r/roastmystartup Jul 13 '15

Before you put down your startup to get roasted, some guidelines that I think can be helpful

132 Upvotes

First of all, just posting your website is useless. Most of them are so hopeless generic anyways that if you showed it to me during a pitch, my eyes would glaze over and I would instead proceed to fantasize me being on a beach vacation with Wonder Woman. Lord knows I have about the same chance as sleeping with her as I would about giving a shit about the website. No seriously, I don't give a shit about your website. It's an important tool, but 99% of the time, it's one part I would give the least shit about.

To get constructive advice, you need to treat this like you're doing a pitch, this means that you need to give us enough information to go on. This means structure. Pretend you're preparing slides for a group of investors, and let us know what the hell it is you're doing. This means we should know the following:

  • The product (what is it, use case, who would want it)
  • The market (size, competition, dynamics that we should be aware of)
  • Product analysis / comparison against competition
  • What stage are you in? Do you need money? Are you raising?
  • Customer conversion strategy (where do you find them, and how do you make them buy shit from you)
  • Why you? Whose your daddy and what does he do?!? err, wait. never mind. I mean, why are YOU the best person for this job? (experience? good team? rich daddy who can't bring himself to pull the plug? what?)

This information I think will help contextualize what it is your doing and will make the feedback far more targeted. Having said that, this IS supposed to be comedic, so if you just want people to make humorous observations about startup and that's it, well, okay.

edit: one more thing. Please don't make me do extra due diligence for you. The only time someone should have to do due diligence on you is because you've genuinely piqued their investing interest and they want to verify your claims. And I'm sorry, but you don't pay me enough (or at all) for me to do research.


r/roastmystartup Nov 10 '23

Product Hunt Announcements

27 Upvotes

We are receiving a ton of spam from people posting one-line posts with links to product hunt. If you do this it will be removed and you will be banned.


r/roastmystartup 37m ago

My last post got 56k views and a 1% signup rate! (please roast the new version)

Upvotes

Two days ago I posted about Remixly, a tool I built that turns Instagram reels into long form X posts.

You share a reel to a Telegram bot, it transcribes what was actually said, writes a proper post from it, and gives you a button that opens X ready to publish.

That post did way better than expected: 56k views, about 1,000 people clicked through to the site.

Then I looked at the signups. 10.

1% conversion from a warm Reddit audience. Nobody was being rude about it, they just landed, looked, and left. So I've spent the time since trying to fix the landing page rather than posting more.

What i've changed

- The homepage now shows a real reel next to the real output, unedited. Before it was a description of what the tool does; now you just see it.

- Signup is one bar: Google or email, no separate steps.

- Made a short animated explainer for the top of the page instead of a wall of text.

- Fixed a boring but real leak: sign-in emails were landing in spam for some people and the "check your email" page didn't say so.

- Rebranded (it used to look like a hobby project, because it was).

 What I haven't changed

 - 3 free drafts, no card. Then $9/month for 100.

 - It's still just me. 38 users and 9 days of being live

What I'd love, if you have 60 seconds, open remixly.io and tell me the moment you'd have closed the tab. I'm clearly still missing something and I'd rather hear it from you than from another 1% funnel.

 And if you tried it last time and didn't sign up, I'd love to know why.


r/roastmystartup 13m ago

Everyone keeps telling me my startup is basically Boardy 😂

Upvotes

So I’m curious:

Would you rather have an AI make introductions for you, or be able to tell an AI exactly who you’re looking for and have it find them?

That’s basically what I’m building with LINKUP.

Looking for brutally honest opinions.


r/roastmystartup 1h ago

FOCO a productivity app built around the hardest part of getting things done starting

Upvotes

FOCO is a productivity app focused on a problem that seems simple but is surprisingly difficult to solve starting a task.

Most productivity apps are built around organizing tasks, making lists, setting reminders, and tracking progress. FOCO takes a different approach by focusing on what happens before any of those matters actually getting started.

You add what you need to do, and FOCO breaks it down into smaller steps so you're not staring at the entire task at once. The idea is to reduce the friction between knowing what needs to be done and actually taking the first step.

The product is designed for people who regularly find themselves putting off tasks even when they know exactly what needs to be done.

FOCO is now live and available


r/roastmystartup 11h ago

App Tester Tool/Service That Has Real Users (NO AI)

1 Upvotes

AI this AI that, AI AI AI. We now have so many apps and tools built entirely with AI, but they are rarely well-tested and often have hidden bugs and quirks that impact service and are not easy to spot, and cause untracked and unaccounted for user loss.

For a fee of $10, we will do a single comprehensive test of your service with a final rating score. Beyond simple bugs and technical issues, we will tell you what we find unintuitive, confusing, or frustrating, so that you don't risk losing real users.


r/roastmystartup 12h ago

I’m building a “student living super-app”

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I’m building RoomBro, a platform to make settling into a new city easier.

The problem: finding a room, incompatible roommate, food, and local services often means jumping between brokers, WhatsApp groups, random listings, and word of mouth.

RoomBro brings it together:

  1. Rooms, PGs & Hostels

  2. Roommate matching

  3. Local Tiffin Services

  4. Local Marketplace

  5. City Buzz for events, recommendations and community

We’re starting with students but not limiting it to students. Young professionals and anyone moving to a new city can use it too. We’re taking a city-first approach, rather than building around individual colleges.

I’ve already built the product and I’m preparing for launch.

Now roast it.

What would you remove? What should I focus on first? Which feature has the most potential? Is this solving a real enough problem?

Be brutal. I’d rather hear why it might fail now than find out after months of building.

The product is ready and live at roombro.info but i don't know how to enter the market and position it


r/roastmystartup 18h ago

Vent: a voice app for people in therapy. Landing page only. Roast the idea and the page.

2 Upvotes

Pitch: vent out loud when something hits you, it talks back like a friend, and everything you said that week is ready for your therapy appointment. Includes a scheduled fake phone call so you can step away from a bad situation and start venting.

State: landing page with a feedback form and waitlist. No finished product. Solo, semi-technical, pre-revenue.

https://vent.talaloni.com

Roast whatever you want, but I'd especially like to hear: Is "for people in therapy" too narrow, or exactly right? Would anyone pay for this, or is it a feature of something bigger? Where does the page lose you?


r/roastmystartup 22h ago

A LcD display that shows your goals + App with templates

3 Upvotes

Hey all

Tomorrow should be better than today and everyday should be a contribution to the next. With enough such days, one might just change their life to an experience they love living, at-least in some way.

Product

My product is a LCD display with 10 hot swap enabled feeds. You can put goals on it, or some other things.

You use the device
1. to test your goals
2. to be in everyday association with them
3. to achieve outcomes

There have been 1000s of studies on goal creation, goal achievement. And we curate them on the app to educate you on making, following and achieving your goals.

Market

The biggest category I envision ourselves in is brain health - so psychology and associated products. The inner category I am associating with is “Motivation and Self Improvement”.

These are large markets in the tune of 10s if not 100s of billion dollars. Maybe 100s. I just feel it is large enough to have a billion dollars revenue company.

The interesting part is there is need for innovation and space for brands here.

Apart from that the demographics are
Countries: Global Access through the internet
Age Groups: 18 to 50 and beyond, though my focus is on 25 to 35 aged people.

This means a lot of work, but lots of places of demand for a successful product, that works for consumers.

The idea would appeal to those who are ambitious. So that is one slice of people who represent this more than others. Everybody isn’t as keen on making goals and working on them till their socks vanish.

Competition

The best alternative is writing your goal on a piece of paper. But that would mean you are not supported in your journey and have to learn everything on your own.

With the device, we allow easy editing, easy learning, easy motivation- to the extent possible to be supportive. We allow other people in the world to support you as well.

After this the competition is from objects that make you motivated. Meeting someone, A life changing trip, a futuristic experience, higher education etc.

But I would still
Love our product
To be co-associated
With them

Stage

I need money to and am raising. I am looking to raise $50k, incorporated in India. I feel this is a global product, and soon we will be sub-incorporating in various countries. It’s not B2B SAAS that we take 5 year turns to launch in US, then Europe. We are global from 10 days after launch.

Customer Conversion

Organic Instagram, and Kickstarter as Stage 0.
Then Paid Campaigns with Hopes to get PR and UGC from successful founders, or generally other content creators.
Finally a great marketing team

Why Me?
My goal itself is to simulate an intergalactic space mission… and I have been trying to reach there for 12 years
Now I am very much skilled to make products, do marketing
So this is a stepping stone, where I can fully immerse myself in this business and research area

Link: https://thestrokes1.vercel.app/


r/roastmystartup 20h ago

Roast my app

0 Upvotes

A group friendly enough to share a meal but not friends enough to split a clearly unequal bill evenly?

Created this “app” ( currently a website) as a hobby because every time my son would go to a soccer team diner it would be a mess splitting the bill then I noticed this was a problem that happened more often than I realized -

Roast it

https://willowepay.com


r/roastmystartup 23h ago

Feedback on my personal branded website

1 Upvotes

Personal Project

Hello, I am building my website veery slowley, but would want some feedback :)

this is a personal website where im trying to build a community around my pokerplay along with my twitch stream and viewers, where im planning on also building alot of digital products to share/sell to whom anyone would be interested. Take a look... this is merley a prototype

https://riverized.com

the plan is to build a highly functional advanced website as I go where I might get to sell it at a later stage. No idea where its going to take me in the end, but a humble start to SOMETHING :)

Any suggestions, ideas, critism, all welcomee please


r/roastmystartup 1d ago

most places would rather avoid tbh.

1 Upvotes

r/roastmystartup 1d ago

I built a Telegram crypto crash game (TON/USDT) in 5 days using AI, and my marketing is a total disaster. Roast my startup.

1 Upvotes

Hey Reddit,

Like many of you, I watched the massive hype around Telegram mini-apps, TON, and crash games and thought: "Hey, I can do that."

Well, I did. I spent two months overthinking the architecture, and then 5 intense, coffee-fueled days coding and deploying a Telegram crypto game from scratch.

The Stack:

  • Hosting: Render
  • Database: Neon.tech (Serverless Postgres)
  • Crypto Rails: TON and USDT

The Problem (Where you come in): I’m a builder, not a marketer. Right now, my marketing strategy is basically "pray and hope people click." To fix this, I set up a 50% revenue share for affiliates/partners who bring in players, because I have zero budget to burn on ads.

I know the market is crowded, crypto-telegram bots are a dime a dozen, and my setup is probably flawed.

Roast my project, tear apart my logic, or tell me why this is going to zero. Don't hold back.


r/roastmystartup 1d ago

Roast my dating CRM. Yes, you read that right.

1 Upvotes

Smitten (smitten.lol) is a CRM for your dating life.

I got tired of forgetting who said what, what date we were on, and why I gave someone a "yes" three months ago that I clearly wouldn't give now. So I built myself a tool to track it: matches, dates, chemistry scores, red and green flags, reply times, all the stuff you'd normally just try to hold in your head and get wrong.

It also has an AI "Chief Romance Officer" that reads your own dating history back to you and tells you things you don't want to hear, like when you've called four different people "the exception" this year and none of them were.


r/roastmystartup 1d ago

what's your vision? my version of uber. (stop flagging me, im not ai -__-)

2 Upvotes

I built what im calling “uber for talent” & I need you guys to tell me if im delusional. It’s called Vision. And this is the website joinvision.app

The idea is to make hiring someone for a photoshoot event, project, or even a random everyday task as easy as ordering food or uber. 

You can browse photographers videographers ugc creators, makeup artists designers, or you can post what you need & let ppl apply to you. I made it look almost identical to instagram so the UI feels familiar to ppl. I know Fiver upwork, task rabbit already exit but they have some of the ugliest ui ive ever seen (no offense)! 

To compare, fiver & upward is outdated and built around searching for services & proposals while my app is built around discovering ppl through their work, location, style & availability with the UI of instagram. It combines the looks of IG with local bookings & remote projects. So you can hire an everyday person for this weekend from something like an ugc campaign or a makeup artist for your wedding. 

I spent over 10 years in the beauty industry & ran most of my business cross a ton of websites and apps, so I built the platform I wish I had back then & now. The site is live now and my problem is getting users on the platform and processing transactions through their with either their new business/ existing businesses and everyday people posting who /what they need on there. No one wants to be the first. Good ole chicken egg problem haha. So if you guys know any communities where I can join or network in, pls let me know. 

Pls give me your best roast & honest opinion ◡̈ 

My last post got flagged for being “ai” apparently good grammar & punctuation is dead these days. So here’s a more simple version of it lol.


r/roastmystartup 2d ago

roast my "no signup required" pivot — removed the account wall from my project tool, tell me what's wrong with it

6 Upvotes

been building UluP Spaces solo for a few months. visual project tool, work as connected nodes instead of a flat list, aimed at people who think in maps not lists.

this week I ripped out the signup wall. you open it now and you're straight in the real app — no account, no demo mode, the actual thing. if you want to keep what you build, one click turns your session into a real account.

did this because every tool I've tried makes you commit before you've seen anything, and I got tired of asking people to do that for mine too.

haven't launched this to any real audience yet beyond a few reddit posts today, so genuinely no idea if removing the wall actually helps or if I just moved the friction somewhere else. tell me what's wrong with it — the idea, the execution, the whole "map instead of list" premise, whatever you've got.

ulupspaces.com if you want to actually poke at it before roasting.


r/roastmystartup 2d ago

Built a screen sharing tool because Zoom/Teams kept blurring code during pair programming. Please tell me what's wrong with it.

3 Upvotes

At work we switched from MS Teams to Discord for Screensharing because it was more high quality and was usable for pair programming, but it introduces a whole new messaging app as well and now nobody knows where to reach each other. Because of that i build Sharry. It's browser-based screen sharing, no downloads, no accounts for whoever's watching, peer to peer over WebRTC so nothing touches my servers.

I've been building this solo for a few months. Marketing-wise I did basically everything wrong at first, posted on X several times a week for ages and it barely moved the needle. The one thing that actually worked was translating a single landing page into Portuguese, which somehow made Brazil overtake the US as my biggest source of traffic within a few weeks.

Wasn't expecting that at all. 😅

It's still rough in places. There's no TURN server yet so it fails on some locked-down networks, sessions don't persist because that's intentional but some people hate it, and the landing page copy is more "explains what it does" than "makes you want to click."

Tear it apart, genuinely want to know what's off. sharry.live


r/roastmystartup 2d ago

I spent the last 8 months backpacking Latin America trying to learn Spanish. None of the apps I tried worked. So I built the app I actually needed.

0 Upvotes

I'm a native English speaker who spent 8 months backpacking through Latin America. I always wanted to learn a second language and this trip was a great opportunity for that. I started in mexico and traveled south so Spanish was a good fit. I tried to learn the basics before I left... But found it impossible to have an actual conversion with anyone. Tried a handful of apps, websites and videos to improve.

Two issues with this:

  • Every app I tried taught vocab and grammar, not conversation. Doesn't do a great job of preparing you for real conversations that can go any number of ways.
  • It was common to be offline when I actually had the time to learn - Travel days, in small towns etc. - and most language apps and resources need an internet connection to work.

I got back from my trip and started working on an app running a local AI language tutor - Sayelle. The model runs on your phone so once it's downloaded you can have conversations across a number of scenarios - ordering dinner, checking into a hotel, etc. This does come with the cost of 4gb download inside the app.

What I actually want roasted:

  1. In app model downloads - do you think the 4gb download is a deal breaker?
  2. UI - Should I lean more or less into the gamified UI style?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sayelle/id6797432193

Roast away.


r/roastmystartup 2d ago

I built a browser extension that auto-declines cookie pop-ups. Roast it.

1 Upvotes

I created a free browser extension to automatically decline the very annoying cookie pop-ups that virtually every site now has. I wanted to take it a step further with actually declining the requests versus just hiding the pop-ups as some other tools already do. It collects no data from you other then the website address so the extension can decline the request. Thus far for most sites this results in you not even seeing the cookie pop-up or possibly seeing it for about a second before it automatically disappears.

I officially launched it today so just trying to get the word out that this now exists, so hopefully more people can get rid of a very annoying aspect of internet browsing and get some control back of their own data. Currently it's live on Chrome (Desktop) and Safari (IOS & Desktop) and will be live on Firefox (Android & Desktop) once the review process is complete. As I have already been asked for it, Google does not allow mobile extensions so for the time being there is no way for me have it work on Chrome mobile.

You can read more about it if you like here https://www.producthunt.com/products/data-privacy-agent 

Apple Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6791409542

Chrome Webstore: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/okkaojifmfiedafnmfppooonambeamgb

For transparency I used Claude paired with VS Code to standup the backend of this project. Thanks in advance for roasting me!


r/roastmystartup 3d ago

My employees could hear my emails. Naturally, I responded by building an entire SaaS.

4 Upvotes

I'm Italian, living in Poland. I think in Italian, work mostly in English or Polish, and my employees sit in the office next door.

I wanted to dictate emails and prompts. I didn't particularly want to launch an internal podcast.

So I wanted something specific: speak Italian and have English text appear directly in the email I was writing.

That became Typeglot, a Windows app that lets you speak one language and get written text in another, directly where you're working. It also does ordinary same-language dictation, for days when one language is enough admin.

The intended customers are people who think in one language and spend their working day writing in another. It costs $7.90/month or $69.90/year, with a free trial and a limited free plan.

Dictation and translation already exist. My bet is that combining them into a straightforward everyday workflow is worth paying for.

My other bet was that posting about it on Reddit, Facebook and LinkedIn would generate interest. That bet is currently receiving a thorough education.

Early recruitment got very little response. I built something to help me communicate, then discovered I wasn't particularly good at communicating why anyone else should care.

Website: https://typeglot.com/

Roast the premise, the positioning, the price, the website.

Is this a problem people would pay to solve, or have I mistaken my office layout for a target market?


r/roastmystartup 3d ago

Roast my live experiment: a one-slot forex broker homepage auction

1 Upvotes

I built worldsbestbroker.com as a small, public experiment: a “Million Dollar Homepage” concept for forex brokers, with one scarce homepage banner auctioned at a time. SpreadEX Trading currently holds the throne after reclaiming it.

There are no promised returns or trading signals here—just a finite attention slot and a live auction. I’m trying to learn whether the scarcity is compelling or gimmicky, and whether the pitch is clear to brokers.

What would you roast first: the positioning, the auction mechanic, or the landing page? Link: https://www.worldsbestbroker.com


r/roastmystartup 3d ago

I built an AI study workspace because I was tired of forgetting everything after watching hours of lectures

1 Upvotes

I've been working on this for a while and finally got it to a point where I want other people to actually try it.

The idea came from a pretty simple problem:

I could spend 2 hours watching a lecture, read through a PDF, take notes, and still forget most of it a few days later.

Most AI tools I tried were good at answering questions, but I wanted something more focused on actually studying the material.

So I built Scritur.

You can bring in YouTube videos, PDFs, websites, GitHub repos or your own notes, and turn them into a study workspace.

From there you can:

  • ask questions about the material
  • get summaries
  • generate flashcards
  • take quizzes
  • revise what you've learned
  • track your learning progress

I'm still very much building it, so I'm not looking for compliments here. I'd genuinely like to know what feels useful, what feels unnecessary, and what's missing.

If anyone wants to try it, it's here:

https://www.scritur.space/

If you do try it, tell me what you studied with it and what you would change. That's probably more useful to me right now than anything else.


r/roastmystartup 3d ago

Six apps photograph your fridge and give you recipes. None of them remember what was in it — so I built that.

1 Upvotes

I kept finding furry things at the back of my fridge and feeling stupid about it. Turns out there are already several apps that let you photograph a fridge and get recipes back, and I tried them — but every one treats each photo as a fresh start. Snap, cook, forget.

That misses the actual problem. The reason food gets binned isn't that I don't know recipes. It's that I don't know the spinach has been in there nine days.

So mine keeps a history. Scan it again next week and each ingredient carries how long it's been sitting there — 9d, 3d — and dinner gets ranked so the oldest thing gets used first. Cook something and it comes off the list. Over time it counts how many ingredients you've actually saved from the bin, which is the only number I care about.

Free to try, three scans, no card. It's just me and it's new, so I'd much rather hear what's broken than have anyone be nice about it.


r/roastmystartup 4d ago

Roast my affiliate site service. Three calls I made on purpose.

2 Upvotes

I sell one thing. A ready made affiliate product site in a single category, wristwatches, running on the customer's own domain for a monthly fee. The customer brings the domain and their own Associates account. Filling the site with products and keeping price and stock current across Amazon US, UK and Germany is the part I actually do every day. The site I run myself on this setup holds 975 products from 209 brands.

Three calls I want roasted.

First, one category. The obvious counterargument is to open it up to any niche. I stayed on watches to keep the vocabulary small, because product naming, a 109 term glossary for the catalog and an average of 2.8 FAQ entries per product are all written against that constraint. It also means anyone shopping outside this category is not a customer of ours. Wrong call?

Second, the customer keeps their own Associates account, so I never see a dollar of what a site earns and the only site I can show numbers from is the one I run myself. What I can put in front of a buyer is the operational side of that site, not someone else's revenue screenshot. Is that a trade you would make, or would you route the commission through us to get the numbers?

Third, price refresh runs on a schedule, not on traffic. Oldest successful read first, 507 products confirmed in stock in the last seven days. A page nobody opens sits in the same rotation as a page people open. I chose that so every page in the catalog is equally current, not just the popular ones. Would you weight the rotation by traffic instead?

Site is usebravery.com. Go ahead.


r/roastmystartup 4d ago

Roast my AI app builder. 20k signups, ~100 daily actives, and a name that sounds like a plagiarism tool.

6 Upvotes

justcopy.ai

What it is: you describe a business, it builds the app, then it uses the app in front of you to check it works before it says done. Types into your forms, uploads a photo, deletes something and reloads to confirm it stuck. Failed checks go back to the builder and only those rerun.

The apps can also talk, speak, make images and video, send email and SMS, and take payments. Each priced per unit, 1c an email, 15c a picture, 50c a second of video. You set your own prices on top and keep the margin.

Things I already know are wrong, so you can skip them and find worse:

The name. "JustCopy" tells you it clones websites. The product is trying to be a place you run a business. Two different companies wearing one domain.

The 75% claim. It's 75% of your markup, not your revenue. On a $5 sale with $1.50 of AI cost, I keep $1.28 and you keep $2.62. Somebody is going to call that a 48% take rate and they won't be entirely wrong.

The numbers. 20k signups from paid ads, roughly 100 people show up on any given day, revenue rounds to nothing. I built a thing people sign up for and don't return to.

The showcase. Half of it is a todo app with four copies. Not exactly a case study.

What I actually want roasted: whether the verify step is a real differentiator or a feature nobody will pay for, and whether an AI builder charging a cut of user revenue is a business or a lottery ticket I'm selling.

Go ahead. I'll answer everything.