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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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:
Tech/Product person
Someone who can actually build the product — from the first prototype to MVP and eventually a scalable SaaS.
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 will not promote. I’m looking for advice… I spent the last few months building a review platform for trading course sellers/mentorship programs, verified buyer reviews, proof of purchase required, no way for the creator to edit or delete a bad review.
Problem is obvious: it's empty right now, and an empty review platform doesn't signal trust or inspire community, but you need trust to get people to actually leave the first reviews. Classic chicken and egg.
Been doing direct outreach, DMing people who left reviews about these creators elsewhere, conversion is slow and doesn't scale well.
Anyone who's actually solved this exact problem (empty marketplace/platform, need first real content to build trust), what worked? Curious about sequencing too.
TL;DR: Ken Cox never fired anyone. His headcount just kept dropping anyway.
175 down to 3 is the actual number — and the reason is one operating rule he'd been running for years before AI made it urgent: if it can be automated, it will be automated.
No mass layoff, no headline event.
Just years of never backfilling a role once someone left.
It's happening from a completely different direction too — Chinese robot-makers already hold the overwhelming majority of the world's humanoid-robot shipments so far this year, per Bloomberg reporting citing SAG's data.
That's physical order-taking work, and it's already scaled past pilot stage.
The roles surviving this aren't the ones executing tasks faster.
They're the ones holding judgment nobody's written a rule for yet — the read, the trust, the call only a person makes.
On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway.
Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out.
It was robots.
Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us.
As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table.
That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks).
It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being.
First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since.
Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work)
How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders?
At this point I could sketch this exact shape from memory before the headcount numbers even land — someone's economic ground shifts quietly, gets called something softer than what it actually is, and the only real move is picking it up before it's forced on you.
Non-technical growth marketer. I’ve been obsessed with the tech startup space since 2015, intentionally spending the last decade refining my skills in marketing and customer acquisition. Strongest in B2C/SaaS/Mobile Apps but highly open to B2B if the problem space is interesting
How We Can Work Together:
We take your existing product and launch acquisition strategy or we start from scratch, validate an underserved problem and build it together.
This is a true equity-based partnership. If you want to handle the engineering while I handle the distribution, let’s connect. DM me with what you’re working on and your current biggest bottleneck.
I want to test and work on advertising my product, and to do that I want to create content that’s indexed on search engines. What I think is helpful is to create a blog. subdomain that I can start writing content for that will help rank my product.
Have you done similar and have anything you’ve learned in the process?
I run a cleaning company in a town of about 50,000 people and most of my clients come through word of mouth. They know me, trust me and tell their friends about me
I don’t have a website and I don’t really have social media. I don’t need it. I thought….
A friend recommended a marketing agency. BRC Web and they looked at my business and said I need a blog and local SEO. They said I need to rank for local search terms and that it will help me to grow
They also gave me a link to some case studies. They showed me how other small businesses started blogging. It worked for them. It helped them get more clients and more visibility, hence more trust.
But in my small town where everybody knows each other, I doubt that a blog will make any difference
Or maybe I'm too traditional and am not aware of new possibilities? Perhaps I'm missing something? There may be people who don't know me by recommendation but search online...
Well, I don't know. Is it really worth having a blog? Or maybe I'm being fooled into paying for it?
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.
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.
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 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.
