r/advancedentrepreneur

I am a solo founder, no VC connections, no fancy degree, no warm intros to investors.
So I did what I know. I picked up the phone.
Day one I made 15 calls to random business owners. Nobody invested but almost everyone listened to the full pitch. That told me the idea was solid, I just needed better targets.
Day two I refined my approach, called people more aligned with the space and closed my first $5,000 investor over a cold call.
Here is what I learned that nobody talks about…
Most founders wait for permission to raise money. They wait for the perfect pitch deck, the warm intro, the right accelerator. Meanwhile the phone is sitting right there.
People invest in conviction before they invest in products. If you believe in what you are building they can hear it. That is the whole pitch.
The app is called BulldoggX, world’s first non custodial P2P gaming exchange where competitive gamers play for real money and winners get paid automatically on chain. We are pre launch and the early round is open.
Happy to answer questions about the fundraising process or what we are building. 🐾

I’m trying to understand if other founders are also dealing with a lot of cognitive demand.

For those of you pulling 50 or 60+ hour weeks, how are you actually dealing with your processing power and thinking quality? Specifically, I'm curious about the "brain fog" that tends to hit when you're overworked.

Do you notice major shifts in your focus and cognitive load throughout the day? How exactly does it show up for you, and more importantly, have you found a reliable solution to snap out of it or prevent it entirely?

Would love to hear how you guys are managing this.

Hi guys I really really need help finding leads. If you know how, I'm actl begging for any help or advice.

I've searched for at least 50h+ (manually) on facebook and IG but cannot find enough coaches who fall in my ICP. most of the profiles I can find are unqualified or too little followers...

ICP Finance coaches on Instagram with 10-500k followers who want more clients (and they have a conversion issue) -- is the TAM too small? I have a friend whose ICP is health coaches doing the same thing and he's on track to hitting 100k/mo this year...

I really don't know what's wrong with me and my partner and I are completely f*cking clueless...

We have the capacity to hire someone who can generate qualified leads reliably.

The issue I find is in the online dating platforms as I have tried it myself and spoken to many others. It's a combination of fake accounts, free account that cant comment, long contracts and expensive monthly fees. Now although some people have matched and are no married the chances of getting into conversation with someone is not great.

In truth these platforms are there to suck money out of people and the general feedback I have had is that people have had enough.

My idea is to build a match making platform geared around getting them off the platform for good. In reality the way it would work is once all the BIO details are sent over the business would send matches to the user. All users are verified and therefore no fake accounts. Initially I was thinking of getting a beta group of say 40 people within a specific age range and using that to get people matched up and receiving feedback at the same time. I would then use this experience and feedback to build a platform that is AI driven however still has humans behind it to validate matches etc.

Any thoughts would be great.

If so, what is it? And why is it important that the problem is solved? I often see business owners, big or small, have a goal to solve a problem or use their business as a way to benefit their community. I’m curious about what other problems may be out there!

london. NHS-adjacent digital health platform. 53 GP practices on platform. founded at 44. just closed seed at 47.

writing this for the 14 dms i got after the seed announcement from women in their 40s and 50s asking what nobody writes about.

the part nobody writes about.

at 47 with a founder title nobody at investor meetings asks where i went to university. they ask what i did at the last 2 companies. that is a real benefit of starting later. credentials get replaced by track record. you do not pay the youth tax of having to prove you are smart. you pay the experience tax of having to prove the experience is recent.

at 47 with a founder title and a husband and 2 teenagers i don't pretend to work 80-hour weeks. nobody on my team asks. one of my investors asked at a recent meeting whether my husband (a barrister) is supportive. i told him my husband works longer hours than i do and we both do our share. the investor was satisfied. i resented the question. he is in his late 30s. he would not have asked a 47-year-old male founder.

at 47 with a founder title my pace is slower than my 31-year-old engineers' pace and they are watching it. i had a conversation with my CTO last month about how i needed her to push me on engineering decisions because i was going to default to "what worked at my last company." which is not always right. she was relieved i said it first.

at 47 with a founder title the comparison is not "could i have done this at 27." the comparison is "what would i have built at 27 with less reputation, less network, less capital, and the same energy." probably worse. probably not at all.

if you are 40-something and thinking about starting something the question is not "is it too late." it is "are you finally ready to use what you actually know."

i was. i wish i had started at 41..

run a small australian ecom. 7 years. low 7s top line in AUD, mid 6s in EBITDA. seasonal business. nothing exciting but it pays.

last week. former colleague (now at a private equity-backed retailer) called. they want a head of digital. comp package: $340k AUD base, 30% bonus, $180k equity vesting 4 years. 3 day in office in melbourne (i am in brisbane, would need to relocate or commute).

running the math out loud because operators here are the only people who get the actual question.

cash side. the offer is 2.4x what i pay myself out of the ecom. with bonus and equity it is roughly 3x. ecom keeps producing if i sell or hire to replace me. selling at 2.5x EBITDA gets me a one-time figure i won't say.

life side. wife works HR at a hospital chain. one of our kids is in uni in melbourne. would be near our oldest. brisbane house is paid off. melbourne would be rented for 2-3 years while we figure out where we want to be in our 50s.

ego side. i miss being part of a team. running solo ecom is fine for the money. it is not fine for the part of me that liked running an office of 60 people pre-2018.

the part i keep getting stuck on. if i take the role and it does not work out (private equity timelines are 3-5 years, after which they sell and the team turns), i am 56 with a resume that says "ran ecom from brisbane for 7 years, then 3 years at a portfolio company." i am unsure that resume is stronger than the current one.

if i stay in ecom, i am 60 with a small business that has paid me $1.4M AUD over 10 years and is worth maybe $1.6M at sale. predictable. boring. controllable.

asking the operators who have been in similar positions: did you go back to corporate from your own thing. did it work out. would you do it again.

Got my first user yesterday on my SaaS HarkPost. They signed up, went through onboarding, then nothing. No actual usage yet.

Has anyone been through this with their early users? Signed up, onboarded, then didn't come back to actually use the thing?

Curious what you did about it, if anything.

Free-course-to-consulting pipeline. 18 months old. $16K/month from 14 active consulting clients. Every client came through the free course I published 2 years ago.

The bottleneck is me. Every client gets my time directly. No leverage. I work 48 hours/week and the next client means either dropping quality or dropping sleep.

What the advisors say:

Advisor 1: "Hire a junior consultant and train them on your process." The risk: my clients hired me, not my firm. A junior delivering my methodology in my name is a retention gamble.

Advisor 2: "Hire an ops person to handle scheduling, invoicing, and client onboarding." The risk: I already do those things in about 4 hours/week. The ops role would be 60% idle.

Advisor 3: "Don't hire. Raise prices until demand matches capacity." The risk: I've already raised twice. A third increase in 18 months pushes past what my course graduates can afford.

The advisor who was most helpful actually said "I don't know" and then asked me to describe my worst 5 hours every week. Those 5 hours turned out to be client follow-ups and check-ins, not the strategy work itself. Maybe the first hire is someone who handles the relationship maintenance, not the delivery.

Still deciding. Curious how operators at similar revenue and similar service models made the first-hire call. What did you hire for first and was it the right decision?

B2B SaaS for accounting firms in India and Southeast Asia, started in 2021, currently at $180K MRR across 67 customers. Founder-led sales, mostly inbound through referrals and a couple of partnerships with two industry associations.

Pipeline math finally caught up with me. New customer acquisition has been flat for two quarters because I've worked through everyone in our referral network who was going to convert. I need to build a real outbound function and I'm starting from zero.

What I've already ruled out:

The agency pitches are all the same. Three or four "growth hacking" outfits have reached out promising 50 meetings a month from cold email, and the case studies all look like spreadsheet fiction. The same fiction every time.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator with a tool stack feels obvious but everyone I respect in B2B SaaS in India tells me the reply rates have dropped to nothing in the last 12 months. Inbox saturation is real. Worse in our niche because accountants get pitched every tool under the sun.

For founders who built outbound from zero at roughly our stage in the last 18 months:

Did you hire an SDR first or run outbound yourself for the first 90 days before hiring?

What channel is actually working in 2026 if not standard cold email? I've heard mixed things on cold call, mixed things on LinkedIn voice notes, and nothing concrete on the industry-community angle.

How are you handling the qualification step when inbound was doing it implicitly through referral context?

What tools are actually pulling weight in your stack, not the ones with the biggest marketing budget?

Not looking for agency pitches in the comments. Looking for founders who've actually walked this in the last year and what surprised them.

We're at 15 people now. $28K MRR. Two things changed when we crossed ~12 employees that

I wasn't prepared for.

First, I stopped being able to hold the entire company state in my head. At 8 people I knew

every customer conversation, every pipeline deal, every product decision. At 15 I'm discovering

things a week late through secondhand Slack messages. The information surface area grew

faster than my ability to track it.

Second, the board updates I used to write in 30 minutes now take 3 hours because I'm

assembling information from 4 people before I can even start. I rebuilt the format in Gamma last

quarter because the old Google Doc was becoming unmanageable. But the tool isn't the

problem. The problem is that I'm still the single point of assembly for information that lives in

other people's heads.

What I'm realizing: the jump from 8 to 15 isn't a hiring problem. It's an information architecture

problem. The founder who was the router for all company knowledge needs to build a system

that routes without them.

I haven't built that system yet. Currently trying: each team lead writes a 3-line weekly update

(metric, win, blocker) in a shared doc. I synthesize. It's better than chasing people. Not good

enough yet.

For founders at the 12-20 person stage: what does your internal information system look like?

Not the tools. The actual habit. Who updates what, when, in what format. Curious what works

because every blog post says "have regular standups" and that answer stopped being useful at

person 10.

Shipped a few days ago. No customers yet.

Anyone here interested, or been through this stretch recently? Curious how others got their first one over the line.

Keep clients meaning I could move provinces and the customers wouldn't be disappointed cause I don't have anything with insurance or smth if it breaks. Thing is I don't like alot of trades electrician, plumber, carpenter, HD mechanic, iron worker, windmil, airplanes, operator, if I had a eye for designing maybe I would, call me lazy idc, I always try and think of good ideas to create a product for a bussiness. Ik I got alot of hobbies interest but when u put one as a career u lose interest in it,but maybe I just gotta accept that what I'm good at is better to pursue it as a career than let it be a interest, for example ik I'm good at cooking cause I'm good in fast paced environment I feel, but then when I'd get home I wouldn't wanna cook or bake.. so that's off the list.

What's a good way to find your first 100 customers as a B2B SaaS? Cold email is dead, paid ads are too expensive.

Hi everyone,

I’m working on an app idea that came from a problem I personally run into quite often in my day-to-day life. The solution itself is simple, but the more I think about it, the more potential I see if it’s done properly.

The main blocker right now is probably familiar to many of you: since it’s an app, development costs aren’t cheap, and at the moment I don’t have investors or a technical co-founder.

I’m not looking for funding directly. I’d genuinely love to hear real experiences from people who’ve been at this stage before:

•	Were you able to validate your idea before investing seriously? How did you do it?

•	Did you partner with a technical co-founder in exchange for equity?

•	Did incubators or accelerator programs actually make a difference?

Any advice or personal experiences would be really appreciated. Thanks!

I’m currently building a SaaS and starting to think seriously about sales and lead generation.
Right now, I’m considering doing cold outreach through both email and LinkedIn at the same time since I’m on a limited budget.

My biggest issue is knowing where to start: How do you identify the first qualified target companies/users . What are the lowest-cost actions that actually work in the beginning? Do i need automation in the beginning ?

Would really appreciate advice from people who already went through the “0 to first clients” phase.

I run a small web development business and we have worked with around 45 clients so far. The funny thing is that building the websites is not the hardest part anymore. We can handle the work, revisions, delivery, and client communication. The part I am still trying to figure out is how to get new clients in a consistent and predictable way.

Until now, most clients came through referrals, friends of clients, local contacts, or people who saw our previous work. That has worked well, but it is not stable. Some months are full and some months I am wondering where the next few projects will come from. I do not want to spam people with cold messages or keep posting the usual “we build websites” content everywhere, because I know that usually turns people off.

I want to understand how people actually grow this kind of service business. Should I niche down into one type of client, like clinics, restaurants, coaches, construction companies, or local service businesses? Should I create content around website mistakes and case studies? Should I do cold email with free website audits? Or are partnerships and referrals still the best way?

For anyone who has grown a freelance or agency business, what would you do at this stage? And for business owners, what would make you trust a web developer enough to work with them?

Why are you working so hard to build your business? Is it just to eventually be wealthy or is there more to it? Entrepreneurship seems to be a lot of risk, blood, sweat, and tears, and there are easier paths to making money. Why choose entrepreneurship out of all of them? And what keeps driving you to stick with it?

I sell enterprise software to massive companies! It's genuinely fun - I help companies manage their data by using even more data. Its ok and pays me about 120k a year.

Anyway! The thing is - I simply cannot do my own finances anymore. And neither can my Accountant/childhood friend who does it for me. I pay her £400 a day atm

Now needing someone to take all finance off me so I can focus on my actual work (dealing with other people). I am also scaling

Should I go fractional or a whole outsourced team?
How do you find someone worth the money or a team that actually cares about you?

I just need month end recs, dashboards (with numbers I can actually trust) and lots of one-off forecasting. If they also do AR & AP that would be great but I can do it myself tbh.

Just doesn't make sense I am doing this tbh- any others who managed to navigate this?