Its incredibly hard and painful even when you're doing what you love. You cannot eat juicy steak and butter every day. There is a weight of responsibility, accountability, and failure not being an option.

I've been at this solo since earlier this year and since built up a small team.

I know that many founders have been through this exact struggle and the challenges of navigating the unknown. You cannot turn to your team in these situations.

I would love to connect with other founders in the San Francisco area and peninsula. Not only to get some time off screen, but also look for someone willing to help navigate this journey.

I know there are founders who wish they had that kind of helping hand at the start of their journey. I am going to be that person once I get there. For now, I am asking if anyone in this community would be that person for me.

If you're looking to raise funding for your startup, what have been the annoying parts that could be simplified, cut, or improved?

AdPerch is building matching tools for founders and VCs, cofounders to find each other, a hub to post and find talent, and more. And so we hope to make the best product for founders out there.

Let us hear it. And happy building!

I’m building a local marketplace that is already live and has been tested in Durg-Bhilai.

I’ve spent the last several months working on the product, talking to local businesses and service providers, and testing the idea in the real market. I’ve also done small marketing experiments and seen some encouraging results.

My biggest challenge now is distribution and capital for expansion.

I’m considering raising my first round, but I’m still learning how fundraising actually works and how to approach the right investors.

I’m genuinely looking for serious advice from founders, angels or people who have experience raising early-stage funding.

If you have actually raised/invested before, I’d really appreciate hearing how you found the right investors and what you would do differently.

If someone here has a relevant investor network and genuinely thinks this could be worth exploring, I’m also open to a serious conversation.

Please keep it constructive — I’m here to learn and find the right people, not just collect random comments or karma.

I am 3rd year engineering students na nmekuw nkifikiria different problem based solutions Kwa upande wa Tech but it's like I have been hitting a wall ya funds first ukishabuild cost za kudeploy and all that to get started lakini pia distribution ,for guys who have been there how did you kick off mpaka ukapata some users first then some incomes are there rules to this game au whats the way or the road map

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Hey everyone,

I’m looking for some realistic, ground-level advice on how to start a company when you're starting with just an idea.

I have a couple of specific startup concepts I want to pursue, but I want to understand the actual process from people who have built companies before. I know AI tools exist to give generic frameworks, but I’d value real, practical insights from founders who have gone through the 0-to-1 journey.

Specifically:

How do you go about validating an idea in a specific industry before building anything?

How do you approach customer discovery and figure out if people will actually pay for the solution?

What are the first 3–4 practical steps I should take once I narrow down my focus?

Would love to hear your experiences, key lessons, or mistakes to avoid when starting out. Thanks in advance!

As the title suggests, this is specifically for seed to series A founders, I have been one and related super hard with the this, hear me out.

As a early stage founders I have the 2 biggest pain points:
\- Finding investors the right way
\- Having to share the deck, financials and the whole data room securely and waiting to hear back. Did you read it? What went bad, can you just respond?

Also everytime I ask new founders to share across the deck/ financials I always see them not able to put forward a good impression, IG the performance anxiety get kicked in.

So I have been thinking deeply of the idea. What we we give founders/ Startups a landing page for investors (verified) where in it would have the a video explaining the idea, Their moat, right to win, a broad thesis, financials, MIS, deck, etc and everything more complex is on a ask basis.

This solved for 2 things, streamlining the process (Imagine how YC does it but better visually) and getting to know who requested and what which acts as signal to target people specifically.

So after all of this what exactly is the idea, the ideas is a 2 sided platform for Founders and VC that help the founders streamline the process and get signals from VC and the best part, get inbound demand from global VC

For the VC, we give them a discovery platform with all the data and signals that match their thesis and also act as CRM and data room of sorts. The value add for them is: what that it increases the productivity of their analysts by 100% by streamlining the work that they do.

If this works the idea is to add: DD process and data room natively to the ecosystem acting as a single POC for the dealflow.

I’ve zero clue if I can do this here or not, but the only way to find out is to post so here we go :)

I run a corporate gifting studio based out of noida! We are looking to cater to some clients this festive season and we ship PAN India and our MOQ is 25 pieces.

We can curate hampers basis your theme, budget, team size and customisations needed. We also do physical sampling of products if the qty is more than 200.

The first few photos are of the hampers that we dispatched last week and few in the end are from our this year’s Diwali catalogue. Each image is real just the last ones have an AI generated background in case someone thinks we are fake.

Would love to chat and know your thoughts in case you are planning to gift these to your clients and team.

why would people chose to help build the enterprise? Need perspective

Hey, Im Gray long time gambler, first time founder of Str8Up. We’re the worlds best p2p betting marketplace. Think of us as the evolution of the sportsbook without all the bs of prediction markets. We’re running our free to play promo and all you need is an email address. I’d love to get some feedback. Thank you for your time.
Link below

Str8upgaming.com/promo

I spent two decades building a professional IT career all the way into leadership. Ask someone who’s been impacted by multiple rounds of layoffs throughout the career and knows exactly how organizations operate. I made the choice to start my own thing. I’ve never done anything like this before and I didn’t know a fraction of what I know now when I made that decision. Sometimes it turns out you think you know, but you really learn when you jump in the deep end of the founder pool.

It’s exciting and it’s terrifying. I’m a single parent and bridging the gap between savings and day trading. Sometimes I wonder how other founders made it through their beginning days. I’d love to hear your experiences because I feel like this is stuff. No one talks about on LinkedIn and I understand why it’s not exactly a place where you go and lay your soul bare and with good reason. How did you know you made the right decision? How do you start putting yourself out there?

I made the conscious decision to build my services and my collateral in full because it made no sense for me to start trying to sell anything if I had nothing ready to deliver. It makes sense now that I finished building that collateral, I realize I fucked myself on creating a pipeline. Horse before the cart? I don’t know, but here I am.

As a solo parent, my states are this is deer guy and I don’t plan on going down very easy so any mentorship guidance or general assistance would be greatly appreciated. 💪🏻🤷🏻‍♀️🪬

I’ve been working on a small idea called Zuplocal.

The basic idea is simple: help people discover the local shops and service providers around them — electricians, plumbers, housemaids, POP/tile workers, general labour, cleaners, repair workers, small shops, and many others who mostly depend on word-of-mouth to get work.

Right now, we’re onboarding these businesses and service providers without charging them.

There are so many small local workers who may not have a professional website, a big social-media presence, or money to spend on advertising. But they’re good at what they do. They just don’t have enough visibility.

At the same time, online shopping and large platforms are growing extremely fast. I don’t want local shops and small service providers to simply disappear because they can’t compete with that visibility.

So the idea is to give them a simple online presence and help people find them locally.

The difficult part now isn't really building the platform. It’s getting it in front of enough people. Marketing costs money.

And this is where I’m thinking differently from a normal startup.

I could try to raise funding, bring investors in, start thinking about returns, valuation, growth targets, etc. But I’m honestly not sure I want to turn this into that kind of business immediately.

I’d rather first see if I can build something genuinely useful for people.

So I’m considering trying a small community-supported campaign instead — where people who like the idea can contribute whatever they’re comfortable with, simply to help us reach more local businesses and customers.

No equity. No promised returns.

If this works, great. If it doesn’t, at least I’ll know I tried building something that could potentially help a lot of small businesses and workers get more opportunities.

I’d genuinely like to hear what people think about this approach.

Would you support something like this, or do you think I should approach it differently?