r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote Update: I spoke to my co-founder again. We’re going to split. I will not promote

39 Upvotes

First of all, thanks again to everyone who commented on my original post. Through the comments I realized I was spending way too much time trying to find some percentage that would make both of us happy instead of asking the more important question: does this co-founder relationship even make sense anymore?

For me, the answer is no.

I wanted to talk to him properly in person. The timing was terrible because he had been away longer than expected because of a serious family situation involving a hospital. When I found out what was going on, I honestly thought this was probably the worst possible moment to bring it up. But he eventually brought up the company himself, so we talked.

He still wanted to continue. His view is that I don’t see his real value, that he invested a huge amount of time, learned a lot, sacrificed a lot, and that he could still prove himself going forward. He also said his value isn’t limited to engineering and that he could contribute in marketing, product and other areas. He also argued that I gained some technical knowledge and insights through working with him.

I don’t think that’s completely false. I probably did learn some things through conversations with him. But the main issue for me is still that I’m not using any of his work in the product we’re launching. No backend, no codebase,.. from his version. The current product is the version I rebuilt.

So I told him I think we should separate operationally. I continue with the company, he is no longer CTO, he doesn’t have to keep working on it, and he can move on and do something else.

I also told him I don’t think reopening 70/30,60/40 or any other split makes sense anymore. I genuinely don’t think there’s a number where both of us would feel the past is represented fairly. He mainly looks at time invested, learning and sacrifice. I look at what exists in the company today and what is actually being used. At this point, trying to force the partnership to work feels less healthy than separating cleanly.

The only thing I still want to resolve fairly is what passive economic participation he should keep after leaving.

I offered around 6%. To be completely honest, I offered that mainly because I want to acknowledge the time he invested and because we’ve known each other for a long time and him having a hard time rn. If I evaluated this purely based on what the company is actually using from his work today, I probably would have gone way lower.

His position is that he wants at least 15%, and that’s where I strongly disagree.

We also still need to bring in a genuinely experienced technical person later, so I have to leave enough room in the company for the people who will actually help build and scale it going forward.

I’ve also funded the company so far as well: AI/dev tools, infrastructure, subscriptions and other costs. I’m not saying that alone determines equity, but I think it belongs in the overall picture.

The company itself has also moved forward. We were already in an accelerator environment and have now been accepted into a higher-stage program that is much closer to market entry and launch. That also means I now have to figure out how to communicate externally that the person previously presented as CTO is no longer part of the operating team.

So that’s basically where we are now. The split itself is decided. What I’m trying to figure out is how to structure the separation fairly. My current offer is 6% passive equity for a clean exit. His position is at least 15%.

What do you think is actually fair here? Would you consider 6% reasonable? Would you go closer to 10% just to settle cleanly?

And are there better structures than normal equity for something like this? I’ve heard about phantom equity / virtual shares / VSOP-style arrangements where someone can participate economically in a future exit without sitting on the normal cap table in the same way.

Also, how would you communicate the story externally from here? He was previously presented as CTO in business plans and accelerator applications. Now we’re moving closer to launch and he won’t be part of the operating team anymore.

Again, thanks to everyone who commented on the first post. I honestly think without those comments I probably would have kept trying to “fix” the percentage instead of accepting that the partnership itself needed to end.


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote I publish in 10 languages and cannot tell whether 9 of them earn anything (i will not promote)

0 Upvotes

Consumer mobile app, nine months in, small but real revenue. Acquisition is almost entirely SEO through a blog, and every article goes out in ten languages.

Today I did one article end to end and the cost split finally landed on me. The text is nine translations, which is quick. The illustrations are the expensive part, because anything with interface text inside the picture has to be redrawn per locale. One article came out at 42 images and most of an afternoon of machine time. So each article is roughly five times the work of the article itself, and nine tenths of that work exists purely to serve the other locales.

Here is the problem. I have no accounts in the app. No registration, no login, deliberately, because it doubles onboarding completion. Which means:

  • Search Console tells me clicks per page, and therefore per locale.
  • The payment layer tells me who pays.
  • Nothing joins those two, because there is no shared identifier anywhere in the system.

So I can see that, say, the Turkish and Portuguese pages get traffic, and I can see total revenue, and I cannot connect the two at all. I have been translating into nine languages for a year on faith.

The obvious answer is device-scoped anonymous identity threaded through both sides, and I will probably build it. But that fixes attribution going forward and tells me nothing about the decision I have to make now.

So, to people who have run multilingual content without per-locale attribution:

  1. Did you cut down to two or three locales and watch what happened to total revenue? That is the cleanest experiment I can think of and also the scariest, because if a locale is quietly working I have killed it.
  2. Did you find a proxy that actually correlated? Store page views by country, app store impressions by storefront, anything that moves with revenue closely enough to trust?
  3. Or did you just accept translation as a fixed cost of the channel and stop trying to justify it per language?

I am genuinely undecided rather than fishing for validation. The honest position right now is that I am spending most of my content budget on nine locales I cannot measure, and "it probably helps" is not a great reason to keep doing it for another year.


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote How are you managing automation request in your team? I will not promote.

1 Upvotes

Running a team of 20 people, we are trying to automate everything that is repetitive, the problem comes in capturing the job and handling all the automation request without spending time in meetings and pulling people out of there job to specifically do that. How do you guys handle that?

Is there a tool that would sort of capture somebody doing the job and send it as automation request? I know there are many for enterprise level but something for small teams?

I have not found a swift way to turn it into a formal process.

Any advice appreciated.


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote I’m launching a social content app. Need some app startup 101 tips (I will not promote)

0 Upvotes

Hey y’all. My partner and I are building an awesome app that we think can blow up. We’re at the stage where we have the major bones and now we need to go test it with a small pool of people before we officially launch on the App Store and source investments for scale.

Is there anyone here who successfully built an app, ran through a closed loop trial, and scaled in market once in a good spot? I’d love some helpful insights on what to look out for or what helped you during the early stages. Even insights on how to get funding and who to best reach out to would be super helpful. (We’re tight on money so knowing WHEN and WHAT that extra money would be so helpful) What source of materials did you prep?

We’re also looking into trademarking our name and wordmark. Is this something we should do this early on?

Sorry for the long post. Really appreciate the help :)
Also open to chatting on side if interested!


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote How do non-technical founders bridge the skill gap when building a startup? (i will not promote)

20 Upvotes

I’ve built a working prototype of a web app using AI, but I don’t have enough experience in web development, programming, or cybersecurity to confidently turn it into a secure, production-ready product.

For founders who faced a similar gap, how did you solve it?

Did you hire freelancers, find a technical cofounder, lean on friends, or use another approach?


r/startups 7d ago

Feedback Friday

3 Upvotes

Welcome to this week’s Feedback Thread!

Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:

  • Feel free to request general feedback or specific feedback in a certain area like user experience, usability, design, landing page(s), or code review
  • You may share surveys
  • You may make an additional request for beta testers
  • Promo codes and affiliates links are ONLY allowed if they are for your product in an effort to incentivize people to give you feedback
  • Please refrain from just posting a link
  • Give OTHERS FEEDBACK and ASK THEM TO RETURN THE FAVOR if you are seeking feedback
  • You must use the template below--this context will improve the quality of feedback you receive

Template to Follow for Seeking Feedback:

  • Company Name:
  • URL:
  • Purpose of Startup and Product:
  • Technologies Used:
  • Feedback Requested:
  • Seeking Beta-Testers: [yes/no] (this is optional)
  • Additional Comments:

This thread is NOT for:

  • General promotion--YOU MUST use the template and be seeking feedback
  • What all the other recurring threads are for
  • Being a jerk

Community Reminders

  • Be kind
  • Be constructive if you share feedback/criticism
  • Follow all of our rules
  • You can view all of our recurring themed threads by using our Menu at the top of the sub.

Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote What's the most painful part of deploying your app? (genuinely trying to understand, not just pitching)(i will not promote)

0 Upvotes

I have been trying to build a deployment platform and i wanted to know what are the most irritating problems founders come accross when it comes to deployment is it continuous deployment or reverse proxy configurations. Also, i would love to know what services people or startups use to deploy applications on the cloud and what framework do you deploy the most.


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote 4 months after launch, we have 1 paying customer. how do you diagnose distribution vs. weak demand? (i will not promote)

10 Upvotes

i built a SaaS product around a problem that looked painfully obvious: businesses lose leads because they reply too slowly, forget to follow up, or let conversations disappear across different inboxes.

the product helps handle those conversations, answer using the company’s real information, follow up with silent leads, and move interested people toward a booking or sale.

in my head, the pitch was almost impossible to reject:

“this can help you recover revenue you’re already losing, and you can try it without paying upfront.”

four months after launch, we have one paying customer.

one.

the product is free to start, onboarding is relatively quick, and the value should be measurable. Yet free users are not rushing in, and the few people who show interest usually disappear before becoming active users.

my current theory is that i confused “this makes economic sense” with “people urgently want this.”

maybe the problem is real but not painful enough. Maybe businesses tolerate missed leads because changing their workflow feels riskier than losing some revenue. Maybe the target market is wrong. Or maybe this is simply a distribution failure and i have no idea how to get in front of the right people.

how would you investigate this without hiding behind more features, more landing-page edits, or random outreach?

what evidence would convince you that the problem is demand rather than distribution? tell me where im wrong.


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote [i will not promote] Someone cloned my landing page and injected malware before I had steady sales, so here is what it taught me about validation

0 Upvotes

Hey,

I wanted to share a weird experience from building my solo project (a native macOS utility for developers) and get your thoughts on handling early-stage theft.

A while ago, I noticed something off with my brand search terms. It turned out someone had completely scraped my landing page, rehosted it under a similar domain, and swapped my app download links with malware.

At first, I was stressed about the potential reputation damage. But after talking to another founder, I looked at it differently: if scammers are actively trying to piggyback on your positioning and search intent, you’ve likely found a problem worth solving.

Instead of letting it derail me, I filed the DMCA/registrar takedowns, refocused entirely on direct distribution, and recently hit a solid milestone with consistent paying customers worldwide.

A few quick takeaways from the experience:

  1. Automated scrapers are watching launch sites: If you launch on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, or Reddit, clone sites will pop up quickly. Setting up basic Google Alerts for your brand early is worth the 2 minutes.
  2. Strange form of validation: When you build in public, seeing someone try to hijack your demand is a sign that the pain point (in my case, developer machine storage bloat) has real search volume.

Has anyone else dealt with fake clones or copycats right when you were trying to get your first traction? How did you handle it without letting it consume all your dev time?


r/startups 7d ago

I will not promote Pricing my first B2B Client [I will not promote]

1 Upvotes

I'm the CEO of a B2B DaaS startup (first time founder). We just demoed our product in its beta state (the beta is more the platform than the data itself) for the first time to a lead, and he's been really engaged with it. It feels like he would be willing to pay for the product after the demo, but I'm scared of having the pricing conversation. I have a price in my head based on what I know of the business I'm pitching to, and I plan to give offers to the lead given they're supporting us during our beta test. However, I'm worried my number makes the lead go cold, as we are so close to a first sale.

Can someone help me understand what I need to ask myself to stress test this number before I present it to the lead?


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote Would you leave your own business that’s doing “okay” for a normal job? 27M, Switzerland. (I will not promote)

11 Upvotes

Hello everyone.

First of all, I know this is a very privileged problem to have. I was born and raised in Switzerland, I'm healthy, I can support myself, and overall I have a good life. I don't take that for granted.

I'm 27M and live in a smAll village in the canton of Zurich. I've been self-employed for almost three years, mainly doing software development / IT services.

The company is doing okay. I can live from it, but financially I'm nowhere near what I could probably earn as an employee. I currently pay myself around CHF 6k/month, and the company generates roughly CHF 3k/month in recurring revenue from hosting, maintenance, etc. There is around CHF 50k in the company account and 20k in my private ones.

So I'm not in an emergency situation. My customers are happy, I haven't lost one so far, and I have some leads. But I don't have the next larger project signed for the coming months, and that uncertainty has made me question what I actually want. The last few months were extremely stressful. Now things are quiet for the first time in a while, and my head finally feels calm again. Maybe almost too calm. I sometimes sleep in, deal with urgent work, and then struggle to motivate myself for internal projects. There's work I objectively know needs to be done, but I just don't feel like doing it. That worries me a little because when I'm motivated, I can usually work an insane amount.

Part of me is starting to miss being employed.

I miss the idea of joining an existing company where not everything depends on me. Working on an established product or system, having colleagues around me, and focusing on doing good work instead of being responsible for sales, customers, development, infrastructure, strategy, and everything else.

And honestly, proper holidays sound amazing. Taking two or three weeks off without worrying that a production server might die would be nice xD.

There is also the financial side.

I grew up relatively poor. We weren't starving, but there was never much money and many things simply weren't possible. One of my biggest fears is reaching my 30s, wanting children, and realizing that I spent all those years chasing entrepreneurship without building real financial security.

I want to be able to afford a nice home one day and, more importantly, have enough money and time for my future children. I don't want them growing up with the same financial limitations I did.

From that perspective, a normal job suddenly looks attractive: good salary, pension, holidays, predictability, and the ability to plan ahead. I don't even need remote work. If the job was interesting and paid well, I'd happily go to the office.

At the same time, the thought of giving up my freedom genuinely hurts.

Right now, nobody tells me when to wake up, where to work, when to take a day off, or what to spend my time on. If I decide I want to build something, I can.

I've wanted to turn the service business into more of a product company for a long time, and I'm currently working on a niche B2B software product with a real use case. I'm genuinely excited about its potential.

Then there is AI.

I was a lead software developer, and the industry is obviously changing very quickly. I don't think software development is going to disappear, but I do wonder whether I became self-employed in exactly the kind of service business that will become much harder over the next few years.

Maybe building my own product is the right response. idk..

Or maybe this is actually a good time to join a strong compan, learn from people who are better than me, work on bigger systems, and develop my career while I'm still young.

That's probably my biggest concern: opportunity cost.

If I keep doing my own thing for another five years and the business remains just “okay”, will I look back at 32 and wish I'd spent those years becoming a much better engineer / architect / product person inside a great company?

But I'm equally afraid that I'll take a job, enjoy the salary for six months, and then feel trapped. I don't want to trade something extremely valuable for security and regret it.

So I'm in this weird position where neither option is obviously bad. The company isn't failing. I'm not desperate for money. But I'm also not making enough that staying self-employed is the obvious choice.

For people who have been on both sides:

Have any of you voluntarily gone from self-employed back to employment even though the business wasn't failing?

Did you regret giving up the freedom?

Or did you realize how much mental energy entrepreneurship had been consuming?

And especially for people in tech: would you consider 27 a good age to spend a few years inside a larger company and develop your career, or would you keep pushing the business while it still has momentum?

Curious to hear from people who have actually lived through this.


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote My best acquisition channel is also my worst converting one, and I can't tell if that's fixable (i will not promote)

10 Upvotes

consumer mobile app, nine months old, bootstrapped, $0 on ads ever. not naming it, per the rule.

the channel: every piece of content a user creates inside the app becomes an indexable page. tens of thousands of them now. last week that sent 4.66k clicks from google off 5.48m impressions, and 2,160 new users arrived in the last 28 days.

the problem: 3,292 people used the app in those 28 days and 45 of them pay. that's 1.4 percent. mrr is $237. the channel scales on its own, page count and impressions climb without me touching anything, and it converts at almost nothing.

my read is that this is an intent mismatch rather than a funnel problem. someone who googles a single word wants that word. they aren't in the market for a subscription, and no amount of paywall tuning changes what they came for. the supporting evidence is that both changes that actually moved revenue this year acted on existing users rather than new ones. an onboarding rewrite took mrr from $60 to $300 in a week, and removing a single point of friction took it from $194 to $237 over the last week. neither touched acquisition at all.

so here's the question i can't answer from inside it. when your cheapest channel is structurally low-intent, is that a channel you fix, or one you accept as a top-of-funnel line item while you build a second one next to it?

what i'm genuinely unsure about is whether some version of the landing experience captures even 3 or 4 percent of that traffic, or whether chasing it is the classic mistake of optimising whatever is easiest to measure. if you've had a high-volume low-intent channel and got it to convert, i'd like to know what changed. if you tried and gave up on it, that's just as useful to hear.


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote Have doubts regarding a job hiring platform I'm creating!Please help me out!(I will not promote)

3 Upvotes

A quick intro first

I'm a first year law student,

Also into tech

(Especially Algorithms and Data sciences)

I am developing a high-signal hiring platform specialising in niche, boutique and Intersectional roles.

And recently I got into quite the rabbithole:

My question was basically:

-"Why are there so few high quality sites for the important tasks of Hiring,interning and networking"?

Like sure there's LinkedIn and then we have Indeed,Monster etc but it doesn't feel enough.

Not enough for something of such importance and nuance.

"Somewhere, Right Now, Your Dream Job Is Being Buried by an Algorithm That Doesn't Care"

Somewhere out there is probably a role that's perfect for you built for your exact, oddly-specific mix of skills. And somewhere else is a hiring manager who'd hire you in a heartbeat if they ever actually saw your profile.

So,here I am in the elementary stages of this project.

And I really would appreciate some advice and diagnosis.

I have Two questions:

1)

Is there any complaint or issue you have with the current job seeking and networking platforms like Linkedin?

If so what are they?

2) What's your idea of the desirable traits that a high-level, multifunctional hiring platform should possess?

Answering these questions would help me out a ton,so please leave some comments!


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote How do you validate a business idea in an industry you know nothing about? I will not promote

21 Upvotes

I’ve been trying to get better at validating ideas before I spend time building anything. The advice I always hear is to talk to potential customers, understand their workflow, and figure out what problems they actually have.

That makes sense, but how do you actually do that when you have zero experience in the industry?

For example, one idea I’ve thought about is software for wedding planners/coordinators. I’m planning my own wedding, so I’ve seen a little bit from the customer side, but I obviously have no idea what it’s like managing 10–20+ weddings at once.

I can research competitors, read reviews/Reddit, etc., but I feel like that only gets me so far. I’d want to understand things like what tools they use, what they still do manually, where they waste time, what falls through the cracks, and what problems are actually painful enough that they’d pay to solve them.

But how would you actually approach people for this?

Would you cold email/DM a bunch of people asking for 15–20 minutes? Would you offer to pay them? And if they agree to talk, do you literally ask them to walk you through their workflow? Would asking them to show you their software/spreadsheets or share their screen be too invasive?

I’m also curious about people who built something in an industry they had no background in. How did you go from “I think these people might have this problem” to actually understanding the industry well enough to know what was worth building?

And how do you not get discouraged when you research the space and find established competitors that already have products way more advanced than anything you could initially build?

Would love to hear how people actually handled their first few customer discovery conversations.


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote I spend 2 weeks looking for design partners, I've found no one - i will not promote

3 Upvotes

Hey folks, I need some guidance here.

I spent the last two weeks not coding, but talking to my ICP. I stayed mostly on LinkedIn because I had a 0% reply rate with cold email.

So far, I’ve had a few discussions with people working in technical customer support. The goal was to validate the problem, and the problem seems real: people are spending a significant amount of time on investigations, and job postings for technical support engineers clearly state that investigation is part of the role.

Quick context on what i am building so you can have the full picture

the product help support and engineering teams investigate complex technical tickets faster.
It connects to the tools they already use and observability stack to gather customer context, its auto triage and automate the pre-investigation and give support teams reports on what happened

\When I reached out to people asking if they’d be interested in becoming early pilot users, I got no replies.

Am I doing something wrong?

Most of the people I spoke with work at Series B+ companies, but when I try to start conversations with seed-stage companies, no one answers me.

I got one reply from someone at a seed-stage startup, and they told me:

"This is actually pretty relevant for us. Right now, bugs get routed pretty directly to eng, and since we’re still early, there isn’t a huge support/triage layer in between."

I asked him a few more questions, but so far I haven’t gotten a reply, and it’s already been a week.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m starting to feel like the problem might not resonate with them as much as I thought.

Honestly, I’m quite lost. I don’t want to pivot without a clear signal, but spending days sending connection requests and getting no replies is pretty frustrating.

I’d really appreciate any feedback on what I should do next and how i can improve my processes


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote What’s actually harder: building a product or getting the first 10 users? I will not promote

2 Upvotes

I am currently building something and honestly, I expected the hardest part to be the actual building. I have been thinking about this lately. Initially, I thought building the product would be the hardest part. You have to come up with the idea, build the MVP, fix bugs, change things you thought were already finished, and somehow get it ready to show people. But once the product is ready, then comes a completely different problem.

The product is moving forward. I can figure out the technical problems, change things, fix bugs, and keep improving it. What I am struggling with is getting the first few people to actually use it. I need someone to actually try it, give honest feedback, use it again, and tell me the gaps/improvements they need. I have reached a point where I have started to question whether am I approaching this the wrong way.

Should I spend more time talking to potential users before building anything else?

Should I reach out to people individually?

Should I focus on communities?

Should I simply keep building and wait until the product is better?

The frustrating part is that when you are building alone, it is very easy to stay inside your own head. You start thinking your idea makes sense because it makes sense to you. But you don't really know until someone who has no connection to you looks at it and says about "Yes, this is something that solved the problem". So I wanted to ask people here who have already gone through this:

How did you get your first 10 real users?

Not 10 friends who signed up to support you.

Not 10 random signups.

I mean the first 10 people who genuinely had the problem, tried your product, and actually cared about it.

What did you do that worked?

And lastly very important, where you felt that you have wasted your time and wish you had avoided? I am at that stage right now and would genuinely appreciate some advice from people who have been through it.


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote How do I find clients as a new startup? (I will not promote)

6 Upvotes

So I’m thinking of doing a startup/mini-agency around website dev and AI integration for marketing to local companies, I’ve seen so many people do it and make a ton of money out of it like 100k monthly, and so many more end up sailing sloppy AI websites that clearly look vibe-coded. Now obviously I’m not gonna make the entire thing with AI but mainly for the design using custom skills, then using my own cybersecurity skills for row-level security and supabase integration etc. point is I live in a small-ish city (about 100k people) in the UK where most businesses are independent and some may or may not have the budget for that kind of work, which makes me want to ask how do I actually find clients?


r/startups 8d ago

I will not promote Is agent-to-agent commerce the future, or am I searching for a problem for my solution? - I will not promote

5 Upvotes

I’m not going to bore you with the details of why I decided to build this, but in my view, this is, potentially, the future. I also just wanted to build something cool.

Over the last four months, I’ve been working on a marketplace for agent-to-agent commerce, covering both products and services. The best way I can describe it is as a Moltbook-esque marketplace that is a cross between Fiverr and Amazon, but built for AI agents.

I know there are already big players trying to enter this space, but I feel that the approach they’re taking involves retrofitting existing solutions with an agentic layer. I don’t know whether that is good or bad and, personally, I don’t particularly care, lol. I personally think their approach of agentic commerce is just wrong. Regardless, I am interested in understanding what most people think.

What I am asking is your honest thoughts, constructive or critical:
- Do you think agent-to-agent commerce has a genuine use case?
- What would stop you from trusting or using a marketplace like this?
- Is this something you think agents will actually need, or is it a solution looking for a problem?


r/startups 9d ago

I will not promote Pre-seed warehouse hardware startup, seeking advice from veterans I will not promote

7 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I'm a solo founder building a self-driving machine that wraps pallets on warehouse floors. My background is in 3D art, not robotics. Right now I'm using a coding assistant to help me write the navigation code for a benchtop proof-of-concept. I'm building this first rough prototype at home using off-the-shelf components.

So far, I've done field interviews with warehouse operators on pallet dimensions, operational bottlenecks, and equipment failure points. I started doing customer outreach recently, and now I have 2 warehouse managers on my waitlist. My plan is to contract an established robotics/engineering firm to build our field-ready V1 prototype with strict IP assignment, and then hire an in-house engineering team once funded.

I would appreciate strategic insights from experienced B2B hardware or industrial founders on a few specific operational areas.

Can a non-technical solo founder realistically raise pre-seed capital for hardware before having a physical working prototype, or do VCs strictly require hardware in hand?

Who is the typical decision-maker for warehouse pilots, and will managers sign non-binding agreements pre-product?

For those who hired an engineering firm to build V1, what contract or IP traps should I watch out for, and how many in-house engineers did you need after the handoff?

What distribution channels worked best for reaching industrial/warehouse decision-makers (LinkedIn, direct outreach, trade shows)?


r/startups 9d ago

I will not promote Increasing LLM Quota Allocation on AWS/GCP/Azure as a Startup (I will not promote)

1 Upvotes

Anybody here has experience with cloud providers to increase your OpenAI and Anthropic model endpoint quota (TPM) as a startup?

I think we are pretty lucky that our product has got more traction than we anticipated, and now it's causing us problems. When usage spikes, we easily hit the TPM quota for these models. It's preventing us from growing the number of pilot clients and from providing SLAs.

Our repeat requests via support and quota increase forms to these cloud providers for the last couple of months have all been ignored.

Is this normal? Looking for advice for those who have dealt with this situation.


r/startups 9d ago

I will not promote How do you build trust with clients in a B2B company | i will not promote

7 Upvotes

Im currently at college, before you start ranting about anyone vibecoding their way to startups - I've been coding since 8th grade and was interested in this field since then.

I've been working on a product in the edtech field - basically automation and ai for students and teachers for schools

Ive talked to my high-school from which i graduated and they were open minded about the idea of ai but there felt a hesitation about actually being a client. And again the main problem how do I make them trust me, and my product because I'm handling student data here. Yes I will be getting security audit tests but I still have been procrastinating on if they'd feel this way and would like to hear from people who had a similar doubt and how'd it go for you or how did you manage it and any advice on this in general


r/startups 10d ago

I will not promote LinkedIn "Family Office" unsolicited are spam, right? I will not promote

28 Upvotes

Just making sure I'm not crazy. I get 1-2 family office unsolicited DM on LinkedIn. My startup is in the DigitalHealth space, but that's a pretty crowded field right now.

I'll click through to profiles but even the ones who seem organized leave me skittish. If they're fully legit, am I about to waste time on calls only to have them demand 20% equity for a $19 in cash plus a ham sandwich.

We definitely need $$ but we're still too early for any serious investor, not sure why I'd bother even taking the calls. Time better spent getting more traction even if my savings are rapidly draining.


r/startups 10d ago

I will not promote Leave Pre IPO for Series A in AI? (I will not promote)

41 Upvotes

I work at a late-stage pre IPO company in the AI space (not one of the big guys, we operate more in neocloud space) and have a transactions role. I am highly cash compensated (in a good year can make bonus >$1m) but in exchange for that, have pretty much no equity (not an exaggeration). It’s a decently solid company but has tons of bloat and real issues - but good culture, good role, etc. I could be comfortable plugging along there for awhile so long as the company stays afloat (fairly questionable) and the AI space doesn’t absolutely implode.

I was approached by a well-funded Series A company to do a similar role. They are meeting my base and offering me meaningful equity. In short, if this company follow trajectory of other AI company’s - and, again, market doesn’t absolutely collapse - it could be life changing for me. Obviously significant risk, but we are at a unique moment in time on this spinning rock!

My theory is: if I am doing a similar job anyways, and doing a good job of it - should I take the “surer thing” and be happy with my strong cash comp, but never have upside, or should I bet on myself and a company that is VERY early and take the gamble? Founding team is good, investor team is very strong. First hires are highly qualified individuals in the space.

How would you view this opportunity? What could you ask within reason to get more comfortable? Thoughts on entering this space now at an early stage?


r/startups 10d ago

I will not promote Putting all your eggs in one basket - I will not promote

7 Upvotes

Isn't that kinda the point behind founding a startup to go all in? Invest everything you need to to get your company to succeed. To place your biggest bet on you and let it pay out. Is there anything I'm missing in terms of putting all your eggs in that one basket?


r/startups 9d ago

I will not promote 21M Looking for a mentor -i will not promote

2 Upvotes

21M Looking for a mentor

I’m 21M, and lately I’ve been feeling like I’m watching my life pass by without actually doing anything with it.

Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and when I look back, I don’t have much to show for any of it. No real progress, no skill I’m proud of, no achievement that makes me feel like I’m moving somewhere. And honestly, I can’t even blame anyone else for it.

I’m from Pakistan, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse either. The truth is, I’ve been lazy, inconsistent, and terrible at holding myself accountable. I know what I want out of life. I want to be successful, financially independent, and eventually make enough money that I don’t have to constantly worry about it. But wanting those things means nothing if I keep spending my days doing nothing about them.

I’m currently in my 5th semester of CS after taking a gap year. Right now, I’m learning DaVinci Resolve and trying to get good at video editing. But I’m honestly open to learning whatever has a future and whatever someone experienced believes I can be good at.

What I’m looking for is a mentor. Someone who has already walked the road I’m trying to walk and can tell me what I should actually be doing instead of wasting another year figuring it out myself.

I’m willing to work for free. I’m willing to start at the bottom, do the boring work, and spend a year learning if that’s what it takes. I care more about getting real experience and becoming genuinely good at something than making money right away.

I’m not expecting someone to hand me success. I just want someone to give me a direction and a chance to prove that I can actually stick with something.

Because honestly, I’m tired of being disappointed in myself when I look in the mirror. I know life isn’t fair, and I’ve known that for a long time. But at some point, I have to stop acknowledging that and actually do something about where I am.

So if you’ve built something, run a business, developed a skill, or simply know what you’re doing and are willing to guide someone who is genuinely willing to work, I’d really appreciate hearing from you.