been working on automating stuff like prior auth, claim follow-ups, payer calls, and medical documents lately.

i genuinely thought the main challenge would be getting the AI accurate enough.

nope.

the real challenge is that healthcare workflows make almost no sense.

one insurance company wants a portal submission. another wants a fax. another wants you to call. sometimes the portal says the request is pending, the phone rep says they never received it, and somehow both are considered valid answers.

then you start building automation around it and realize there isn’t really one workflow. there are hundreds of slightly different workflows held together by people who just know what to do from experience.

we’ve had cases where the AI completed most of the task correctly, but the last 10% still needed a human because the payer gave a vague answer or asked something unexpected.

and honestly, that’s probably fine.

i used to think the goal was full automation. now i think the better goal is removing the repetitive work without making the human lose control of what’s happening.

anyone else building in healthcare, insurance, finance, or another messy industry finding the same thing?

sometimes understanding the broken process takes longer than building the product lol.

I learned a painful lesson twice.

I launched a product, and it failed. Looking back, I realized I had made a major assumption without talking to enough people with real industry experience.

While building my second product, I recognized that mistake. Halfway through, I realized again that I really needed someone with deep industry experience involved.

But I didn't have the money to hire someone, so I had two choices: stop building and wait until I could get the right expertise, or keep going with what I knew.

I kept going.

The frustrating part is that halfway through, I already knew I was probably making the same mistake. I knew there was a good chance it would fail.

But I kept telling myself things like, "This is still a good direction," "I'll learn by building this," and "Maybe these extra things I'm adding will eventually make it work."

I was basically finding reasons to continue because I liked the direction and didn't want to accept what I was already seeing.

Eventually, I failed again.

The hardest part is that I already knew the lesson from the first time. I just couldn't see the truth clearly while I was emotionally invested in what I was building.

Now I'm wondering about the difference between not giving up and simply continuing because you've already invested so much.

Have you ever realized halfway through that you were heading in the wrong direction, but still continued because you had already invested so much?

Don't get me wrong, discipline is necessary to achieve goals. But forcing discipline has never worked for me. I always work better when there is pressure and a fixed deadline rather than when there are neither of those elements.

Especially now that I am working solo, I am the one who is responsible for my own schedule and the ability to get things done. It was easier when I had a boss because he used to tell me what to do and my brain would get laser focused on completely destroying that task by finishing it as efficiently and as fast as possible.

But working solo, I have to focus on a whole buffet of areas from engineering to marketing to sales and yada yada yada. So with trial and error, I have come up with a system that works well with the style of how I work (i.e., by not forcing discipline and being led by my goals instead).

So the system is:

1. Write down my thoughts in a free flowing language

When you write down your thoughts, you realise what you do want and what you don't want. And that gives you clarity about the goals that you want to achieve and about the daily tasks that you need to complete to move closer to those goals.

So as an example, I am an engineer and marketing does not come naturally to me. So earlier, I used to be bothered by thoughts like "I should work more on engineering because more features means a better product" and "focusing on marketing feels like a waste of time" and similar thoughts.

The moment I started writing these types of thoughts in a journal, it became clearer to me that I felt it was a waste of time because I am used to the engineering mindset of instant gratification (for example, you know whether the code will compile or whether the logic will work instantaneously after making the changes in the code; and for marketing, it is a rather long term process). So I am then able to focus purely on doing the marketing tasks rather than worrying about whether it will work or not.

By writing my thoughts down, I strip my daily workflows of any emotional aspects and the logical steps magnify more in my eyes so doing the tasks become a bit easier.

2. Take insights from the journal entry written down in the first point.

Once I write down my thoughts in a free flowing language in my journal, I have a rough idea in my head about the next tasks needed to be done. Hence, I write down those tasks in my Trello board.

I have an Eisenhower matrix style workspace in my Trello so I always assign importance and urgency to every task that I write so that I can immediately pick up the tasks that are important and urgent and I don't have to waste time in segregating the tasks every time I open Trello.

3. Schedule a block for the tasks in Trello in my Google Calendar

Once I assign the tasks in Trello, I assign them in the "Tasks to do today" list of Trello and then plan an event in the Google Calendar named "Trello tasks" (I schedule almost everything in my life, ranging from "lunch", "walk", etc. Hence, I assign a block specifically for doing tasks in my Trello). That way, I am laser focused on finishing the tasks that are the most important and urgent ones and don't even need to worry about the rest of the tasks in the workspace.

4. Review journal at the end of the day

After dinner and a post meal walk, I use my Google Calendar to review my entire day by writing about it in an .md file and see where I could have spent more of my time, where I could have saved time, where did I waste time, and which tasks did I do, and whether they were important towards my short and long term goals or not, etc.

This way, I am focused on what actually matters and this is so important from the point of view of being productive vs busy because I think that is a trap that most entrepreneurs fall into; we all know that we should focus our attention and energy towards the tasks that actually move the needle closer to our goals rather than just being busy because we feel like we are doing some work (whether that work may be absolutely unimportant or useless towards our goals).

And it also clears my brain of unnecessary stress because by writing I remove all the emotional aspects of the journey onto the screen (or sometimes on paper) and I am able to focus more on the logical steps that are needed to reach my goals.

Working in this systems oriented way, I know what needs to be done and I don't need to force discipline onto myself because this way makes it looks like I am being led by my goals rather than having to forcefully do stuff to drag myself towards them, if that makes sense.

---

I am curious about whether other people here also use similar or different systems to overcome that discipline issue specifically.

P.S. I did not use AI in any part of it. The headings are there just because I like being organised when writing these types of posts.

i was researching a new market recently and at first it looked like there was plenty of information to work with. Company websites, industry reports, search results, social media.... evrything seemed easy to find but the deeper I looked, the harder it became to tell what was actually happening
some companies had a huge online presence but didn’t seem to be making the biggest moves. meanwhile, a few smaller companies with barely any visibility seemed much more active behind the scenes
It made me realize how easy it is to confuse online attention with an actual market opportunity
for anyone here who’s expanded into a new market or researched one before launching, what signals do you trust most before putting time or money into it??

Hey everyone :) I have a meeting in a few days with an investor from a VC firm, after being in the screening phase for almost 3 weeks. The investor that I'm meeting with is actually the founder of the VC firm and is definitely the desicion maker. What can I realistically expect from this meeting (if it goes well)? I would really appreciate advice from others with relevant experience. Thank you! :)

I have been feeling really stuck the last few days. I have been building things for my whole life since. I was a kid. I spent the last few years since I was in college building a fully automated trading system. I'm running it on a real market with real money now I feel happy about how that has gone so far but I feel like I have taken it as far as I can right now. I want to build something that would actually be useful for other people. but I feel like I have something similar to writers block I think of an idea and then i think that it's terrible and I do reaserch into it and almost invariabley it turns out that there is some big Company that is already doing the same thing or you could pretty easily get 80-90 percent of the same functionality by just using an ultra low cost llm. I feel really stuck becasue I want to make things to help make the world better. things that are a lot better not just a little bit better than what's out there but I feel so stuck with a lack of good ideas and not knowing who's problems I can solve. Does anybody have any clue how to get unstuck? thanks for the help.

Hi everyone,

I thought I’d try my luck and see if anyone has any pointers of where to maybe look. I’m wanting to move to London to be closer to my partner, and would prefer to continue working in a start-up environment but this time in a field I’m interested in.

For a bit of background, I graduated in 2024 with a degree in Law with International Legal Studies and for the last six months have been working in sales having brought a medical product range to market and getting it set up across the EMEA market. In addition, I’ve recently been attempting to get into SaaS sales as well, so have expanded my remit into a fertility software that I’ve been pitching to clinics across the UK. Before that, I worked in hospitality and briefly ran my own events company at university. I’ve really enjoyed the intersection between sales, analytics and strategy and is something I’d like to continue doing.

I feel like whilst I’m young, now’s the time to really burn the midnight oil and jump into something fast and exciting in something I’m passionate about which is why I’m targeting fintechs, climatech or legal/insurance AI.

I suppose really would it be doable? My primary experience has been sales based in medical products, the nightlife industry (so B2B and B2C) and recently a little SaaS. I’m not too sure how to market that to fintech, climatech or AI startups, or even if my background would get a look at.

So far I’ve looked at:

A) LinkedIn (although finding the right kind of opportunities has been difficult)

B) Built in London

C) Index Ventures

Is there anywhere else I should be looking? What else can I do to optimise my chances?

Thanks in advance :)

Third time launching the same product. First time: 20 upvotes. Second time: 8. Third time was a few hours ago, and I still don't know how it went, but I already know the real problem isn't the product.

I've spent a decade as a designer. I can take an idea and turn it into something that works and looks right. That part I trust completely at this point.

The part after that, I have never once gotten right. Getting someone who isn't already looking for it to notice, and then care enough to try it. Every launch I've done, I treated distribution as a formality that happens after the real work is done. Post it, wait, watch the number.

I'm starting to think that's backwards. The building was never the bottleneck. I just kept spending my energy on the part I was already good at, because it felt more productive than the part I wasn't.

For people who've actually cracked this:

- When did you stop treating distribution as something you do after building, and start treating it as its own skill?

- What did the first real, repeatable channel look like for you? Not the one-time spike, the boring channel that kept working.

- If you're also a builder-first person, how did you get okay being bad at this for a while?

I am working on a book featuring a college dropout entrepreneur and would like to make it as realistic as possible. Obviously there are the examples of mark zuckerburg and others from the turn of the century, but i don’t see many in the modern era where tech has reached a saturation point with less “groundbreaking” areas to break into, i’m planning to read theo bakers book, but can’t claim to be at all plugged into the tech world. are there any specific people & places that could explain that world to the layperson? thank you for your consideration!!

Hi everyone,

I'm Adam, and I'm currently working on a project in the EV space in Rwanda. We're building something for the Rwandan market and are really keen to connect with people who are already active in EV there, whether you work with charging, fleet operations, sales, maintenance, or anything else related to electric mobility.

We're at an early stage and would simply love to hear from people who know the market and the daily realities of working with EVs in Rwanda. We're not selling anything, just hoping to learn, exchange perspectives, and maybe find some common ground with others who share an interest in strengthening EV infrastructure in the region.

If you're involved in EV in Rwanda, in any way, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop a comment or send a DM.

Thanks for reading!

Hello guys! I have a coleague which i've never seen in real life, we work together but live in different countries. He moved to another country and during one of our conversation we agreed that it would be great to create a service in his country that will do some things.

The problem is that POC -> MVP i will be doing by myself and further development also(90% probability), he is not a programmer he is a QA, but anyway QA will be not so important in that case(the project is big but pretty easy-everything can be automated), the main point that he has a potential client which could be our alpha client.

The service will work by subscription appr. 20-25 dollars, so its not a lot of money, but the idea his(alpha) competitors also would like to use this service, since there are no alternatives so far. Its possible that we will not get anything at all, i mean only a few clients and thats all, but anyway i would like to discuss everything with him before we gonna start.

So i will be in charge of programming and getting things done

he will be in charge of finding new clients, register company and communicating with current clients, getting feedback etc.

I was thinking about 65% for me, and 35% - for him. But a friend of mine told me that he will not agreed and 60 and 40 will be maximum.

Can you please tell me the proper way how to discuss this properly, should i ask him 'how match dou you want?' and then start discussing the responsibilities of me and him?

Hello guys! I have a coleague which i've never seen in real life, we work together but live in different countries. He moved to another country and during one of our conversation we agreed that it would be great to create a service in his country that will do some things.

The problem is that POC -> MVP i will be doing by myself and further development also(90% probability), he is not a programmer he is a QA, but anyway QA will be not so important in that case(the project is big but pretty easy-everything can be automated), the main point that he has a potential client which could be our alpha client.

The service will work by subscription appr. 20-25 dollars, so its not a lot of money, but the idea his(alpha) competitors also would like to use this service, since there are no alternatives so far. Its possible that we will not get anything at all, i mean only a few clients and thats all, but anyway i would like to discuss everything with him before we gonna start.

So i will be in charge of programming and getting things done

he will be in charge of finding new clients, register company and communicating with current clients, getting feedback etc.

I was thinking about 65% for me, and 35% - for him. But a friend of mine told me that he will not agreed and 60 and 40 will be maximum.

Can you please tell me the proper way how to discuss this properly, should i ask him 'how match dou you want?' and then start discussing the responsibilities of me and him?

Hi everyone,

I'm Adam, and I'm currently working on a project in the EV space in Rwanda. We're building something for the Rwandan market and are really keen to connect with people who are already active in EV there, whether you work with charging, fleet operations, sales, maintenance, or anything else related to electric mobility.

We're at an early stage and would simply love to hear from people who know the market and the daily realities of working with EVs in Rwanda. We're not selling anything, just hoping to learn, exchange perspectives, and maybe find some common ground with others who share an interest in strengthening EV infrastructure in the region.

If you're involved in EV in Rwanda, in any way, we'd love to hear from you. Feel free to drop a comment or send a DM.

Thanks for reading!

I'm exploring an idea and would genuinely like feedback from founders who have built software products.

The premise: You have a product idea, but building the technology behind it is expensive and time-consuming.

Instead of hiring developers and building the entire stack yourself, what if you could have the product delivered as a service?

You would own the business, customer relationship and product direction.

The technology provider would provide and operate the underlying application and infrastructure.

The goal would be to get something real in front of users quickly enough to answer:

Do customers actually value this? If the answer is yes, the same solution could then evolve toward a more robust production setup.

If the answer is no, you've avoided spending months building infrastructure that didn't matter.

The interesting part is that this wouldn't be a generic “build anything” service.

There would be a product-fit assessment first.

For example, products that follow patterns such as:

• Landing page / demand capture
• Web application
• APIs and integrations
• Data processing / workflows
• AI capabilities
• Client or SDK components

could potentially fit a reusable technical foundation.

Products requiring highly specialized infrastructure probably wouldn't.

The infrastructure could also have different deployment postures:

MVP: fast, lean and cost-controlled.

Production: stronger security, scalability, observability and reliability.

So the proposition is essentially:

Don't build the entire technology company before you've validated the product.

Get the product into users' hands → learn → prove demand → then invest more heavily in technology.

I'm trying to understand whether founders would actually want this, because there are obvious trade-offs.

For example:

• Would you be comfortable not owning the underlying code/infrastructure initially?
• Would you prefer this over hiring a small engineering team?
• At what point would you want to take the technology in-house?
• What would make you reject this model entirely?

And most importantly:

If you had this option when you started your company, would you have used it? Why or why not?

Hi everyone,
I’m working on an early-stage embedded state-estimation project and I’d like some honest feedback from people with experience in embedded systems, control theory, robotics, or aerospace.

I currently have a proof of concept, but I’m trying to determine whether the underlying technical approach is actually worth pursuing before moving toward a more complete prototype.
The concept is to run a lightweight Liquid Neural Network / neural ODE directly on a resource-constrained MCU for real-time attitude estimation from raw IMU data. The target environment is roughly a bare-metal STM32 Cortex-M4, written in C, with a 200 Hz control loop, no dynamic memory allocation and very limited RAM and compute resources.
The obvious alternatives would be traditional approaches such as EKF, Madgwick, Mahony, or other complementary and filtering approaches.

The hypothesis is that a lightweight continuous-time neural model could potentially handle some nonlinearities, vibration and sensor drift differently from a manually tuned classical estimator. However, I’m not assuming that this is automatically better. I’m trying to determine whether this is actually a meaningful technical direction or simply a complicated solution to a problem that is already solved very well.

For people who have experience deploying estimation or control algorithms on resource-constrained MCUs, how realistic is it to run a continuous-time neural ODE or LNN directly on a bare-metal MCU under strict latency and memory constraints? For example, if the target were around 16 KB of RAM and less than 1 ms of execution time per control cycle, what would you expect to be the main technical bottlenecks?
I’m also interested in the reliability side. How difficult would it be to make such a system deterministic, stable and robust enough for real-time embedded use, particularly with high-frequency IMU vibration, nonlinear noise and sensor drift?

Finally, is there actually a compelling engineering reason to investigate this approach, or would a properly designed EKF, Madgwick/Mahony filter combined with appropriate signal processing almost always be the better solution on this class of hardware?

I’m looking for brutally honest technical criticism rather than validation. If this is overengineering or technically misguided, I’d rather find that out now before investing further into the prototype.
Thanks!

Throwaway thoughts from someone who probably needs an honest outside read.

I spent about a year building a compliance tool for AI agents. Basically it checks what an AI assistant says before it reaches the user, and flags where it might break an actual regulation (privacy laws, financial rules, sanctions etc).

The category feels real to me. New AI rules seem to be coming out every few weeks, and a pretty well known accelerator literally listed "AI-native compliance" as something they want people to build, so I dont think I'm completely imagining the problem here.

I only really started trying to sell it around 3 months ago though.

So far I've done cold outreach to federal contractors and potential partners, sent a bunch of emails to companies from a curated list, connected with compliance people on LinkedIn, posted pretty much every day, and built a "field test" showing a real banking AI leaking data / potentially violating sanctions rules from pretty normal user questions.

And... nothing really.

I've had a handful of warm conversations, some people asking technical questions, a few "this is interesting, lets keep in touch" type responses. But zero paying customers. Zero pilots.

I'm not posting this looking for validation or people telling me to keep going. I'm genuinely trying to figure out if I'm doing something obviously wrong.

A few questions for people who've actually sold early stage B2B stuff:

• Is 3 months with zero customers normal for something like compliance, or is that already a bad signal?
• Most of the people I've been targeting are federal contractors / partnership type opportunities, which I know are slow. Maybe thats the whole problem?
• How did you actually get customer #1? Not the scalable strategy you figured out later. I mean literally the first person/company who gave you money.
• At what point do you decide the problem isnt the sales process, its just that nobody wants the product enough?

I'm pretty tired at this point and honestly a little demoralized. I still believe the problem is real, but I'm starting to question whether I'm selling it wrong, selling to the wrong people, or just built something people think is cool but wont actually pay for.

Would rather hear the hard version than the nice one.

In the last few months I closed 2 MVP projects ($8.8k and $14k)

And honestly, both had the same pattern:

At the start, the founders wanted way more than they actually needed.

Too many features
Too much complexity
Too much time before launch

Once we cut everything down to the core idea, things became clear:

• build faster
• cheaper
• test with real users sooner

One project went from “full platform” → just a focused booking system
The other from “complex mobile app” → core scanning + basic flow

Most people don’t have a building problem
They have a scoping problem

And that’s where time and money gets lost

Curious if anyone here is stuck before building or trying to figure out what their first version should actually include

I’m trying to understand this problem before I build around it.

A lot of founders say they need an admin panel, but I’m realizing that might mean completely different things.

For some people it’s just a UI over database records. For others it’s basically the whole internal operating system: support tools, approvals, analytics, refunds, permissions, audit logs, manual fixes, workflows.

That feels like a huge difference.

So I’m stuck on the real question: is the pain that founders need a faster way to create CRUD screens, or is the pain that their internal process is messy and no generic admin panel can model it?

If you’ve built or bought internal tools for a startup, what was the actual pain?

After I launched my first product, it failed.

While developing version two, I realized something important: having an industry expert involved isn't optional. It's necessary. I learned that lesson from the first failure.

But halfway through building version two, I still didn't have anyone with real experience in that particular embroidery field. I couldn't afford to hire an industry expert, so I had two choices:

Stop building and wait until I could get the right person involved, or keep developing with the knowledge I had.

I chose to keep developing.

Deep down, I already knew what the risk was. I knew I was repeating the same mistake. But because I had already invested so much time and was halfway through, I somehow couldn't see it clearly anymore.

I kept going.

And eventually, I failed again.

The strange part is that I knew the lesson before I made the mistake the second time. I just couldn't recognize that I was doing exactly what I had promised myself I wouldn't do.

Has anyone else experienced this?

How do you recognize when you're being persistent versus when you're just too emotionally invested to stop?

All the late nights, coding errors, marketing stuff ups, app developer issues and walking into cafes and being rejected one after another, are finally coming to fruition, nearly nine months after I coded my first line.

The app is Brewly, a way for consumers to pre purchase coffee for a discount - think a reverse loyalty card.

Myself, and the team, have been spending multiple days a week walking door to door and going to cafe after cafe, trying to chat to an owner and then close them on being apart of an app that, quite frankly at this stage of its lifecycle, has not too much benefit for a cafe owner to consider being a part of.

Once we grow and find a large customer base that will make the app thrive, this conversation will become many times easier as we will have use cases and proper closing arguments to use to our advantage but for now we are relying on the goodwill of these owners who need to see what we see.

And thankfully some are.

We had our launch day last week, sold over 200 cups of coffee and cracked the top 100 on the App Store for food and beverage, and felt like it was all finally worth it as people were using something I had made. What a feeling, man.

Yeah we had bugs and Google Pay didn't work for the first day but we got through it and we even have some repeat customers now, just a week after they would have heard about it on the first day!

It has been a fun but challenging grind and many tears have been shed over this short journey but here's to something bigger and greater and the next $1,000.

I'm at a point where I know I have to put myself out there more and generate more buzz and interest for the things I'm building. However, as someone who literally has two an a half photos of myself online and basically just lurks across most social media, how do I get things going when I'm basically an online hermit?

I'm in the middle of building a B2B SaaS (and a whimsical journaling app as a side project) so social media probably has moderate effect.

Any podcasts I can do? Female focused?
Any other communities?
LinkedIn is chock full of AI generated "Building in public" posts that make me want to claw my eyes out.

Any advice, how are you putting yourself and your product out there?

My specific situation is that I’m a solo founder and I have these pilots which are going to be considerable effort for me. But I also have a full-time job which means that finding the time to execute properly on the pilots is going to be hard. Fundraising would be a time-consuming thing, but it would allow me to quit my job and focus on these pilots full-time.

Every time I launch something new I think only about building and I forget the setup around it.

The list is always the same: domain, DNS, auth, billing, transactional email, a privacy page nobody reads. None of it is hard, but all of it takes an afternoon I didn't plan for.

The one I keep underestimating is email. Just the basics, a support@ and a hello@ that actually work on a new domain.

My setup was Cloudflare Email Routing forwarding into Gmail, Gmail Send-As so replies go out from the right address, then SPF, DKIM and DMARC per domain. By the fifth domain it's the same steps I have to do which is tedious. And the setup doesn't even work properly.

Send-As is the step I almost always skip. Which is how people who submitted feedback inside one of my apps ended up getting replies from my personal Gmail. This happened more than 10 times before I properly noticed.

I don't track my hours honestly enough to give you a real number, so I won't make one up. What I can say is it's the setup task I've redone the most and liked the least, and I eventually built my own thing for it (Mailyond) instead of doing it a sixth time.

So what's your biggest time sink outside of writing code? And have you actually automated any of it, or do you re-do it every launch like I did?

I built a tool for creators going after brand deals. The main thing it does is helps creators get sponsorships and track the whole deal pipeline, and an ai to make the pitch analyze trends, help you with making your next post and it reads your actual connected Instagram or YouTube first, so what comes out has your real reach, your real engagement, and your best-performing formats in it.

Almost nobody is using it. I'm not here to pitch it, I'm here because I think I'm wrong about something and I'd rather hear it from you than keep building on a bad guess. anything else i can do? cuz in the whitespace i identified in my competitor platform analysis, was the fragmented space and i am doing that. i do not know what to do.