u/Amazing_Skill_6080

Still can't believe im typing this.Someone actually bought my little thing. I sold it for $30.5k to a buyer I sourced on Articuler, for a stupid tiny tarot app i made.

For context it's not some massive exit, but honestly im thrilled with it. at 3x arr, and the wild part is i only built and ran it for 6 months. basically all the growth came from me posting organic tiktoks, scaled 100x with cloud phones. no ad budget, nothing fancy. I used a prompt on Twitter to distill successful slideshows and turned them into virality.

Six months of making tiktoks and now this. if your sitting on a tiny app wondering if anyone would ever want it, apparently they will. still shaking a little lol.

Still can't believe im typing this.Someone actually bought my little thing. I sold it for $30.5k to a buyer I sourced on Articuler, for a stupid tiny tarot app i made.

For context it's not some massive exit, but honestly im thrilled with it. at 3x arr, and the wild part is i only built and ran it for 6 months. basically all the growth came from me posting organic tiktoks, scaled 100x with cloud phones. no ad budget, nothing fancy. I used a prompt on Twitter to distill successful slideshows and turned them into virality.

Six months of making tiktoks and now this. if your sitting on a tiny app wondering if anyone would ever want it, apparently they will. still shaking a little lol.

Crossed 13k this month and my whole stack is basically free. heres how

SWE here, bootstrapped, allergic to paying for stuff i can get free. crossed 13k this month and my monthly tooling bill is almost nothing. heres how the free/cheap stack actually holds up.

the foundation:

-Neon Postgres : generous free tier, never hit the ceiling

-Vercel : free hobby tier carried me way longer than i expected tbh

-Velobase : my framework, fully open-source and MIT, $0. this is the big one. instead of renting a 300/mo boilerplate or stiching together a bunch of saas tools, it ships with server-side ad attribution and a double-entry affiliate ledger built in.

-Fly.io : free allowances cover the backend no problem

-Resend : free up to 3k emails/mo, plenty early on

-Mixpanel startup program : FREE and so powerful, def apply

-Revenue Cat : only "cost" is their cut once you actually make money (2k plus), which is the good kind of cost imo

-Fastlane: got a couple free tiktok accounts for distribution

-Articuler AI: free plan; got me initial 100 customers.

the whole thing runs for basically the price of a domain until you're genuinely scaling. anyway hope that helps someone.

I'm honestly a little confused. All the investors I've met are asking the same questions in different formats:

Are you an AI company? How are you using AI? How do you make sure one of the AI giants doesn't just build a feature and eat your entire SaaS?

I'm really curious how you guys have been raising as a non-AI company, because I really hate to wrap my little SaaS in some AI wrapper and call it AI. I think it fundamentally comes down to solving a problem and finding a solution, whether that solution is AI or not. The market is killing me, and I have no idea how to find investors who would just invest in non-AI companies.

I'm honestly a little confused. All the investors I've met are asking the same questions in different formats:

Are you an AI company? How are you using AI? How do you make sure one of the AI giants doesn't just build a feature and eat your entire SaaS?

I'm really curious how you guys have been raising as a non-AI company, because I really hate to wrap my little SaaS in some AI wrapper and call it AI. I think it fundamentally comes down to solving a problem and finding a solution, whether that solution is AI or not. The market is killing me, and I have no idea how to find investors who would just invest in non-AI companies.

So for background, I'm working at a mid sized B2B SaaS company in Chicago. My entire team got cut off because of some AI agent my boss is trying to implement, and he seems so sure it's going to replace all of us. We're a frontend engineering team, and I lead a team of five. I managed to find everyone on my team a job offer within about a month, because honestly the bonding here feels almost like a real family. I know how hard it is when you're at a mid-sized company outside the Bay Area or the East Coast. I did a lot of one on ones and studied their resumes and LinkedIn like they were my own. I polished their resumes and used all my personal connections (warm intros myself as the TL) and built new ones. I even sourced and created group chats (using articuler for everyone getting laid off recently in Chicago or the midwest, because those are the people who can really relate.

I guess the last thing I want to say is that in a time when new technology is creating crazy uncertainty, you really need to stick to what makes us human. It's our connection, our love, and our bonding that makes us thrive.

Hardest decision week of my life, urgently need some outside brains.

Got into Yale SOM this cycle but the timing/cost felt off. admissions kindly let me defer a year. in the meantime i jumped from consulting into an AI product manager role at a big tech company (non bay area office tho). basically the exact pivot i wanted the MBA for, except it just happened, no two years and no $200k tuition.

So now im stuck. take the job and skip the degree i already technically dont need for this role? or still do Yale next year for the brand and network in case i want VC or exec stuff later? Or maybe break into the Bay Area office

if youve skipped or done the MBA and have regrets either way, what would you do?

Hardest decision week of my life, urgently need some outside brains.

got into Yale SOM this cycle but the timing/cost felt off. admissions kindly let me defer a year. in the meantime i jumped from consulting into an AI product manager role at a big tech company (non bay area office tho). basically the exact pivot i wanted the MBA for, except it just happened, no two years and no $200k tuition.

so now im stuck. take the job and skip the degree i already technically dont need for this role? or still do Yale next year for the brand and network in case i want VC or exec stuff later? Or maybe break into the Bay Area office.

if youve skipped or done the MBA and have regrets either way, what would you do?

our CEO has gone full AI pilled lately and keeps talking about replacing sales with an "AI agent" or whatever its called. and honestly it's stressing me out. my take is that sales is one of the last things that gets replaced, because the whole job is human trust. people buy from people. but maybe im biased and too non-technical to see whats coming? where i actually think AI helps is the top of the funnel. the lead sourcing, the research, the grunt work before the conversation. but the actual trust building and closing after the lead?

for context we're a mid sized company, 20-30 full time reps, real pipeline. so whats the honest read from people here, especially anyone at a similar size company. Please tell me I'm not coping.

our CEO has gone full AI pilled lately and keeps talking about replacing sales with an "AI agent" or whatever its called. and honestly it's stressing me out. my take is that sales is one of the last things that gets replaced, because the whole job is human trust. people buy from people. but maybe im biased and too non-technical to see whats coming? where i actually think AI helps is the top of the funnel. the lead sourcing, the research, the grunt work before the conversation. but the actual trust building and closing after the lead?

for context we're a mid sized company, 20-30 full time reps, real pipeline. so whats the honest read from people here, especially anyone at a similar size company. Please tell me I'm not coping.

Crossed 13k this month and my whole stack is basically free. heres how

SWE here, bootstrapped, allergic to paying for stuff i can get free. crossed 13k this month and my monthly tooling bill is almost nothing. heres how the free/cheap stack actually holds up.

the foundation:

-Neon Postgres : generous free tier, never hit the ceiling

-Vercel : free hobby tier carried me way longer than i expected tbh

-Velobase : my framework, fully open-source and MIT, $0. this is the big one. instead of renting a 300/mo boilerplate or stiching together a bunch of saas tools, it ships with server-side ad attribution and a double-entry affiliate ledger built in.

-Fly.io : free allowances cover the backend no problem

-Resend : free up to 3k emails/mo, plenty early on

-Mixpanel startup program : FREE and so powerful, def apply

-Revenue Cat : only "cost" is their cut once you actually make money (2k plus), which is the good kind of cost imo

-Fastlane: got a couple free tiktok accounts for distribution

-Articuler AI: free plan; got me initial 100 customers.

the whole thing runs for basically the price of a domain until you're genuinely scaling. anyway hope that helps someone.

It's probably more of a funding hack. But this really helped me secure my first 1k user of my app.

Generic investor cold emails die instantly. the ones that worked for me opened with this one line:

"You backed [company], we're going after the same buyer from a different angle." shows i did the homework and puts me in a category they already spent day and night believing in.

The only annoying part was knowing what each investor had actually funded so i could reference the right company.

So just check their websites, Linkedin, do some AI Deep Research or check some curated directories.

Once i could do that, my reply rate on cold investor emails went from 0.3% to 17%.

Hopefully this hack helps!

A trick to raise fund that helped me a lot was not starting with my target investors.

Instead, I first lined up a group of investors I wasn’t particularly focused on closing. I used those early meetings as practice rounds to stress-test the pitch in real conditions. Every call is pinpointing weak points, like unclear stats or weak framing etc.

After each meeting, I refined the pitch and updated how I handled those objections. I repeated this process across the whole list, moving from easier or lower-priority investors to stronger ones.

By the time I reached the investors I actually cared about, the pitch had already been pressure-tested multiple times and felt much more solid.

Let me know if that helps.

Just got my first angel check! from an ex founder.

Biggest lesson: most vc dont know wtf they doing.

Most VCs just chase tags. ai agent, ai harness, vertical ai whatever. or stanford drop out, ex-openai, shining resume. if you dont fit the pattern your dead on arrival, doesnt matter how good the product is.

You need someone whos once in your shoes.

Go get the founder. they were underdogs, ambitious, broke, ignored by the same funds just like you. they remember it. so when you show up with no pedigree but real grit, they actually see it, because they were you.

They also move fast. its their own money so theres no committee, no four partner meetings.|

You can use chatgpt deepresearch, gemini or articuler to source: 'ex founders who does angel invest now", remember to actually look into their linkedin.

VCs back patterns. founders back people. go find the founders.

Just got my first angel check! from an ex founder.

Biggest lesson: most vc dont know wtf they doing.

Most VCs just chase tags. ai agent, ai harness, vertical ai whatever. or stanford drop out, ex-openai, shining resume. if you dont fit the pattern your dead on arrival, doesnt matter how good the product is.

You need someone whos once in your shoes.

Go get the founder. they were underdogs, ambitious, broke, ignored by the same funds just like you. they remember it. so when you show up with no pedigree but real grit, they actually see it, because they were you.

They also move fast. its their own money so theres no committee, no four partner meetings.|

You can use chatgpt deepresearch, gemini or articuler to source: 'ex founders who does angel invest now", remember to actually look into their linkedin.

VCs back patterns. founders back people. go find the founders.

Just got my first angel check! from an ex founder.

Biggest lesson: most vc dont know wtf they doing.

Most VCs just chase tags. ai agent, ai harness, vertical ai whatever. or stanford drop out, ex-openai, shining resume. if you dont fit the pattern your dead on arrival, doesnt matter how good the product is.

You need someone whos once in your shoes.

Go get the founder. they were underdogs, ambitious, broke, ignored by the same funds just like you. they remember it. so when you show up with no pedigree but real grit, they actually see it, because they were you.

They also move fast. its their own money so theres no committee, no four partner meetings.|

You can use chatgpt deepresearch, gemini or articuler to source: 'ex founders who does angel invest now", remember to actually look into their linkedin.

VCs back patterns. founders back people. go find the founders.