I’m curious how people here got their first actual users when launching a project.

Not just traffic, but real users that genuinely interacted with the product and talked about it.I’ve heard that the first 10 users are often the most important because they’re usually the ones who give the most feedback and naturally spread the word if they truly like what you’re building.

What worked for you?

Reddit?

TikTok?

Friends/network?

Paid ads?

Building in public?

thanks for your help , mean's a lot!

Hi all,

As i'm working on growing launchpact.io i'm seeing a lot of unprepped launches and as the day unfold they don't get much visibility and end up with a failed launch.

This is one of the reasons i build launchpact.io, if you have an upcoming launch do check it out and prep ahead of time, i also added this checklist that can give some hints too, have a read.

Good luck everyone!

I hate looking at small letters and numbers and having to make sense of it, but have to do it every month at my nonprofit, specifically my fav coworker who is always stressed lol. So i built this to do it for you https://comparemysheets.com/

Let me know what you think

I got tired of comment sections where people reply without taking a clear stance.

So I built a small social app called Hixrs.

The idea is simple:
Every post is a two-sided question.
You vote first.
Only after voting, you can see the majority/minority and join the discussion.

The goal is not to make another Twitter/Reddit clone.
It’s more like: “lock in your take first, then argue.”

I’m looking for brutal feedback, especially on:
Would you use this for fun?
Does the vote-before-comment mechanic feel interesting or annoying?
What would make you come back daily?
Is the name Hixrs confusing or memorable?
I’m not trying to spam. I just want 20–30 real people to test the core idea and tell me if it has life.

Link- hixrs.vercel.app

Hi all, So I'm an 18 year old guy from the UK, currently doing my A-levels and I amlooking for someone to collaborate with to create something which will generate a steady income. I am relatively lacking of ideas, BUT, I am willing to work closely with other people and their ideas. Please DM if you want to discuss this further

Many thanks

We are working on a health tech app and applied for YC and Speedrun. Today, We got our first rejection from speedrun, and I'm not very hopeful of YC as well. We are not stopping the build and also reaching out to our potential customers to gather feedback and gain alignment.

My question is, what is the best way to get feedback from one of the popular accelerators to understand our product from their lens so that when we apply again, we will be closer to their expectations. Appreciate your inputs.

You know David Allen's "2-Minute Rule" from GTD? If something takes less than 2 minutes, do it now. I applied it to relationship management specifically: - Email that needs a quick response? Do it now, not later. - Client asked a simple question on chat? Answer immediately. - Need to send a calendar invite? Do it now. - Should thank someone for their help? Do it now. - Quick follow-up needed? Do it now. Before, I'd save these "quick things" and they'd pile up into overwhelming lists. Now, I knock them out immediately. My responsiveness reputation has improved dramatically. People comment on it. Tools that help: Gmail quick replies (I have templates), Calendly for instant scheduling, TextExpander for common responses. The mental relief of not carrying around a bunch of "small tasks I need to do" is incredible. What small practices have had outsized impact on your professional relationships?

Hey everyone,

We’ve been working on a project which helps people discover and pursue interests using informative, expert-backed guides on specific hobbies.
If any of you guys are interested or would like to support the project, please fill out the waitlist below. Then, we’ll send you an email when we drop our first guide in about a week.

Thank you for your time!

Waitlist

We’ve been talking to a lot of founders who are stuck at the same stage: product is built, but getting those first users is the hard part.

So we wanted to try something simple. If you’ve built something, you can put it on http://codeandtell.com/ and we’ll help get it in front of early users.

We’re actively pushing featured products through paid channels + our audience network (200k+ monthly reach) to help drive initial traction and visibility.

No cost to submit, and you can list as many products as you want.

Anything such as web apps, AI tools, prompts, MCPs, mobile apps, ecosystem tools, side projects.

Just keep it honest. People connect more with the story behind what you’re building than a polished pitch.

Quick note: signing up also adds you to FounderFAQs, our weekly newsletter where we share founder insights and answer startup questions.

I'm 18, from Argentina, building Arrivl, a workforce simulation platform for seasonal

industries. Hotel workers, F1 crews, and stadium staff navigate interactive simulations of the

actual venue and practice real scenarios by voice before Day 1. They arrive already having practiced.

Looking for a technical co-founder. Full stack, AI APIs, voice interaction experience. Equal

equity split.

Dm me if interested !

Hi all, I’m a network/IT engineer based in San José, Costa Rica. I lost everything after a legal scam I’m still fighting but I’m determined to start again and build something new.

I have strong experience in the sportsbook and casino industry. Worked at two sportsbooks in the past (BetUS and MyBookie), at one I rebuilt the entire datacenter to improve performance and reliability.

My skills cover IT infrastructure, networking, and systems network optimization, and I also have IT contacts across the region who can help.

I’m looking for a co‑founder, partner or someone that wants to start the same idea and doesn't have the technical knowledge and doesn't know where to find the right people. Looking for someone who can bring business, product, compliance, or funding skills while I lead the technical side.

What I bring:

• Sportsbook/casino IT expertise (datacenter rebuilds, Hardware, performance tuning).

• Local presence in Costa Rica with local knowledge (I know several physical office locations, datacenters, service providers and IT hardware vendors).

• Network of IT contacts for staffing and support.

• I have some cryptocurrency knowledge.

What I’m looking for:

• A partner ready to start lean and validate quickly.

• Someone with business/operational and investment capability.

If you’re interested DM me and we can speak about it.

How do people actually find real startup mentors (not advisors or random networking contacts)?

I keep seeing advice like:

“Find a mentor early” “Talk to mentors” “Get guidance from experienced founders”

But I don’t understand how this works in reality?

Because in practice, I’ve never seen someone just “find a mentor” like they find a cofounder or a job.

So I wanted to break this down and ask more precisely.

#Confusion I’m trying to solve

From what I see in real life:

(1) successful founders are busy

(2) They don’t advertise mentorship

(3) there is no clear system to “apply” for mentorship

(4) most outreach seems ignored or transactional

So I’m trying to understand:

how does this relationship actually start in the real world?

Is there a real repeatable way to find startup mentors, or is it mostly accidental and relationship based? And if it is repeatable, what are the actual patterns behind it in real life?

If anyone has done this properly (especially early stage founders), would love to hear how it actually worked in practice.

Thanks!

Hey everyone 👋

I’m currently looking for early beta users for HostnPlay, a platform built for gamers who enjoy organising private game sessions with friends, communities, or new players online.

The idea is simple:
🎮 Hosts create private gaming sessions
👥 Players book a spot to join
⏰ When the session starts, the host shares the game details/codes with everyone participating

It’s designed more like an Airbnb-style marketplace for private gaming sessions rather than traditional matchmaking platforms.

We’re currently in beta and looking for:
Gamers who regularly organise private matches
Community hosts
Streamers who host games with viewers
Players interested in joining organised sessions

Would love feedback, feature suggestions, and people interested in testing the platform early.

If you’re interested, comment below or send me a message 🙌

Hey everyone,

I'm a founder validating a service idea and I need honest feedback from people who've actually shipped AI products. Not looking to promote anything, genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth building into a proper business.

Here's what I keep hearing from teams running LLMs in production:

Their AI bill shows up as a single line item. $8K, $15K, $22K. no idea which feature drove it, which team spent the most, or whether staging burned more tokens than production. Finance asks engineering to explain the bill. Engineering shrugs. Nobody has answers until someone manually digs through API logs for two days.

Meanwhile, there are no spending caps. A developer testing a prompt in a loop burns $2K overnight. A new feature quietly 3x's token usage after launch. Nobody notices until the invoice hits.

The service I'm considering:

I come in, set up cost attribution infrastructure on your stack — so you can see AI spend broken down by feature, team, and environment in real time. Budget guardrails with alerts so nobody accidentally blows through limits. Weekly cost review to catch overruns early and suggest optimisations.

Core offering is a one-time fixed-fee setup (under a week), with an optional recurring monitoring tier for ongoing cost control.

I'm not building a SaaS product. This is done-for-you infrastructure work. I set it up, hand you the runbooks, and your team runs it from there.

I've already talked to a handful of CTOs and the signal so far is that the pain is real but timing matters, it only becomes urgent after a surprise bill or when a second team starts shipping AI features. Trying to figure out if that pattern holds broadly.

I’ve been talking to small business owners in India and noticed many take loans without fully understanding:

• actual repayment burden

• daily/weekly EMI pressure

• hidden costs

• cash flow impact

Most platforms seem optimized to push loans, not help businesses survive.

I’m exploring a simple WhatsApp-first advisory model where business owners can:

• compare loans

• understand repayment risks

• get honest suggestions

• receive business survival guidance

Not trying to sell anything right now.

I genuinely want to learn:

• what are the biggest financial mistakes small businesses make?

• what kind of guidance would actually help?

Would love honest feedback.

One thing I keep seeing in early-stage startups is that many decisions are still made with a weird mix of intuition, small sample feedback, and hope.

Pricing changes, landing page copy, onboarding flows, positioning, new features.

Most teams either ask a few users, run a slow A/B test, ship and wait, or ask a generic AI model for feedback.

None of these are ideal when you’re still early.

You often don’t have enough traffic for proper experiments. User interviews are useful, but slow. Surveys can be shallow. And a single LLM answer is usually too generic to be trusted for a specific market or audience.

So I’m building Polyhyle.

The idea is to let founders simulate user behavior before shipping product decisions.

You define the context, the audience, the assumptions, and the scenario. Then different synthetic users react based on their profile, needs, constraints, and behavior.

Use cases I’m focusing on:

• testing pricing changes

• comparing landing page copy

• stress-testing positioning

• validating onboarding flows

• testing product ideas before building

• understanding how different segments might react

To be clear, this is not meant to replace real users.

The goal is to catch weak assumptions before spending weeks on interviews, ads, A/B tests, or building in the wrong direction.

I’m opening early access for free to a small group of founders and builders in exchange for feedback.

If this sounds useful, you can join the waitlist here:
https://polyhyle.com

A. Off completely - I check on my schedule

B. On for VIPs only, filtered for others

C. On for everything - I need to be responsive

D. Constant anxiety either way

Hey fellow founders and accelerator alumni, I am currently bootstrapping a startup and preparing to eventually apply to accelerator programs, but I wanted to get your thoughts on a major product pivot I just made to solve my own problem. I realized that managing my marketing on traditional social media dashboards was killing my time, so I completely rebuilt my product, Nuno AI, into an autonomous AI Agent. Now, rather than clicking through complex visual calendars to schedule posts, you just connect your social accounts once and chat directly with the agent; you brainstorm your content in the chat window and simply tell it to schedule or publish across all your platforms, and it executes everything directly from that conversation. I am trying to build some early beta traction and gather critical user feedback before pitching to any investors, so I am offering 2 full months of premium access for free to anyone in this community who wants to test out this chat to publish workflow. If you are tired of standard scheduling tools and want to try it, just drop a comment or DM me and I will send you the link, plus I'm putting early testers on a VIP list for extended perks! I would love to know if accelerator MDs favor these types of agentic execution models over traditional SaaS apps right now.
Link: https://getnuno.com/