r/founder

So I’m obsessed with debate, I’ll be honest, and I’ve noticed, as I’m sure we all have, that discourse in recent years has gotten really toxic.

It’s either a dogpile, throwing insults, being condescending, I don’t need to rehash what I imagine we all already know.

I built an app where people could swipe on topics, get matched with someone who disagrees, and get a score on their civility. The idea was that if you’re always an asshole, your shitty civility score would follow you and no one would want to talk to you.

I added a feature in passing called toxic mode that did not judge your civility. Spew your venom, no holds barred.

That was the idea.

Every time I got an install on the app, every single user immediately jumped into toxic mode. Out of 100+ downloads, not a single person wanted to have a civil discussion. They wanted the messy version. The heated version. The version that felt more like a chaotic internet argument than a polite debate club.

So I stopped fighting it and built a lightweight browser version where you can just pick a topic and jump in:

https://thinklavender.com/ragebait

The goal is still to get people talking to people they disagree with. Maybe the first step is not making everyone perfectly civil. Maybe it is just getting them in the same room.

And if that room has to be a little toxic to get people through the door, so be it.

Would love feedback on the idea and whether this feels like something people would actually try.

Sensei is a diagnosis tool for founders. You run your idea or site through it and it audits your positioning, pricing, competitors, and whether you've actually validated the thing.

Here's the doubt I'd been carrying: every time I opened Reddit I'd see another "product strategy" or "founder feedback" tool getting promoted, and they all sounded like mine. I kept wondering if I was building into a space that was already saturated and didn't need me. It's a quiet kind of discouragement - not "this is broken," just "is this even worth it."

What changed wasn't the product. It was finding the actual audience for it. Once I stopped marketing to "founders" in the abstract and started showing up where the specific people who feel stuck on positioning actually hang out, it started clicking. And then people paid. Not a flood, but real ones, with real cards.

I won't pretend that didn't do something to me. After months of "is this worth it," a stranger deciding your thing is worth money hits different. It's the first external signal that the bet wasn't crazy.

But I'm trying to hold it loosely. First payers prove people will try it. They don't prove the thing is good enough to keep. The job just changed from "will anyone pay" to "will they stay" - and retention is a completely different, harder problem. So I'm celebrating quietly and getting back to work.

Which is where I'd love this sub's brain:

For those of you past first payers:

• What actually moved retention for you early on?
  • I'm trying to figure out where to put my energy.
• Onboarding that gets people to a win faster?
• A reason to come back week over week?
• Just talking to the early users directly?

Curious what made the difference for you, especially for tools people might only think they need occasionally.

If you're in the doubt phase right now wondering if your crowded-looking space has room for you: the room is usually in who you're talking to, not what you built. That's the thing that moved for me.

Hey everyone,

I made a short video to explain a concept we’re exploring: a macro keyboard built on top of our Smart Surface technology.

At èlevit, we work on sensorizing materials. Basically, we turn materials like carbon fiber, decorated glass, ceramics and composites in general into reliable touch surfaces. Most of our work is in automotive, smart home and robotics, where the goal is to take reliable data directly from the surface of a product.

Now we’re trying to understand if this technology could make sense for a consumer product. The concept is a premium control made from real carbon fiber or decorated glass.

What we’re exploring:

• touch buttons with finger guides, so you can distinguish the keys by touch + resting positions for the fingers
• dynamic haptic feedback
• customizable dot-matrix icons under the surface
• modular elements, buttons + slider

For now, we’re mainly focused on the hardware, but we also have software ideas and we’re open to suggestions.

I’d love honest feedback.

What feels strong? What feels wrong? And what should we change to make it truly useful, not just cool-looking?

Hi we just launched the waitlist for yaven!

It's currently free for all beta testers :)

On its first iteration yaven:
- is an ai notification center, it prioritises your notifications across all apps (telegram, email, slack, imessage). It not only shows you whats urgent but it also shows you all the needed follow ups!
- one click drafts with full context
- A flows section where yaven will proactively start creating automations for you depending on your work.

- on the video we showcase the automatic meeting briefs, which have been really useful for me as it pull from previous meeting notes and messages.

Two commands:
- ⌥A : ask anything on your screen, teach you something on a new app you're using, find information about a person, resolve a quiz, all with context of your work day, ask for a price comparison etc.
- ⌥D : draft a response anywhere in your computer. This has been so useful for cold outreach with full search of the person, responding to message that need information of my calendar/ work etc. from anywhere

there is a lot more to come and would love to have you all on this journey :)

you can become a beta tester or sign up to the waitlist here yaven.ai

thank you.

Been going back and forth on this one for a while.

Half the people I respect swear it's just discipline. Get up, do the thing, stop negotiating with yourself. Anything else is making excuses.

The other half say willpower runs out by 9pm and the only thing that ever actually worked was changing their setup so they never had to fight in the first place. Phone charges in the kitchen. Gym bag by the door the night before. Junk food never enters the house.

Genuinely curious which one it was for you. Not what sounds good. What actually changed things in your real life, and how do you know it was that?

I’ve been working on something for a couple months and wanted to get some honest feedback from people who actually run machines and deal with scheduling chaos.

Most shops I’ve worked with run blind on capacity — overloaded work centers, late jobs, guessing on RFQs, juggling spreadsheets, etc.

So I built a dashboard to make all of that visual:

🔹 Heat Map — shows bottlenecks instantly
🔹 Work Center Loading — where machines are overloaded
🔹 Gantt — how jobs actually flow
🔹 RFQ Simulation — whether you can take the job
🔹 Jobs at Risk — what’s about to be late

I’m not trying to sell anything here — just genuinely curious:

Would something like this be useful in your shop?
What would you want it to do that it doesn’t?

Here’s the visual I put together.

For most of my life I tried to be someone else. I'd find someone I admired, decide they were better than me, and copy them. That mindset pushed me into a business I never enjoyed and only started because I looked up to one specific guy. It failed. I felt completely lost.

Around that time I was obsessively tracking my sleep with a Whoop, trying to optimize it. I kept getting good recovery scores. And I was still exhausted, yawning through entire afternoons, dead by 2pm. That's when it clicked: the score doesn't do anything. It just confirms you slept well or badly. Cool. Now what? Knowing isn't fixing.

So I built the thing I actually wanted. It takes the data your wearable already collects sleep, recovery, heart rate, and turns it into a daily protocol instead of another number. It tells you what supplements to take based on your metrics, predicts your most productive hours and gives you the exact time window when you should do deep focus tasks and light focus tasks, it tells you how much caffeine you have in your system left based on your first coffee taken and notifies you when you should take the next caffeinated drink for maximum productivity, it even tells you when to nap so your energy lasts the whole day instead of crashing and much more...

It's on the App Store as RizeAI https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rizeai-maximize-your-energy/id6762402079. i built by myself, it's early stage right now, and I want honest feedback, what's confusing, what's missing, what you'd never use. Tear it apart.

We went public with KomFi: Personalized Adaptive Learning for Anything on June 21st and are starting to see early signs of traction! It's a free-to-use platform that offers computerized adaptive microlearning to help you master life's most important test, finance prep, & trading theories.

At its core it’s a microlearning platform to help you master tests including the GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, ACT, National Real Estate Exam, etc along with finance fields (IB, PE, DCM, Quant), and trading theories. One of our major selling points is our built in computerized adaptive testing engine that calibrates to your level in any of our 20+ topics and feeds you questions catered to your level. Core feature is a mobile friendly commuter mode which are concept only quizzes in 10-question sprints.

At this point the content engine comprises 22 topics, over 50,000 practice questions and 20,000+ flashcards. Each topic features simulated test-like scoring, shareable session report cards, and free on-demand learning resources. I initially built this for myself as I wanted to master a trading concept, and my experience prepping for multiple finance regulatory licenses taught me that high-volume drilling can be an addictive and hyper efficient way to learn. After that first version, I took those skills and knowledge and to scale up to the current content moat.

For the last few weeks I've been working on Traxio AI - a tool that uses social media (primarily Linkedin and X) to help founders find early adopters that are the right fit for their product (30+ intent signals baked in) and build their own social presence to establish a credibility backbone (through consistent post content). It's right now designed primarily for B2B tech companies and I've been tweaking it with my first few customers to a point that I'm reasonably happy that it works well (not super feature rich, but it does its job).

I just launched on Product Hunt - would love founders to give it a spin and let me know what you think.

I see the same story in this sub every week. Someone spends six months building, ships, posts a launch thread, gets forty visitors, and concludes the product is bad. The product is usually fine. What is missing is distribution, and most of us treat it as an afterthought because building feels productive and marketing feels like shouting into the void.

Here is the mental shift that changed things for me: marketing is not a launch event, it is a daily habit that starts before the product is done. If you only remember one thing from this post, make it this. One piece of content per day, on one channel, for ninety days, before you judge anything. Not five channels. One. The founders you see everywhere are not everywhere, they are consistent in one place and it creates the illusion of omnipresence.

Choosing the channel matters less than people think, but the logic is simple. If your users are developers, write where developers read, meaning here or on Hacker News or in dev newsletters. If your users are normal humans, businesses, creators or shoppers, short form platforms are the cheapest attention available right now, and you do not need to show your face. Slideshows, screenshots with text on them and screen recordings all work fine faceless.

On the content itself, the mistake I made for months was talking about my product. Nobody cares about your product, people care about their problem. Every piece of content should name a specific pain your user recognizes, in their words, before your product is ever mentioned. "Your churn emails are ignored because they all say the same thing" will always outperform "check out my retention tool". A useful exercise is to write down twenty complaints your target user would say out loud, then turn each one into a piece of content. That is your first month done.

The last piece is expectation management. Weeks one to three will feel like posting into a void, and this is where almost everyone quits. Algorithms need time to figure out who your content is for. My own curve looked exactly like that: a first month where total views barely reached triple digits, a second month of slow movement, and then a sudden spike that came out of nowhere. The curve is not linear, it is flat and then it jumps, and you have to survive the flat part.

For transparency, I am the founder of Cinerads, which automates the short form part of this system by turning a product URL into daily TikTok slideshows. I built it because I could not sustain the daily habit manually. If you want to try it, comment and I will DM you a discount code, but honestly the system above works whether you automate it or grind it out by hand. What I would love from this thread is to hear which channel finally worked for you, because the ninety day rule applies everywhere but the right channel differs by product.

As the title says, I founded an online roster building game that now has about 1.25M active users since I launched it on June 4.

And now that I have ad revenue coming in, I want to tap into more paid growth outlets.

I already have:
-Google ads $100/day
-PR firm $4.5k/mo

But I am really struggling to tap into UGC, TikTok, meta ads, apple App Store ads, etc

I’ve tried Favikon but basically none of the creators got back to me.

Do I need to hire a dedicated growth person, or how can I tap into these other paid growth outlets? I don’t understand how to engage these routes, it doesn’t seem clear to me how I get ads or content on those platforms, when creators just ignore me.

I don’t really have the time to create the content myself or focus on being a content creator, I just want to use the revenue I have to pay for this stuff, simply to save time.

I’m also happy to answer any questions that people may have for me, in hopes that you can return the favor with some advice about engaging more paid growth outlets!

TLDR; I need a way to covert money into growth. I have the money, how do I convert dollars to users via UGC or other routes? Content creators ignore my outreach.

Link: https://www.20-0.com