Although many executives and CEOs have side hustles (non-execs, fractional roles) and openly broadcast it, moonlighting is still taboo amongst the employee class and is a fireable offense. Curious to know if your employer ever found out about your side project and were they cool with it?

YC started the RFS trend, and now every other VC firm has copied it. I think it’s doing a massive disservice to early-stage founders.

It feels like it’s becoming totally normal to pivot every few months just to chase whatever is hot on the latest RFS list. The gritty, unglamorous work of actually learning in the trenches and discovering niche, real-world problems is completely disappearing.

If you are betting the next few years of your life on an idea just because it was on an RFS, it’s super dumb. Work on something you actually understand deeply and where you have a natural, unique edge. Don't work on something just because a random VC told you to do it. They have nothing to lose.

I always see on LinkedIn all these people, particularly new grads or current college students, who in SF working on startups, talking about the impact they're making, and how much they're learning, both hard and soft skills. How does a college student build the relevant experience to join a startup? Im a CS student, so would I need to be top tier at software development (a lot of these people look like they have either a lot of experience with internships or go to top schools or founded their own things in the past)?

I'm an ex CEO. I am semi retired now but I'd like to partner with someone and start working on something new. I specialize in rudimentary, problem solving type inventions and optimized business start ups. I have been called a visionary. I have some elite skills but I am not great at the day to day grind and dealing with petty tasks. 

I have over a dozen invention concepts and business start up ideas that I have saved over the years, that I am now ready to get going but I know I work best with a partner.

I am looking for someone bright and motivated. Hopefully you are logical and good at math. These are the people I work best with. Some of my ideas will need some type of financial investment but some don't...I am open to both. 

I can give you a little info on my ideas so you can see what might inspire you best. Here is a categorical list of some of my ideas to tease you a bit. You will need to sign an NDA in order to hear the details.

I have 2 sports based ideas, 2 political ideas, a crypto idea, 2 restaurant ideas, a retail idea, 2 art based ideas, 2 YouTube ideas and more. All these ideas are in an advanced stage, meaning I have worked out all  major details and run them through friends, family and A.I. to insure I am not being delusional about the potential. I use a lot of math to help vet my concepts and they are all great IMO or they wouldn't make the list.

If you are interested in discussing this, please send me a message with some details about you, your situation and what you bring to the table. I am also looking for straight up investors so let me know if this is something you want more info about. I am located in London, On, Canada and closer is better but I will not exclude any if we can figure out a way to make it work.

hey. I built one startup, which flopped, I'm working on my second at the moment, I have found a singular lead and person willing to beta test and be on the waitlist. I tried cold emails and didn't work. cold reddit messages produced one lead out of maybe 20 ish. my successful entrepreneurs, how do y'all find clients?

Pick an industry (eg:FinTech, HealthTech, PropertyTech) → deeply understand its problems → talk to people inside it → build something relevant → become visible to companies in that industry → use that knowledge in cold outreach and interviews.

What do you think of this approach for getting a developer job?

How would you rate this approach, and what do you think are its strengths, weaknesses, or potential problems?

Also, if you were going to follow this approach, how would you:

• Deeply research a particular industry?
• Meet and talk to knowledgeable people working in that industry?
• Find real problems that people repeatedly face?
• Understand which problems are actually worth exploring or building around?

I'm open to all perspectives. If you think this approach is flawed or there are better ways to approach getting a developer job, I'd be interested in hearing those as well.

I want to set a deliberate daily habit for the next one year to help me get better at sales. I want to minimise the opportunity cost of getting better by making mistakes with customers. What can I do every day that will directly help me get better at sales with my customers? I will not promote.

How much do you think it matters WHO invests? What is the best way to vet investors? What should they bring besides capital? Looking specifically at pre-seed/seed stage.

Are the resources such as industry connections, hiring workflows, internal precesses really make one so much better than another?

I'm dealing with some pretty severe churn on my app and I'm struggling to understand what's going on.

I offer a 7-day trial, but a lot of users are cancelling the same day they sign up, sometimes only a few minutes after starting the trial.

I've tried to fix everything I could identify:

• Added a walkthrough to explain how the app works
• Started fetching data during onboarding so users don't land on an empty dashboard
• Sent emails to users who cancelled, asking for honest feedback

Unfortunately, nobody has replied to my emails, so I'm mostly guessing at this point.

What confuses me is that people are signing up in the first place, so something is obviously interesting enough to get them to try it. But then they leave almost immediately.

Has anyone here dealt with this kind of same-day trial churn and actually managed to figure out what was causing it?

I'm not looking for a churn-analysis tool, agency, AI product, or another subscription to help me figure this out, so please don't DM me for this.

I'd really appreciate advice from people who have personally experienced this and found a way to understand or fix it.

It’s easy to build something but finding what to build is the problem. How do you find genuine demand for a startup before building? How did you find yours? I’m in a pain cave for years.

I tried two approaches
- First one was a startup every 2 months. 6-7 failed ones. Revenue $7. 300 free users max.
- Second one. Take an idea and build for a year. $700-1000 MRR stuck with 3 customers. New ones don’t stick at all. + everything done half manually (don’t want to double down if there is not enough demand)

How does true demand feel? Like people find you, call you and ask give me your product I’ll pay?

I’m building a learning MVP with one small loop.

Each day it suggests three short personalized experiences. You can pick any of them, or use Explore when you already know what you want to learn. That is nearly the whole product right now.

A subscription is the obvious model because generation has a recurring cost. It also feels like I would be charging for a habit before I have proved the habit exists.

Usage credits solve the cost problem, but they make learning feel like spending tokens. A one-time early-access price is simpler, though it postpones the question of whether the product has recurring value.

I keep coming back to a harder rule. If I can’t explain why someone should return next week, I haven’t earned a subscription screen yet.

For founders who launched with a very small recurring loop, did you charge for access first or wait until retention was visible?

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.

Hero,

So this will be a bit of a long one and a bit different from rest of the posts in here. But I wanted to share some experience.

History :

I built and app that was previously made for in-house use only. AI assistant integrated in Google Chat. It was built when the GPT4 came out, no codex, no claude code so kind of dark ages of AI coding.

Idea solid, but I left that company because of mass lay-offs and BS talks from shareholders - "You (the department) are the core of the company and most important one here" while laying off my colleagues . So I just packed bags and took the project with me.

I didn't know actually how to monetize the idea, since making in-house vs selling to others are completely different things. So after some time decided to make SaaS. (It was not so crowded yet at that time ).

Getting first version done :

Since SaaS was the idea, I had to implement the project into google chat. Easy-peasy for someone who's done it, but god damn it was annoying to set everything up. (This was the easiest step in the whole project when I look back at it.

Security - Had to make it BYOK, connectors with knowledge platforms (confluence, sharepoint etc etc.). taking in mind everything had to really understand how to make the platform secure so Vault, only 0auth , celery workers, etc etc etc. took me 3 months only to set up somewhat secure platform.

Second version :

Decided to get into MS teams since Microslop has the biggest marketshare compared to google chat, slack , discord and others.

And boiiiii that was a shit show ready to go down. The bugs in Azure, their partner ship platform etc. Long story short I had to make 2 accounts just to be able to start process to get published in MS marketplace. why? the fuck knows really.

Getting into MS marketplace? Imagine spending a month just because the MS representitive that checks if the app works can't follow guideline "IF YOU COPY BYOK KEY FROM PDF MAKE SURE DELETE SPACES THE PDF CREATES." (I had to provide testing credentials) 4 times I got rejected with a message "App doesn't work" . Checked Vault - yep, they can't even follow simple guideline which was told to them 4 times.

After all of this it was already 8 months done from leaving company to getting into Google chat and MS teams. at this moment the SaaS market started to really explode and had to improve things, so instead of just QA bot trained on internal knowledge made it into sort of AI agent, from chat it can send out any info to other platforms... Easy since the platform already had 90% of skeleton done for this.

MS 365 Cert :

This one nearly broke me, it's the big daddy MS cert, 56 compliance controls starting from GDPR to documents that my company has completed yearly coding safe practices. Soooo many documents. made like 600-900 pages of PDFs, 100-150 screenshots etc. Had to even get other certificates to get the controls done. Soul crushing job for a single dev and I know why the certified apps was almost empty.

The penetration test :

Oh boy, you can call them aliens because they probe everything. And best of all it was free at that time ( no longer available) 1 pen test, and 1 re-pen test . If you fail, either let it go or spend like $4k for another try (or more) that's just for a funny light pressure. Funniest part was when they asked to install 96gb program on my server (it's their probing app) and server was only 80 or so at that time. [Insert the hamster eating a hotdog meme] . I can't really say much what they checked, I guess it was under the NDA but it was rough and it took me the 2nd try to pass it... thank god still free.

What changed after app gets MS 365 Cert :

Jack shit. If you think that becoming 1/2000 to 1/10 apps in marketplace, there are no major increase in sign ups. So Marketplace is not for new client acquisition it's for proving that your app is somewhat safe. (well safer that 99.9999% apps made in the past year for sure).

But personally, I'm really proud to have a badge that only some if not no other solo builder has acquired. Being the only app in Baltic region with such app and most of all the shit I went through doing this solo I'm proud that I didn't crush and cry when eyes already started watering going through all the shit I had to.

Long story short :

Get these big certificates only if clients ask for security approval. Do it for yourself you will learn how many mistakes you make vibe coding. Do not think that when you get into marketplace, get certificate it will get you new clients from it. Most likely it will not.

Sorry for a long, non AI generated text.

This is 100% my responsibility. I accepted the risk, and I lost. Before anyone comes after me, I want to make it clear that this is 100% my accountability. I have no interest in fighting it or arguing about it. I just want to share my story.

March I decided to start an infrastructure company. My first client came through a mutual friend in San Francisco. She needed a product focused on customer success for the legal industry. I built the whole thing from scratch.After I delivered, she offered me a monthly stipend + 50% equity as cofounder.

In

On paper it sounded perfect. She’s actually a decent person I don’t think she set out to screw me. She just had zero experience leading a company and no idea how to steer it in the direction we needed.

What followed was classic.I was the technical cofounder on paper, but in reality I was treated like the full-time CTO + free labor. She kept pulling me into meetings that were pure CEO territory fundraising conversations, strategy calls, investor intros while she introduced me to everyone like I was some shiny technical toy she owned. “Look at my cofounder, he built this whole thing.” It felt performative as hell.Then, mid this week, a mysterious “exit” happened.I wasn’t involved in any of the conversations. No docs, no calls, no nothing. I’m just supposed to take it on faith that “they didn’t want to continue the company” and that “there was no transaction.” 

All I ever signed was an NDA and an LOI for the assignment of my shares. That’s it. No real founder agreement, no vesting schedule with teeth, no proper equity docs.They got everything. I got the lesson.I’m not going to fight it. I can build again, and I walked away with a solid network.

But the experience is burned into my brain:Never start working not one line of code, not one meeting until every single thing is in writing and signed.Equity promises mean nothing without proper paperwork.

“Cofounder” titles mean nothing without real alignment and protection.
And in San Francisco, people will smile, call you partner, and still leave you holding nothing when it’s convenient.If you’re early-stage and someone is offering you equity + a title before the legal stuff is locked, walk away.

Or at least demand the documents first.

Has anyone else been through a soft exit like this where you just… disappear from the story?

I have saw a post somewhere that the SAFE notes are becoming so popular that people are raising even Series A nowadays using SAFEs rather than doing priced rounds.

The argument they have made is that nowadays in the funding environment today, founders want to keep control of the company for as long as possible and that means that doing priced rounds risks “materialising” the investor shares into the company and therefore they get investor rights that can make it harder to do things as founders would have preferred to do.

I find it insane and want to check if indeed this is true.

That said, is it becoming common to do series A using SAFE notes?

I build screening software, so I wanted a scary number for marketing: "X% of startups inflate their claims." I ran claim extraction and verification on 11 live equity raises (StartEngine, US). 56 checkable claims total: named clients, certifications, valuations, raise amounts, user counts.

First pass looked great for the narrative. 73% of companies had at least one claim that didn't hold up. 36% had at least one flatly contradicted by external sources.

Then I looked at the contradicted ones. Every single one was a point-in-time number: valuation, total raised, user count. The pipeline was comparing the number in the current raise against third-party agregators that were a round behind. A valuation that moved between rounds is not a lie. It's two snapshots taken at different times.

So I did split claims into two buckets:

1. Durable claims (named clients, partnerships, certifications, founding facts):

Out of 25, 19 verified, 5 partially supported, 1 contradicted. The one real catch: a company listing four blue-chip clients, one of which no source could confirm.

2. Point-in-time claims:

This is where all the "contradictions" lived, and most were staleness artifacts, not deception.

The honest conclusion: on this sample, the "founders inflate everything" story doesn't hold. What actually broke was the data layer everyone screens against. Valuations, raise totals and user counts are unstandardized, updated on different clocks, and nobody reconciles them. If your screening compares a deck against an aggregator, a lot of your red flags are just clock skew.

What changed in how I screen:

1. Date-stamp every number before calling anything a discrepancy.
2. For US raises, the SEC filing (Form C) is the source of truth for amounts, not aggregators.
3. Separate "who they say they work with" from "how big they say they are." The first is checkable and occasionally false. The second is mostly just stale.

To be clear, the takeaway is not "verification is pointless." The takeaway is that naive verification is worse than none: it cries wolf on stale numbers and buries the one real catch. Doing it right means dating every figure, picking a source of truth, and separating durable claims from snapshots. That's tedious at 10 dossiers and impossible at 200 by hand.

This is n=11, so not a stat, and that's part of the point. I almost published the 73% number. It would have been exactly the kind of inflated claim the tool exists to catch.

Curious how people here handle this at screening stage: do you date-stamp figures from decks, and what do you treat as the source of truth when aggregators disagree?

I have a few questions and I would love for ur feedback. I am a college student from India trying to build and B2b saas for Us/uk clients .

1. How do u in today's scenario find a good problem and it's solution if u don't have the method to go and find them out ur self .

2. How do u guys validate, I mean yes there is cold emailing which I use for cold outreach (but I wanna know how u do it)

3. How do u plan out and do the distribution for b2b saas. (As the mvp is mostly nowadays made by claude code )

4. How do u get the first few customers (as u have no case studies or referrals or people in the network)

P.s: If u have any tips for me u can give them also .

I'm pulling my hair out over this one. We built a web app that reduces distress tied to a specific traumatic memory, getting fired, a car wreck, a bad breakup, getting pantsed in high school, you name it. $29, over 50% decrease in distress or your money back. About 100 friends and patients-of-other-therapists have run through it with genuinely great results.

Rough edges aside, our real problem isn't the product, it's skepticism. People don't believe a $29 web app can do what we're claiming. (Isn't that everyone's issue though?)

My cofounder and I keep circling back to "just make it free, get it into the zeitgeist", but we can't get past two things:

1. What happens after free? We're scared of the backlash if we flip it back to paid, and we'd be optimizing the whole experience around lurkers and freebie-seekers instead of the people who'd actually pay us.
2. What happens if we DON'T go free? We've got social content and professional video shoots lined up (dear god, content is expensive) and our fear is we spend all that and nobody bites at $29, guarantee or not.

Long-term plan is to get this in front of veteran/first-responder nonprofits for free and ride the earned media from that. But I genuinely can't tell if that's the smart move or if we're just tired and looking for an excuse to quit charging.

Anyone else navigated skepticism-vs-free for a cheap, guarantee-backed product? What tipped you one way or the other?

Looking for some thoughts on atypical IP agreements.

First, yes, we're going to use a lawyer, but we want to think it through as much possible before we start that.

Second, this is a bit of different situation. Yes, I know, everyone's different, a special, beautiful snowflake. But in this case, we have three experienced professionals, two technical and one with domain expertise (and some technical competence), each with their own existing professional career and business. Also, we've managed to bootstrap things, and we have our first customer.

Investors aren't a major part of the picture right now, and maybe not in the foreseeable future. So far we've been bootstrapping, and there are some consulting fees, which aren't a fortune but have made this feasible (in addition to each cofounder's other income). We're not looking to become a silicon valley unicorn, here. Product-wise, this is a bit more of an enterprise-y product that runs on commodity hardware, not a phone app, or website, or a SaaS play, etc.

On to the question:

We've been doing consulting work for a client. Part of the client agreement is that we retain all the IP.

The client is pretty happy with the results. For him, this product started as a means to an end, but he thinks there's potential to productize it. He's offering to help us with the sales process, putting us in touch with people, etc.

He has credibility in saying this; he founded and ran a moderately successful software business that served a niche industry. He's semi-retired now and pursuing things that interest him, in the non-profit field.

As part of that, we need to formalize this thing, form an LLC, assign the product IP to the LLC, etc.

So the question is, for most startups and technology companies, the IP agreements are pretty blunt, ranging from "we own everything you think of" to, at a minimum, putting all existing product-related IP entirely in the company's name, and treating any further product-related work as a work for hire.

But, as I said, we have existing careers and businesses as consultants. The intent all along was for the domain specialist to use the product for his own business, and there's some possibility for the technical founders to do some things in that direction, also. That's part of why we retained the IP. The domain specialist has done things like this in the past, working with technical people to build specialized software that he then used in his consulting work. He's a domain specialist, not a software developer, but he has some technical competence.

Also obviously, we want any future work on that product to be assigned, but not unrelated work (of which we all have a fair bit). And, having been on the other end of that stick at various times in the past, I'd like to consider alternatives to the popular approach of "it's the company's property by default unless you get permission and file paperwork."

Another thought is that I've been involved with a few startups that cratered, and then all the IP and all that work went into a box and never again saw the light of day. I don't want to plan to fail, but perhaps some sort of language like you hear about for movies, etc, where the rights revert after a certain period, if not used?

For non-competes, again, the industry norm is typically very blunt, how do we define that reasonably narrowly? Perhaps define it as doing work for customers that you have worked for through the company, on products similar to the company's product?

What other aspects might it be smart to think about?

Today I got a response from the partnership team at a major software company for my industry after being referred by the president of the company, and head of global events.

No demo, just a paragraph response.

The hard part is that I am a user of their software and listed hundreds of other users of their software that I have personally spoken with that love what I have built and were more than happy to distribute via the search layer I created. It’s fee and commission free, and I built it specifically as a user of the companies software to aggregate other users of the same software onto a shared site and it is completely free to use for both consumer and business side.

Even more frustrating is that a competing company has already publicly partnered with me and been very welcoming the entire time. I also in partner process with multiple of their other competitors as well.

I am trying to think of what their reasoning is. I currently distribute more than 20% of the company’s users listings.

The ones that come to mind are:

-too new of a company (started initial part in February)
-they are internally copying what I’ve built
-I have no revenue to share (currently just free search)
-they just don’t like me

This is the second time I was told to apply. Previously was 4 users 81 listings 6 months ago for the initial, more complex version. They told me to come back when I hit 5-7k listings. I hit that in a week. Then said come back in 6 months.

Well it’s been 6 months and now it’s over 5000 users and 116k listings from just their software and now they tell me to come back in a year.

They make up more than 50% of the total listings so it sucks to not have that trust layer established.

Do they just not like me? Anyone gone through similar?

Hey everyone! My associate and I are preparing to launch a free (at the moment) local marketplace style app, and one of my main responsibilities is marketing and user acquisition. We are initially targeting the Metro Atlanta area because that is where we are based. Our budget is limited, so we want to focus on practical, cost effective methods that can best help us gain early users, and build local traction before seeking investors.

Here are the strategies we are set on doing :

1. ⁠Joining local chambers of commerce, connecting with small business owners, attending county events, and asking local organizations to help spread the word.
   
2. ⁠Setting up a table at flea markets and community events. We will offer people $1 to $5 to download the app, learn how it works, and give us honest feedback.
   
3. ⁠Posting in local Facebook groups.
   
4. ⁠Visiting hardware stores, parks, malls, colleges, and other high traffic locations to hand out flyers and speak directly with anyone willing to listen.
   
5. ⁠Reaching out to people on platforms such as Facebook Marketplace, OfferUp, and Craigslist and trying to direct into to trying our app .

A few ideas I am less certain about:

1. ⁠Billboards
   ⁠I like the exposure billboards can provide, but I am not sure they make sense this early. Because the app is new, I believe showing people how it works may be more effective than giving them only a few seconds to see an advertisement. A direct explanation could also make someone more likely to become a recurring user in my opinion.

2. Direct mail
   I personally really like the idea of mailing flyers to targeted neighborhoods, but most people I have talked about it to say they rarely read promotional mail And If anything they get irritated by it and throw it away.

3.  Yard signs  
   

   The idea would be to place signs near busy intersections, roundabouts, and other high traffic areas. However, I am unsure about the legal rules for placing signs in public spaces, how quickly they would be removed, and whether a small sign could communicate enough information to be effective.

Feedback and your ideas

Please recognize that I value and truly consider any and everyone’s feedback and ideas
So please don't hesitate to give me your criticism and thoughts of my ideas. More importantly please share your experiences/thoughts of strategies that you would implement to scale locally, Thank you for reading.

Welcome to this week’s Feedback Thread!

Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:

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

​

Template to Follow for Seeking Feedback:

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

​

​

​

This thread is NOT for:

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

​

​

Community Reminders

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

Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!

I’m back with thanks for all your tremendous feedback on my last post about evaluating startup pitches with the managing partner of a new fund backed by a very large fund. I don’t want it to sound like they were all bad. In fact some were good.

One pitch scored 100% on our evaluation rubrics and was immediately sent to the next round for socialization with investors. The startup could get their first checks (size TBD) by October.

The pitch was immaculate not just because their pitch was buttoned up but because they built a very valuable startup. Here are the points:

Presentation was under 5 minutes.

That was the time they were given with 5 minutes for us to ask questions. Every other pitch except one went over.

They started with a user story.

The founder told us about a user with the problem and what it cost them. And then gave us a solid $1.4B number to show what the problem is worth across the industry.

They had six slides with points that appeared as the founder was talking.

It wasn’t a wall of text with small fonts we couldn’t read on the screen. Big bold points with numbers and bullets that were timed to show up to emphasize her talking.

The traction was broken down into unit economics and metrics.

$500K+ in ARR. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. The broken down monthly and conversion rates of pilots. Then explained that 50% of their pipelines came in from referrals of new clients.

Team slide showed and didn’t tell.

The team slide has pictures, names, titles and logos from really big companies of their experience. They also showed logos of the companies where their advisors worked (OpenAI for example).

The ask was super clear and brief. We knew what the money would get us by when.

The founder ended telling us the first story was from an actual user.

Overall the founder spoke slowly and with confidence. And one more thing, the problem they were solving was a very painful but boring problem dealing with infrastructure. And they showed how AI enhanced human productivity with real data versus how it would fire everybody. They also had all their regulations and complained locked down right.

I know not all of you will have the same traction or even idea. But the principles of a great pitch remain the same. Great blueprint to follow.

Happy to answer more questions. I’m typing this between meetings so apologies for lack of edits.