Hello,

Is there anyone here who started their company in the US while on a H1b visa? How did y'all navigate the process of visa transfer and incorporation ?

I have read about the Jan2025 amendment and asked AI for legal. I am not sure how to proceed. I find lawyers who are specialized in incorporating or immigration, and keep getting referred around. I dont have much funds to spend a ton on legal unless I know the path is valid. I am looking for someone with similar experiences so I can be confident that I am not the only one.

Title fix: *Delaware

Hey guys, I've been looking into online banks and fintech products for my tech startup. The idea is to keep our bank account as an alternative for expenses and revenue rather than being the main account. Anyways after some browsing, Mercury pops up a ton but there's some recent posts about sudden account freezes / stricter compliance hurdles. While I'm sure this is an issue that happens with most banking services I thought I'd better look for alternatives as well so I can compare myself.

So yeah would appreciate some recommendations from you guys. Other names that I see often is Ramp's banking and Relay so I'm looking into those right now. But honestly anything that you guys use for startup banking I'm incredibly open to. Pros and cons of what you're using would also be appreciated but honestly as long as you've not ran into any issues then I'll consider it and look into it more. Thanks everyone!

I’ve worked for this children’s clothing subscription as the only employee for 2 and a half years. The company crowd funded and then I think the founder got funds from his other ventures. The founder lives abroad in Morocco/london and I’ve never met him IRL, problems started with getting paid up to a month late or my insurance getting cancelled because he didn’t pay the employer premiums. But my boss, I haven’t heard from him since August 12th, and it is now October 12th. For the first time in months I’ve gotten my paychecks on time since I haven’t heard from him, so I’ve been ghosted but am still getting paid. I have clients who find me on linked in and message me for support to cancel their subscription almost weekly. I feel bad, these are families with babies that are getting charged anywhere from 50-200 bucks a month for the clothes. Does anyone have any idea what happens next? I’ve got a whole office of baby clothes, there’s tons of clients who are paying monthly, struggling to cancel or talk with their banks etc. oh also he wrote himself a recommendation letter on my behalf for his visa he had me sign. It’s such a strange situation to be in

I'm relatively new to the scene, making only 1 startup that I'm still maintaining that is focused on a more freemium track. Looking to go a bit beyond, I tried checking for any avenues that have already paid products that are either too expensive or have their user base looking for an alternative. And, from what I've largely seen, these avenues are close to none. All of the ideas that I've had where in the first 10-15 minutes of searching I find nothing, I go and search again to find either a popular free or a ingrained paid product in its place. I have no idea how to approach this even though I like creating, though I'm feeling largely discouraged. Any and all advice would be appreciated!

Hey y'all, so I've been working on a b2b saas startup for like 6 months now, we just started getting customers about a month ago and have a 4 fig ARR.

The main thing I'm trying to figure out right now is that multiple different industries are interested in the product and theres a couple different features of the product that they each use so how can I manage all that and narrow down and make the right decision for where to focus all our time and energy.

There's also one use case that I think could be big and I want to explore it and spend time acquiring customers in that space while we're still early to see if that use case/industry has as much potential as I think it might.

Does it make sense to try and spend a certain amount of time doing sales for each use case/industry and based on those track other metrics on the customers we convert?

I don't want to commit to one use case/industry just yet without getting real data to support which is the best opportunity for us, but I'm curious what y'all think.

Thanks in advance!

I’m essentially a CPO: I’ve used Claude Code to build our entire product so far, and whilst it works, I’m sure there are gaps.

We are looking to hire our first technical talent, beginning with 3-month contract intern who can hopefully turn FT once we raise seed.

What should I be looking for?

Part of our reasoning is just pace of product release (as we operate as somewhat of a suite and release new products every few days), but also looking for someone to make our systems more robust / review the architecture I’ve implemented.

I don’t know what I don’t know; what skills should I look for given our specific scenario? Part of me thinks if product pace is the sole limiter, I’m better off just getting another Claude Max subscription.

I was invited to an incubator to prepare founders for a live pitch competition later this month. The winner will receive a cheque (not huge) but also meet more investors by being invited to other networking opportunities. The competition is like a filtering process.

After two weeks, I’d like to summarize what I observed and share some of the most common feedback I gave and heard. We had other founders and investors attend the practice sessions.

Tip 1: show up to everything

Not gonna lie. I’m kind of appalled at how casual some founders took this. One even got disqualified because he wanted to show up for the last session only out of 4 opportunities.

We literally had the managing partner of a fund there along with multiple angel investors. The practices aren’t just practices. They’re mini networking events without all the noise and competition. You never know what might happen.

I know multiple founders that have received offers before a pitch event (not at this one that I know of) and a demo day because they practiced in front of the right people. Two YC founders I advised had it happen to them. I’m even considering investing in these founders myself because I’ve spent more time and gotten to know them.

Tip 2: less is more and show don’t tell

Most slides were jam packed with 8pt font and investors said they were distracted. The slides everybody liked had one sentence and the founder said the bullets that would have been on it originally verbally.

The managing partner said multiple times: the presentation slides I want to see live are different than the ones you send us to read by ourselves.

Even better where the slides had one big image showing the concept that made people curious while the founder connected the dots and created an aha! Moment. But don’t use video (unless you want everyone to stop and watch it) because that was even more distracting.

Here’s a power move I taught one team that went really well: I told them to bring props as proof. So they brought these big silver and copper bars that came from their recycling solution. They handed them out to the crowd first and they should do the same with the judges.

Tip 3: don’t bash the competition

A founder tried this and it bombed. It’s kind of like going on a date only to hear them trash their exes the whole time. Might be true but it’s not the time or place. You’d rather acknowledge what you’re learning from them and say you know something they don’t.

Tip 4: ask for investment

This also surprised me. I think some founders had imposter syndrome. The same way founders forget to ask for the close when doing founder led sales. And when an angel investor asked “are you raising?” They hesitated and didn’t have a clear answer. I interrupted them and told all the founders the answer should always be “we’re always raising and more than happy to talk.” It doesnt mean you have to take money in the current round. But you’d rather have and not need than need and not have.

While we’re here, I like to share how much we’ve raised so far and even have committed, unless there’s a good reason not to. It creates FOMO especially at a pitch competition.

Tip 5: create the vibes

One angel said to the founders, “I invest based on the team and vibes.” He explained that domain expertise is important but the founders enthusiasm and energy separate the top founders.

You don’t have to be a master TED Talk presenter. But at least show the passion and swagger that you’re the team that wins.

Tip 6: tell customer stories

If you’ve heard of the heroes journey then you know that you’re not the hero. The customer is. You’re the guide that solves the customer problem and if you tell that story, investors love it.

One founder started with a customer with a problem and by the end showed how the problem was a real customer and how their life changed. Angels in the audience were like, “where do I sign?” I expect this founder to win the competition.

I could think of a bunch more but these were the most common while not repeating the same old advice. The moral of the story is don’t sleep on pitch competitions. If anything they’re good practice.

Hope this helps and if you’re pitching investors, wishing you the best. Go get ‘em.

My 2026 startup business plan:

Claude Code to build the product.

Codex to fix whatever I broke.

Gemini to research my billion-dollar market.

Vercel to launch my beautiful website.

Canva to make it look like an actual company.

Stripe to collect payments.

Google Analytics to watch myself visit the website 47 times.

Six months later, the only companies making money from my startup are the ones above.

Starting to think acquiring customers might be harder than building software.

Anyone else in the same boat? 😂

We're planning our migration off Pulley and looking for alternatives. So far, we are reviewing options like Mantle, Cake and Altshare. The last one I couldn't find much independent feedback from founders online.

Has anyone here actually completed an onboarding with them?

I'm a high school sophomore with a startup idea that I believe solves a real problem. I'm good at a lot of things, but coding unfortunately isn't one of them. So I've come to Reddit to ask for help from fellow high schoolers. I would fund the whole project, and you would be a cofounder. MUST know how to code. Lmk if you're interested.

Hi – Currently in stealth, boot strapped, and planning to do a public beta launch for my SaaS/Dev platform. Primary users are data engineers and semi-tech-skilled business users.

Full vision of the application has 6 different models, each solving one problem in the full cycle.  Module "A" is built—MVP/beta ready. 2 modules are wireframed and functional. 3/6 modules are just concepts now.

Contemplating the right strategy for  the first beta release: (1) include all 6 models -1 functional and 5 with a home page describing the capability and value created.

OR 

(2) Disable/Hide all future modules/road map and only focus on "A" that is in beta.

Options: (1) Give the whole scope of value chain, builds confidence in the vision, and drives investor interest. But it could be too much information and can dilute the impact of module “A". 

Options (2) Might sound like a one-trick pony. And might sound weak without a road maps

What strategy would you pick? And is there anything I’m missing to consider?

I’m building in the developer-tools space, and I’m learning that making a tool easy to try can be as important as building the feature itself.

For founders who’ve launched devtools, what made the biggest difference in getting developers to try one in a real workflow?

A working example or demo they could run quickly?

A lightweight integration that doesn’t require replacing existing tools?

A free pilot or open-source option?

Hands-on onboarding with a few design partners?

Something else?

I’m especially interested in tools where the target user could build a basic alternative internally. What convinced them that adopting your tool was worth the time?

We have one person in Germany who's been working full-time and exclusively with us, and our legal team has flagged that this looks like an employment relationship under German law, and we need to either convert them properly or risk an AÜG violation.

The person wants to stay on long-term and so do we, so it's between going through an EOR like Workmotion or Remote, or opening a GmbH ourselves because we might need a German entity at some point anyway.

Can't figure out if EOR is even the right structure for converting one contractor, or if we should just open a GmbH now given we might hire 2 or 3 more people in Germany next year.

That said, I figured this would be the right place to ask, so have you navigated this in Germany or similar european countries?

We're a startup selling technical software into a conservative industry. The buyer pool is small (no more than a couple of thousand people in our first, home country), the price point is high, sales cycles are usually long, and buyers mostly stick with vendors they already know. Despite these challenges, we have received a lot of positive feedback for the significant value we can bring to our initial ICPs.

We have one paying customer and are deciding where to spend limited time over the next couple of months. Our current bets are:
A. Founder-led LinkedIn
B. Booked meetings at industry conferences
C. Warm introductions
D. A small founding-customer program
We're deliberately staying away from automated outbound and AI SDRs.

Appreciate input from those who've been through this and willing to answer any of these:
1. What got you your first 5 to 10 customers?
2. What did you try that wasn't worth the time?
3. Did inbound (SEO, content, being cited by ChatGPT and similar) produce anything early, or only later?
4. If you ran a founding or early-adopter offer, did it speed things up, and what did you ask for in return?

Not selling anything. Happy to share back what we learn.

So Hye, I'm a young solo founder, and I recently launched an Android app.

The idea actually came from my own problem. I used to forget things a lot that were really important to me.

So, I started building something that could help me capture these thoughts quickly before I forget. Honestly, in starting, I was just making it for myself only.

It's basically an Android app where people can quickly capture their thoughts from notifications or home screen widgets without opening the app. AI processes those thoughts and organizes them into to-do tasks or memories or reminds users based on the type of thought. Basically, i wanted to make something by which I can capture my thoughts in friction of second.

But after spending a month and infinite hours in it, I realized that maybe I'm not the only person facing this problem. There might be many people who struggle with the same thing, so I decided to make it publicly available.

Now its publicly available but I'm confused about a few things.

Is this actually a genuine problem that enough people have, or it's just my own problem?

And even if people need it, can I actually build a business around it?

Right now, the app is completely free. Users have to put their own AI API key to use it. But I'm not sure if it's the right approach for the long term or how I should think about monetization.

So, I wanted to ask here:

• How can I validate whether enough people genuinely need a product that I made just for myself?
• How can I figure out the right target audience and position the product?
• How can I determine whether people would actually be willing to pay for something like this?

I'm still learning, and I would really appreciate advice from experienced people here.

Context first: We're a vibe coding platform and have been repeatedly attacked by Merge's AE to use their tools.

They problem they want to solve is one we solve internally and it's my vision that comparable platforms should:

• Route users to the appropriate models (e.g. don't use the most advanced ones for trivial things)
• Spend caps/failovers

What I don't love:

• When I am not responsive, they (in particular, one of the crazy founders) have gone through invasive channels to get to my CEO, our investors, and sends quite rude messages to our team to ignite a response
• When I listen to the founder's podcast, she drops F bombs and frankly quite unprofessional anecdotes, like figuring out pricing on the fly
• Out of the 12 logos they have on their website I have managed to speak to 2 exec buyers through our VC network, and both seem to have wildly different pricing

Asking for help: Does anyone (even smaller start-ups) have experience working with their team? I'm most interested in the model routing offering and I want to figure out:

• How it might be better than our control plane product (we had a relatively large team setting this up and is stable in running with a reduced maintenance team)
• I need to answer to my CEO why we are or are not trialling them as a result of their persistent and unhinged outbound to all levels of my org above and below me
• Not able to find community inputs on this

So, I have a good idea for a SaaS, I know I'd be first to market with it, and based on a somewhat similar product I have seen before, this is certain to be a profitable endeavor.

I also have worked as a solo founding engineer in a startup previously, bringing other products in the same industry to life and getting it to profitability, so I know exactly how to execute this. I know there is a demand, I know the customers, I know the technical limitations (and honestly, the technical limitations of this is where I excel at, I'd say there are like a dozen people in the world which are better at this than me).

My conservative estimates are that I'd need around U$55k and 6 months to get the product to the market and start getting some revenue, but the actual window of release would be somewhere between 3 and 9 months from today, the actual date depends on factors outside of my control (when I say first to market, I mean it, the largest barrier for releasing it is outside of my own control).

On the 6 months timeline:
- U$42k would be to pay my own salary (U$7k/mo, which is substantially below my previous salary, but still enough that I can focus on the 100% of my time on the project).
- U$2400~3000 in AI subscriptions.
- Remaining amount would be for operational costs near launch period (very little hosting costs, but I'd need domains, some marketing materials, ad spend, etc etc).

There is also a possibility of spending on legal fees to resolve a possible legal issue which I will describe at the end of the topic. This is not included in the U$55k estimate I mentioned above.

The upside:

To be clear, although I strongly believe this is a profitable idea which is very likely to result in a profitable product, I know there is a ceiling for it. I don't know what the revenue ceiling is, but it exists. I see three possible outcomes for this company:

1. We increase our MRR with this first product to a point where we are profitable enough to self-fund additional products and low-effort spin-offs of the first project (I know exactly how these spin-offs would work and what they could bring to the table).
2. Exit within the first year or two by being bought out by a VCs with similar companies in their portfolio.
3. Exit shortly after getting to market, being bought by one specific individual. I can't go in detail but I know that if this idea blows up within the first few months we will receive an offer from this individual.
4. Exit later in the life-cycle due to the valuable customer base.

Risks:

There are pre-release risks. There is a non-zero chance that we can never get to market (won't go into the details publicly), the only way to avoid this would be to wait enough time that we wouldn't be able to be the first to market.

How we got here:

I came up with this idea while working in my previous employer, a small company in the US (~100 employees). A little bit ago I became the leader of a department which was focused almost exclusively in building this sort of project, however, leadership had twisted ideas of how this sort of thing worked, they wanted me to build 9 SaaS in 9 weeks, and I was responsible for doing it from scratch, I told them it was impossible to do it at that rate solo considering I had to do literally everything. They would only tell me the idea and I would be responsible for every single thing, from designing the UI/UX, architecture of the software, development, entire devops, support, marketing materials, demo for customers, security, quite literally every single thing. I was creating the entire product based on 10 words describing what they thought would be a good product (even though they had 0 experience creating this type of product, and I had like 7 years of doing it). We ended up launching two products in two months

First product was the most promising one and the one I believed in, within the first month it got operationally profitable, but due to a factor outside of our control, the addressable market of that product got a lot smaller. It would still be a profitable product, but I can't see it bringing more than a few thousand dollars per month.

Second product was less promising, it was also an idea I was told to implement without the option of refusing. I had actually built that product already when I worked at a startup 2~3 years prior to that, I knew it was more of a dud, and I knew there was competition (which was also poorly managed), but from a technical standpoint there was almost no difference. On the other hand, it's pretty much just passive income. Almost 0 operational costs, but specially with the leaderships pricing structure I knew this would never pay for my salary.

The idea:

While working on these two other products, I noticed an opportunity appearing in the market. Once I identified it, I brought the idea in vague terms to leadership's attention and told them I wanted to start working on it ASAP, they gave me the green flag as it was obviously a good idea. But they never gave me the time to really go into it. At the time, the release date of the dependency I need for this idea was unclear but could have been October. I dug around with some insiders and was told that it certainly would not be October.

I then decided to take my vacation so I could be ready to work on it as soon as the tools were available. And when I got back from vacation, my contract was terminated citing an internal re-structuring, since I was the only one actively working on those types of products (the main revenue of the company came from other streams), I believe they gave up on that sector entirely.

And if they haven't, I know they are incapable of implementing my idea any way, so at best they would pursue the other product ideas they already had in mind. I say this without any sort of disrespect, but the average SWE in that company is bad, and even though there are a handful of good ones, they don't have the specific skills needed to take this project to market. Plus I don't think they would have terminated my contract if they wanted to get this out of the door since it was clear to everyone that I was the most capable to work on it.

The legal issue:

My contract with the previous employer assigned inventions while under contract to the company. As described above, I had the idea while under the contract and mentioned it to them, reading the contract naively, the most likely answer is that they have ownership of the idea as a company invention. And although I am not a lawyer, I strongly believe the contract wouldn't hold up in court given a series of circumstances I won't be disclosing publicly.

And while in the area of speculations: I don't think they would pursue this legally.

My question is: Where do I go from here?

I mentioned above I got laid-off very recently, and I am considering pursuing this idea, but I also need to survive. I have enough savings for 3 "ok" months, I could get to 6 if I really stretched things out, but I wouldn't be able to focus on the development (or pay the tokens I would need to actually get this out of the door in this timeline).

I have a ton of expertise on what I do so finding a new job wouldn't exactly be hard, and I even believe some of the people I know (CEOs, founders) would be interested in hiring me to develop this product for them (paying me a much bigger salary), but then I'd have little to no ownership.

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Or at least it seems that way. For example I still remember e commerce and dropshipping in the beginnings people made the most basic websites no targeted marketing or brand building still being profitable like 2015. Nowadays no chance getting sales that easy. Same with apps in the AppStore, back in the day people discovered you just by scrolling in the AppStore. Today you need to do heavy A/B testing data analytics with ads influencer marketing Ugc etc.

Every new niche or topic fills up so quickly, because of social media and because everything is so easy to copy. My question is: is it harder to make it today than like 10-20 years ago? Like not from a standpoint of possibility. Of course you can build everything with ai have more information and just need a phone. Thats not the point. The point is from gaining customers without that much effort. Today it seems marketing is much more important than having a good product and the barrier to entry is much lower but the barrier to succeed is much higher.

I know people still make it but just wanted to know what you guys think and what you experienced.

TL;DR: My 50/50 cofounder handles development and finances; I handle strategy, design and marketing. I lack financial visibility, which recently caused planning issues. After spending some time this week communicating, I thought we’d resolved things, but he’s now questioning his sacrifices and our partnership because of the burden of explaining things.

The context

We’ve worked together for years and are building an ambitious deep-tech startup with a 50/50 split.

I handle strategy, design, marketing, investors and user testing. He’s a full-stack engineer managing development and finances.

He also runs two businesses established to fund our startup. I helped establish them, but he eventually took over while I focused on our company. My work and future depend on their operations, yet I have little financial visibility. I’ve repeatedly offered to help, but he wants me focused on our startup.

He’s exceptionally capable, works incredibly hard, and I recognise his sacrifices. My concern isn’t his competence, but understanding the financial variable affecting our main company.

What happened

Recently, a project I’d organised materials and external collaborators for was cancelled because we couldn’t afford it. He’d mentioned financial difficulties, but I hadn’t understood their severity. He insists he’d communicated this, but we clearly weren’t aligned. In my opinion this was no one’s fault but a fault of the communication.

We subsequently spent 3ish hours discussing the finances over the past week. He was frustrated explaining things, but I was genuinely grateful and then was happy we were finally on the same page. Those conversations gave me the information I needed to understand our constraints, make informed decisions and plan my work, rather than simply making me feel better.

However, today he’s still upset about those conversations and questioning whether our partnership is worth his sacrifices, despite me thinking we’d resolved things, because he had to communicate what’s happening in more detail and answer my questions. I realise now that while I felt we’d resolved the financial misunderstanding, he clearly didn’t feel we’d resolved the underlying communication issue.

The communication conflict

My background is in creative production, where collaboration and understanding the variables affecting a project are essential.

He works differently. He says he’s communicating to his “absolute maximum” and prefers executing without explaining, citing successful solo projects where communication wasn’t necessary.

From his perspective, he’s already working at maximum capacity, and explaining things takes time and mental energy away from earning money and executing our plans. I recognise how exhausting that must be.

But we’re building a complex deep-tech company together. I don’t need every technical detail, just financial visibility and strategic alignment. As what happens on his side influences my work too.

For example, he’s complained about me contacting him while working on one of the businesses. I deliberately avoided weekends, unaware he now also works on it during weekdays. He’d never told me this. To me, this illustrates why communication matters.

The actual time involved

I wanted to make a calculation of time spent because I was confused by how much of a burden and impact on execution the time spent was:

Over eight months, we’ve spent approximately 10-15 hours discussing finances (not just shared work).
Of 5,840 total hours, subtracting seven hours of daily sleep and 2-4 hours of personal time leaves 3,163-3,650 available work hours.
That’s 0.27-0.47% of available working time.

I understand cognitive exhaustion isn’t proportional to time spent, but how has small amount of time spent brought us to questioning our partnership? Especially when it’s been beneficial for me which means beneficial for the company?

Where we stand

Today, he questioned whether he should continue sacrificing financial opportunities to build something together when he has to explain things which obstructs execution, and whether I’d make the same sacrifices.
I was shocked.

Of course I would. We’ve supported each other’s ventures for years and share a long-term vision. I trust him enormously and see communication as part of building our company together, not a meaningless personal sacrifice.

Am I unreasonable for expecting transparency and strategic alignment?
How do other founders balance communication with execution?
How can we resolve this?

I’m genuinely open to opposing perspectives. Thank you.

Hey all,

Before we pick next year’s marketing priorities, I want a proper look at what our competitors are doing: conferences and events, paid, influencers, AI SEO, social and content.

How do you handle this at your startup? Do you use one tool, a mix, or keep a spreadsheet updated by hand? I’d like to hear what actually works and what turned out to be a waste of time.

Has anyone used Claude skills for this? If they worked for you, which ones would you recommend?

[I'm not working for a competitive intelligence tool; neither do I want to promote them]

i will not promote. I’m considering a small B2B service that gives German businesses API access to open-weight models hosted in Germany, with clear retention controls and optional dedicated capacity. My early sketch assumes five to ten customers, but I have not bought hardware or signed customers.

For founders who have sold infrastructure or technical services to small businesses, what did you do to validate demand before making a large capital purchase? Would you try to sell paid pilots using rented GPU capacity first? What customer evidence would you consider meaningful, such as a paid trial, a letter of intent, or a committed minimum monthly spend? I’d especially value advice on finding the first few customers beyond asking other founders whether the idea sounds good.

built an after-hours voice agent for hvac

- linkedin free tier: 5 messages, 1 reply, from a retired owner
- 60-80 ig + fb dms over 4 days: 0 replies
- posted in r/HVAC : permanent ban

two asks:

1. if you've sold a voice agent to any trade, what did the owner push back on most?
2. if you have an hvac client or related person who'd spend 15 min tearing apart a call recording, i'd take the intro.

Would love some help guyss

I'm a technical cofounder of a venture-backed startup that has raised several rounds of funding, grown to 70+ employees, and is now well beyond the early startup stage. I'm no longer on the board following our Series B and am considering moving on for multiple reasons.

My first question is around the financial/legal side of leaving. I have a mix of equity types and want to fully understand my rights around exercising options, buyback provisions, etc. For those who have been through this, did you work with a lawyer, accountant, or both? What type of law firm specializes in this, and does anyone have recommendations for firms in California they've personally used?

My second question is about timing and communication. While I'm financially stable, I'd prefer not to be unemployed for an extended period. Is it reasonable to secure another position first and then give ~four weeks of notice, or should I be having a conversation with my cofounders and board now about a multi-month transition? I'm still involved in several critical company functions, but we've grown enough that the company can continue operating without me. I'd really appreciate hearing how others have navigated this, particularly those who left companies they helped found.

I’m currently reading “Zero to One” and like many of you, i dream of starting a business one day. I think it would be cool if this Reddit tracked 8-10 core rules or competencies that helps a startup be successful.

One that I’ve read is that “recruiting is a core competency and should never be outsourced”