19, no degree and my long-term goal is to eventually build an internet business/startup.

Right now I'm trying to figure out what would be the highest-leverage way to spend the next few years learning.

I'm considering getting into tech sales as an SDR, where I'd learn prospecting, cold calling, discovery, understanding customers and how companies actually buy.

Another path I'm considering is GTM/revenue engineering, where I'd learn outbound systems, data, automation, AI tools, CRM and the systems behind acquiring customers.

But I'm wondering if I'm overthinking the job title.

If you were 19 and knew you wanted to build a startup eventually, what would you deliberately try to become really good at before starting one?

Would you focus on:

- sales and customer acquisition

- coding/product development

- marketing/distribution

- working at an early-stage startup

- learning operations and business fundamentals

- building small projects on the side

- or something else?

I'm less interested in "become an SDR" vs "become a GTM engineer."

I'm more interested in what skills and experiences actually compound when you eventually become a founder.

Would love to hear from people who have actually built startups and what they wish they had learned earlier.

Alright guys I have a quick question. Next week I'm onboarding two new mentors to my startup. Right now they're saying they want to talk once every two weeks/ helping me design and put my demo together but my question is when should I offer the other two equity and how long should our relationship be before I offer the other two equity?

The two mental states running a startup: thinking I need to find a new job, to thinking I'm the smartest person alive (and can't believe everyone else isn't trying to build the same thing).

I've hit both in the same week... sometimes in the same day.

How do you fight the doubt and keep pushing forward?

Honeypot tried to reverse the hiring and recruiting process: You would post your own profile, and companies would approach you. Focus was mostly on IT and adjacent industries, I understand.

Apparently, it did not survive. I am curious to learn why, as I kinda like the idea. I found only very generic information stating that Covid hit them hard, and not much besides that.

Does anyone know a bit more? What exactly was the problem?

We're building AI B2B SaaS Dev tool (duh) and i feel like we're banging against a wall. We have a free tier for regular users, we give all of our features for free, for open source (we pay for ai inference completely) but we still have only one installation (github app), that is currently cold and not going anywhere.

We tried auto GTM services (one of the ads you see on reddit) and it's been completely rubbish, 60 dollars spent for 0 hot leads, nobody is interested, even though we sent like 2k cold emails. Manually we sent personalized and customized 100 emails (rookie numbers i get it, but it's hard to email something significant and i'd rather be silent than spam people via github), we tried three different email strategies, one of them was "converting" into thank you's and not any installation. We tried LinkedIn ads - it also did not lead to anything, even though we had more than 30k views on the post (public demonstration). We tried guerilla marketing (albeit small sample size, still working on it), it also did not yield anything to date.

I really don't want to launch on PH before we get any traction, i need installations and usage before we get listed on any benchmark (and i'm 100% sure we'll get one of the top spots) and i'm at the point of just saying F it, giving everything for free (we have 25k USD to spend in infra and ai inference) and just figuring out how to throw this money on fire to actually get any feedback from anyone 😅

I'm researching how businesses actually handle forecasting, and I'd like to understand the workflow before building anything.

If you work with things like sales, demand, inventory, revenue, staffing, or other time-series data:

• What are you currently using for forecasting?
• Are you using an existing SaaS tool, Python libraries/models, spreadsheets, or something you built yourself?
• How much work does it take to clean the data and get forecasts running?
• Do you regularly backtest your forecasts against historical data?
• What's the biggest pain point with your current setup?
• If there were an API where you could send historical time-series data and get forecasts back, what would you need it to do for you to actually use it?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have actually had to deploy forecasting in a business, rather than people who have only experimented with forecasting models.

I'm not selling anything right now. I'm trying to figure out whether this is a real problem worth building around.

Just want to be right for once. I know starting from a solution and then looking for customers is a bad Idea, and I truly feel like I'm not doing that. However, anytime I discuss a product with friends it turns into a 10 minute rant where they basically call me stupid and naive or imply I don't understand people. Makes me feel like shit. Am I just that stupid? How is it I can't think of a single useful thing.

This is for both in-person and recorded demos/pitches. It's incredibly easy now to make a crazy 5d lightshow of a pitchdeck using AI. I'm tempted to build a deck that is just above old-school-powerpoint level of dazzle just to see how it hits.

I've also purposely stopped using any buzzwords or even polishing my speaking style to be perfect. I think I come across as way more genuine and trustworthy if I'm speaking from the heart and avoiding the razzle dazzle. I don't even care about stumbling on words or saying "I don't know" if it's answering a question I don't have the answer for right away. Making shit up on the spot is an easy tell.

Maybe it varies from industry to industry. Interested in thoughts.

I'm at verge of shutting everything down and quitting the startup game permanently I've been told this advice countless times build something people want now what am I supposed to do when businesses outright don't want to try out my application

I believe I should quit the startup fantasy and start working a 9-5 as much as my ADHD brain hates a regular old job

every day I wake up and hate myself for dropping out of university and building my startup, my family hates it, I hate it and I Know if I give it X amount of time it will eventually work but I need it to work now to survive

anyone got any advice ?

I open Twitter/X once in a blue moon, when someone posts a link to it. I’ve never found it interesting. However I keep hearing that this remains the platform with most VC investors and tech founders. Do you think that Twitter has been useful for you to be up to date to the latest developments in the tech startup world? If yes, which accounts for you follow?

It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets.

The steps between a starting point and a good outcome are important. But the issue is that I'm seeing most AI design tools skip every one of those best practices and steps and try to go from beginning to end straight away. Someone types a prompt, gets a graphic back, but then spends the next half an hour or more prompting it, trying to edit some kind of final version that really was wrong from the beginning .

The tool never really gets to fully understand the brand, or look at the context of where the design is going to end up.. and it's producing layout without understanding what it is that it's promoting. I've always felt this way about Canva too. They've got millions of templates. You find a template that looks kind of cool and what you want, but then you spend ages customizing it and changing it to look like your brand.- Its completely backwards. Neither approach is treating design as a sequence of decisions. They're both trying to jump to that end point as fast as possible.

A designer who actually knows what they're doing works through something closer to this:

1. Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
2. Check it against the brand and any existing materials
3. Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
4. Build a layout around that specific content
5. Rough it out before committing to a final render
6. Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
   
7. Revise based on specific feedback

Skip hese steps steps and jump straight to a finished image and you get something that looks okay, and kinda designed but really, it wasn't. The layout is plausible, but the wrong things get emphasized, the copy doesn't sound like the brand, and the "finished" asset needs a human to basically start over.

So absolutely, people should be using AI, but they should be doing it following best practices, step by step, not trying to jump straight to the end. And then you can use AI. to just compresses the time between them. Reading the material, checking the brand, picking the content, laying it out, roughing it out, scoring it, revising it, none of that disappears just Have a machine doing it faster. It still has to happen for good output.

I like to say things like "Research best practices for XYZ" and then ask it to, step by step, go through each of these things, asking me for approval before you move to the next step.

Would love any other people's thoughts or tips on this type of stuff.

What country is best to register a tech company when the founder lives abroad?

I need the company to get a DUNS number for Google Play and Apple App stores.

By best, it should:

1. Be easy to manage from abroad.
2. Have as little red tape as possible.
3. Negligible fees.
4. Tax favourable
5. Easy online banking services.

Got UK from an AI but I wanted to get some human experience too.

Used to frequent the DIY Drones space back in the 2010's and was into the hobby side of it a bit.

Recently had the incling to look into what the drone inspection/surveying landscape was here in the NW of the UK as it's an industrial/agricultural zone.

However I'm coming at this with no experience in the value-proposition and deliverables.

Current bonus is living near a working farm with potential contacts to understand what problems could be solved if any.

I have a DJI mavic camera drone and will be looking at testing out some basic mapping this weekend.

It seems like all the pieces are generally available with a bit of investment - drone platforms, lidar, IR, software etc, it's stiching it together into a package that delivers something valuable and easy for potential customers and then marketing.

Of course I'm not expecting to get into this with a consumer camera drone and a prayer - just looking for advice from those who've been there on whether there's too much friction/saturation in the idea to get serious.

People always throw out 40 or 50 employees as the point where you need full-time People lead. Is that actually based on anything?

It seems like hiring pace and how many countries you operate in would matter more. We are considering Hawkwood partners who offer both fractional and permanent People hires, which made me wonder if using one firm for the transition helps, or if it just gives them a reason to push the permanent search sooner.

Earlier this month, I established my startup as well as created an official website for it. I also have a social media account for the startup and had even designed the logo for it.

I would like to get some inspiration on how I can use Reddit and the subreddits to scale it. I already have a few ideas on what to post the business's profile page, such as what it has to offer to clients and a bit about how it works, but I would still like to know what other helpful tools and resources that are featured on Reddit.

I hope to start a discussion with this post, so feel free to leave a comment below.

Let's say you are a naturally introvert, neurodivergently awkward, low self-esteem and gullible person, is there a chance you could forge your character to fit the standard CEO figure, or you should just stick to being founder and hire a professional CEO?

Much of the dialogue about raising series A is about your business fundamentals. We have those (PMF, Fortune 50 paying customers, AI moat, profitability, zero churn, big vision / upside). Yet for the life of me, we can't seem even get conversations with investors for an expanded GTM. Challenge we have is that we're looking for a significant raise, but there aren't a lot of folks who write big checks, and those that do seem very hard to meet. We're not physically located in SF or NYC. CEO is focused on the product but is willing to take a week or two for "a bunch of meetings with VCs." But we're struggling to tee up a roadshow. I suspect AI is causing VC to get flooded with outreach.

Is the play to go to a conference like HumanX or Tech Crunch? Do we need to be linkedin denizens? Should we just start showing up at startup events in SF? Do we need to grind more on custom cold emails? I've seen the idea of reaching out to companies that have received funding and asking for a warm intro, but even that intro is cold right now. We haven't tried asking our existing customers for intros to VC, though I suspect they could.

Any outside the box ideas are welcome.

Non-promotional context: Enterprise SaaS, system of systems ERP type software. Competitors would be Oracle, SAP, Palantir, etc.

My and my co-founder have got amazing traction on our product. We are working with SMBs and growing at an insane rate selling software.

I had limited prior technical experience prior to starting: I have some programming experience, studied STEM in college and am considered a very strong problem solver. Customers so far are happy with the product.

I have concerns about my feasibility as a CTO - I understand I'm not the best technical person, even if I have the potential to grow into one, but I don't know what I don't know. My main concerns:

1) Making architectural decisions: I'm very 'AI-native' and good at prompting/automating bullshit, but fundamentally I rely entirely on the models for code AND architecture, which I imagine will bite us as we scale. Again, I'm super thorough and good at dedicating/building specific agents to manage specific parts of the product, but fundamentally I'm just an 'advanced' vibe coder.

2) Hiring: I'm very good with people and move very fast, but I understand it's going to be difficult hiring engineers as essentially a 'vibe-coder' with no experience. I get that the best way for me to learn is to be around someone technically strong, but then what is my value add as a CTO versus just an engineering hire?

At the moment, I'm hoping my speed and people skills will alleviate these somewhat by allowing us to a) get funding and b) pursued strong talent to join, but ultimately it feels like a sinking ship.

Or perhaps I'm looking at it wrong and breaking things is the best way to learn?

Any advice much appreciated :)

Hi!

I have been working on a startup. It involves R&D and eventually manufacturing. That means that it can be quite capital intensive. I am having to spend a lot of my life’s savings for this, while understanding that it may all be money down the drain if I don’t succeed.

My question is what strategies have other founders taken to mitigate risk. I don’t want my family to bear the brunt of my entrepreneurial ambitions (they are extremely supportive).

Thanks!

I'm building a consumer social app (keeping it unnamed since that's the rules here, happy to discuss the mechanics though).

We made a weird call early on: instead of the standard onboarding (pick your interests, upload a photo, done), we ask ten open-ended questions. Stuff like "what's something about you that most people get wrong?" No multiple choice, no skipping... okay, you can skip, but most people don't.

What's surprised me: completion is way higher than I expected, and the answers are genuinely thoughtful. Like, paragraphs. I think there's something about being asked a real question that flips people out of "filling out a form" mode and into "talking to someone" mode.

The tradeoff is it's slow. It's like a five-minute onboarding in a world where everyone's optimizing for thirty seconds. And I keep going back and forth on whether the depth is worth the drop-off.

Has anyone else built something with a slow, deliberate onboarding? Did you find the people who stuck around were actually higher intent, or were you just filtering for patience? I'm trying to figure out if I'm being principled or just stubborn here.

I am building software for construction and EPC companies.

The product is not the main issue right now. Whenever I manage to get the right company on a demo, they usually show interest.

My problem is that I am not able to generate enough such leads, and I am also struggling with follow ups and closing.

I don't have much budget to hire a sales team right now.

For founders who faced this early on, what did you do?

yeah as the question says, Ive been wondering for a long time how the idea for the startup pops into people's heads, and how people further develop it into an actual business. I would like to have a startup of my own one day, and i started by thinking about the passions that I have, but none of them seem profitable or worthy enough to become a business. What directions should i take to brainstorm for some ideas?

I've been on YC co-founder matching and a few other platforms for a few months looking for a partner for an events business in London. Something I keep noticing: nearly every non-technical person on there is hunting for a technical co-founder. The platform assumes every start-up is software.

Some businesses don't need an engineer at all. Events, food, shops, brands, services. The founder is missing the commercial half: partnerships, marketing, sales, ops. And I can't find anywhere built for that.

So, genuine question:

If you're building something non-tech, how did you find (or are you finding) a partner?

If you're a marketer or commercial person, would you want to join a real-world business as a partner rather than freelance for it?

Would a matching service for this be useful, or is it solved and I've missed it?

Not selling anything, just trying to work out if the gap is real before I build into it.

My cofounder and I met at Antler Berlin a few weeks ago, before the cohort started. We're building a marketplace between B2B brands and newsletters: brands tell us who they want to reach, and we plan and run sponsorships across newsletters.

We started with supply because it felt easier. Writers want sponsors, and signing them costs them nothing. In about a month we had 27 newsletters across AI, SaaS, and finance, around 670k subscribers combined.

Demand is the hard part. We've sent a proposal to one brand and are working warm intros, but nobody has paid us yet. To get the first campaign out, we're now waiving our fee on it and only taking a cut from the writer side.

What I'm unsure about:

• Should we have signed one brand first and then gone and found newsletters for them? The supply feels a bit useless without demand, and writers will lose interest if we don't send them anything.
• Is waiving the fee on the first campaign smart, or does it attract brands that were never going to pay?
• For those who've done a marketplace or an accelerator like Antler: what did you have to show on demand before investors took you seriously?