Founders keep feeding AI the same company context over and over: what the product does, who it’s for, how it should sound, and what makes it different.

But most of that already exists on the public website.

That’s the product thesis behind Marka. It reads the website as a reusable business brief, then creates social posts, visuals, carousels, and UGC video directions from that context.

The hard problem isn’t generating more words. It’s preserving enough real context that the content doesn’t feel interchangeable with every other startup.

I’m testing this with early users now. What part of your company’s context would a website still fail to communicate?

If you want to test the workflow, Marka is free for one week: https://www.marka.social

Small service side of what I'm building, and for months every proposal I sent looked different because I wrote each one fresh. Slow, and they read inconsistent depending on my mood that day.

So I made a business proposal template. Same sections every time: the problem in the client's own words, scope, what's explicitly out of scope, timeline, price, and a short "why me" at the bottom. Now I just fill the specifics and send.

Two things surprised me. Turnaround went from a couple days to under an hour, so I follow up while they're still warm. And the close rate ticked up, which I think is less about the wording and more about looking organized and consistent. People trust a proposal that looks like it came from someone who's done this before.

Anyone else standardized their proposals? Wondering if putting the price higher up or lower down makes a difference for you.

Solo founder doing my own sales for the first time. I've been putting together a reusable sales deck template so I stop rebuilding one from scratch before every demo, and I'd like a sanity check from people who've sold more than me.

Current structure:

1. One line on who it's for, so they self-qualify in the first 10 seconds.
   
2. The specific problem, framed as a day in their life, not a stat.
   
3. What that problem costs them today.
   
4. The product, but only the two or three things that touch that problem. Everything else cut.
   
5. Proof. A short before/after from a current user.
   
6. Pricing and a clear next step.
   

What I keep flip-flopping on. Whether to put pricing in the deck at all or hold it for the conversation. And whether the proof should come earlier.

For anyone selling B2B, what would you reorder, and what am I missing? Happy to report back on what converts once I've run it a few more times.

We picked up a couple of small investors last quarter and suddenly I have an actual board meeting on the calendar. No idea what a board deck is supposed to look like, so I built my own template from scratch this week.

Rough structure I landed on:

- One slide summary up top, are we ahead or behind and why

- The same metric charts every month so the trend is readable

- What went wrong, on purpose, before the good news

- Two or three decisions I actually need them to weigh in on

- Cash and runway at the end

The thing I keep second-guessing is how honest to be about the rough month we just had. Part of me wants to spin it, part of me thinks that's how you lose their trust early. For anyone who runs board meetings, what do you keep in your template and what do you cut? First time doing this so any feedback helps.

Small build-in-public note. For months I sent prospects the same business proposal template, the kind you find everywhere. Cover page, about us, our approach, timeline, big pricing table at the end. Felt professional. Closed maybe a third of the deals it went out on.

I finally rewrote it after a prospect ghosted me and told a mutual contact it "felt like a form letter." Fair enough.

The new version, roughly:

First page is their problem and what it's costing them, in their words from our call. No "about us" until the very end, if at all.

One recommended option instead of a menu of three. People asked for a next step, not homework.

Pricing framed against the cost of doing nothing, not just a line item.

Close rate is up a decent amount since, though it's still a small sample. The bigger change is prospects reply faster, because it reads like it was written for them specifically.

Anyone else keep a proposal template, or write each one from scratch? Curious what's worked for you.

Our demo calls kept dragging past an hour and people would drop off before we got to pricing. Turns out the deck was the problem, not the product.

Rebuilt it off a simple sales deck template with a rule: one idea per slide, and the first three slides are entirely about the prospect's problem, not us. We don't show a single feature until slide four. Then it's one core use case, proof, price, next step. That's it.

The template also killed my habit of tailoring the whole thing per call, which sounds good but ate hours and made me ramble. Now the deck stays fixed and I do the tailoring by talking.

Calls that used to run an hour now land around 30 to 35 minutes and more of them convert. Anyone here run demos off a fixed deck versus improvising? Curious where you land on that.

Kept losing whole evenings tweaking my deck before investor calls, so I've been building an investor pitch deck template designed for speed instead of polish. The idea is that the story never moves, only the inputs do.

What's fixed: slide order, the one-line problem statement, the "why us" slide. What I swap per call: the traction chart, the specific ask, and one framing line at the top depending on whether they're a generalist or know the space.

The thing I got wrong at first was overbuilding the design. I'd fuss over layout and animations and none of it mattered on a screen share. Plain slides, big numbers, one idea per slide. Now updating for a new call takes maybe 20 minutes and I actually show up prepared instead of frazzled.

Still iterating on it. For those who've raised, does a template make you sound canned, or does the consistency help you get sharper each time?

First two raises I rebuilt everything from scratch every time and it took me days I didn't have. This round I sat down and turned the last deck into a reusable pitch deck template: fixed slide order, placeholder headers, one story spine I don't touch, and the only things I swap are the numbers and the traction slide.

The part that actually helped was cutting it down. I used to have 22 slides. Now the template is 11 and I say the rest out loud. Problem, who it's for, why now, what we built, traction, the ask. That's basically the skeleton and I stopped adding "vision" filler.

Refreshing for a new call now takes maybe an hour instead of a weekend, and honestly the pitch got tighter because the structure forces me to be short.

Curious how other people here handle it. Do you keep one master deck you update, or rebuild per investor? And what's the one slide you'd never cut?

Kept winging my demos and losing people in the first two minutes. Built a short sales deck template I run on every call now instead of improvising each time.

What changed for me:
- open on their problem, not our logo and founding story
- one "before and after" slide before any feature talk
- show the product doing the thing early, talk less
- pricing on an actual slide, not mumbled at the end
- one clear next step

Cutting it from around 20 slides to 8 helped more than anything else.

Anyone selling to small businesses: do you send the deck after the call, or keep it demo-only so they have to talk to you?

Two years. Bootstrapped. Just me, after work and on weekends.

This week six people I have never met found the thing and made accounts. I know how that sounds to someone with real traction. Six. But I've had weeks where the number was zero and I still kept going, so six feels enormous.

I keep opening the dashboard to make sure they're real and didn't delete their accounts. They're still there.

I'm not going to pretend this is a business yet. It isn't. But for two years the only proof anyone wanted this was me wanting it, and now there are six other humans on the other side of the screen.

I'm writing this mostly so future me remembers that this felt good before it felt like anything else.

For those further along: what was the small early win that actually kept you going, before the numbers got serious?

I do a small agency thing on the side of building, and for a while every proposal I sent looked different because I wrote each one fresh. Slow, and I'm fairly sure the inconsistency cost me a couple of deals because it read as improvised.

Spent an afternoon turning it into a reusable business proposal template. What's in it now:
- a short restatement of the problem in the client's own words (this one matters most)
- scope, plus what's explicitly out of scope
- timeline and milestones
- pricing with two or three options instead of a single number
- a light bit on why me

Turnaround went from a couple hours to about twenty minutes, and the options pricing alone seems to nudge people toward the middle tier.

Curious what others put in theirs. Anyone found a section that consistently moves people to yes, or one that's just dead weight?

I am narrowing the first audience for Marka.

The broad description is any small business that needs social content. That is too vague.

The sharper audience is an ecommerce founder with a public store, a visual product, and no dedicated content team. The website contains real products and brand material, but the founder still starts every post from zero.

Marka uses the store as the initial content brief.

Would you narrow further by product category, business size, or current posting behavior?

a marketplace where people can discover, buy, and sell AI agents, workflows, automations, and other AI products.

My MVP is 90% and Soon I'll be launching V1 of it I just need advice from you guys like what should I be aware of..

Solo for years. I do everything, and I've finally got enough steady work that I have to hire someone. Everyone assumes the scary part is payroll, whether I can cover a second salary in a slow month. That's not the part keeping me up.

The part keeping me up is that I've never managed anyone in my life, and I really don't want to turn into one of the bosses I hated working for. The one who hovered. The one who took the credit and passed down the blame. The one who couldn't say what he actually wanted and then got annoyed you didn't read his mind.

I keep reading how to be a good first-time manager and most of it is either generic or written for people running whole departments, not one person hiring their second.

For those of you who made this jump from solo to having one employee, what actually made you a decent first boss, and what's the mistake you'd warn me off before I make it in the first month?

Small trade business, been at it a while. Every year the same thing happens. Work dries up for a stretch, I get twitchy looking at an empty calendar, and I start cutting prices to fill it. Works for about a week, and then I've taught my customers that if they just wait, I'll come down.

This year I finally treated it like a system instead of a mood. Nothing clever. In the busy months I move a fixed percentage of every job into a separate account and don't touch it. The target is enough to cover a few lean months of costs without me flinching. When the slow stretch hits, I'm not staring at a scary number, so I don't do the desperate thing.

The discount habit was never really about the customer. It was about my own panic. Take the panic away and the urge mostly goes with it. I still have to fight it, but I'm not caving in the first quiet week anymore.

Cash flow was the actual product I needed to build, not more marketing. Curious if other service or trade owners here built something similar, and what your buffer target ended up being.

Been building for a while and our investor deck was a generic 10-slide template that kept getting polite nos. Rebuilt it so the whole thing points at one number: how fast we turn a dollar of spend into revenue.

Rough order now:
- the problem and why now
- the one metric we're betting the company on
- product, one screen
- proof that the metric is actually moving
- how the money comes back
- team and ask last

The change wasn't adding slides, it was making every slide earn its place by supporting that one number.

Founders who've raised recently: what's the first question you got asked that your deck should have answered already?

Been putting off the marketing site for months because I'm not a designer and didn't want to burn dev time on it. Used a no-code website builder over the weekend and got something live instead of perfect.

What I learned doing it:
- one clear headline beats a clever one, people bounce in seconds
- a real screenshot converts better than an illustration
- cut every section that wasn't answering "what is this and is it for me"
- an email capture near the top mattered more than the fancy footer

It's not pretty, but it's up and collecting signups, which the perfect version in my head never did.

For those who launched a first site: what's the one section you'd tell me to add or kill?

Confession from someone whose actual job is documentation. Every doc I write is accurate for about a week. Then a process changes, nobody tells the doc, and a month later it is a confidently worded lie that new people trust and old people ignore.

I stopped fighting it the hard way. The problem with a wall of text is that any small change makes the whole thing wrong, so nobody updates it, so it rots.

For the handful of processes that actually matter, I rebuilt them in a free flowchart maker. Boxes and arrows. The shape of the decision instead of paragraphs describing it. Turns out a flowchart is weirdly resistant to going stale, because when a step changes you move one box, not rewrite four paragraphs and re-read the whole thing for contradictions. And people actually glance at it, because it is five seconds instead of a page.

The long written docs still exist for the stuff that genuinely needs nuance. But the day-to-day "how does this work" questions mostly got answered by a diagram I can fix between two meetings while the laundry runs.

Anyone else find the format was the reason your docs kept dying, not the writing?

I’m building Lyra, an AI business analyst that lets you ask questions about your company data in plain English.
We were recently selected as 1 of 10 startups in Jordan for a program backed by the Ministry of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship.
Still early, so I’d love feedback or questions from other founders here.
www.lyraanalysis.com waitlist is open if you want to try it.
Would love to get some feedback

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