u/Practical_Surround_8

Built two startups. First went through YC, pivoted constantly using Mom Test interviews, and never gained traction.

My second company by no means is successful, but we're profitable, and it pays the bills.

Why the Mom Test broke for us:

• People don’t know what they want. Ask about their problems, and get inaccurate answers. We offered to solve their stated problems for $100. They wouldn’t pay.
• Watching what they do has the same flaw. Now I know Mom test tells you not to directly ask the prospects what their problems are, but rather to understand what they're doing. We saw a construction company where all of their time was going towards scheduling. We offered to fix it, and they wouldn’t pay us. If the prospect doesn’t see it as a problem, they won’t pay to solve it.
• Execs don’t take open-ended calls. They’re slammed. “I’d love to learn about your workflow” goes nowhere. We ended up stuck talking mostly with ICs who have no buying power.

What worked instead:

• Start with your own pain. If you’d pay someone to fix it, others will too. Stronger than 50 customer interviews.
• Become an agency first. Promise execs you’ll solve a specific pain. They take the call. They sign. You learn what’s broken from inside the work while you get paid.
• Stay generalized until you find the wedge. Even doing taxes for companies teaches you the pain and how you can do the workflow a 1000 times automatically.

Lets not forget the Mom test author Rob Fitzpatrick didn't make most of his money from his tech startup. It failed after 4 years. He made most of his money from the book...

Built two startups. First went through YC, pivoted constantly using Mom Test interviews, and never gained traction.

My second company by no means is successful, but we're profitable, and it pays the bills.

Why the Mom Test broke for us:

• People don’t know what they want. Ask about their problems, and get inaccurate answers. We offered to solve their stated problems for $100. They wouldn’t pay.
• Watching what they do has the same flaw. Now I know Mom test tells you not to directly ask the prospects what their problems are, but rather to understand what they're doing. We saw a construction company where all of their time was going towards scheduling. We offered to fix it, and they wouldn’t pay us. If the prospect doesn’t see it as a problem, they won’t pay to solve it.
• Execs don’t take open-ended calls. They’re slammed. “I’d love to learn about your workflow” goes nowhere. We ended up stuck talking mostly with ICs who have no buying power.

What worked instead:

• Start with your own pain. If you’d pay someone to fix it, others will too. Stronger than 50 customer interviews.
• Become an agency first. Promise execs you’ll solve a specific pain. They take the call. They sign. You learn what’s broken from inside the work while you get paid.
• Stay generalized until you find the wedge. Even doing taxes for companies teaches you the pain and how you can do the workflow a 1000 times automatically.

Lets not forget the Mom test author Rob Fitzpatrick didn't make most of his money from his tech startup. It failed after 4 years. He made most of his money from the book...

TLDR: I went through YC in 2023, spent 2 years struggling to get real traction, and only recently built a profitable business with my second company.

A few people have asked me about my journey, so I figured I’d write this out.

I was in YC S23 with my last company. Our original application was for a pretty generic AI coding idea. Think Cursor/Windsurf/Copilot competitor, before that market got hot.

During YC, we mostly bounced between generic AI ideas. One of them was AI meeting notes. After YC, we spent about a year and a half trying to build in insurance because we thought, “Not many people are applying AI here, so maybe there’s opportunity.”

We did get some interest. Some proof-of-concepts. But no real MRR

Eventually, we realized we were not solving a painful enough problem.

Today, I’m running a profitable data/lead gen business as a solo founder. We don’t have insane revenue numbers, but it actually makes money and customers actually care.

There were many points where I was sleeping 2 hours a night, working 20+ hour days, and seriously thinking about quitting.

Here’s what I’ve learned about taking a company from 0→1

• Enterprises can move fast when the problem is painful enough. People say enterprise sales always take forever. I don’t think that’s fully true. At my last company, we were talking to one enterprise prospect for months and got nowhere. No LOI. No real commitment. Just endless conversations. At my current company, we closed that same type of customer in under 2 months. The difference was that we were solving a problem the C-suite already cared about. If you’re pushing something uphill for months, it might not be “enterprise sales are slow.” It might be “this is not urgent enough.”
• Customers will tolerate a lot of bullshit. When I look back at our product from 6–8 months ago, I’m honestly embarrassed. It was buggy. It was messy. A lot of things were manual behind the scenes. But customers still paid. Not because the product was beautiful. But because it solved a painful enough problem that they were willing to work around the issues. Early customers are buying relief.
• Play to your strengths. This one took me way too long to learn. For a while, I worked on browser agents, construction tech ideas, insurance workflows, and a bunch of other things where I had no real edge. No distribution advantage and no unfair reason I should win. If you feel like you have no advantage in the market you’re attacking, you probably need to either get closer to the customer, consult in the space, or pick a different market

Hey everyone,

For the last year, the bottleneck in our outbound at Potarix has been the dumbest possible problem: we have a company name, and we need its website.

Clay's company-name-to-domain enrichment was inaccurate 90% of the time.

We built our own pipeline that makes our customers happy.

The result is enricher.potarix.com. It's the same internal tool we use to run Potarix's lead-intel pipeline, which is now at 6 figures ARR. $0.01 per lookup, no minimum. You can use it within clay as well.

Happy to share more on what led us to build this!

I run farm-to-door. Raw dairy delivered to Manhattan stoops every Saturday

Menu:
- Raw whole milk, gallon, $20
- Raw kefir, quart, $15
- Raw colostrum, pint, $20

How it works
Order by Thursday 8pm. We drop a cooler on your stoop Saturday. $7 flat delivery. Stripe checkout, no subscription.

farmtodoor.com/delivery

I don't know why no one has done this yet, but I ran out of my codex limits for the week so I decided to make this for claude code.

Here's a way to use /goal in claude code where each session has its own goal, so you can run concurrent sessions easily.

It works just like codex

Built two startups. First went through YC, pivoted constantly using Mom Test interviews, and never gained traction.

My second company by no means is successful, but we're profitable, and it pays the bills.

Why the Mom Test broke for us:

• People don’t know what they want. Ask about their problems, and get inaccurate answers. We offered to solve their stated problems for $100. They wouldn’t pay.
• Watching what they do has the same flaw. Now I know Mom test tells you not to directly ask the prospects what their problems are, but rather to understand what they're doing. We saw a construction company where all of their time was going towards scheduling. We offered to fix it, and they wouldn’t pay us. If the prospect doesn’t see it as a problem, they won’t pay to solve it.
• Execs don’t take open-ended calls. They’re slammed. “I’d love to learn about your workflow” goes nowhere. We ended up stuck talking mostly with ICs who have no buying power.

What worked instead:

• Start with your own pain. If you’d pay someone to fix it, others will too. Stronger than 50 customer interviews.
• Become an agency first. Promise execs you’ll solve a specific pain. They take the call. They sign. You learn what’s broken from inside the work while you get paid.
• Stay generalized until you find the wedge. Even doing taxes for companies teaches you the pain and how you can do the workflow a 1000 times automatically.

Edit: To all the people downvoting and debating. Lets not forget the Mom test author Rob Fitzpatrick didn't make most of his money from his tech startup. It failed after 4 years. He made most of his money from the book...

Built two startups. First went through YC, pivoted constantly using Mom Test interviews, and never gained traction.

My second company by no means is successful, but we're profitable, and it pays the bills.

Why the Mom Test broke for us:

• People don’t know what they want. Ask about their problems, and get inaccurate answers. We offered to solve their stated problems for $100. They wouldn’t pay.
• Watching what they do has the same flaw. Now I know Mom test tells you not to directly ask the prospects what their problems are, but rather to understand what they're doing. We saw a construction company where all of their time was going towards scheduling. We offered to fix it, and they wouldn’t pay us. If the prospect doesn’t see it as a problem, they won’t pay to solve it.
• Execs don’t take open-ended calls. They’re slammed. “I’d love to learn about your workflow” goes nowhere. We ended up stuck talking mostly with ICs who have no buying power.

What worked instead:

• Start with your own pain. If you’d pay someone to fix it, others will too. Stronger than 50 customer interviews.
• Become an agency first. Promise execs you’ll solve a specific pain. They take the call. They sign. You learn what’s broken from inside the work while you get paid.
• Stay generalized until you find the wedge. Even doing taxes for companies teaches you the pain and how you can do the workflow a 1000 times automatically.

Two months on farm-sourced food only. Diet sits close to Paul Saladino's stack with the addition of 12ish-18ish raw eggs daily.

Five things changed:

1. Eczema is cleared. Beef tallow is my main moisturizer (I've always found plain water is the best cleanser for my face). Skin is the clearest it's been.

2. Up ~10 lbs. I haven't got a dexa or anything so can't be sure about body fat percentage. But I don't look fatter. Only look fuller.

3. Gut feels normal. I've had lifelong gut issues, I had my appendix removed a few years ago (if relevant at all). Gut feels amazing.

4. Hair feels thicker. Been on fin/min for a year, and I didn't stop that. However, my hair feels thicker. I naturally have 3A hair and my curls look significantly better than any hair product at the store.

5. Pre-workout is raw honey now. I used to take energy drinks + candy before the gym. Now a couple spoons of raw honey. I don't feel as hyped(not sure if thats the right word?) in the gym anymore. But overall I'm seeing the same steady growth in the gym. I lift twice a week Mike Mentzer style. I do sprints twice a week with stretching every other day.

I was juggling 5 terminal tabs, and a bunch of UIs to manage all my agents.

So I built a free app that puts Claude Code, Codex, Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Cowork, and the Codex app in one window, with SSH support for remote dev boxes.

Hey folks,

I got tired of using 5 different tools to talk to my agents and CLIs.

I open sourced agent-hub, a tool I built for myself to interface with CLIs and agents in one place.

https://github.com/Potarix/agent-hub

https://agent-hub.tools/

TLDR: I went through YC in 2023, spent 2 years struggling to get real traction, and only recently built a profitable business with my second company.

A few people have asked me about my journey, so I figured I’d write this out.

I was in YC S23 with my last company. Our original application was for a pretty generic AI coding idea. Think Cursor/Windsurf/Copilot competitor, before that market got hot.

During YC, we mostly bounced between generic AI ideas. One of them was AI meeting notes. After YC, we spent about a year and a half trying to build in insurance because we thought, “Not many people are applying AI here, so maybe there’s opportunity.”

We did get some interest. Some proof-of-concepts. But no real MRR

Eventually, we realized we were not solving a painful enough problem.

Today, I’m running a profitable data/lead gen business as a solo founder. We don’t have insane revenue numbers, but it actually makes money and customers actually care.

There were many points where I was sleeping 2 hours a night, working 20+ hour days, and seriously thinking about quitting.

Here’s what I’ve learned about taking a company from 0→1

• Enterprises can move fast when the problem is painful enough. People say enterprise sales always take forever. I don’t think that’s fully true. At my last company, we were talking to one enterprise prospect for months and got nowhere. No LOI. No real commitment. Just endless conversations. At my current company, we closed that same type of customer in under 2 months. The difference was that we were solving a problem the C-suite already cared about. If you’re pushing something uphill for months, it might not be “enterprise sales are slow.” It might be “this is not urgent enough.”
• Customers will tolerate a lot of bullshit. When I look back at our product from 6–8 months ago, I’m honestly embarrassed. It was buggy. It was messy. A lot of things were manual behind the scenes. But customers still paid. Not because the product was beautiful. But because it solved a painful enough problem that they were willing to work around the issues. Early customers are buying relief.
• Play to your strengths. This one took me way too long to learn. For a while, I worked on browser agents, construction tech ideas, insurance workflows, and a bunch of other things where I had no real edge. No distribution advantage and no unfair reason I should win. If you feel like you have no advantage in the market you’re attacking, you probably need to either get closer to the customer, consult in the space, or pick a different market

TLDR: I went through YC in 2023, spent 2 years struggling to get real traction, and only recently built a profitable business with my second company.

A few people have asked me about my journey, so I figured I’d write this out.

I was in YC S23 with my last company. Our original application was for a pretty generic AI coding idea. Think Cursor/Windsurf/Copilot competitor, before that market got hot.

During YC, we mostly bounced between generic AI ideas. One of them was AI meeting notes. After YC, we spent about a year and a half trying to build in insurance because we thought, “Not many people are applying AI here, so maybe there’s opportunity.”

We did get some interest. Some proof-of-concepts. But no real MRR

Eventually, we realized we were not solving a painful enough problem.

Today, I’m running a profitable data/lead gen business as a solo founder. We don’t have insane revenue numbers, but it actually makes money and customers actually care.

There were many points where I was sleeping 2 hours a night, working 20+ hour days, and seriously thinking about quitting.

Here’s what I’ve learned about taking a company from 0→1

• Enterprises can move fast when the problem is painful enough. People say enterprise sales always take forever. I don’t think that’s fully true. At my last company, we were talking to one enterprise prospect for months and got nowhere. No LOI. No real commitment. Just endless conversations. At my current company, we closed that same type of customer in under 2 months. The difference was that we were solving a problem the C-suite already cared about. If you’re pushing something uphill for months, it might not be “enterprise sales are slow.” It might be “this is not urgent enough.”
• Customers will tolerate a lot of bullshit. When I look back at our product from 6–8 months ago, I’m honestly embarrassed. It was buggy. It was messy. A lot of things were manual behind the scenes. But customers still paid. Not because the product was beautiful. But because it solved a painful enough problem that they were willing to work around the issues. Early customers are buying relief.
• Play to your strengths. This one took me way too long to learn. For a while, I worked on browser agents, construction tech ideas, insurance workflows, and a bunch of other things where I had no real edge. No distribution advantage and no unfair reason I should win. If you feel like you have no advantage in the market you’re attacking, you probably need to either get closer to the customer, consult in the space, or pick a different market

Company name in. Website out.

For months at Potarix, we’ve had to solve this problem for ourselves:

Start with only a company name → find the right website → enrich the company from there.

Every existing solution we tried was garbage.

So we built our own.

Today, we’re launching the easiest way to find a company website from just a company name.

Try it here: https://enricher.potarix.com

Hey everyone,

I know this sub hates self promotion, so I'll keep this short and I promise you this isn't another clay competitor.

Getting a website from a company name. We kept needing this at Potarix, and every solution we tried was garbage, so we built our own. Just launched https://enricher.potarix.com today. Let me know if its useful to anyone :)