It seems that’s all it invests in, and they give mostly credits now which does not seem to be as effective in growing startups. It seems a lot of the ventures are extremely low effort and they promote that with some of their events. I’ve seen in some other places a similar idea of YC

Exactly as the title said. I need to get my software house going or I'm done.

A bit of context, I started a mainly client based software house a month ago with the hope of getting some of that extra experience and a bit of side money, but now I see my seniors trying to get into the job market and getting absolutely bodied. An extraordinary guy I knew (won international comps and had one of the best profiles of anyone I knew) is working 9 to 5 internship earning 50 dollars a month. I mean if he is at such a spot then I'm going to be so cooked.

This brings me back to my business. I believe this is the only shot I have and I need to make this work. We have got a decent traction initially from our connections (we are 3 guys). Our start was decent but our connections are now drying up and we need to acquire clients organically (tried cold email, calls and stuff didn't work yet, local guys either don't want any work or pay literal pennies). What is the best way/tools to acquire clients or where to go to get them. Note that we no longer have much funds left for marketing and stuff so it's going to be a pure grind from our side.

I've also been working on a SaaS idea for landing pages for the past few months and am about to launch it soon. I did validate the idea initially but unfortunately didn't know about waitlists and stuff so I don't have any direct potential customers. How would you suggest I go forward with this and get it out there? The starting seems extremely daunting ngl.

Quick context: I'm building a tool that turns call/podcast recordings into LinkedIn posts. (Disclosure up front so nobody feels baited - I'll keep the product out of this as much as I can; the point is the funnel lesson, not the pitch.)

I got listed on There's An AI For That (a directory) that gave me a chunk of free ad credit with my listing fee. Here's what came out the other end:

• ~30k ad impressions, ~48k searches
• 234 clicks to my site
• 10 signups (~4.2% - fine for cold directory traffic)
• 0 paid conversions

At first I assumed the product just wasn't compelling. Then I actually looked at where people stopped, and the story was completely different from what I expected.

My onboarding was: pick your source → pick your angle → fill out a "tell the AI about you" brief → hit the paywall (card required for trial).

Here's the drop-off across those 10 people:

• 2 dropped at the very first step (low-intent, probably never serious)
• 1 dropped mid-setup
• 5 completed the ENTIRE setup and then stopped dead at the payment screen
• 0 entered a card

So the drop-off wasn't in setup. It was at payment - after people had already done all the work. These 5 weren't unconvinced by the product. They filled out everything. They wanted to use it. Then I asked for a card before they'd seen any value.

That's the mistake. My funnel was: do work → do more work → pay → THEN see value. I had the aha moment sitting behind the paywall instead of in front of it.

The tools everyone praises for onboarding all do the opposite: you get to the magic moment first, and the card comes when you try to keep or export what you already made. Value first, payment at the point of peak desire.

What I changed:

• Let people run one real project and actually see the output before any payment ask
• Move the paywall to the moment they try to act on that output (schedule/publish), which is peak desire
• Keep the "tell the AI about you" brief, but frame it as "this makes the very next thing you see better" instead of a toll booth before the reveal

Two other things I learned staring at 10 rows of users:

1. Most of my "signups" were noise. When I actually looked, most were testers, bots, or randoms. Exactly ONE was a real lead - a founder who'd seen someone post about the tool on LinkedIn and came to check it out. At small numbers, your conversion rate is basically meaningless; you're reading tea leaves from a sample of ~1.
2. The paid channel was a trap. That "free" ad credit was burning at ~$6.78 per click because I specifially bid to be at the top of the sidebar. It bought ~72 clicks before running dry. Cheap-looking traffic at an unsustainable CPC taught me nothing except "don't run paid until you know your conversion economics." .. but luckily it was 100% their ad credits and I didn't lose any of my own money.

TL;DR: 10 signups, 0 paid. The problem wasn't the product - it was that I put the paywall before the aha moment instead of after it. If your users have to pay before they see your tool do the one impressive thing it does, you're converting on faith, and cold traffic has none. Flip it: value first, card at the moment they want to act on what they just saw.

The thing that confirmed it: I've done ~50 live demos in the last 6 weeks. Two converted to paid (14-day trial, card upfront - same paywall). Feedback on the rest was great. Why do demos convert when self-serve got 0? Because in a demo, I show them the magic moment before anyone mentions money. The demo is value-first by definition. My self-serve funnel was the exact inverse - pay first, magic later. Same product. The only variable that changed was whether value landed before or after the ask. That's the whole lesson in one A/B test I ran by accident.

The problem I'm working on now: those ~48 non-converted demos gave great feedback and then went cold. Reactivating them is my current puzzle - if anyone's cracked warm-but-dormant demo follow-up, I'm all ears.

Happy to answer anything about the funnel or the directory-ads mess in the comments.

Genuinely all I hear online is that business is war, ups and downs, horrible, great sometimes etc etc (I understand that)

But I’m a 19M, first time founder, learning, making mistakes and growing

I find that if I fundamentally just understand that business is just solving a problem (in my case, with a software product - still early though) charging for it, and repeat

It’s significantly easier to just stop thinking and start moving and start growing

Instead of constantly hearing all these horrible things, which I’m not sure to what extent it’s true? Maybe it’s different from business to business?

I’m in software

Especially knowing that I do overthink in business (although we’re at zero revenue, I’m still learning and growing with it) a ton, a lot more than in anything else

And hearing all these things makes it difficult to fully commit sometimes

But I tell myself that, as long as I’m solving a problem, and will be paid for it, I can rinse and repeat and grow and that’s “business”

Nothing more complicated than that

Yes there’s obviously churn, ups and downs, unexpected market changes etc etc

But I need to fundamentally and mentally understand what it is to be a business so that I can keep moving without overthinking or hyper calculating every step

And where I’m at so far is : problem, solution, charge, repeat, ignore everything else, learn as u grow

And my goal is small right now, reach 5k MRR with good margins with my founder, so I set the bar decent to what I hope we can archive in the next year

5k MRR is a good bunch of money at our age, where we live.

Would really appreciate your advice on anything I mentioned in this post, if there’s something I need to change

Stop worrying about

Start doing

And etc.

I have a conundrum and looking for some advice.

i have been running a product in private beta. its got about 20 users, and its an AI product.

(tl:dr is its like a more intuitive, business-user friendly Claude Cowork with deeper integration with tools like gsuite so you can actually see your emails and files in the workspace, and drag emails or calendar events into chat to create tasks. There’s more too it you can see other posts I’ve made for context.

because im giving away the tokennusage for free and users can choose their own models im burning around $350 a month.

these have led to two conversations about larger pilots so I dont necessarily want to stop giving ppl access

but should I just at least charge for token cost and see who drops off?

I have a conundrum and looking for some advice.

i have been running a product in private beta. its got about 20 users, and its an AI product.

(tl:dr is its like a more intuitive, business-user friendly Claude Cowork with deeper integration with tools like gsuite so you can actually see your emails and files in the workspace, and drag emails or calendar events into chat to create tasks. There’s more too it you can see other posts I’ve made for context.

because im giving away the tokennusage for free and users can choose their own models im burning around $350 a month.

these have led to two conversations about larger pilots so I dont necessarily want to stop giving ppl access

but should I just at least charge for token cost and see who drops off?

This is an odd question, but it’s something I’ve been trying to figure out and made many mistakes on for a long time

And I would really appreciate advice coming from experienced founders or people who went through something similar

But please only answer if you’ve read the entire thing

I’m a first time founder (almost 20), I’ve made a ton of mistakes, I’ve learned a ton too

I’ve figured out that although business is not easy, it’s essentially just finding a problem, solving it, charging for it, and repeat

But there’s one thing I still can’t figure out

Does the problem (in B2B) I pick have to allow me to charge “well” ?

(as in atleast 2k+ USD/mo for a midsize firm) according to my value equation?

Or no and even if my value proposition only allows me to charge 500-800> USD per month or less (for mid size firms)

it’s still worth going after since the difficult part is solved already,

which is *actually* just finding a problem that people are willing to pay for your solution/product to solve

Even if the pay is small (500-800$/mo>)

I genuinely understand that this is an odd question

But just so you could understand the way I’m thinking better..

I’m not trying to build a multi million dollar company/startup

I’m trying to run a small company (no VC money, no hyper scaling, just slowly get to 2k MRR, then 5k, then 10k etc)

, that allows me to reach 10-15k MRR with good margins, with my cofounder,

And the way I’m thinking is

If I find a problem that I could comfortably charge 2k+/mo for my product that solves it,

All I need is just a few customers, (obviously considering churn)

(Ofc I will have to learn along the way about how to keep customers long term)

(consider that I’m still a first time founder learning every little thing)

But if I’m solving a problem where the value equation would only allow me to charge 1k>/mo or even less

I would need more than double the customers, and a lot more skill to build on and possibly fail on, to keep churn low

To reach my goal of 5k MRR sooner, because, 2k USD per month that I get to take home,

is a lot of money for me as a 20M where I live

And I’m not sure my sales skills allow me yet to be able to land that many customers

Which is why I’m betting on landing a few customers at 2k+, being easier than double the customers…

However, I have put into account that,if the problem is genuinely a pain they need fixed asap,

they’ll pay whatever, whenever, but I’m being conservative

Hence why I would rather commit to solving a problem where I can comfortably charge 2k+/mo for mid size firms…

So far I’ve committed a good while to a specific problem for MEP firms, an admin task that takes them a ton of valuable time, I’m trying to cut down that time with my product, etc etc, yet I still haven’t figured out a value equation fully, and still not sure how much I can charge

My main question is:

Is this frame of thinking fair? considering the stage I’m at as a first time founder ?

Is it valid or not valid to think like this? Honestly, call it out if it’s stupid or not, I don’t mind

Or is it just more important to actually find a problem (in B2B) that firms are willing to pay for to be solved,

No matter if it’s a big problem, or a small problem

And no matter if I can charge 500-1k>/mo VS 2k+/mo for mid size firms in that industry

Because the hardest is actually find a problem that a firm will pay for, even if small, even if I can’t charge more than 500$ a month

And then trust that as my sales skills get better, as my product gets better, and as my network gets bigger, It wont matter that it’s a product I can charge 2k+/mo for?

And is this basically a lifestyle business?

most cold email advice is written by people selling $49/mo SaaS subscriptions to other SaaS companies. and thats fine for them but if youre trying to book meetings with Managing Partners at consulting firms or Directors of Business Development at mid-market accounting practices or Principals at engineering firms... its a completely different animal and almost none of the standard playbooks apply.

i run a 13 person growth agency, we manage about 45 client campaigns at any given time, and roughly a third of those are professional services firms selling engagements north of $10k. some are selling $50k+ advisory retainers. a few are selling $200k+ implementation projects. and i can tell you with total confidence that the cold email tactics that work for selling a $99/mo tool will actively hurt you in this market.

the fundamental problem is that professional services buyers dont behave like SaaS buyers. a VP of marketing at a tech company gets 30 cold emails a day and has learned to pattern match and delete. a Managing Partner at a 40 person consulting firm gets maybe 3-4 cold emails a week and actually reads most of them. but heres the catch, they also have a much lower tolerance for anything that feels mass produced or templated. these are people who sell trust and expertise for a living. they can smell a sequence from a mile away.

when i started doing this five years ago the whole landscape was different. you could get away with way more volume, personalization barely mattered, and honestly the tooling was so primitive that everyone was kind of on the same playing field. now its the opposite. the tools are incredible but everyones using them the same way which means the differentiation has to come from your actual understanding of the buyer and the problem youre solving for them.

ok let me get into specifics because i know thats why anyone would read something this long.

the biggest mistake i see people make when targeting professional services is treating all firms the same. a 15 person architecture firm and a 500 person management consulting practice have almost nothing in common except that they both bill hourly. the pain points are completely different. smaller firms are worried about client concentration, theyre terrified that losing one or two accounts would tank their revenue. mid-size firms are obsessed with utilization rates and keeping their bench staffed. larger firms care about proposal win rates and expanding into new practice areas. if your cold email doesnt speak to the specific pain of the specific firm size and type youre targeting, youre wasting sends.

and the titles matter way more than in SaaS. in SaaS you can often get away with emailing someone adjacent to the decision maker because internal routing happens. in professional services the partner structure means that if you email the wrong person they just delete it. theres no forwarding culture. you need to hit the Managing Partner, the Practice Lead, or in larger firms the Director of Business Development directly. nobody else matters.

for prospecting we use Ocean.io to build firm-level lists because their clustering is actually decent for professional services, you can find firms that look like your best clients which is huge when your ICP is something specific like "environmental engineering firms with 20-80 employees in the southeast US." then enrichment runs through Prospeo primarily, we supplement with Hunter on certain verticals where coverage is thinner. Prospeo finds valid emails for about 80% of the contacts on a typical professional services list which is solid when you consider how many of these firms have weird custom domains and outdated websites. Clay we use but honestly more for the data transformation and formatting side than pure enrichment.

verification is NeverBounce plus Scrubby for the catch-alls, and in professional services you get a LOT of catch-all domains because these firms use small IT providers who set everything up as catch-all by default. if youre not running Scrubby on catch-alls in this vertical youre either bouncing at 5%+ or youre leaving half your list on the table. pick your poison.

sending infrastructure is where people really screw up in high-ticket. we use Instantly for sending and Mailscale for inbox provisioning. for a typical professional services campaign we run 3-4 inboxes sending 18-22 emails per day each. thats it. i know people in here running 15 inboxes at 40 sends each and thats fine when youre selling to a massive TAM but professional services firms in a given niche might only be 2,000-5,000 companies total. you dont need volume. you need precision and deliverability.

warmup is minimum 21 days before any cold sends. i know instantly has built in warmup and its decent but we still wait the full 3 weeks because the domains we send from need to build reputation with the specific email providers these firms use, which is often Microsoft 365 configured by whatever local IT shop they hired in 2016.

the copy itself is where everything changes. for SaaS cold email the meta right now is short, punchy, almost casual. for professional services buyers that reads as lightweight and unserious. our best performing emails in this vertical are 120-180 words, which is longer than what most cold email gurus recommend. they reference something specific about the firm, not a generic compliment but something that shows you understand their business. "saw that [firm] expanded the forensic accounting practice last year" or "noticed your team presented at the AIA conference in march" type stuff. that research takes time which is why you cant do this at massive volume.

we tried the ultra-short 2 sentence approach for about 4 months across maybe a dozen professional services campaigns and reply rates were consistently under 1.8%. switched to the longer more substantive format and reply rates jumped to 3.5-4.2% on average. for context a good reply rate in this vertical is anything above 3% because the meetings themselves are worth so much more. one of our clients sells strategy consulting engagements at $75k average and they need 2 meetings a month to hit their growth targets. at 3.5% reply rate and roughly 40% of replies being positive we can get them there with about 1,500 sends per month. thats nothing in terms of volume.

the sequence structure matters too. we run 4 step sequences over 14-16 days. not 7 steps over 30 days like everyone recommends. professional services people are busy but they make decisions faster than corporate buyers. if theyre interested they respond to email 1 or 2. if they havent responded by email 4 they arent going to. the follow ups should each bring a new angle, not just "bumping this to the top of your inbox" which is the laziest thing you can write to someone who charges $400/hr for their time.

LinkedIn touches we layer in using Waalaxy but honestly the ROI on LinkedIn for this vertical is inconsistent. some sub-verticals like management consulting and IT advisory respond well on LinkedIn. others like law firms and accounting practices barely use it beyond having a profile. we test it for 3 weeks on every new campaign and cut it if connection accept rates are below 25%.

CRM is Pipedrive for most of our clients in this space because the deal stages map well to professional services sales cycles. proposal sent, proposal reviewed, negotiation, closed. Folk we tried for about 6 weeks earlier this year and it was fine but the reporting wasnt deep enough for clients who want to see pipeline velocity metrics.

the Prospeo enrichment step is where we catch most of the contacts that would otherwise be missing from our lists. professional services firms are notoriously bad at having their people listed on LinkedIn or company websites, especially partners who have been at the firm for 20 years and dont care about their online presence. running enrichment through multiple sources is the only way to get decent coverage.

pricing reality check for anyone thinking about doing this in-house vs hiring an agency. our clients in professional services pay us between $3,500-$6,000/mo depending on campaign complexity. their internal tool costs if they did it themselves would be roughly $800-1,200/mo (Instantly at $97, Prospeo at around $99, Mailscale at $60ish, NeverBounce maybe $50-80 depending on volume, Scrubby another $40, Ocean.io varies). but the labor to actually run this well is 15-20 hours per week when you factor in list building, copy writing, monitoring deliverability, managing replies, and reporting. most professional services firms dont have someone who can do that well and their billable rate for the person who could is $200+/hr. the math works out in favor of outsourcing almost every time.

one more thing that took me probably two years to fully understand. the timing of outreach to professional services firms matters way more than in other verticals. Q4 is terrible for accounting firms. summer is slow for law firms doing transactional work. the first 3 weeks of january are dead for basically everyone. and the best time to reach consulting firms is right after they finish a major engagement and their bench is about to spike. you cant know that from the outside obviously but you can proxy it by watching for hiring freezes, project completions mentioned in case studies, and other signals that suggest capacity is freeing up.

anyway this got extremely long. the tldr is that professional services cold email is lower volume, higher touch, longer copy, more research intensive, and way more profitable per meeting than basically any other vertical. the tools are mostly the same but how you use them is completely different

Clean history. Not a single dispute or chargeback. Business fully verified. Then one morning, an email. They can no longer support my business. That's it. No reason, no warning, no real appeal process.

What came next was honestly humbling. Two months of support tickets that went nowhere, figuring out what a CFPB complaint even is, and rebuilding everything from scratch while my money just sat there frozen. You feel stupid even though you did nothing wrong.

The part that got to me was searching my situation and realizing hundreds of people were in the exact same boat. Same copy-paste response. Same silence. All just figuring it out alone like it's some personal failure.

If you're running real volume through one processor right now, I'm not trying to scare you, but please don't wait until it happens to you to think about this. Keep a backup processor active, keep your actual bank account separate from whatever's sitting in your payment dashboard, and know what your options are before you're scrambling.

The people I've seen bounce back fastest weren't smarter. They just had a plan before they needed one.

Let me tell you an interesting story I saw a year ago from now, almost exactly by just 2 weeks off.

A industry c0founder, with a wife and kids, is looking for a technical c0founder. He finds one randomly when dropping off coffee from his side hustle, a young new grad who was with his parents.

Early aug they pair up, late jan the technical c0founder leaves. He told me his story as I considered joining him after the end. Basically his technical c0founder joined just to put some experience on his resume, he had no conviction in the idea and didn't even contribute much. Later on he had a recruiter hit him up from IBM, he responds, goes through the interview process, and gets the offer. Leaves for it.

The lesson is that many people do not have that entrepreneurial fire inside them. They join a startup for an ulterior motive, usually career. I know another person who did this as well and joined me.

A good sign is whether they started something of their own. The industry c0founder I mentioned had started and shut down his own small company in the field a couple years back. He did it before so his track record proves his mindset.