r/StartupAccelerators

As part of the program my first week goal is customer discovery and validating real demand for the product. They said not to talk to friends and family because their responses could be biased as they want to help and support me. Makes sense, but my startup is a street parking discovery app, think of it like Waze but for parking.

So how does this actually work for me? Am I supposed to stand on the street and walk up to strangers as they get in or out of their cars, hang around car parks or DM people on social media?

Lost on the format here. How did you do your first customer interview especially for a consumer product?

I just launched my company and I have an email list with over 1000 people. Among them, over half is warm leads and will open my emails, the other half has opted-in for a freebie, but never opened any email. Still no sales from the email sequences sent.

Are emails enough, do we keep pushing with multiple channels?

Looking for some advice on how to market/grow the startup I've been working on for the past 6 months called Official HireMe: https://officialhireme.com

The idea came from a problem I was dealing with myself. Applying to jobs, especially as a student/recent grad/early-career person, feels completely broken. You spend hours applying, send out tons of applications, and most of the time you either get ghosted or never know if anyone actually looked at your profile.

Official HireMe is basically a reverse-hiring platform. Instead of candidates mass-applying to hundreds of jobs, they create one strong profile with their resume, background, links, and even a introduction video so employers can get a full view of the candidate. Then vetted companies can find and reach out to candidates directly when there’s a real match.

I already have the website built, and I’ve actually had some users sign up randomly without doing any real marketing, which makes me think there is at least some demand. Now I’m trying to figure out how to actually grow it.

My question is: how would you market something like this?

I've tried posting consistently on LinkedIn/X but not much is really happening. I've also tried QR codes on campus but at the end of the day weather destroys them and I need to grow faster than that.

Where would you recommend that I post about my website to promote it? Other websites, different forums/subreddits?

I've been thinking about finding student ambassadors/ social media interns etc. to film content while promoting it at their colleges.

Any help would be appreciated and also would love feedback on the website if you have it!

I'm 18, from Argentina, building Arrivl, a workforce simulation platform for seasonal

industries. Hotel workers, F1 crews, and stadium staff navigate interactive simulations of the

actual venue and practice real scenarios by voice before Day 1. They arrive already having practiced.

Looking for a technical co-founder. Full stack, AI APIs, voice interaction experience. Equal

equity split.

Dm me if interested !

I am excited to reach out about my project, Sushaasan—India’s Government OS for the next generation.

Sushaasan is civic–environmental platform that turns what 500M Indians say across WhatsApp, Instagram, Twitter, and news in 22 languages into actionable intelligence. It collects and analyses large volumes of unstructured data from social media and user inputs, then generates solutions the government can swiftly implement. This empowers citizens and helps government authorities use resources effectively and act as a team to solve civic issues rather than dumping responsibilities.

Yes, you guys must be wondering why the government would use it. The answer is similar to why we use Ola/Uber when we can go outside and find transportation ourselves, or why we use Blinkit/Zepto when we could step out and buy stuff from grocery stores or call the kirana store owner to deliver within five minutes. The reason is convenience and structure, which is exactly what I'm providing to the government — helping them assist citizens in solving civic problems more easily and with less friction.

With this, I'm looking for the most influential Gen Z individuals working in governance, civic policy development, or related fields who have extensive contacts with IAS officers, high government officials, and the AI for India mission to work towards a new era of governance which is coming with GenZ.

Warm regards,

Founder, Sushaasan

Website: Sushaasan.in

We’re a small team of 4 building a B2B SaaS product.

Right now, one developer is focused on ML/data work. My dev partner (my brother btw) is asking me what he should work on next, and honestly, I don’t have a clear answer.

That feels weird, because usually “not enough dev capacity” is the problem. But we’ve reached a stage where the bigger question is not execution, it’s product direction.

We have users & design partners, we have signals, we have feedback, but we’re still figuring out what the product should become:

• Is this a feed users check daily?
• Is it a workflow?
• Is it a notification layer?
• What actually makes users come back?
• What is the core recurring value?

So now I’m stuck in this awkward moment where giving my dev partner random tasks feels wrong, but not giving him anything also feels like wasted momentum.

Curious how other founders handled this stage. What would you focus on when direction is not clear?

Would love practical advice from people who have been through this.

Hi everyone,

I’m the founder of Unicoder, an AI-powered IDE we’ve been building with a very clear goal:

To deeply integrate AI into the development workflow with real project context, instead of isolated chat responses where you describe what you want, and it builds at the speed of thought.

Unicoder is designed to help developers:

• Understand large codebases with multi-file context
• Debug using natural language
• Refactor entire files or modules
• Generate and explain code with real project awareness
• Speed up development without losing control

We’re currently pre-launch and around 70% product-complete.

Instead of opening this as a free beta, we’re intentionally looking for only 100 paid beta users.

Why paid?

Because we want:
• Serious developers who already invest in tools
• Honest and critical feedback
• Long-term users who genuinely care about quality

What the first 100 users get:

• Paid early access to the beta
• Lifetime discounted pricing
• Direct influence on the product roadmap
• Private feedback channel with the founding team

This isn’t for everyone.

If you’re only looking for free tools, this probably won’t be the right fit and that’s completely okay.

But if you’re a developer or founder who:
• Already uses AI tools in development
• Values productivity and speed
• Wants to help shape a serious product from the beginning

I’d love to connect.

Join the waitlist to become one of the first early users building with Unicoder.

Unicoderapp.com

I got told multiple times to "find the people you built this for and market to them" Sure, there are some reddit communities that could have potential users, but I cannot post okay, download my app right now it's for you, because these communities aren't for marketing. About social media marketing I have no idea how to make videos or what about that would grab people's attention. Genuinely what do hell do I do? How do other people promote?

P.S. I don't want anyone commenting here their SaaS for marketing or DMing me about how they have a startup that helps startups, I don't care, thank you.

Hi everyone,

I’m the founder of Unicoder, an AI-powered IDE we’ve been building with a very clear goal:

To deeply integrate AI into the development workflow with real project context, instead of isolated chat responses where you describe what you want, and it builds at the speed of thought.

Unicoder is designed to help developers:

• Understand large codebases with multi-file context
• Debug using natural language
• Refactor entire files or modules
• Generate and explain code with real project awareness
• Speed up development without losing control

We’re currently pre-launch and around 70% product-complete.

We’re now looking for early beta users who want to test the product and help shape the future of Unicoder.

What beta users will get:

• Early access to the product
• Direct influence on the product roadmap
• Private feedback access with the founding team
• Opportunity to help shape features and workflows from the beginning

We’re especially looking for developers and founders who:
• Already use AI tools in development
• Care about developer experience and productivity
• Want to be involved in building serious AI developer tools early

This is still early, and that’s exactly why your feedback matters.

If this resonates with you, I’d love to connect.

Join the waitlist at Unicoderapp.com to become one of the first beta users building with Unicoder.

Hey everyone,

I'm a founder validating a service idea and I need honest feedback from people who've actually shipped AI products. Not looking to promote anything, genuinely trying to figure out if this is worth building into a proper business.

Here's what I keep hearing from teams running LLMs in production:

Their AI bill shows up as a single line item. $8K, $15K, $22K. no idea which feature drove it, which team spent the most, or whether staging burned more tokens than production. Finance asks engineering to explain the bill. Engineering shrugs. Nobody has answers until someone manually digs through API logs for two days.

Meanwhile, there are no spending caps. A developer testing a prompt in a loop burns $2K overnight. A new feature quietly 3x's token usage after launch. Nobody notices until the invoice hits.

The service I'm considering:

I come in, set up cost attribution infrastructure on your stack — so you can see AI spend broken down by feature, team, and environment in real time. Budget guardrails with alerts so nobody accidentally blows through limits. Weekly cost review to catch overruns early and suggest optimisations.

Core offering is a one-time fixed-fee setup (under a week), with an optional recurring monitoring tier for ongoing cost control.

I'm not building a SaaS product. This is done-for-you infrastructure work. I set it up, hand you the runbooks, and your team runs it from there.

I've already talked to a handful of CTOs and the signal so far is that the pain is real but timing matters, it only becomes urgent after a surprise bill or when a second team starts shipping AI features. Trying to figure out if that pattern holds broadly.

EarMe is an AI-powered assistant that helps you understand and manage your healthcare conversations.

Doctor visits can be overwhelming. Important details are easy to forget, medical language can be confusing, and it’s hard to know what to do next once you leave the room. EarMe solves this by turning your visit into something you can actually understand and act on.

With EarMe, you can:

• Record your doctor visit securely and effortlessly as well as upload & view medical documents 
• Receive a summary from your visit
• Ask questions to our chat model - just like talking to an expert who remembers your visit that has all the context from your past visits & medical documents
• Get personalised recommendations so you know exactly what to do after your appointment
• Note down questions for next visit

Instead of leaving appointments confused or relying on memory, EarMe gives you clarity, confidence, and control over your health.

Wondering if anyone has any feedback on this for me. And also who I should target first.

Please vote

View Poll

Don't get me wrong I released my app like 2 weeks ago, and since then I've actively talked to people to get feedback and they all said good things, yet they don't download the app and ghost me after replying once. Am I the one doing something wrong, are they lying about liking what I built? How do I even market it in the start if everyone just ghosts me after saying it's amazing?

I am not posting this to beg for users, I'm trying to get advice but I will put the link here so I can know what I'm doing wrong.

I built Memora which is an app that keeps track of your everyday stuff like keys, wallet, headphones etc. You can log items with one tap with the widget you can customize and it saves the location and time. Bluetooth devices get automatically logged every time you connect them to your phone. What makes it different from other apps is that it has an ML system that learns your routines and then it can predict where your things are later if you forgot to log it.

I updated the website a bunch of times based on feedback people gave me and they said it's clear what the app does at first glance but I feel like atp they are just saying it to be nice.

I really, really appreciate any advice on what should I do, the website or the app or anything lol