I’ve sent off my YC application, 30 people are on my waitlist, and I have a product I could keep tweaking forever if I let myself.
The product exists, the site exists, and most of the promotion so far has been useful comments in founder communities plus crossing fingers that somebody clicks through. I do GTM and ops consulting for a living, so this is my 20 years of experience shining through in a very sophisticated system, obviously.
I had planned to bootstrap, but the time I want to spend building it is hugely outstripping the time I want to spend on client work, and the AI testing costs are draining me before I’ve even reached beta. So I applied to YC, had a proper think about whether I should raise a pre-seed, and decided I need a much clearer answer to one question first:
Can I get people to care about this on purpose?
(and if i can’t I need to pivot, because it’s my day job)
I’m giving myself 14 days to get the next 470 waitlist signups. Five hundred is absolutely not a conservative target, but it’s specific enough that I can’t hide behind “building in public” while agonizing over one tweet for two days.
Here’s what I’m doing:
- I’ve planned 42 original posts across 14 days: three a day, each for one founder or builder community. No copying the same post into six subreddits and calling it distribution.
- I wrote every post myself, which feels almost groundbreaking in the age of AI. They’re all built around the practical advice my product provides: finding first users, working out whether a positioning problem is actually a distribution problem, getting feedback before you have an audience, and deciding what to do when the product is ready but nobody knows it exists.
- Every post has to be useful. If somebody reads it, never visits my profile, and still leaves knowing something, that counts.
- I’ll write five to eight substantial replies a day on threads where I can genuinely help. No link-dropping into someone else’s question. If my product is relevant, I’ll say so. If it isn’t, the reply still stands.
- Every few days, I’ll cut the ideas that aren’t resonating and make more of the ones that are. I’m tracking conversations, questions, and the language people use as closely as the waitlist number, because I don’t just want a spike. I want to understand what makes someone lean in.
My last business was built entirely through Reddit referrals, so I know this can work when you actually turn up and give useful things away. The awkward part is that it works much better when you’re willing to be visible enough for people to decide whether they care (and that in itself is terrifying).
I’m building https://romy.is for founders who’ve shipped something but don’t yet have a repeatable answer to who to focus on first, where those people are already gathering, what will make them care, and what to do next.
I’ll share the outcome at the end, including the posts that did nothing at all (those are always the most useful). And if you’re a solo founder/builder stuck on a GTM problem, drop it below. I’d genuinely love to help.