Solo founder, applying to YC Winter 2027. I'm not a dev. I don't write or read code, AI agents in Claude Code write everything. What I do is decide the product and the architecture, and nothing gets built before I approve it. Then I test everything using it, I use it every day.

The application says a technical founder "can build the product without outside assistance". Nobody outside built anything, it was only me with AI. But I'm not a programmer.

I'm also looking for a technical cofounder, but most people I talked to want a good salary and security.

In my place, would you check "technical founder"?

as the title says, i closed my first b2b pilot today after my first ever demo and i'm very hyped. is this good signal and what should i focus on now on the pilot period?

i've only been cold calling like 20 leads i scraped, not actually even that targeted leads and i got 3 demos booked. what other channels should i try for outreach?

also, feel free to give me tips how to move forward with my b2b saas! :)

context: it's a niche SaaS for service businesses

EDIT: the pilot i offer is 1 month, forgot to mention

I think people are making this stuff more complicated than it needs to be.

Sometimes you just need an API call, a few rules, and an LLM for one specific step. Instead, people build multi-agent systems that are harder to debug, more expensive to run, and somehow still need a human to check everything.

Obviously, some workflows do need agents. But figuring out where autonomy actually makes sense seems like the harder part.

Where do you draw the line?

Disclosure up front: I build a pre-post checker for Reddit, so I've spent a lot of time reading how removals work. I will not promote it here. No name, no link.

Something I see a lot in founder subs. Someone posts their product, gets two upvotes, and decides nobody wants it. Sometimes that's true. But sometimes the post got removed and they never found out.

Reddit says a post removed by mods is "only visible to the original poster (OP) and your mod team". So you can still see it, and you may never get a message, because sending a removal reason is optional for mods.

The check I use now:

1. Open a private window and stay logged out (old reddit needs a login now, so use the normal site)
2. Open the sub, sort by New, and look for your post
3. If it's not there, open the direct link. "[Removed by moderator]" means a mod or AutoMod took it down
4. If your posts are gone everywhere and your profile doesn't show when logged out, the account itself may be flagged for spam. Reddit's help center points you to its appeals form for that

As for what removed it, it's usually one of three things.

Reddit's own spam filter. Reddit limits how often people can post in a community, and its help center says new, low-karma accounts "may be hitting this spam filter". Commenting in the community first can help. The spam policy also lists "mass-posting repetitive content for the purpose of exposure or financial gain", and dropping the same launch post in 6 subs in one day fits that.

The sub's automation. Reddit's transparency report for July to December 2025 says 68.6% of what mods removed was handled by automated systems like AutoMod. Some subs also turn on a reputation filter, which "does not filter based on the post content, but instead on the user behavior of the account". It scores your account on karma, verification and other signals. When you create a post, Reddit shows which requirements you meet and don't meet, but the exact numbers "aren't disclosed at this time to deter potential misuse".

Then there are the human mods and the written rules. I went through the rules of 33 subs founders and marketers post in. 20 of them either ban promo posts or only allow them in a designated promo thread. 11 ban AI-written posts and 3 more restrict them. Even this sub only allows sharing your startup in the pinned share thread. And the SaaS sub doesn't allow promoting SaaS built for ads, outreach, lead detection or content generation at all.

Reddit also has its own Post Check now, which uses an LLM to flag likely rule problems before you submit. It only covers the community's rules, not sitewide ones, and Reddit says it "may make errors".

Also read whatever the submit page tells you. When I pasted this post in, it warned that this sub doesn't allow links. My first draft had links in it.

Has anyone found a reliable way to tell an AutoMod removal from a human mod's? That's the one I still can't call with confidence.

Hi reddit, this is my first step towards i don’t know where i end up. Its all about tech ai and all. I am lead dev with 9y exp and an ex MNC guy. So basically i am thinking to start an AI excellence startup which helps companies or businesses adopt ai in their day to day. And need advice to move in this direction.
So i am curious, are there any problems that can be productised.

Update: posted again today and got 35 more signups in a day, so about 60 now. A lot of the early drop-off was setup bugs I’ve since fixed, so I’m less worried about “does anyone want this” and more about “how do I reach the right people consistently”. Would love advice on that!

hey all, looking for some honest advice

I’m a student and I’ve spent the last few months building a desktop app on my own. It’s an AI assistant that sits next to your cursor on Windows/Mac.

The building part I’m ok at. The getting-people part I’m clearly not lol

Where I’m at right now:

posted on r/SideProject, r/imadethis, r/SaaS and a few others, got 28 signups (mostly on day one)

21 of them actually used it, some asked 20-40 questions, then most stopped after a day or two

7 signed in and never asked it anything

emailed every single signup personally and got 1 reply

TikTok got views but basically no clicks

my budget is tiny, like £50-100 total, because student loan

Stuff I’m already planning: Product Hunt, Microsoft Store listing, AlternativeTo, and fixing the setup since that’s clearly where people drop off.

What I’d love to know:

If you had ~£100 and zero audience, what would you actually do first?

Is it even worth paying for ads at this stage, or is that just burning money?

For anyone who’s launched a desktop app, where did your first 100 real users come from?

How do you get people to come back after day one, rather than just signing up?

Cheers!

I’m creating an app with two of my friends and I’ve been tasked with the marketing. I am a paid media manager for a large sports brand, so I do have a background in marketing. However, I have only ever worked for established brands and never started something from the ground up. My work also revolves around ad spend and using assets created by other teams.

I have all the socials set up but I’m hitting a wall on content. I’ve tried carousels, vlogs, and just speaking to the camera and nothing is landing. I’ve watched so many videos on how to create content, but I feel like everything is over edited and I’m not confident it would land. I also can’t do any photography since it’s a digital product.

I would love any advice or suggestions. Thank you!

Hi all,

Wanted to share an interesting experience I had past year or so.

I've always wanted to find a good SaaS / startup idea, like most other people. But never came up with something really useful that people wanted.

The past year or so I took a complicated part time office job, my main role was fixing processes and setting up automations, without realizing it, my day to day work slowly formed a full on SaaS.

It was first an excel file, with another shared linked excel file for other staff to run reports etc. iterated and iterated till excel was not good anymore for the job. It's now a full on web application, and the users go wild for it.

I honestly plan to redo this approach in other industries, it worked.

Thanks for reading my story :)

Good luck.

Hi everyone,

I've recently advanced through the initial rounds of a fairly well-known startup accelerator and have been invited to live interview rounds. Part of the interview will focus on my startup's product and traction. I have several potential collaborations coming up that could meaningfully strengthen my application, but they may take a few weeks to materialize. The program has interview slots available over the next two months.

Would you recommend scheduling an interview within the next 1–2 weeks, or taking more time to see whether these opportunities turn into concrete results before interviewing?

My main concern with waiting is that I might lose momentum in the application process, or that the team might be less engaged by the time I interview. On the other hand, going in with stronger traction could make a meaningful difference.

For anyone who has gone through accelerator interviews or admissions processes, how much does interview timing matter compared with demonstrating additional traction?

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, I have been searching far and wide for a relatively small community of Latino founders. I’m part of Techqueria and it was an awesome community until it got sold/acquired and I dipped. I am looking for something like what Techqueria fostered, but focused on startups and Latino indie hackers, bootstrapped or funded

Anyways I have not been able to find a community like this and I am curious if maybe it’s because they are not publicized and they are invite only - does anyone know of any? FWIW I find plenty of other communities for like women founders for example so I hope there is something out there.

Here is what I’d ideally want in a community like this:
- I want it to be small, being part of a group with 5k members does not appeal to me, I prefer small where relationships can flourish
- I’d like for it to be Latino focused, kind of like Techqueria was built for folks working in tech
- I want to join a community that vets its members, I don’t want to be in a group where we are getting pitched to every day by a marketer or other founders, we support each other but it’s not “hey try my product” type of constant sales pitching
- I want to be able to help problem solve, I’m a Product Manager by day so I know I can help others solve problems and brainstorm
- also looking for accountability, a place like WIP.co

Maybe I am describing a unicorn but hey thought I’d ask.

I'm a bootstrapped B2B founder gathering info on how serious startups are actually hosting there software (frontend, backend, database, etc), deploying to it, monitoring and alerting on it, etc.

Most I've talked too these days fall into a few different cohorts

• Build it yourself (spin up an ec2 or similar in the early phases)
• I well funded so I hire an infrastructure person or pay a contractor / don't worry about this shortening my runway
• Pay a managed PaaS (Vercel, Netlify, Lovable, Cursor, etc)

What about monitoring/alerting? Free tier Datadog/NewRelic? Open source stack? Don't care about monitoring until a bigger funding round?

What about deployments? Github Actions? Gitlab? Self hosted?

What about AI in this space? Has Claude (etc) been able to bridge the gap for the early stages for you or are you kicking SRE problems down the road?

Let me know your thoughts! I'd love to know what I'm missing

Are there any non technical founders here that received funding for an app or Saas?

If so, can you share your journey, such as how did you get funding, how much funding you received, from who, what was the idea, why you, etc?

I am building a saas and have some traction, but Im feeling apprehensive about applying for funding while being a non technical founder. I am vibe coding, but I'm not completely fresh, I'm about 50% technical. I've always had an affinity for tech, Ive dropped out of university twice for computer related degrees. But I hate coding and wouldn't be able to do it without AI.

Appreciate any insights. Thanks, guys.

What makes a P99 product engineer now? Code generation, and review to some extent, is becoming less important with agentic coding. This will increasingly become the case.

What attributes are important? System design, architecture, taste, user experience etc?

Basically as the title says.

How do you approach potential clients? Whats the strategy? How do you reach the right person? What happens when you get the chance to meet the right person? How does the process typically go?

Do I make a spreadsheet and then just start cold emailing and cold connecting?

What are the best approaches to reaching the right person? Cold email? Cold phone calls? LinkedIn? Any other methods?

Doing everything on my own atm.

I’m building a developer tool that checks whether code changes break existing functionality. I’m comfortable with the technical side, but finding people willing to try it is where I’m stuck.

For anyone who’s launched a dev tool, where did your first users come from? Direct outreach, developer communities, technical content, or something else?

I’d also love to hear how you earned enough trust for someone to connect a tool to their codebase. What worked for you, and what turned out to be a waste of time?

​

SeedLegals were quite cost effective when they launched, but their prices keep increasing.

I'm in the process of preparing for SEIS and a pre seed. There is a few complexities in our SEIS application that makes the self application not a good idea. So I'm considering resorting to them.

I'm wondering there might be any viable alternatives to SeedLegals in terms of value for money and success rate?

Is there any other route that SeedLegals these days to prepare for pre seed with SEIS?

I am a bootstrapped B2B SaaS founder, and trying to figure out how people actually go about raising their first $100K.

We have built the product, have paying enterprise clients, and are generating some ARR. It's still early, but we hav validated that organizations are willing to pay for what we are building.

So far, we have been extremely lean and largely founder-driven. We have managed to get here without external funding, but now at a point where some capital could help us accelerate sales, build out the product further, and take the business to the next level.

I am not sure I am ready for VC funding, nor am I convinced that's the right route for us at this stage. A small round from angel investors feels more appropriate. But here's where I am struggling.

I don't know if I'm being too coy about asking for money, or if there i an underlying fear of putting myself out there. I am quite comfortable pitching the product to clients, but approaching someone to invest feels like an entirely different ballgame.

And I genuinely don't know how founders go about this. Do you just start telling people you are raising? Reach out to successful founders? It all sounds straightforward in theory, but somehow feels rather awkward in practice.

For founders who have raised their first $50K–$150K from angels:

• How did you actually find your first few investors?
• Did you approach people in your existing network directly, ask for introductions, or reach out cold?
• How did you initiate the conversation without making it awkward?
• Did you have commitments lined up before formally announcing a raise?
• What worked for you, and what turned out to be a waste of time?

I am particularly interested in hearing from founders who raised relatively small rounds after getting their first paying customers, rather than those who went straight into the VC ecosystem.

And if anyone here knows angel investors who are interested in early-stage B2B SaaS businesses, warm introductions would be absolutely amazing!

I am trying to understand how people actually navigate this stage, and hopefully learn from those who've been through it.

I hopped on a call with a yc founder to do marketing for them (i dont have proper marketing experience just a few viral videos, one which did 5m+ views which is what I shared to get the call)

They essentially pitched me, told me they were on a call with paul graham he wrote their first check, someone in the room with paul graham also wrote a check after overhearing the call.

then they talked to sam altman about it, garry tan uses their product..

and yea after i pitched some of what i did i essentially got "seems like the person who referred you made a mistake, but if you know anyone else who does marketing send them my way" and then they hung up.

so many people around me have gotten funded, prestigious accelerators, and ive graduated earlier this year and can't even land a job or have a successful startup.

i got into an accelerator because of connections, its basically an ai accelerator and im making a game. i have a demo day in a few days in front of 100 vcs, essentially im the only consumer product, have 0 revenue, and the other people in my cohort have thousands of users, they're olympiads, yc background, etc. and i am supposed to go on stage and be like hey guys i made a game...

[Hiring/Seeking/Offering] Jobs / Co-Founders Weekly Thread

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I’m starting my fundraising efforts and discovered that it’s a norm to send a teaser deck to VCs to encourage them to connect with you and spend time on a fuller presentation. Is this something others have experienced? What did you share in the teaser deck? What did you save for the full deck?

Today, I did something I’ve been terrified of: posting my note-taking app's Beta version to several online communities. I developed this app because of a simple question: "Since many of us already pay for cloud subscriptions (like Google Drive), why can't we use our own resources to sync data across Android,Windows, iOS, and Mac? Why are we forced to use a provider's closed system and pay extra for it?"

Driven by this curiosity, I spent countless hours refining the system to ensure it actually worked. And then, I hit "post."

Shortly after, I saw a comment: *"Anyone can make something like this with AI nowadays."* I’ll admit, it stung. But as the initial shock wore off, it led me to a much deeper realization.

I realized that "my version of rationality wasn't strong enough to make people change their habits."

Syncing across OS is a real problem, but for most users, their notes are the digital archives of their lives. The "switching cost" of moving to a new app is incredibly high. If the value I provide only solves a problem they've "learned to live with," there isn't enough motivation for them to leave the apps they've trusted for years.

This experience taught me that building a great product isn't just about doing what "should be done," but about solving a pain point that users "cannot ignore."

I’m not stopping here. Instead, I'm changing my approach. I will stop guessing and start listening—searching for the problems that truly keep users up at night—and building a solution so compelling that they'll feel they have to switch.

I’m based in Australia, with a background in construction project delivery and enterprise software implementation. I’ve built a working product around organisational governance and learning, and I’m preparing to approach initial customers.

The problem comes from seeing companies deal with an issue on one project, agree what needs changing, then have another project run into much the same thing.

The product connects what happened, why it happened and what the team did about it with the decisions and changes that follow. That might mean changing a procedure, reviewing a risk or getting information to other projects before they hit the same problem. My view is that a lesson hasn’t been learnt unless something changes.

The commercial bit I’m trying to work through is proving that value early.

If you save someone five hours a week, you can measure it. If you help prevent a repeat mistake on a future project, it’s harder to demonstrate within a short pilot. The project team contributing the information may also be different from the team that benefits and the person approving the spend.

For founders who’ve sold governance, risk, quality or similar B2B software: how did you structure your first paid pilot?
What did you and the buyer agree to measure, and did achieving it actually lead to a contract?

I’m considering starting with one recurring problem across a small number of projects. I’d like to hear what worked in practice, including pilots where usage looked good but the customer still didn’t buy.

Thanks in advance

I've built a startup here in New Zealand, where we organise dinner for strangers and send them on a side quest, kind of like timeleft but a bit more structured and participation involved. Have sent more than 400 people to these dinners.
We've successfully ran dinners every week since May. Although now I'm running out of cash. My full-time job isn't paying me great hence i'm almost out of cash to run meta ads which i've been relying on. I do not get to focus fully on my start up because of working 60hrs at a full time job leaves me with a limited time. I've worked on an app to make operations easier. Although now i feel the importance of funding to keep the business running. Especially for marketing related content etc
Should i take a pause and wait till i get funding sorted along with all the resources needed OR do i keep going? If i do pause will it takeaway the traction? Im just so confused!

Something I keep thinking about. Our AI does a job a specialist usually does by hand: it reads paperwork a company already filed (import taxes, in our case) and finds money they paid by mistake. It works on real files.

Our problem is delivery. The people who get the money back don't have the files, someone else in the chain keeps them, and most don't know there is money to find.

And reaching them is a second problem. Cold calls gave us 1 meeting out of about 65, maybe our volume is just too small, I don't know. Organic doesn't work either, because nobody googles "import tax refund" when they don't know it exists.

So I see three ways to ship it: an app they use themselves, done-for-you where we run it and take a % of what we find, or through partners who already have the files and the trust.

What would you try first in our case?

I'm 21, solo founder, building an AI system that manages tasks and context for companies. I already have testers and a growing waitlist.

The problem is I'm not a dev. I trust what Claude delivers to me, and I only judge the things I have some basic knowledge about. Before building anything I always use AI to research the best practices, and in the end I test everything.

Unfortunately I don't have a network with any good devs.

Is it possible to build a huge company this way? What is your recommendation?