I'm an Indian founder building a data intelligence tool focused on European ESG compliance (specifically CSRD/ESRS workflows).

​The core problem we solve is the manual grunt work: sustainability teams burning hours digging through 800+ page reports just to find specific disclosures or metrics, where every number needs to be 100% traceable back to the source page/table.

​Product-wise, the engine works, and we have clear pricing/credits locked down. But cross-border GTM is where I'm hitting a wall. Selling B2B from India into Europe comes with obvious trust, compliance, and timezone hurdles.

​For anyone selling B2B into the EU (especially in ESG/compliance):

​Where did you find your first early conversations—cold outbound on LinkedIn, specialized communities, or channel partners/consultancies?

​How did you handle the trust barrier of being an offshore founder in a highly regulated EU space?

​Would love candid advice or teardowns.

Hi everyone,

We’re a small technical founding team based in APAC looking to connect with a business-focused co-founder or small team based in Europe to jointly validate, build and grow technology companies.

Our team currently consists of:

• I’m a software engineer specialising in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure and scalable systems.
• My co-founder is an AI engineer with experience building AI-driven products and intelligent systems.

We can take ownership of much of the technical side: product engineering, architecture, cloud infrastructure, AI integration, automation and scaling.

What we’re looking for now is the business side of the founding team, potentially someone who could eventually become the CEO / commercial co-founder and lead market validation, partnerships, sales, operations, fundraising and go-to-market within Europe.

We currently have two main concepts we’re interested in exploring.

1. Grocery / food-tech platform

We’re exploring a grocery and food-commerce platform that could combine several business models:

Instacart-style marketplace: connecting customers with grocery retailers and enabling fast online ordering and delivery.

HelloFresh-style model: curated products or meal solutions, subscriptions and recurring customer relationships.

More vertically integrated supply-chain model: as the company grows, potentially developing stronger relationships with producers and suppliers and gaining greater control over sourcing, fulfilment and distribution rather than remaining only a marketplace.

The interesting opportunity for us is combining AI, logistics optimisation, supplier technology, subscriptions and marketplace infrastructure to see whether we can create something differentiated for European markets.

2. Real-estate / PropTech platform

We have also been developing the concept for an all-in-one real-estate and rental platform.

Think of something combining the simplicity and discovery experience of Airbnb with a more complete operating platform for landlords, property managers and tenants.

For renters, the platform could provide:

• Property discovery and intelligent property matching
• Viewing requests and communication with landlords or agents
• Rental applications
• Digital lease agreements
• Rent and deposit payments
• Payment reminders and history
• Maintenance requests and tracking

For landlords and property managers, it could provide:

• Property and listing management
• Tenant management and screening
• Lease management
• Automated rent collection and reminders
• Maintenance management
• Occupancy and rental-income analytics
• AI-assisted rental pricing
• Portfolio dashboards and property insights

The business could eventually operate through a combination of subscriptions, listing fees, transaction fees and premium services, while building a larger marketplace connecting tenants, landlords, property managers and potentially other real-estate service providers.

We see significant potential to apply AI and automation to areas such as property matching, pricing, tenant workflows, documentation, support and portfolio analytics.

What we're looking for

Rather than simply finding someone to execute our ideas, we want a real founding partner who challenges assumptions, understands the European market and helps decide what is actually worth building.

A background in any of the following would be particularly interesting:

Business development, startups, marketing, finance, operations, retail, logistics, supply chains, real estate, PropTech, marketplaces, SaaS, fundraising or partnerships.

You don't need to already be a CEO. We care more about entrepreneurial ability, commercial thinking, execution and founder fit.

Partnership

This is not a job opening.

We’re looking at this as an equity and profit-based partnership, with ownership and responsibilities structured around each founder's contribution and long-term involvement.

We’re also not limiting ourselves to these two concepts.

If we connect with the right person or team and discover a stronger SaaS, AI, marketplace or technology opportunity, we're completely open to exploring and building that together.

The goal is simple:

Strong technical founders + strong European business leadership + local market knowledge**.**

Validate the problem, speak to customers, build quickly, launch, measure traction and keep pushing the ideas that prove they have a market.

If you're based in Europe and interested in building something from the ground up, DM me with a little about your background, location and the type of company you'd like to build.

We can connect on LinkedIn first, exchange ideas and see whether there is a genuine founder fit.

Also happy to hear from existing business teams looking for technical co-founders, not only individuals.

Honestly, I think traditional dating apps have some pretty big problems, especially lately.

It often feels like men struggle to get matches, while women can end up with an overwhelming number of choices. In both cases, I think the endless swiping can become repetitive and frustrating.

But while endlessly swiping, I noticed something interesting...

You scroll through Tinder, Hinge, etc. and sometimes you see someone and immediately think:

“Wait… I saw a profile 5 minutes ago that would be perfect for this person.”

But there's nothing you can do about it.

So I decided to create Pezzo (Piece in Italian)

The idea is simple:

Instead of swiping for yourself, you're shown two dating profiles and asked:

“Would these two make a good match?”

Yes or No

You can also say why you think they're compatible.

Over time, I want to build statistics around these “ships”:

“You and X have been matched by 27 people.”

And if the same two people keep getting matched, they could eventually choose whether they actually want to connect.

Basically, I'm trying to turn matchmaking into a social game.

I think there's something really interesting about letting other people notice compatibility that you might completely miss yourself.

Right now I have basically 2 test users, so I'm looking for the first 100 people to try it and tell me honestly:

Is this actually fun? Is it useful? What would you change?

https://pezzopuzzle.com/

Hello,
I am a eu citizen (French) residing outside of Europe for now (Saudi Arabia).
I am currently building a platform online and it can possibly provide subscription based services.

I have multiple ideas, this is only one of them , but all of them provides this kind of product. The target users is worldwide.

I want to have a real company and have this legal. Where do I start? Where should I open my company?

- In Saudi Arabia I can’t open the company as a resident non saudi.
- I want to be legal and doing the right thing if I ever go back to France or Europe.
- for now no external investment, aiming to grow organically, should my decision be based on if I want to take profit out or no?

- I have no legal background and more of a tech background so I dont know from where to start

Thanks,

Curious to know if anyone here has raised pre-seed with EU-based investors/VC funds and what have your general experiences been? Any advice or recommendations?

We're looking for a technical co-founder to join the team, replacing our current CTO.

He's been poached by a startup offering him a ridiculous salary — he wants to buy a house, so I get it. He's staying around for calls when needed, but we need someone to properly take the reins on the tech.

The product is roughly 80% built — you'd be taking over an already largely-made system, not starting from scratch. The gap between where we are and launch is three things:

1. Finishing the single-creator theme (white-label) — this is already underway; the foundational work (CSS pipeline, design tokens, cleanup) is done, and the theme build itself is in progress. Needs finishing off.
2. Automated DNS for creator subdomains — the core domain infrastructure is built and live (creation, SSL, admin management). What's left is the last mile — automated preview domains for new creators — which hasn't been started yet.
3. Balance & payout system — this is the part with the most left to do. A couple of underlying pieces exist (payout intake, notifications), but the backend foundation, creator-facing UI, and admin/ops tooling for payouts are all still to be built.

A good chunk of this is already in progress — you'd be finishing things off rather than starting cold.

We're building a creator commerce platform for the adult industry, made up of three products that all sit on one underlying system:

1. Multi-creator white-labels — functional and live, but early, and working through the cold-start problem
2. AI creator-generation tool — releasing next week
3. Headless CMS — the multi-creator white-label above is built on top of this

We've architected it so that individual creator sites will eventually feed content into the multi-creator network — so as creators post, the network itself gets more valuable. It's a long-term network effect play.

Me and my other co-founder have been in the adult space for 4 years. We've got relationships with site owners and brands who'll be promoting our products directly to their models. We've also got a waitlist of ~10,000 models who've registered interest in our single-creator site product, and our partners will be pushing it out to their creator networks too.

Barriers to entry in adult are high — payments, regulatory compliance, age assurance, etc — and we've built an out-of-the-box compliant solution. It's not a clone, not a script. Everything runs on our own infrastructure going forward.

Looking for someone with real technical chops — proper system architecture experience, comfortable using AI orchestration for coding rather than vibe coding. There are a few repos to maintain (platform, white-label, API) so you need to genuinely understand how it all fits together, not just bolt things on.

It's an equity-only role for now, salary tied to earnings — we want to get the wheels turning properly before we try to raise (there's a stigma around adult that makes fundraising harder).

We also have some v. strong propsects in podcasting and music who want to use the same system, but see adult as the quickest and most sustainable cash.

If you're interested, send me a DM with a bit about yourself — previous work, relevant experience, and any questions you've got. If it looks like a good fit, we'll set up a call and go from there.

I currently have a trademark right related to cars in the area of EU.

The trademark is also protected by the Madrid system, which gives it potential protection in other countries.

I want to produce electric supercar as an industrial designer

and the headquarters of the company to be established wants to be in Europe.

So I'd like to get an investment for my first project, what should I do? (Except for defective countries)

A startup can start with a fairly simple application and eventually end up with APIs, databases, Redis, background workers, containers and cloud infrastructure.

For a small team, keeping all those pieces connected and understandable can become a bigger challenge than expected.

How are European startups dealing with this?

Do you keep the architecture simple for as long as possible, invest in DevOps early, or use AI-assisted development to reduce some of the engineering overhead?

There's no reliable public number for what a design engineer earns in Europe. The salary aggregators mostly report mechanical and hardware engineers who share the job title, and the role means something different at every company. So I ran an anonymous survey: 106 design engineers across Europe, total comp including realistic equity value, captured in bands.

Disclosure: I run a small firm that places design and product engineers, so I had a commercial reason to want this data. Posting the findings here rather than a link.

Overall median: €115k. Middle 50% between €70k and €140k. A quarter earn under €70k, a third earn over €130k.

By company stage:

• Pre-seed / seed: €90k (n=24)
• Series A: €115k (n=17)
• Series B: €115k (n=11)
• Series C+ / growth: €140k (n=11)
• Large / public company: €115k (n=15)
• Not a startup: €70k (n=24)

Non-startup companies pay the least, below even pre-seed. I don't have an explanation from the data. It might be that traditional companies benchmark this role against internal design or IT bands rather than engineering ones.

By country (only samples large enough to mean anything):

• UK: €140k (n=19)
• Spain: €115k (n=9)
• Sweden: €115k (n=9)
• Germany: €90k (n=14)
• France: €70k (n=10)
• Italy: €60k (n=8)

Spain and Sweden landing at the same median despite very different living costs was the one that stood out. Remote work may be flattening the geographic hierarchy at the top end.

By contract title:

• Design Engineer: €115k (n=48)
• Product Designer: €90k (n=15)
• Frontend Engineer: €70k (n=12)

Seniority would explain this, except it doesn't hold up — comparing people with the same years of experience, the gap stays. Only 46% of respondents have "Design Engineer" on their actual contract.

I can't say from a survey this size why the title tracks so closely with pay. It could be that companies using the design engineer title already understand the role. It could be that the title sets which salary band gets used for benchmarking. Probably both.

Other cuts: pay jumps once at around four years (€90k to €115k) then flattens. Remote and fully onsite both €115k; hybrid came in at €90k, which I can't explain.

Caveats: self-selected sample from my network and networks of people who shared it, not a census. Bands mean medians use midpoints, accurate to within a band rather than to the euro. Country samples outside these six were too small to report.

Happy to get into methodology in the comments.

TL;DR: I’m building BuildEye, a field-first construction management platform designed around how construction sites actually operate.

I come from the construction side. I’m looking for a technical/product co-founder who wants to turn what started as an internal solution into a real product for construction companies.

The problem
A huge amount of site management still happens through:
phone calls
WhatsApp/Viber messages
Excel sheets
handwritten notes
photos
verbal instructions
An engineer walks the site, notices that something is unfinished, calls a subcontractor, writes something down, requests materials from procurement, checks manpower and tries to remember what changed yesterday.
The information exists — but it is fragmented.
And most construction software I’ve seen adds more administration instead of reducing it.

What I’m building
BuildEye is designed as a simple operational layer between the construction site and the office.
The goal is not to create another generic task manager.
The goal is to let a site engineer quickly understand:
what is finished
what is late
where each subcontractor is working
how many workers are on site
what problems are open
what materials have been requested
what needs attention today
how the project is progressing by building, floor, apartment and trade
The product is currently being developed as an AppSheet-based MVP so that workflows can be tested quickly against real construction operations.

What I bring
I bring the construction side.
I’ve worked directly on construction sites and I understand the workflows, the people, the problems and the gap between what software designers think happens on site and what actually happens.
I’m defining the product and testing the workflows from that perspective.

Who I’m looking for
Not an employee and not an AppSheet freelancer.
I’m looking for someone who wants to potentially build BuildEye as a company with me.
Ideally someone with experience in:
AppSheet / Google ecosystem
workflow automation
databases and integrations
product development
eventually moving from low-code MVP to a scalable SaaS architecture if the market requires it
You don’t need to be a construction expert.
That’s the part I bring.
But you should be interested in understanding construction operations deeply enough to build software that people on site will actually use.

Why I think there’s something here
Construction has plenty of software.
What it still lacks is software that a site engineer can actually use while walking the site, without turning every action into administration.
That’s the problem I want BuildEye to solve.
If this sounds interesting, DM me.

I’d be happy to show you what I’ve built so far, the workflow behind it and where I think this could go

Me and another founder are building a B2B SaaS aimed at European and UK customers.

Of the two founders, I’m the techy one. The other founder is the product owner, has experience in the industry and handles sales, so I’m currently the only person doing the technical work, including development and infrastructure.

Because the software needs to have 99.99% availability, the technical requirements leave us with relatively few options in terms of providers.

Since I’m the only person doing the tech, my thinking was to use a PaaS for the first customers rather than spending a lot of time managing infrastructure ourselves.

At the moment, I have Scalingo, Clever Cloud and Northflank on my list. There don’t seem to be many reviews or much discussion about them, so I was wondering if anyone here has used them. If you have, what was your experience?

I’ve also looked at providers like Hetzner, OVHcloud and Scaleway, where managing more of the infrastructure ourselves is an option. I was shocked by the amount of the negative reviews in Trustpilot.

So:

• Has anyone here used Scalingo, Clever Cloud or Northflank?
• How reliable have they been for production workloads?
• Are there any other PaaS or cloud providers you would recommend?
• Has anyone here run a B2B SaaS with high availability requirements in Europe?

We're 5 hires in through an EOR across Germany and the Netherlands, and what we're paying per hire is at the point where the question of setting up a direct entity in at least one of those markets has come up internally.

But I have no idea whether that crossover happens somewhere between 5 and 15 hires or depends entirely on the country.

Part of what makes it hard to compare is that we're not clear on what we're paying as EOR management fee versus what's employer contribution markup, and with our current provider those line items aren't clearly separated, so comparing against the cost of running direct payroll in Germany is basically guessing.

A founder I know had been on Deel before switching and mentioned Workmotion as having a cleaner cost breakdown, which is what made me wonder if the problem is the provider or just EOR pricing generally.

So, what's the cheapest EOR you've found for Europe-first hiring, and at what team size did EOR stop making sense for you?