u/No-Insurance-6337

My wife is suffering from serious ppd, so much so thst she moved home with our 1 year old about 2 months ago now (this is about 1200km from where I live and work).

I've been to visit 2 or 3 times already - got lucky with work projects in yhe area, so work covered the flights and I got to spend a week with then on 2 separate occasions.

A big part of the problem is that our little one doesn't sleep in his crib. He just refuses to. So when I'm there he sleeps with me and we cuddle and it is no problem, but his mom "gets absolutely no sleep" and is constantly "over stimulated" and so the moment I come back home the problems start again. The i hate being a mother, I hate that you've done this to me, blah blah blah.

And now she's not all to blame, I have my own issues. I have a lot of childhood trauma that I wont go into now, but I've done a lot of lying and it has lead to a lot of our problems (I am in therapy, working through it, getting better, but she says its too late).

I guess I just dont know what to do man. I can't imagine a world where my son has to grow up with a step father. He is my boy - he needs his dad, and I love both of them more than words can describe.

She has told me that she hates me, that she's done, that she will never forgive me, blah blah blah, and man I can't have that be the case.

I am just so lost 😭

Hello hi greetings from the southern most tip of Africa.

I am a 31 M, recently blindsided by singledom and in all honestly, pretty lost.

I'm 6'3, tattooed, PhD candidate who works in mining and renewable energy, and since becoming single, more and more of a hermit - HELP.

I enjoy being active, playing sport, going to the gym, spending time with friends in a sunny beer garden, but also equally happy rotting at home all weekend watching movies, making extravagant meals and hating every second of washing the dishes.

That rotting at home side has started winning recently, I belive they call that seasonal depression😅 and so this is my attempt to fight that, get some of my mojo back and mingle with some new people!

I am not trying to use Reddit as a dating app, but hey, if you like what you see, who am I to stop you from loving me? 😉 All jokes aside - I am just hoping to find someone to chat to, hopefully take the edge of the loneliness and make pen pals great again in 2026. And hey, if something actually develops out of that, who am I to tell the universe that it doesn't know what it's doing?

So if any of this sounds even remotely not off putting, reach out, I'd love to chat!

Hi all, looking for some career advice - keeping it short and sweet.

I'm an economist that has specialized in the "energy" space, specifically critical minerals for the renewable energy transition.

The ambition is transition into a career in mining, but unsure of where to even begin to look.

Do you think there are any opportunities outside of potentially FIFO roles (lol, I have zero mechanic or otherwise skills) that I could look at, and where?

Side note: South African - so the visa would be a bitch.

TIA.

I'm building a dataset business focused on African critical minerals, tracking things like mining licences, ownership, production volumes, legislation and supply chain links (and much more) across the continent. This kind of data barely exists today in any clean, structured form. Part of what I'm building is the data infrastructure itself, and part of it is the relationships and sourcing needed to get and verify information that isn't publicly available in a usable way, especially across a lot of different countries and jurisdictions.

I have real experience on the data and infrastructure side. What I don't have is experience on the business side (buying and selling). I've never worked at a hedge fund or research desk, etc, deciding whether to pay for a dataset like this, so I have a bunch of assumptions I can't fully test myself.

Some of the things I'm trying to figure out:

1. Who would actually be the buyer for something like this? I'm assuming hedge funds and commodity traders, but I don't know if researchers, banks, industry players, or governments end up being just as much, or more, of the real market (I know this is something to nail down, but on a Monday it makes sense to sell to Hedge funds and by a Friday I think it's a completely different customer, partly because the applications for the data are rather vast, and partly because moron).
2. When you're evaluating a new alt-data vendor, what actually makes you say yes versus pass? Is it the uniqueness of the data, the track record of the vendor, sample data quality, something else?
3. How much does exclusivity actually matter to you? If a dataset is available to, say, 10 other funds, does that kill the value for you, or does it depend on what you're doing with it?
4. For a brand new, unproven data source, what would make you trust it enough to actually pay for it versus wait and see if others use it first?
5. Is there a typical structure for how these deals go, one flat subscription, tiered access, custom feeds per client, something else?
6. If you've bought or evaluated alt-data before, what's a mistake you saw a vendor make, or a red flag that made you walk away?

One specific thing I'm stuck on: standard startup advice says to validate early by talking to customers before building too much. But in this space, it feels hard to have those conversations without something polished to actually show. I don't know if that's a correct read of this market or just an excuse I'm telling myself to keep building instead of getting out there and talking to people. If you've been in a similarly technical or niche B2B space, how early did you start having customer conversations, and what did you actually show them at that stage?

Claude and I have been chatting through these questions for months now, but I feel like it is way to much of a kiss ass to be trusting the answers I am getting.

Not trying to pitch anything here, genuinely just want to hear from people who've been on either side of these deals before I get further into building. Happy to share more specifics in comments if people have questions.

I'm building a dataset business focused on African critical minerals, tracking things like mining licences, ownership, production volumes, legislation and supply chain links (and much more) across the continent. This kind of data barely exists today in any clean, structured form. Part of what I'm building is the data infrastructure itself, and part of it is the relationships and sourcing needed to get and verify information that isn't publicly available in a usable way, especially across a lot of different countries and jurisdictions.

I have real experience on the data and infrastructure side. What I don't have is experience on the business side (buying and selling). I've never worked at a hedge fund or research desk, etc, deciding whether to pay for a dataset like this, so I have a bunch of assumptions I can't fully test myself.

Some of the things I'm trying to figure out:

1. Who would actually be the buyer for something like this? I'm assuming hedge funds and commodity traders, but I don't know if researchers, banks, industry players, or governments end up being just as much, or more, of the real market (I know this is something to nail down, but on a Monday it makes sense to sell to Hedge funds and by a Friday I think it's a completely different customer, partly because the applications for the data are rather vast, and partly because moron).
2. When you're evaluating a new alt-data vendor, what actually makes you say yes versus pass? Is it the uniqueness of the data, the track record of the vendor, sample data quality, something else?
3. How much does exclusivity actually matter to you? If a dataset is available to, say, 10 other funds, does that kill the value for you, or does it depend on what you're doing with it?
4. For a brand new, unproven data source, what would make you trust it enough to actually pay for it versus wait and see if others use it first?
5. Is there a typical structure for how these deals go, one flat subscription, tiered access, custom feeds per client, something else?
6. If you've bought or evaluated alt-data before, what's a mistake you saw a vendor make, or a red flag that made you walk away?

One specific thing I'm stuck on: standard startup advice says to validate early by talking to customers before building too much. But in this space, it feels hard to have those conversations without something polished to actually show. I don't know if that's a correct read of this market or just an excuse I'm telling myself to keep building instead of getting out there and talking to people. If you've been in a similarly technical or niche B2B space, how early did you start having customer conversations, and what did you actually show them at that stage?

Claude and I have been chatting through these questions for months now, but I feel like it is way to much of a kiss ass to be trusting the answers I am getting.

Not trying to pitch anything here, genuinely just want to hear from people who've been on either side of these deals before I get further into building. Happy to share more specifics in comments if people have questions.

I'm building a dataset business focused on African critical minerals, tracking things like mining licences, ownership, production volumes, legislation and supply chain links (and much more) across the continent. This kind of data barely exists today in any clean, structured form. Part of what I'm building is the data infrastructure itself, and part of it is the relationships and sourcing needed to get and verify information that isn't publicly available in a usable way, especially across a lot of different countries and jurisdictions.

I have real experience on the data and infrastructure side. What I don't have is experience on the business side (buying and selling). I've never worked at a hedge fund or research desk, etc, deciding whether to pay for a dataset like this, so I have a bunch of assumptions I can't fully test myself.

Some of the things I'm trying to figure out:

1. Who would actually be the buyer for something like this? I'm assuming hedge funds and commodity traders, but I don't know if researchers, banks, industry players, or governments end up being just as much, or more, of the real market (I know this is something to nail down, but on a Monday it makes sense to sell to Hedge funds and by a Friday I think it's a completely different customer, partly because the applications for the data are rather vast, and partly because moron).
2. When you're evaluating a new alt-data vendor, what actually makes you say yes versus pass? Is it the uniqueness of the data, the track record of the vendor, sample data quality, something else?
3. How much does exclusivity actually matter to you? If a dataset is available to, say, 10 other funds, does that kill the value for you, or does it depend on what you're doing with it?
4. For a brand new, unproven data source, what would make you trust it enough to actually pay for it versus wait and see if others use it first?
5. Is there a typical structure for how these deals go, one flat subscription, tiered access, custom feeds per client, something else?
6. If you've bought or evaluated alt-data before, what's a mistake you saw a vendor make, or a red flag that made you walk away?

One specific thing I'm stuck on: standard startup advice says to validate early by talking to customers before building too much. But in this space, it feels hard to have those conversations without something polished to actually show. I don't know if that's a correct read of this market or just an excuse I'm telling myself to keep building instead of getting out there and talking to people. If you've been in a similarly technical or niche B2B space, how early did you start having customer conversations, and what did you actually show them at that stage?

Claude and I have been chatting through these questions for months now, but I feel like it is way to much of a kiss ass to be trusting the answers I am getting.

Not trying to pitch anything here, genuinely just want to hear from people who've been on either side of these deals before I get further into building. Happy to share more specifics in comments if people have questions.

I'm an economist, specializing in Critical Minerals for the new energy transition. I'm starting a critical minerals intelligence practice, turning scattered, messy, opaque and siloed data on mineral trade, production and markets into the kind of structured analysis institutions and investors pay for. It's a real gap: the data exists, almost nobody is doing the work to make it usable, and those that are charge $50k-$200k for a yearly license.

I'm the technical half of this. I build the models, run the analysis, write the reports, that's where my time is best spent and where the actual value gets created. But none of that matters if it looks and reads like my 2nd PhD. Design, brand, comms, the public-facing story, that's a genuinely important part of this business, and it's not something I should be spending my time learning to do badly when I could be doing the analytical work well.

So I'm looking for a co-founder to own that side: visual identity, UI/UX, content and distribution, the voice of the thing.

This is a new project. I have built the IP over the past 8 months and we are now in a position to start to market out work. Being a new project there is no cash, but real equity and real ownership is on offer, with salaries as soon as the first subscription is purchased.

If you like the idea of taking something analytically rigorous and making it look and sound like something people trust and want to engage with, DM me and I'll tell you more.