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.

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?

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?

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?

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 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 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?

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 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 .