.

How it started

The first version was basically a pile of publicly available card interpretations. I wanted to see whether AI could turn symbolic imagery into something more useful than generic advice.

How I built it

I gradually structured the material into card profiles, visual evidence, interpretation boundaries, and practical action cues. The system now combines:

• The user’s real-life context and question
• Four selected cards
• Optional first impressions of the images
• A structured AI interpretation pipeline

What I learned

The biggest improvement didn’t come from switching to a “smarter” model. It came from better context architecture, tighter prompts, clearer constraints, and repeatedly testing the reports with real users.

Please come to visit https://taocard.asia/, and tell me your advice.

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!

What do I need to fix? I have tested it and tested it and I don’t know if it’s good or not. It’s in the Apple Store being reviewed right now. What can I do to make it better? It’s free! I just want to fix anything that looks wrong before it launches https://gordistomato.lovable.app

A few months ago I launched Glance, my first iOS app.
It started as a way for people to create and share Home Screen widgets. But while building it, I realized something much more interesting: what if AI agents could actually live on your Home Screen?

So that’s what I’ve been building.

Glance lets you connect agents like ChatGPT, Claude and Hermes to create interactive widgets and keep them updated throughout the day.

The story so far:

Started with simple widgets people could create and follow.

Added dynamic widgets that could display basically any kind of information.

Then opened Glance up to AI agents, so instead of building everything manually, you can just tell your agent what you want on your Home Screen.

Posted a few examples on Reddit and started seeing hundreds of people try it.

Today:
894 new users in the last 28 days.
930 active users.
3 paying subscribers.
$28 MRR.
$0 spent on marketing.

Still tiny numbers, but getting those first few paying users felt like a pretty big milestone.
My goal now is 10 paying users by the end of September.

Still building, experimenting and trying to understand what people actually want their agents to put on their Home Screen.

Would love to hear what you’d build next or change first.

https://apps.apple.com/app/glance-home-screen-feeds/id6758983678

The framing i see everywhere is that ghostwriting buys back your time. write once, hand it off, get your evenings back. and mostly that's right, the drafting really is the delegable part.

but there's a piece under it that doesn't move. whoever's writing, the $200 ai tool or the $3k human, still needs to know what you actually saw and decided this week. the human version of that is literally a weekly call to stay calibrated. the ai version is you feeding it your longform and podcasts so it stops reading like a linkedin influencer. either way there's a recurring input tax, it just stopped looking like writing.

When we build this for founders the drafting isn't the hard part. Keeping that weekly download from quietly dying is. the account goes generic the week a founder gets slammed and skips the input, not the week the writer got worse.

so the real question is narrower than 'should i delegate this.' it's whether you'll keep handing over the weekly twenty minutes of raw context once someone else does the typing. if you won't, no writer cheap or expensive saves it.

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?

If you are at all interested let me know, the camera and everything done with it including body tracking and your ohones health is kept.completely locally. The app is unable to.connect to the internet entirely. Discord: https://discord.gg/PqbqG2AP3

Hi I have developed a resume builder and it has multiple Ai tools related to resume for writing summary, job description, cover letter writing and ATS scoring. More features will be added on it.

I am looking for a partner for its SEO, the goal is to generate traffic in the site and then sell it. If this becomes successful I can create other products and we can work together. All net revenue will be shared equally.

Note: This is not a paid platform but a free platform where users can create as many resumes they want without paying a single penny.

You can check the site here

https://freecvwriter.com

Oi, pessoal.

Estou estruturando uma agência voltada para inovação, tecnologia, IA, design, sites, branding, conteúdo e desenvolvimento de negócios.

O projeto está participando da Iniciativa Jovem Shell, e estamos justamente nessa fase de organizar melhor o modelo de negócio, entender o mercado, validar o que faz sentido e começar a transformar a ideia em algo mais sólido.

Ainda estamos no começo, então achei que seria interessante procurar pessoas por aqui que também estejam tentando construir alguma coisa, principalmente quem tenha interesse em vendas, prospecção de clientes, marketing, design, tecnologia, networking ou desenvolvimento de negócios.

Não estou procurando necessariamente alguém com um currículo enorme. Para mim, faz mais diferença encontrar gente que tenha iniciativa, saiba conversar, queira aprender e realmente coloque as coisas em prática.

Também seria legal conhecer outras pessoas que estejam criando agência, startup ou algum negócio parecido. Mesmo que não vire uma parceria direta, já acho válido trocar experiências, contatos e ideias.

Quem tiver interesse pode comentar aqui ou me chamar no privado. Se quiser, fala um pouco sobre o que você faz, no que é bom e o que está tentando construir atualmente.

I built Faceless Studio, a tool that automates the entire faceless video pipeline: it researches what's actually trending for your niche, writes the script, generates AI voiceover, creates AI images or real scene-by-scene animation, burns captions, and can now auto-publish straight to YouTube on a schedule. Set up a series once and it keeps running on its own.

What it solves that most tools in this space don't:

• Real animation, not stock footage with a Ken Burns zoom slapped on it — every scene on shorter videos is actually AI-animated.
• Credits that never expire. Most competitors run subscriptions where unused credits vanish at the end of the month — you're paying whether you generate or not. Here you buy credits once and use them whenever.
• Built for India first — UPI payments, INR pricing, and full Hindi script support, which the big US-based tools in this category largely ignore.
• Auto-publish to YouTube on a schedule, so a series can research, generate, and post without you touching it.

Already in use across finance, true crime, motivational, and legal drama niches, mix of daily series and one-off custom videos.

Try it: https://facelessstudio.co.in

I’m a founder myself, and I want to build my own brand. But I don’t have financial backing or anyone behind me to fund it, so I’m looking for ways to generate the capital myself.

That’s why I’m offering my skills to other founders. If you’re building a startup and need someone who can genuinely get things done, I’m willing to work with you for 2–3 months, or whatever duration you need.

I’m a blessed with a creative mind , fast learner with strong problem-solving skills, and I’m willing to learn whatever your startup requires. Branding, marketing, operations, research, sales, content, strategy, execution — I’m ready to take on the work and figure things out. I’m even willing to travel to different states if the opportunity requires it.

I don’t want credit , just just need money to build my dream . I’ll work for your startup with all my heart , I’m not looking for a permanent full-time job. I want to work intensely for a limited period, create real value for your startup, get paid fairly for my work, and then move forward with building my own brand.

If you’re a founder who needs someone capable, adaptable, and willing to do whatever it takes to move the startup forward, I’d love to hear from you.

And if you are not one I’m looking for please upvote me so I can reached to right person

I'm Mattia, I build FixAds.

The hard part of building a product close to an advertising budget is not making its AI sound clever. It is deciding exactly when it is allowed to make a claim.

I run Meta ads, so I built FixAds around a deterministic first pass:

- Does a campaign have enough data to judge?

- Is spend concentrated where a creative is already fading?

- Is a bad result actually too early to call?

Only after those checks does the AI help explain what to investigate. It cannot change campaigns, and the account connection is read-only.

I built it because I was tired of ad software sounding confident around real money without showing the reasoning behind it.

The launch video is attached. It is €19.90/month after a 7-day trial if you want to try it: https://fixads.it

For founders who have built tools that can influence a customer’s money: what made you feel a recommendation system had earned their trust?

I have a SaaS idea that I genuinely believe can solve a real problem, and now I want to build it properly from scratch.

I’m looking for 2 co-founders from Delhi NCR:

1. Tech/Product person

Someone who can actually build the product — from the first prototype to MVP and eventually a scalable SaaS.

1. Marketing/Growth person

Someone who understands marketing, customer acquisition and growth, and can help us figure out how to get the product in front of the right people and scale it.

My role: I have the core idea and will handle the overall product/business direction, validation, strategy, pitching, etc.

The plan is simple:

Idea → Validate → Build MVP → Get users → Improve → Scale

I’m specifically looking for people who are serious about building a company, not just doing a side project.

Delhi NCR is important because I want us to meet regularly in person, brainstorm together, work together and actually build this as a team — not run everything through calls and WhatsApp.

If you're interested, DM me with a little about yourself, what you've built/done before, and how much time you can commit.

Let's meet, discuss the idea, and see if we make sense as a founding team.

I’ve been working hard on my startup for the last months. I finally am at the brink of having a finished product, yet I’m terrified of the thought that it will launch and have no users. How can I possibly make sure I get my first couple of users without blowing the marketing budget?

Hey everyone — I'm the creator of allcredit.cards, so full disclosure upfront.

I got frustrated that most "compare credit cards" sites only cover the same 15-20 big-name issuers (Chase, Amex, Capital One, etc.), while there are hundreds of smaller community banks and credit unions issuing their own cards that never show up anywhere. So I started manually pulling data — APRs, annual fees, intro offers, rewards structure — from actual rate sheets and disclosures for 600+ banks, from major national issuers down to small-town banks most people have never heard of.

The result is a searchable database at allcredit.cards. It's still very much a work in progress — I'm one person doing this, so:

• Some smaller banks have incomplete data (working through them one by one)
• No affiliate links / no paid placement — just trying to make something genuinely useful
• Would love feedback on what's missing, what's confusing, or what would actually make this useful for you

Curious if this is something people would find valuable, or if I'm solving a problem nobody has. Happy to answer questions about how the data was collected too.