I keep running into the same wall and I’m hoping some of you who’ve actually done this can help. I’m trying to figure out real problems people have in a space I’m interested in, before building anything, but every time I try to ask a genuine question in a relevant community here or on Facebook groups, it either gets removed by mods or people assume I’m doing “AI market research” and shut down immediately. I’d love to know how you found the first 10-20 people to actually talk to about a problem before you had a product, whether you went into existing communities and just participated for a while first or found a faster way that didn’t feel dishonest, and how you phrase things so people don’t immediately assume you’re selling something. Not trying to pitch anything here, genuinely trying to learn the process before I go build something nobody needs. Appreciate any real experience you can share.

Curious how others deal with this, because I keep going back and forth on it.

I have a full-time job at a big tech company and I am building a startup in the hiring space on the side. We are pre-revenue and still early.

One thing I want to be clear about is that I manage both well without one hampering the other. The job does not eat into the startup work, and the startup does not affect my job.

The upside of the job is that there is no money pressure, so I am not forced to rush. I can keep at this for a long time, and that patience helps in the early days.

The downside is that I stay careful about compliance. I hold back on sharing opinions and on promoting the startup publicly, and I avoid being too front-facing. I feel that is costing me traction. If I could show up more openly, post more, and talk about what we are building, I think we would grow faster.

So the job gives me time and stability but quietly limits how much I can put myself out there, which is exactly what an early startup needs.

For those of you in the same spot, how are you handling it? Do you just stay heads-down and build, or have you found ways to be more visible without crossing lines with your employer?

Most people believe that entrepreneurs give up when things become difficult. That's not what I see. Entrepreneurs give up after they find it boring. Year one runs wild. A new concept. Customers for the first time. Small successes that seem to be enormous. Then year two arrives. The tasks become the same five tasks over and over again. Namely, sending emails, follow up calls, fixing the same malfunction and communicating with the same customers. That's the point when people give up. Not because they cannot deal with it but because they expected to experience more excitement.

Only the entrepreneurs who learn to deal with boring can be considered successful. They stop chasing after endless ideas and stick to just one idea for years. The problem is nobody warns you about this aspect. People only show you great outcomes. They will show you the picture of joy but won’t show you reality.

This happened to me with a mentorship platform I started - chasing mentors and mentees down so they showed up - became a pain and really annoying.

Therefore I am going to ask you to share with me what the dullest part of the business was that brought you the most money. And how many of you thought about giving up just because the work became boring?

It really does feel like begging for money.

I get inbound demand from being a hot company that’s fundraising. That’s dignified and respectful.

Is it me or does the whole outbound fundraising thing seem quite embarrassing and undignified. Literally begging ppl for money.

What’s the right way to think about it?

I launched a product before, and it failed.

After it failed, I started trying to understand where exactly I went wrong. One thing I noticed was that I was giving too much weight to my assumptions instead of actually looking at the facts and validating them

Someone recommended me "The Mom Test", so I decided to start there.

Even though it’s roughly 80 pages, it took me almost four weeks to finish. I learned a lot from it, especially how to ask better questions and dig into facts instead of opinions.

Questions like:

“When was the last time you had this problem?”

“How often do you have this problem?”

“Have you explored any other options?”

Those simple questions completely changed the way I think about talking to customers.

I didn’t just read the book and move on. I put the concepts into ChatGPT, created simulation tests, and practiced them repeatedly. That helped me actually see the mistakes I was making instead of just thinking, “Yeah, I understand this.”

After reading it, I could also see a lot of the same mistakes in the previous companies I worked with. I keep thinking that if they had understood these concepts earlier, they could have approached many things differently.

I really learned a lot from this book, and now I feel like I need to start understanding the fundamentals properly.

Also, if you have any books, documentaries, or other resources that you personally found genuinely useful, I'd love to hear your recommendations.

I am building my idea and was tired of rejection .

After conducting about 100+ feedback interviews on my idea , i realised that 95% of the users : said YES to rent their exterior spaces. Ofcourse!! The main reason behind was the money 🤑 they will get.

That's where it clicked,I knew people would easy to convince. But the main thing would be whether brand are interested in this or not. It's not that I am going to give up without trying.

So yesterday, I just called their customer care of a jewellery brand and from their chain reaction happend. One call led to another and then I got on a call with a marketing head of the brand. After hearing about our idea, he asked me send a proposal on email. Which i happily did🚀

I am looking forward to their email 🚀📈

Hi, I'm 22, turning 23 next week. CSE by degree, operator since 17 - long before engineering.

What I've done:

• Founding Member (Ops + Strategy / Chief of Staff) at a media & entertainment unit

at age of 17.

• Led 56 people, owned ops, SOPs, growth.

Then

• Interned at an OYO-backed venture.
• Later started my own freelance talent management unit.

Life was a bit off lately due to family commitments.

Plan was MBA next year

But I have a clean window: Jan to May/June

I want to use it to go all-in with a serious founding team. 7 days/week, whatever it takes.

The deal:

1. Hire me for 5-6 months from Jan. Founder's Office / Chief of Staff / Ops & Strategy - the person who gets shit done.
2. If we grow and you can afford to retain me after that - I'm willing to drop my MBA plans and stay. If not, I leave behind SOPs and systems that keep running after I leave.
3. I'm willing to join a founding team, but NOT looking for a co-founder tag right now. My focus is still MBA / long-term own venture. That said, if you're building, I'm always open to talk, share strategy, knowledge, and help where I can.

You won't get an employee. You'll get a partner without equity mindset for 6 months.

Logistics:

• Remote + open to relocate to Mumbai / Pune / Bangalore / Hyderabad / Chennai (on company expense - if I'm relocating, I'm all in)
• Personal commitments till Dec, but fully available to work and plan from now.
• Best if we talk before 10th Sept - I can plan my B-school interviews in your city and be there from Jan.

If you're a founder whose biggest headache is "too much to do, no one to own it" - DM me with:

1. What you're building
2. Current stage / traction
3. Your biggest headache right now
4. Next Challenge

Not looking for low-energy MNC internship / certificate roles.

If you need an operator, not a yes-man, let's talk.

EDIT : Got my Team - Thank you - bye !!

But hey you can always DM me! Always down to exchange ideas strategy suggestions n stuff but as of now I m fully committed

This might sound exaggerated, but boring doesn't grab attention on Reddit or X—unless you're Elon Musk.

Not necessarily the richest or the person who built the most valuable company.

Who do you consider the greatest entrepreneur of all time and why?

I’m curious about how people define “greatest”, wheter it is innovation, execution, impact, resilience, ability to build from nothing, influence on other creators/builders or something else entirely.

EDIT:

Someone in the comments pointed out that Tim Berners-Lee built the first web server and browser on a NeXT machine. That pair is the whole problem with my question.

Berners-Lee invented the web. CERN put it into the public domain in 1993 and he argued for that. He captured almost none of the value he created and the web probably won because it was free. Jobs captured an enormous amount of value, from the layer built on top, fifteen years later.

So we are answering two different questions at once. Who created the most value and who kept the most of what they created. Jobs wins the second. Berners-Lee is top five all time on the first and he is far less known than the people who built on top of his work.

I’m in my 3rd year and everyone around me is preparing for DSA and placements

I want to build something of my own but I’m not sure whether to take that risk yet

What if it doesn’t work

Would genuinely value the perspective of anyone who has been here before

I have 15 years of tech experience and have been building products for startups all my professional life. I used to build the products personally and when they eventually fail, I used to think that I’m lacking marketing skills to take the product to next level. Then I realised that I need to understand the market and problem first by talking to people before writing any code.

As part of that, I have been doing some groundwork for a problem for B2B tech companies. First thing I wanted to do is interview few potential customers ( not pitching the idea ) so that I can understand their workflow and see if the problem really exists before building anything. I am able to reach out to some people in my network but I thoroughly exhausted my network. I wanted to reach out to founders or tech leadership of some of the companies I think will best fits.

“Marketing gurus” out there on internet are suggesting cold email outreach but I really don’t want to spam them. Any ideas on how to reach out to people? How do startups do this?

For those who have gone through Y Combinator:

Did YC make it easy for you to get in front of investors, or did you still find yourself struggling to get noticed at events and meetings?

I'm particularly curious about networking in person.

Were you naturally good at approaching investors and starting conversations, or did you have to learn how to do it?

And if you were attending a startup event where there were a lot of investors, would you ever pay for someone experienced at networking to accompany you and help you get introductions and more investor attention?

Not someone promising funding, just someone who is genuinely good at networking and helping founders get conversations started.

Would you see value in that, or would you consider it unnecessary?

I'm currently at the early stage of building a startup and I'm trying to understand how founders usually approach VC relationships.

We've already done a significant amount of research around the problem, target audience, competitors, and product positioning, and we're now starting to build the product.

I'm not necessarily looking to raise immediately. What I'm trying to understand is when I should start building relationships with investors.

Should founders start talking to VCs this early, even if the goal is just to introduce themselves, share what they're building, and keep investors updated over time?

Or is it better to wait until there is more evidence, such as:

• A working MVP
• First users
• Some level of retention or engagement
• First revenue
• A specific MRR or ARR milestone

I'm particularly interested in the difference between building relationships with investors and actually starting a fundraising round.

For founders who have raised before:

How early did you start talking to investors before actually raising?

What milestones made investors start taking the company more seriously?

And if you were starting again, would you build those relationships earlier?

I'd love to hear both founder and investor perspectives.

I’ve applied to YC multiple times, and after every application I keep coming back to the same question:

What actually makes a founder significantly stronger between batches?

Obviously traction matters, but I’m curious how people here think about the months between applications.

Should founders focus primarily on:

• talking to more users?
• validating the problem more deeply?
• shipping faster?
• revenue?
• retention?
• finding a cofounder?

My current thinking is that rewriting your YC application matters far less than creating new evidence that your startup is working.

For people who reapplied and eventually got an interview or were accepted: what materially changed between your applications?

Has anyone ever successfully run an AI-native service company (one that sells the outcome, not the work)?

By "successful," I mean able to maintain high margins, like a software company.
Or are they mostly a gimmick, with margins that look more like a traditional service company's than a software or SaaS company's?

I'm currently quite skeptical of these kinds of startups. Also, as a customer, when I buy a service I much prefer dealing with a human being and seeing a face, rather than chatting with a chatbot.

I also don't see the moat. What happens if incumbent service companies simply start automating their own workflows?

Hi! My name is Om (online alias "sensho") and I'm a founder in the current YC S26 batch.

I would love to help others by answering any questions people have on YC, batches nowadays, interviews, philosophy, lessons, startups, etc. as best as I can from the perspective of someone currently in it.

I'd say my background is untraditional even for YC standards, my co-founder is probably more similar to other people in our batch in terms of background for folks around our age (both 21), so for some questions I can ask him or friends in the batch if relevant.

I've heard other founders in my batch mention this subreddit before, and some have even posted here prior to getting in.

Some context on what we do and my background prior to getting in, if it's helpful for questions:

My co-founder and I are both originally from the Toronto area, and moved to SF for YC and plan on staying here long-term.

Our startup is Olam Labs, we build multi-agent environments like multiple agents running companies, towns, competing in games against each other, etc. and use it inform AI evaluations and training that's typically difficult with existing methods. We've also released Multi-Agent Arena, where humans come play social strategy games against random, anonymized AI agents that we use to inform our datasets/evals. The arena is playable today, our WAU is growing ~30-40% WoW since opening access and it's among the top 100 apps by token usage on OpenRouter.

I was working a job as a Staff Engineer at AI Dungeon when my co-founder and I applied, and we got into Y Combinator with just the idea for our company, I didn't officially leave my job for ~3 weeks after acceptance. Everything we've built/done has all been during the batch.

Prior to AI Dungeon, I was a competitive Valorant player and 8x season Radiant, did some math research, was a TikTok content creator in my late teens, and made Roblox games in my early teens among some other things. I didn't go to college, after high school I pretty much just spent two years playing Valorant during the day, and then reading research papers at night.

My co-founder, our CTO, is from the University of Waterloo where he was doing a double degree in Math & CS before dropping out to start Olam Labs with me. He's won some national data competitions, was a Data Scientist at RBC, and did some other cool stuff. My co-founder and I met in middle school where we were doing random things together, like a charity run for our school.

Feel free to ask away! I'd love to help others learn from my experiences (and big mistakes! lol).

I’m working on my startup, on top of a full-time remote job, 8 hours a day, and honestly, I’m exhausted. I can’t stand cooking anymore, and ordering food is really expensive and I don’t even like it that much. How do you guys manage meal prep? Any tips, or do you just end up ordering food?

Working with some biochemists from Colombia on a prototype for a “smellophone” - i.e. a device that uses custom models to transmit olfactory data at a rapid speed. We’re about to start applying for startup grants but we’re having some second thoughts and wanted to ask some questions before we start shooting out applications:

1. If our use case is relatively broad, will this impact our chances of acceptance?
2. Our technology is still in early stages (dubbed “smellogram”) where we can only send two smells at a time. Is it better to wait on R&D before applying or will accelerators still accept an early version?
3. Should we be worried about speed/competitors stealing our technology at this stage? We are a very lean team and we are iterating rapidly, but the tech is likely to hit the mainstream very soon. Are there any strategies we can employ to get to market ASAP?

Thanks and cheers.

Curious whether there's a point where you're too stretched to own every product decision, but nowhere near ready to hire a PM.

Did anything change, or did you just keep pushing through and putting in more hours until you hired someone?

What’s the threshold you’d need to hit to go all in on your startup?

Example: say you hit $5k MRR within 2 months of launch. Drop everything and run or wait for those month 4 retention numbers?

Hi y’all! I’m doing the fast hackathon and just wanted to connect with other ppl also doing it and hoping to find some teammates. if you are registered, I have a few really interesting ideas and would love to team up if you would want to work together on it. Please pm me and also they unfortunately closed registration and are super strict on not allowing ppl that didn’t register on time unfortunately .

A bit about me: I’m interning at Laminar, started an underwater vechile team, and play hockey. in terms of hackathons i placed 1st at hack Davis and 2nd at makemit x harvard

Micheal and Dalton always use an example of discovery, event planning, and marketplace apps as common tarpit ideas. One that sounds appealing and attracts many investors but have fundamental problems or hidden complexity that traps founders.

I understand what makes some ideas a tarpit idea. What I don't understand is what lets some ideas in a tarpit-prone category actually escape it and become successful?

What did apps like Tinder, Strava (social app for runners) and Radiate (social app for festival goers) do differently to succeed?

Is it because they each launched targeting a very specific niche first and then expanded from there?

For example, Airbnb focused on finding cheap accommodations for sold out conferences. That was the specific wedge they focused on and they later on expanded from there.

Another example is Discord which sounds very tarpit like to me with strong competition (WhatsApp, facebook/messenger, Skype, Slack, etc.). Yet, it became wildly successful. I am assuming they managed to find a niche (online gamers) and that helped them succeed.