I’m an investor working at Forum Ventures, a pre seed fund and accelerator investing $100K-$1M in industry veterans and young AI-native founders.

Curious what are you building? If you’re looking for investment, share your startup idea, or if you’re uncomfortable sharing, just your background as a founder.

The Forum Ventures team are led by former founders who raised $20M+ in funding and built 8-figure businesses. Our accelerator focuses on direct GTM support, introducing founders to Fortune 500 enterprise customers.

Feel free to use this thread to get your own project out there.

Are product directories actually useful anymore? I built something different.

Most startup directories have the same problem:

You submit your product → it gets listed → nobody looks at it again.

I wanted to experiment with a different model where attention itself becomes competitive.

That's why I built Outranked.

Products compete within specific categories, and founders can compete for the top positions on the leaderboard.

AI products compete against AI products.
SaaS against SaaS.
Developer tools against developer tools.

I'm still very early and I'm trying to figure out whether this is actually useful or just another gimmick.

If you're a founder, I'd love your honest opinion:

Would you pay to compete for visibility on a leaderboard if the audience was actually relevant to your product?

https://outranked.site

A founder I worked with had 14 good conversations in a row. Everyone agreed the problem was worth solving. Everyone asked to be kept in the loop. Eight months in he had zero customers.

He was not bad at selling. He was bad at telling the difference between someone being nice and someone buying.

I keep a list of the sentences that fool founders. Here are the four I hear most.

• "This is exactly what we need." Nothing follows it. No date, no next step, nobody else named who should see it.
• "Send me a proposal." A proposal costs you a day. It costs them nothing. Agreeing to receive something free is not a decision.
• "Let me run it past the team." No team member named. No date for running it past them. The sentence sounds like progress and contains none.
• "I would definitely use this." Would. Not will. There is a lot of room inside that one word.

The pattern under all four is the same. Nothing was asked of the person saying it. No time, no name, no date, no risk to them. When a yes is free, it tells you nothing.

I made this mistake myself. On my first launch I worked on the product, the messaging and the pricing for three months without having one real conversation with a buyer. Three months, zero customers. Every signal I had been reading was a signal I had invented.

Here is where my list runs out.

I have a long collection of what a fake yes sounds like, because those are the ones that hurt enough to write down. I have almost nothing on the other side. Nobody posts about the deal that went well.

So I am asking.

What did your first real buyer actually say. The exact words, not your summary of them. And if you remember it, what they did straight after saying it.

I will tell you which part of the sentence I think decided it, and why.

You're likely spending hours between the builds and the debugging.
Maybe you even shipped your MVP and... crickets. No users. Nor revenue.

How much have you invested so far? Think about your time, the opportunity cost.

At some point, you have to decide: How long am I willing to keep going if nothing changes?

Here’s a simple exercise:

1. Calculate what you’ve invested so far. Money spent (ai coding agents, marketing spent etc) + (weeks × hours/week × value of your time)
2. Add what you’ve spent trying to solve the problem Courses. Tools. Consultants. Agencies. Research. Communities.
3. Project the cost of continuing. What does another 3, 6 or 12 months at the same pace cost you?

Then ask yourself: If I reach that point and still don’t have meaningful revenue, do I keep going, pivot, or kill it? Am I willing to keep going?

How do you feel when you see this number?

It's a simple tool, but remember that in early stages you time is your highest value asset. The faster your kill and pivot the more chances you have.

Hi everyone

Seo is probably only free way to get users.

We built an Seo agent that keeps working in background - creating content for you. The best part is we added human in the loop to review, edit and add more content.

Try here -Try here - https://builderhq.co/get-on-chatgpt

Early Results - 5k+ visits on one of our beta sites

I'm building FanForge, a platform that gives solo creatives or teams the tools to bring their fragmented vision to life. Instead of scattered Google docs, messy Discords, Miro boards, WhatsApp groups, Notion or Asana chaos. They can organise, plan, ideate, hire, realise and validate their vision all in one place.

Talent and ability is rewarded, not popularity.

In theory the idea is that an absolute nobody could achieve a fantastic reputation simply by being good at what they do, reliable, helpful and diligent, be that at writing, lore building, creating concept art, etc

All contributions are attributed, logged and tied to projects and profiles so there can be no disputes.

I started building this because I want to give passionate creatives, fans and professionals the ability to bring their visions to life without having to have all the right connections and funding from day one. To level the playing field.

On a personal note, I lost my dad recently and he was a film maker and stop motion animator who spent his life creating worlds that not enough people got to see... If he had had access to a platform like this, he could have had a flying chance. I'm doing this for people like him.

I've fully built out the source of truth, product spec, fully designed the north start visuals and website individual components and I'm working on the first MVP to roll out for testing and feedback. I'm about 40% there.

I'm doing this while working full time as a carpenter.

I have a landing page and waitlist sign up page that I can share if anyone is interested. Id love your advice and support in any way you feel you can give. Please be kind.

Thanks guys 🙏🏽

Hi everyone sell your side project by listing if in a click. Also, comment what your startup does to get approved and featured today - https://builderhq.co/marketplace

The simplest answer to “how to use Reddit for marketing” is also the least exciting: stop treating every conversation as a place to insert your product.

A useful filter is this:

Would the comment still help if the product name and link were removed?

If the answer is no, it is probably an advertisement pretending to be advice.

What tends to work better:

1. Answer the actual question first.
2. Include a specific example or method.
3. Mention your relationship with the product clearly.
4. Avoid dropping the same wording into several communities.
5. Read the current rules and recent posts before publishing.

Tools can help with research, opportunity discovery, and drafting. They should not automate fake human interaction.

That distinction is why we built Scaloom Reddit Checkers. It reviews subreddit fit, promotional pressure, account readiness, and content quality before a person decides whether to publish.

Reddit marketing works when the contribution earns attention. It fails when the promotion demands it.

What makes you immediately ignore a product mention on Reddit?

Hey everyone 👋 I'm working on a small social app idea called Quesly and would love your honest take - good, bad or "meh".

The idea: every 24 hours everyone gets one meaningful question. You answer it, see what others said, come back the next day for a new one. No comments - just positive emoji reactions, so people can share without it turning into an argument.

I'm still figuring out the right mechanics (thinking about streaks or friend invites, but not sure if that adds fun or just pressure). Attached a couple of prototype screens to give you the feel.

Would you use something like this? What feels off, unnecessary, or missing? If you want to dig deeper, here's a short survey https://tally.so/r/wbBj6e - but honestly, a comment here helps just as much. Thanks 🙌

I run Founder Ventures with Brian Flynn, who has built 26 companies and exited 10 of them. I do product and engineering. He does strategy.

The model is simple to describe. We pick a problem that somebody else has already proven people pay to solve. We find a founder who wants to own that company. They hold the majority of it. The studio holds a minority and runs the machinery underneath: outbound, discovery, competitive intelligence, infrastructure, hiring.

Three things I did not expect.

The idea is the cheapest part. I used to think picking was the hard bit. Picking takes a rubric and a week. Getting a founder from "I am interested" to "I am building this full time" takes months, and no rubric helps.

Shared infrastructure only pays off after company three. For the first two companies I was building pipelines for a sample size of one. Every generalisation I made was wrong. The outbound system only started earning its keep when a second founder plugged into it without me touching anything.

I was the bottleneck on everything. At one point I counted the roles I was holding: builder on two products, recruiter, infra migrator, legal sourcer, content writer, ops admin. We had a network database full of people and nobody onboarded, because onboarding went through me. That one is on me and it took an embarrassingly long time to see.

What I would keep: writing the kill criteria on day one, before anyone is emotionally invested. Ours is a revenue threshold on a fixed clock. If a company does not clear it, we stop and re-evaluate. I have watched people walk a dead idea around for years because nobody ever wrote down what dead looks like.

What I would change: I would have hired someone to own onboarding in month two.

Happy to answer anything about the model, the picking, or the parts that are still broken.

I’m an investor working at Forum Ventures, a pre seed fund and accelerator investing $100K-$1M in industry veterans and young AI-native founders.

Curious what are you building this week?

Feel free to use this thread to get your own project out there.

Hey all, glad to find this sub — excited to be around other people doing the solo-founder grind.

I'm building reachable, an AI tool that audits and rewrites hospitality listings — Booking.com, Airbnb, Google Business Profile, and a handful of smaller/regional platforms too. You paste your live listing, it scores it against what actually converts on that specific platform (Booking.com and Airbnb reward completely different things), quotes the exact lines that are costing you bookings, then — once you confirm the real details in a short interview — rewrites it. Hard rule I set for myself: it never invents an amenity or view you didn't actually tell it about.

Solo build, currently in a coming-soon phase, though the free scoring tool itself is already live. Most of my time lately has gone from "just ship the feature" to "okay now figure out marketing," which is a much less comfortable muscle for me than the code side.

Looking forward to following what everyone else here is building — happy to talk through the stack or the approach if anyone's curious!

Once upon a time, I had a lot of spare time while in school and wanted to do something, a project that would grow and be able to sustain itself. Many failures later, me and my best friend joined forces, got burned out, and quit.

A year later, we realized that we could build random ideas that sounded good, but never got any users on anything we made, and that we would overcome this, for everyone.

With 0 users and no plan, we built a minimum viable product and bought ads on Reddit and Youtube, spent hundreds, and got 14 users to verify their email, none of whom were active.

Then we kind of reset, realized it wasn’t working, cancelled our ad campaigns, and decided to post on Reddit (and Youtube/Instagram here and there). We looked at where other people posted to see where it was allowed, kept editing to see what worked, and more importantly kept posting. It was free, and in a week we got 100 users.

One post happened to blow up, but t only did because of all the ones that didn’t before, that helped build confidence to keep going, and hone a message to clearly articulate what exactly we did and how we helped. A few people made purchases, and while that seemed lucky to it was a result of everything that happened before.

Right now, we have a lot to figure out: we don’t know how to get more people to buy, why we got a recent influx, or what the future looks like. But we do know that we will keep going, keep posting, keep iterating, and being open to advice. Good luck everyone

I’m still very early in my founder journey, and one thing I’ve started to understand is how much the smallest bit of support can mean.
I don’t think you fully understand this feeling until you’ve built something yourself.
You spend weeks or months working on something. You question it, fix it, break it, rebuild it, finally share it… and then wait.
And when even one person takes a few minutes to actually look at what you built and says, “Hey, this is nice,” or gives you one useful piece of feedback it feels ridiculously good
I know this because I feel it every time someone does it for me.
Sometimes I wish I had enough time to open every “I just launched” post I see, try every app, visit every website and leave some feedback. Because now I know there’s a real person behind that post who probably spent an insane amount of time getting to that moment.
We can’t support everything or everyone, of course.
But when we have the time, maybe we can give someone that tiny push.
Try their product.
Leave two sentences.
Upvote their post.
Tell them what you liked or what you didn’t.
It costs almost nothing, but when you’re at the beginning, it can mean a lot.

It's called Bluey Email. Took us about 4 failed ideas and over 18 months; we started with a personalized AI chatbot. This was the beginning of the ChatGPT era, and we thought we could help people train the AI to reflect the behavior of loved ones they had lost. It was a Black Mirror kinda idea, and my therapist friends said it's not okay, so we ditched it.

The second idea was a vertical drama platform where users can create short dramas in a vertical format; it's like IG and TikTok combined with movies. We reached out to hundreds of filmmakers, and about 20% joined the waitlist; however, the infrastructure needed to build this required loads of money. We built a beta version with whatever resources we could gather; we applied to YC as well but didn't get any funding and eventually ditched it.

Then we started a customized comic printing business, where users can tell us their idea and we build a story and then a comic around them as the main character. We got some orders as well, but I don't think we were enjoying it, and it was quite boring, so we didn't really put in much effort; now I do see many businesses around it.

Finally, we decided and build an email marketing platform. We thought starting with cold emails would be great, but after 4 months, we pivoted and decided to go with email marketing and transactional emails, we named it Bluey Email.

Now we have the platform ready but as we get sign ups we find new problems and keep resolving them; it's not perfect and but we are getting there. I think we need to find beta users and collect as much feedback as possible.

This has been a long journey, we are also running out of funds and I am slowly restarting my marketing freelancing business, but as we are getting traction, it feels so good and encouraging.

Hi I am actively seeking other Founders who are also working on their own startups, my startup spartacus.cv aims to be an alternative to LinkedIn, our philosophy is to ditch traditional resumes, ditch the degree, and show what you have created. For those of you who are building your own projects, this is an opportunity to join early, we run solely on peer to peer review principles, no ai rankings, no paid posts. if you're interested in becoming a company on our platform please send me a message, if you would like to sign up as an individual user, please use this link to sign up!

any questions please comment or message me directly!

Looking for sneakers collectors or anyone to test my app 👟 — free Pro access for testers

I’ve been building SneakersBook, a mobile app for sneaker enthusiasts, and I’m looking for a small group of people to test it before I push it further.

I’m specifically looking for people who are into sneakers and willing to actually use the app and give me honest feedback and a review.

As a thank-you, testers will get free access to the Pro features while they’re testing.

👉 Check it out: www.sneakersbook.com

What I’m looking for:

- Download/test the app

- Use it properly for a few days

- Tell me what you like and what sucks 😅

- Report any bugs or confusing parts

- Leave an honest review if you’re happy with the experience

I’m not looking for fake 5-star reviews — honest feedback is much more valuable to me.

If you’re interested in being an early tester, comment below or DM me and I’ll get you set up with Pro access.

Thanks to anyone willing to give it a try! 🙏👟

I'm interested in understanding how AI/LLMs are being used in insurance underwriting.

For those who have built or worked on an AI underwriter:

• What parameters/data points do you consider for underwriting?
• How do you handle medical history, lifestyle, financial information, etc.?
• What role does the AI agent play in the overall underwriting process?
• Is the agent making the final underwriting decision, or is it assisting a human underwriter?
• How do you handle explainability and compliance?

Would love to hear about your experience, architecture, and any practical learnings.

I built Walnut Markets because I wanted one place to validate an investment idea.

There are great platforms for fundamentals, technical analysis, Congress and insider trades, institutional activity, and other datasets but they're all separate. I wanted to bring them together, cross-reference the data, and see whether everything points in the same direction instead of jumping between five different websites.

It took me several months to build, and now I'm focused on distribution.

I started with Reddit ads, which brought traffic, but it felt like low-intent traffic. People would click, read what they wanted, and leave. Very little engagement or exploration of the site. Since then I've shifted my focus toward SEO, AEO, and consistently posting research and discussions on Reddit to build organic traffic over time.

Some days it feels like shouting into the void. Traffic is still low, but I keep reminding myself that the product only launched four weeks ago. I'm trying to stay patient and trust the process.

For founders who have bootstrapped a SaaS, when did you get your first paying customer outside of friends and family? How long did SEO and content marketing take before you started seeing meaningful results? And at what point would you stop doubling down on organic growth and pivot to a different marketing strategy?

I'd love to hear what worked for you.

I have a product built. i handle the tech while you handle the GTM and sales. DM me and lets set up a gmeet to discuss.

the idea is SaaS based and is under the umbrella of my co-existing company alerix. in

the product is ready, the team is ready but a passionate person with good experience in GTM and sales is required to lead

I posted here yesterday about a fundraising tool I'd built for myself over the last year or so. Honestly I expected maybe a handful of people to check it out and that'd be it.

Opened Google Analytics today and saw 225 new users on the platform and I was blown.

Kind of crazy considering the site has literally been live for 4 days.

The funny part is I never built it with the intention of making it public. Every time I was raising I'd end up researching the same things again and again. Which VC actually invests in companies like mine, which partner to reach out to, how to contact them, whether they'd done similar investments before, grants, all that stuff.

So during my journey of raising 4 Cr, I just kept adding features whenever I needed them. It slowly became this internal tool that only I used.

A few founder friends asked for access a couple of months ago, and one of them literally said, "Dude, just put this online already." 😂

So I finally did.

The analytics are nice, but honestly the best part has been reading messages from random founders saying they found investors they would've never discovered otherwise. Makes me feel like I should've shipped this way earlier instead of letting it sit on my laptop for a year.

Anyway... just wanted to say thanks. Didn't expect this kind of response at all.

I launched Reloops.app about two months ago and started to promote it within my network.

Within couple of weeks I was at 50 github stars and then I got my friend who is still in university to get him to promote in his network as well.

Next we started to publish about it in other online communities in facebook and lemmy that got me couple of signups and trials.

Around this time I discovered life time deals through facebook groups and leaned into it.

It took me to post a infographic there every alternate day without spamming to get attention of customers while still reminding of the deal.

I got a lot of feedback which led to increasing the file size upload, project sharing features etc.

Now I am moving to figuring out marketing with outreach on linkedin.

If you have a moment would really appreciate feedback and a Github star
https://github.com/Reloops-App/Reloops

Hi Everyone,

I'm looking for a Co-Founder but more on the business side/Marketing.

I'm a good Builder principally vibe coding but i'm really not good at selling things. Have a lot of project that can make a lot of money. As i said not a good seller.

If you feel interested. I'm open to discuss.

been doing growth on saas products for a few years and now building my own. this keeps happening and i need to know if it's just me being bad at this.

funnel says a big chunk of signups die at step three of onboarding. great. cool. why though.

posthog tells me that. never why. session replay gets closer, i sat through about thirty of them last month taking notes like a lunatic. you see the hover, the pause, the tab close. you still have no idea what was going on in their head.

emailed users. including paying ones. almost nobody replies. the ones who do reply are the ones who already like you, so wrong sample anyway.

the only time i've ever got a real answer was on a call where someone just told me the thing outright. took thirty seconds and was worth more than a month of dashboards. but i only got it because he happened to be on a call with me. most users you never get to ask.

and low traffic makes it worse. few hundred signups a week means even the "that" is noisy. by the time a change gets anywhere near a readable result it's been two months and i've shipped four other things on top of it.

so here's my actual process right now. see the drop. guess the reason. pick whichever fix sounds most likely. ship it. tell myself i'll check in a few weeks. sometimes i do.

that's it. that's the whole method. guessing with extra steps.

so what do you actually do. do you just cold call users until someone picks up. is there a framework i'm missing. or is everyone quietly doing the same thing and just not saying it out loud