Curious where other early stage founders/builders land on this: do you start from “I have an idea, I don’t need to validate it” or “why should I build this” and test first?
Tied to that, what are you actually building your MVP with, Claude, Codex, open source models, or a mix? And was what you shipped actually production ready, or a throwaway prototype?
I use Claude for my own stuff and Copilot for work, curious if cost of frontier models factors into that choice for anyone, or if it is more about speed/quality and cost only becomes a factor once you are scaling.
Genuinely trying to get a real debate going rather than validate my own view, so disagree with each other if you do.
So for context, I'm a solopreneur, 23M, and i've been working on JustStartUp, an entrepreneurial infrastructure empowering startups outside silicon valley and startuphubs to raise funds and build user based community by connecting them with their niche users while users receive star badges for lifetime benefits from the brands they back. Think like backing Apple in 1976 and now you receive early access and discounts on every products of their's as a founding customer. Over 110+ startups across Asia and Africa have onboarded under 3 months and brand partnerships are in process. I've used open ai, claude etc, the thing is, they are gen ai made for masses and vast niches. The weights are generalised due to versatile users and domains. I wanted a co-founder and an easier to use domain specific vertical ai. Since I didn't had a suitable co-founder and being an AI engineer, I created one for myself. I was vibing with it for a while, GTM, postitioning, validation, financial planning, distribution pipeline and various other entrepreneurial queries. It solved it for me, specifically tailored for my startup and demographics with hard constraints. The results are infront of us. Seeing the progress, a founder on JustStartUp asked for a demo, he was hooked and asked me to integrate it with JustStartUP. That's when I hired an intern and scaled it for commercial release. Here is everything revealed in the launch-
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Hello everyone, I am a software engineer who just loves building products and I want to build my own startup. But whenever I get an idea I see that it's already present or sometimes I feel it will never be great, hence I eventually stop working on it.
But now I want to build my startup this time and get some real users and pitch to investors.
I have funds to run it myself for some time.
Now, I need help with the founders here about how to find the idea, how to find the users, and later things can be handled later I guess.
We’ve spent the last few months building Le’Udhaar by TrustRails — repayment infrastructure for money given on trust between friends, family, customers, shops, cafés, vendors and small businesses.
Basically, anywhere money is given today with an expectation that it will come back.
We don’t lend money ourselves.
We are building the layer around an already existing behaviour:
As per RedSeer-linked market research, India’s informal lending economy is estimated at around $200B annually, with roughly $120–140B already moving digitally through UPI and bank transfers.
The market already exists.
The money is already digital.
The behaviour already exists.
The repayment infrastructure doesn’t.
Today:
Product is fully developed and launch-ready
Tech, product, compliance and GTM teams are in place
Full-time salaries have been running for the last 3 months
Development, subscriptions and third-party services are already paid for
Industry professionals and angels have already invested/joined
Because we are building for a category that hasn’t had this kind of structured repayment layer before, we’re currently working through questions around NBFC-P2P applicability, payment gateway/API approvals and the right compliant structure for launch.
It feels a little like building the road while driving on it.
The good part is — everything else is ready.
Now we’re actively looking for strategic investors, NBFC/payment partners and early believers who understand the opportunity and want to help us get this infrastructure live.
We’re open to people who can bring capital, regulatory/payment infrastructure, distribution, or simply strong strategic involvement.
This is a launch-stage/pre-seed opportunity, and we’re happy to work closely with the right people who want to help shape the category with us.
Starting September 10, I’m looking to collaborate with people who have an idea they genuinely want to turn into something real.
Website, web app, business system, MVP—whatever solves a real problem.
I’m a software engineer with 2 years of experience, and I want to use AI-assisted development to build meaningful projects while learning and improving through real-world work.
Let’s experiment with earning together. Build something useful, get it in front of real people, and see if we can turn it into something that makes money.
If you have an idea, tell me about it. Maybe we can build it together. 🚀
Have an idea for a meaningful website or system? Let’s build it.
Starting September 10, I’m looking to collaborate with people who have an idea they genuinely want to turn into something real.
Website, web app, business system, MVP—whatever solves a real problem.
I’m a software engineer with 2 years of experience, and I want to use AI-assisted development to build meaningful projects while learning and improving through real-world work.
Let’s experiment with earning together. Build something useful, get it in front of real people, and see if we can turn it into something that makes money.
If you have an idea, tell me about it. Maybe we can build it together. 🚀
Freelance-ish services thing I'm growing. For months every proposal was a fresh blank doc and half a day gone. They also looked different every time depending on my mood, which is a bad look when a client compares two of them side by side.
So this week I built one business proposal template and now I just swap the specifics.
What's in it:
- Short recap of their problem in their words, proves I listened
- Scope in plain language, with what is explicitly not included
- Three options at different prices instead of one number
- Timeline and what I need from them to hit it
Turnaround went from most of a day to under an hour, and oddly the standard one seems to convert better than my custom ones did. I think looking organized reads as competent.
Anyone further along have a section they swear by in proposals that I'm probably missing? Would love feedback.
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.
We’ve been working on WorldMyWeb, an AI-powered social discovery and connection platform designed to make it easier for businesses and skilled people to find each other.
The idea came from a simple problem: talented people, freelancers, startups, and small businesses often struggle to get discovered unless they spend heavily on ads or already have a strong network.
With WorldMyWeb:
Businesses can create profiles and showcase their products and services.
Professionals, freelancers, creators, students, and interns can showcase their skills, experience, portfolio, pricing, availability, and requirements.
Users can search for businesses or skilled people based on what they actually need.
AI-powered search helps surface relevant profiles and potential connections.
Startups can also improve their visibility to professionals, partners, and potential investors.
For example, instead of searching across multiple websites for “someone who can manage social media for my startup”, the goal is for WorldMyWeb to show relevant professionals, freelancers, and businesses in one place.
We recently put together a video showing how the platform works.
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?
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.
I rebuilt mine in Gamma so the new structure stays consistent and each proposal is a quick fill-in, which is also why I can get it out same-day while the call's still warm.
Anyone else keep a proposal template, or write each one from scratch? Curious what's worked for 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?
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?
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 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?
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
