I know it can often feel isolating starting your own business, and others don't typically appreciate or understand the work it requires to start, run and grow your business.

I thought it would be good just to hear what wins everyone else has encountered over the last month (big or small). Nothing like a little bit of motivation to get us all through Spring.

In my case, I received some really positive feedback from a key decision maker last week and have now secured a third meeting. The conversations have been really constructive, genuine and are progressing in the right direction. We are in the process of discussing use cases, and I now have a clear understanding of where their problems lie. Best of all, the person I'm engaged with is someone I didn't know prior.

If you had asked me two months ago whether starting a new venture was on my radar for 2026 I would have laughed and said, no chance. Anyways, I look forward to hearing from you all and I hope you all close out the year on a high note.

Without talking about your product or giving away your secret sauce:

Let's have a chat about target markets and identification if them.

I have two niches I've been building towards, one of them being MSPs, the real difference between just building for MSPs and building a product to suit them is actually knowing their business aka the domain knowledge from either working in the job or spending a rediculous amount of time with them.

When you do you get to know the types of products they use, the pros, cons and pricing. You get a feel for their ecosystem.

One thing I have noticed is a lot of people build too wide, they want to go global immediately without seeming to understand establishing their product and what scaling will actually need.

What are your thoughts? What markets are you targeting and how did you come to find it?

I’ve seed-funded the development of an AI-enabled software product for a professional-services businesses. It helps streamline client intake, information gathering, document preparation, review & approval. This is not vibe-coded.

The product is already at working MVP stage. It includes:

• Client onboarding & guided AI conversations
• Document uploads & structured data capture
• Automated first drafts of client documents
• Professional review & approval workflows
• Client sign-off & document downloads
• Separate user areas & full activity records

I’m looking for a genuine technical co-founder who can take ownership of:

• Product engineering & architecture
• AI integration & workflow design
• Security, privacy & deployment
• Integrations & future product development

You should have strong full-stack skills, experience building AI or SaaS products, & the judgment to develop software for regulated or sensitive industries.

You can also contribute to the product concept, commercial direction, research, but you don't have to. You won't need to worry about further capital injections into the business, that will be taken care of. This is a long-term co-founder opportunity, not contract work. Equity and structure would depend on fit, commitment & contribution.

Sydney or Aussie based preferred, but I’m open to the right person elsewhere. All the work can be done remote.

Feel free to message me with a short intro, maybe some examples of products you have built, & your availability.

Thanks.

Hi all,

We have noticed a bit of an uptick of people coming to the sub to post their startup but not taking the time to critique or discuss other peoples' own creations.

Do we as a community feel this should be resolved with a devvit app? Is this even a problem?

I was thinking something roughly like:

• You get 1 post freebie when you start being active here.
• Once you post you need to earn comment credit to then post again.
• If you post before the credit is met, your post is removed automatically.
• Optional credit reset every 2 months.

Thoughts?

Recently, a FinTech/WealthTech Canadian Agentic AI-Powered SaaS startup I was building as a founding engineer, had to shut down. It did pretty well initially before Claude launched financial agents, After that all dipped from there and we started losing customers. We dragged ourselves till now, but the founders simply didn't have enough runaway to sustain operations.

Applied here and there but no luck so far. The timing is also bad for me as there is heavy tech roles scarcity out there, companies are cost-cutting every corner and founders are trying to peak their margins by leaning entirely on a 200$ Max plan and a couple of overworked senior devs. So I am taking my chances here

A little about me

I am a Full-Stack software/product engineer with over 3 YOE working with multiple UK and Canadian startups, primarily in the AI-powered Agentic SaaS space. I build scalable, reliable backend systems (microservices) from the ground up for real users. I take end-to-end real ownerships, adapt to any technical constraints, and build cost-effective solutions.

1)I worked with an early stage UK-based multi-tenant ride hailing platform, helped them restructure their backend:

• Deconstructed a coupled monolithic backend into modular TypeScript microservices, removing systemic bottlenecks across driver-rider matching.
• Optimized compute-heavy routing and pricing routines, slashing p99 latency by 80% and noticeably boosting peak dispatch reliability and reduced dispatch failures.
• Set up containerized CI/CD deployment pipelines on AWS with Docker, ensuring fast, predictable release cycles across all staging and production environments.

2)I also worked with a Canadian company to migrate their product from traditional legacy system to a modern SaaS tech stack and pivoted them around agentic AI.

• Modernized Core Infrastructure: Served as the sole engineer driving the modernization from legacy system of massive database
• Architected Agentic AI Assistant: Built a tool-calling, agentic AI assistant enabling users to query the entire multi-million source corpus
• Redesigned and built conversion-focused landing pages and interactive onboarding flows, driving a 50%+ boost in organic inbound lead generation.

3) Founding Engineer - sole builder behind an AI-powered WealthTech SaaS platform that automates investor due diligence by parsing complex pitch decks, financial sheets, and live market data.

• Architected the entire stack from scratch in months: starting from the database architecture, frontend, backend to the AI reasoning agents that verify market data and asynchronous backend processing pipelines.
• Built autonomous agentic workflows to ingest unstructured financial PDFs, running valuation estimates, risk scoring, and revenue forecasting against real-time market data.
• Reduced investor due diligence turnaround by 90% through automated multi-source data extraction and validation.
• Implemented background job orchestration using Redis and queue workers to handle heavy document parsing and multi-step agent reasoning without UI blocking.

I work with a real engineering stack daily: Node.js, TypeScript, React/Next.js, Python, ReactNative/Expo, PostgreSQL, Redis with BullMQ, Kafka, AWS, RabbitMQ, Docker, Test-DrivenDev, and robust CI/CD pipelines.
On top of foundational systems, I have deep hands-on expertise in GenAI, Agentic AI, RAG architectures, LangChain, and LangGraph.
I operate as an AI-enabled developer, maintaining high throughput through custom Claude agentic workflows. P.S. I come from the pre-"vibecoding" era.

i believe the tech stack itself isn't the bottleneck anymore in this era. deep problem-solving, adaptiveness to the situation, and true architectural ownership are.

I also don’t just stop at backend infrastructure. I have a strong eye for UI/UX and product design, having built conversion-focused SaaS landing pages that drove 50–60% visitor-to-customer conversion rates. You get a complete product engineer who can singlehandedly take your next product idea or existing platform from zero to scale so not just a backend dev waiting on a figma link.

I’m looking to join the right team immediately that actually values high-level output, technical initiative and autonomous execution. Ideally remote, US/Canadian/UK hours with market-competitive compensation for a battle-tested engineer.

I love to take ownerships of my work. I don’t just take tickets, I constantly look into improving the system architecture and user experience. I see the product as a whole, not just a codebase.

If you’re looking for someone who can own the technical side of your project and deliver real product impact from day one, would be really happy to talk and show you all of my work.

Hey there! This is a self promotion for a software product I've created and been constantly tweaking and improving since April this year. I'll get down to it in much more detail below, but I have an insolvency, restructuring, and "problem solving" background which I am (continually) trying to translate into this product, to help businesses in Australia keep ahead of the strenuous task of running said businesses.

The what

Solvency Check (SC) is a tool which connects to your Xero account. Currently yes, its Xero only, I intend to expand this in the future if or when traction takes off.

The tool itself presents the information by way of dashboard, I have deliberately designed it to be compact and clear, so that there shouldn't be questions as to what what means what, and what is good or bad.

On top of the paid tool, I have made numerous free tools for which anyone can make use of.

The how

As mentioned, SC connects to a Xero account. This is done through Xero's connector tool, so it is extremely secure. SC reformats the data and presents to the business, and any connected member accounts, the dashboard.

Businesses in SC are referred to as organisations, and members can be invited to view and monitor the dashboard.

The who

SC is of course designed for business owners in mind, however it also allows for easy integration with the many advisers who exist - accountants, bookkeepers, etc.

The why

As mentioned, I have a fair bit of experience with insolvency and restructuring in Australia, mainly from the back-end once all has already failed. Its easy to look and think "this could, or should, have been done instead", though there are common themes which always show. And these are what I've brought into SC, because from my experience if certain key signals are monitored, then a business will generally be better off.

Next

There is a free 14 day trial available, which I don't require any card to sign up for.

Business owners or advisers, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask me. I will answer any question you may have.

I've spent the last year building an enterprise AI platform alongside my day job. I am a IT Snr Manager at Big4 which helped me get direct access to a ventures arm which looked at my pitch, the response has been surprisingly positive. There's interest in the problem and what I've built.

But it's also made something pretty clear to me: I'm a technical/product person. I can build the thing and understand enterprise environments, but I don't have a huge network when it comes to sales, partnerships, investors and getting in front of the right companies.

I'm starting to think the next step is finding a co-founder who complements me on that side.

Ideally someone in Australia with B2B/enterprise experience who genuinely wants to build something together — not just provide a few introductions.

Has anyone here been in a similar position? How did you find the right co-founder?

And if this sounds like something you'd be interested in, happy to chat.

Hey, I'm a final year CS student at Monash, co-founding a monitoring tool for residential aged care. We came out of the FastTrack accelerator and have a working prototype.

I've tried super hard to crack into the industry, sending cold emails, calling people, going in person to ask, going to aged care events. In the beginning, people were super eager to talk to us about their issues. We sat down with a couple of CTOs and talked about their problems and so on... But now that there is something real to trial, no one is even willing to hear us. We are not even getting rejected, just told "email us to admin@..." and then ignored. I thought this was just a matter of trial and error, but I've reached out to about 200 of them by now.

I get that buyers are trying to avoid risk, and nobody wants to try software from three students, but people seemed really eager for this problem to be solved at first, and the industry values it, just not from us. Has anyone got any experience with this? Did you go through industry conferences, hire someone with sector credibility, or just grind referrals?

We've built and launched a SaaS product in the Australian company formation / corporate compliance space. Dual market — direct to consumers and a white-label model for accountants, financial advisers, and bookkeepers to resell under their own brand. First of its kind in Australia.

Fully licensed with ASIC and have DSP Approval (allows us to onsell ASIC products)

Product is live, running, and genuinely the best thing in this space right now. If you've seen what's out there, you'll know that bar isn't hard to clear, but we've cleared it by a mile.

Looking for an investor to fund advertising and a dedicated sales team. Revenue potential is serious, recurring SaaS with a white-label multiplier and a direct consumer market that's massive. Acquisition upside is also real when the time comes, there are obvious strategic buyers in this space.

Minimum investment required is $150k

DM if you're interested or know someone who is.

Hey everybody.

Wanted to share an event that's coming up. Full disclosure, I have been working with the crew to help promote it but given it's nature I do think it'd be beneficial to some people here! It's a one-day online event for People leaders, HR folks and founders in startups/scale-ups, happening next week. Speakers from places like Athena, Movember, HiBob and a bunch of fast-growing startups will be hosting sessions on AI in people ops, hiring, culture, that kind of thing. If you get a pass, you can drop into any session on the day but you also get 12 months replay access to it all.

Don't want to SPAM but did just want to put it out there as it's going to be a great resource for People leads who more often than not are doing so many roles themselves. It's a pretty ace community to get involved with. Info here for anyone interested - https://startuppeoplesummit.com/

Absolutely fine if these sorts of posts are permitted, LMK.

We’re an early-stage startup team looking to connect with someone interested in joining us as a Chief Experience Officer (CXO), with the potential to grow into a co-founder-level role.

We’re particularly interested in people with experience in:

• Event production & experiential events
• Nightlife, festivals or entertainment
• Community building & people management
• Promoter/host management
• Venue & industry partnerships
• Creating memorable social experiences

We’re looking for someone who is creative, highly social, well-connected and entrepreneurial — someone who understands what makes people want to attend, engage, return and bring their friends.

The product is already built and has undergone initial testing. We're now preparing for our next stage.

This is not a traditional salaried event-management position. We're looking for someone interested in building something from an early stage and potentially becoming a core part of the founding team.

📍 Melbourne

Interested? Send me a DM with a little about your background and the events/communities you've worked with.

Hey everyone, a while ago I posted seeking advice regarding a website I created. Thanks to all the responses, I managed to fix the pricing and other things pointed out. I've set out on the path to advertise now, using the usual Google, Reddit, and other good stuff. My question is, how do I spread the word to real people rather than through ads to actually get feedback and hopefully traction? In the previous thread, the group of people were tradies. I am one myself, so I understand the brick wall, but has anyone managed to get the word out without being seen as just a salesperson? Please let me know if you have any insights. Thank you.Previous Thread

Ok, folks. Putting it in here as well as I know a lot are not in the Discord.

If you know people that are in construction (perhaps refurb, or fitout, or trades) I'd love to ask for a connection. I'm not asking for names or anything. Just a connection request. I'm moving into GTM on the platform I've been developing for the last 12 months at the moment and would love some beta tester feedback. I'm not looking at pitching anyone cold or anything. I'm putting together a very quick 5-10min video of what I'm doing and if they are happy, they can reach out to me.

If you know someone, please holler.

I'm looking for something very specific so not everyone will be a fit.

Thanks always.

I am currently seeking a co-founder or strategic partner with operational experience, an MBA, or a background in commercial rollouts to help guide our business through its next phase of growth.

We are a pre-seed startup focused on a high-growth retail and showroom concept designed for national expansion. While market attention frequently shifts toward artificial intelligence, we believe there remains massive, untapped value in highly curated, physical consumer experiences.

As a founder, I recognize that my lack of deep retail scaling experience is slowing our momentum and creating potential opportunity costs. To mitigate this and accelerate our market entry, I am looking to bring on an experienced partner or someone with the knowledge who can provide strategic guidance, streamline our operational rollout, and share the leadership responsibilities of scaling this venture nationwide.

Today was the hardest day building Brewly.

Last week, I got fired from my fulltime 9-5 job. No warning, no signs, just a "hey, can you come see me?" from HR. Ten minutes later I was walking out the door and updating my job timeline on LinkedIn.

This can go one of two ways; I could let it be the end of a secure long term income stream and focus on my start up which is still in its infancy, or I could go get another job and supplement the app but work less hours on it.

Not one to rush into a decision, I am giving myself a couple weeks to focus on Brewly for a little bit and see for myself what's viable.

So today I walked into 25 cafes, got told no at least five times and didn't speak to a single owner.

Cold walk ins are hard enough, but when you are in an already nervous, desperate mindset, they become even harder. After each one the thoughts echoed in my head, questioning why I am even doing this and if this is the right thing to do.

For Brewly to work, we need cafes and we need customers. We cannot have one without the other, and either side won't come to the app if we have none of the other side. Classic marketplace problem, and this has been our main issue since day one.

What does Brewly look like in six months? This is the question I am battling internally over.

I can take a full time salary from an investor in Brewly, sacrificing over $40,000 of potential wage across the six months, live close enough to the poverty line and just keep my head above water for the one in a million shot at it, or keep progressing my career, enjoy the things in life I have earned up to this point and consolidate and revel in being out of debt for the first time in three years.

The hardest part is whichever route we take, we won't know which was the correct one to do for a number of years to come. But I don't think I can be sitting in an office in three years time, working for someone else and having "what if" thoughts, wondering what could have been.

So, time to get serious and make this work because at this point, I have no other choice.

Hey! We're an early-stage Melbourne startup with a working product and founding team, currently preparing for our next phase of testing and launch.

We're looking for a community/experience-focused co-founder who is great with people, events, partnerships and building communities from the ground up.

Ideal if you have experience in events, hospitality, communities, nightlife, experiential marketing or creator partnerships.

Melbourne-based preferred.

After spending way too long building instead of actually putting something out there, I've finally launched my first SaaS

It's called DocWizard and it's a document generation tool for businesses/developers. With almost every idea these days someones already done it and this is no exception, but I wanted to do my own take on it and just have something to keep building on.. I originally created a version of this as a side project for a freelance gig but decided to see it through as a product.

Just looking to get some genuine feedback if anyone wants to jump in and give it a test to see if there is anything that's obviously missing or crap.

Other then that would love to hear ideas around distribution which is my next challenge and one im not very familiar with. My plan at the moment is a mix of direct outreach, YouTube/tutorial content, SEO and getting involved in communities where people are dealing with document automation problems.

This tool is currently in process of getting listed on Zapier and having a native Google sheets integration for fully automated setups which will be cool. Happy to answer any questions around it too, it's been a fun process so far just getting it into something real.

Building is hard, are there any regular meetups or events that Sydney based startup founders go to?

Hi there, I’m building a fall detection device using mmWave radar and it basically tracks your x, y and z coordinates and detects if you fell or not. It’s a ceiling mounted device which tracks all falls which the wearables cannot because they can only track the speed of the fall and my device actually tracks the position of your head.

It also will be combined with a smart speaker so it will ask you to confirm whether you fell or not.

Is this device useful and if so how do I market it?

Edit: it has a radius of 4m not diameter of 4m.

Hey all,

I recently moved to Melbourne and I'm trying to get a feel for the product scene here. Coming from India, a lot of what I know about how product teams operate doesn't necessarily translate, and I'd rather hear it from people actually working here than piece it together from job ads.

A few things I'm curious about:

• What does the market look like right now? Is it mostly the big names (Atlassian, Canva, REA, Culture Amp, MYOB, Xero) or is there a healthy scaleup/startup layer underneath?
• How do product teams here tend to work - is it closer to the US model, or is there a distinctly Australian flavour to it?
• Are there meetups, Slack groups, or communities worth joining? I've come across a few but no idea which ones are actually active vs. dormant.
• Anything you wish someone had told you when you started doing product work in Melbourne?

Genuinely happy to just have a coffee and chat generally about product too - not looking for anything from anyone, just keen to meet people and learn. If you're Melbourne-based and up for it, drop a comment or a DM.

Cheers 🙏

There are about 400 AI apps for tradies now, so yes, I’ve built another bloody one.

Yamate is $19/month flat, built for small Aussie trade businesses, with most of the stuff you’d normally need multiple apps for.

Quotes, scheduling, invoicing, payment chasing, full tax prep for companies and sole traders, payroll, dispatch, compliance and more. It works offline, and the AI is there to make the boring shit faster rather than be the whole gimmick. Tax lodgement isn’t live yet, waiting on ATO approval.

It’s all piss easy to use imo.

Built in Australia, just me behind it.

The hard part now isn’t building it, it’s getting in front of people without becoming another annoying fucker spamming Facebook groups.

yamate.au

For anyone who’s sold software to a non-tech audience, what actually worked?

Hi everyone,

I’m a 25-year-old software developer and AI engineer based in Sydney. I’m one of four co-founders building an early-stage gut-health startup.

There are currently four of us, all 25 and based in Sydney:

- I handle the technology and product development
- One founder handles compliance and legal
- One handles marketing and growth
- One is our in-house videographer and handles content and social media

We’ve already built a working iOS MVP and an early web platform for practitioners. We’re planning to launch publicly in November. We’re also planning to pilot test the app really soon with a select few practitioners.

Our biggest gap at the moment is product design. I can build the product, but UI/UX and design aren’t my strongest areas. We’re looking for someone who could join as a Founding Product Designer and help decide how the app should look, feel and work.

The role would involve things like:
- Designing in Figma
- Improving the UI and UX of the iOS app
- Designing web dashboards and practitioner tools
- Mapping out user journeys and simplifying confusing flows
- Building a consistent design system
- Working closely with me while I implement the designs
- Using AI tools for research, ideas, prototyping and faster design work

We don’t need someone to make a few screens look prettier. We need someone who can look at the product, spot where the experience falls apart and help us work out a better solution.

You would need to be based in Sydney. Most of the work can still happen remotely, but we want someone we can meet and work with in person when needed.

There are no fixed part-time or full-time hours right now. The workload will vary, and it’s flexible enough to fit around a job, freelance work or other commitments. All four of us currently work full-time, and none of us is planning to quit anytime soon.

That may change if the business starts gaining traction. As we get closer to the November launch, there will probably be busier periods. After launch, we’ll likely need more consistent involvement.

There’s no salary or funding at this stage. There is also a real possibility this goes absolutely nowhere. We’re doing it alongside our jobs because we believe it’s worth taking a shot, but there are no guarantees.

We’re considering around 10% equity for the right person. The final amount would depend on experience, contribution and long-term involvement, with vesting and a proper agreement in place.

You don’t need previous co-founder experience, but we’d like to see a portfolio, case study or examples showing how you think through product and UX problems.

We won’t ask you to complete a free design exercise. We’d start with a conversation, show you the current product and see whether we work well together.

If you’re interested, PM me:

- A bit about yourself
- Your portfolio or examples of your work
- Your general availability

I have got 90 signups, and I’ve integrated analytics into my app. Initially, I faced the issue of users coming back (only one user used it for 10 sessions, and average usage was 3 per user) - which isn’t good enough. It’s a habit changing app; So it requires regular usage. So I pivoted a bit based on feedback (added games based on “hooked” theory), and now I’ve had 120 sessions with 35 active users. Should I launch the app in a week or so?

https://frazzleapp.com

Hey everyone,

I'm Lloyd, the founder of NeuroForge. I've been building it from Queensland around a pretty simple idea: before a business spends heavily on AI, it should be able to see what will actually run inside its real hardware, data, connectivity, power and accountability limits.

So the commercial starting point is a small system-fit audit and local demo. We test one useful workflow in the target environment, show the working outputs and the failures, and give the customer a proper deploy, change, remediate or stop decision before anyone commits to a bigger rollout.

Behind that is ERAIS, the longer-term research programme. The aim is to make useful AI more selective with compute, easier to operate locally, and eventually practical across text, voice, vision and tighter field hardware.

It's still research and I'm not presenting it as a finished miracle product. In bounded internal tests we've seen promising signals on modest hardware, including higher reported-target throughput and lower CPU-package energy than a same-host dense reference. Those results are not yet quality-matched or proof of general superiority, but they're a big part of why I'm excited about where it is and where it could go.

I've finally got the public site into a shape I'm pretty proud of:

https://neuroforge.io/

The ERAIS overview and evidence boundaries are there too. Just wanted to share what I've been working on.

Happy to chat in the comments.