u/Sea_Yak6099

Hey everyone, my cofounder and I are building Project Origin, a network for startup founders to find technical cofounders, collaborators, and funding.

The product has two main parts:

• Collaborator feed: founders post what they’re building and the kind of person they need. Technical people and other startup builders can find them and connect. They decide the terms themselves equity, revenue share, etc.
• Pitch feed: founders post their startup as a short video. The community upvotes pitches, and the strongest ones get featured and put in front of an investor.

The bigger goal is to build a global network of startup founders and people who want to build startups, so founders aren't limited to the network they already have.

Our main problem now is distribution.

Our current strategy is:

• Build in public and share what we learn.
• Create startup/tech content that brings people into the community.
• Post community-focused content around startups.
• Directly reach out to founders and technical people.
• Push everything toward our waitlist before launch.

What do you think of this distribution strategy?

Building a reactivation and review automation for small service businesses and looking to connect with anyone who works in or builds for the car detailing space.

Specifically targeting owner-operated detailing businesses in the US and UK mobile or fixed, primarily serving private customers, been operating at least a year, active on Instagram but not getting consistent Google reviews and not following up with past customers who've gone quiet.

Curious if anyone here has built for this niche or knows it well.

Been working in the detailing industry for 2 years now and two things are driving me crazy past customers who never come back after a great service and people not leaving reviews even when they loved the work. Do you guys actually follow up with past customers or does everyone just let them go quiet? And how do you consistently get Google reviews because we struggle with this every single time.

Been curious about the business side of detailing lately. For those of you running your own operation whether mobile or fixed, two things I keep hearing about are no-shows eating into your day and past customers just going quiet after their first visit.

Is that actually as bad as it sounds or is there something else that's a bigger headache day to day?

Hey everyone, me and my co-founder are building something called Assembly and we'd love brutal honest feedback before we go further.

The core idea is simple. A lot of first-time founders have an idea but no money to hire developers, designers, or marketers. What if instead of paying someone upfront, you could find a person willing to build with you in exchange for equity or revenue share? Assembly would be a platform purely focused on that human connection. No AI tools, no idea validation, no venture coach. Just founder meets the right person, they agree on terms themselves, and they build together.

The cofounder matching is completely free. Assembly doesn't take a cut. We just facilitate the connection.

The second part VC access.

We're also thinking about a feature where founders can post a short video elevator pitch on a public feed. The community upvotes the best ideas. The ones that rise to the top get visibility in front of verified VCs and angel investors who are on the platform looking for exactly this. No warm intros needed. No accelerator required. Just a great idea and the community backing it.

We haven't figured out the business model on this side yet and we're being honest about that. That's partly why we're here.

Who it's for:
A first-time founder who has an idea, has conviction, but is missing a skill, a co-founder, or a path to funding.

What we're not doing:
We're not LinkedIn. We're not Reddit. We're not trying to be everything. Just two focused things done well.

What we genuinely want to know:

• Have you ever struggled to find a co-founder or a technical/creative partner?
• Would you use something like this?
• What would make you trust a platform like this over just posting on Reddit?
• Would the VC pitch feed actually excite you or does it feel unrealistic?
• What would make you leave?

also suggest us that how can we make a freemium model.

My first approach is to pick a niche, build an automation, and sell the outcome. I have a few ideas in mind:

1. Invoice and payment recovery automation for B2B service businesses
2. The multi-channel "Lead-Lock" triager
3. AI-powered proposal and quotation system for service businesses
4. Google Reviews agent

After building one of these, I'd reach out to different businesses and pitch them on the offer, basically how it saves them money or whatever the outcome of the automation actually is. Initially, I'd give them a 14-day free trial, and at the end of it, show them a summary of what the automation actually did for their business (leads generated, more customers, time saved, etc.) and go from there.

My second approach is to look for businesses posting jobs on LinkedIn, Indeed, Upwork, and automate the task instead, for example automating a data entry job a business is trying to hire for.

There are a few barriers to this approach though:

A job title alone doesn't tell you which parts of the role are actually automatable. Most roles are a mix of repetitive tasks and tasks that genuinely need a human

A lot of postings are vague ("VA needed for various admin tasks") and don't give enough detail to know if there's a real automatable chunk without asking directly.

But I think this approach is way better than cold outreach because the business has already told me, in writing, that this specific task is painful enough to pay someone's salary for it. There's no guessing involved, the need and the budget are already there, I just have to show up with a cheaper, faster alternative. I'm also not pitching something they don't need; I'm offering to take a repetitive chunk off whoever they're about to hire (or whoever's currently overloaded with it), so it's actual value, not a cold pitch for something they never asked for.

Which approach would you go with, or is there a smarter way to combine both?