I 28[M] had come across a unique problem after facing it myself and noticing many others around me face it as well and I want to start working on the project as soon as I can.

Since I work in a full time corporate job which provide me with ample time but the problem lies on building the product itself.

I have a non tech background, and very little money to hire someone to do the heavy lifting for me. I dont want to look for a co-founder in the initial stages without valudating the idea first, So as not to waste other people time and money.

The product is basically going to be a website and eventually I plan to create an app. I plan to build a landing page to validate my idea first.

Now I want to know from the wonderful people here, Is it possible to build the landing page and a basic website only with the use of no coding tool and AI. Take into consideration I dont have any technical knowledge. Also are there any simple coding language that I can learn in couple of month to be able to build the MVP all by myself.

I appreciate anyone and everyone taking their time to read it till now and provide any useful insight.

Startup: Go Lite

What we do:
We pick up luggage from your home and deliver it to your destination.

You travel without carrying bags.

Works for:

• flights
• trains
• relocations
• weddings
• family trips

Current problem:
Some people instantly love the idea.

Others think it sounds insane.

So before the market humbles us, I’d rather hear honest feedback from founders here.

What are we underestimating?

TL;DR:

33M, qualified CFA at 31 after a difficult/unstable twenties phase. Currently earning 8 LPA with 10–12 hour workdays. Got an 80% hike offer from a tech startup and already accepted. Worried about startup culture fit, younger IIT/IIM crowd, founder behavior during interview, health/stability, and frequent job changes. Looking for honest advice before joining.

Hi everyone,

I’m a 33-year-old male, qualified CFA at 31. My career path has been quite unconventional and messy compared to peers.

Before qualification, I mostly did freelance accounting/tax work and changed a few jobs. I joined the corporate world properly only after qualification. Currently I’m working around 10–12 hours daily for ~8 LPA.

Now, I have received an offer from a tech startup with around 80% hike, and I have already accepted it. Joining is planned in the second week of June.

A little background:

- Messy twenties with lots of instability

- No family savings/support

- Mother and sister are dependent on me

- Father passed away a few years ago

- I have high BP and weight issues (currently improving through weight loss and medication)

My concerns/questions:

1. Should I go ahead with this move?

2. This is a tech startup full of IIT/IIM-type younger crowd and very few finance/accounts people. I’m worried whether I’ll fit into the culture/environment.

3. The founder himself took my interview. He explained things well and seemed decent, but I also felt he wasn’t fully listening to what I was saying sometimes. Is that a red flag, or am I overthinking?

I’ve already changed 4 companies till now:

- 3 before CFA qualification

- 1 after qualification

Another reason I accepted this is because despite interviews going well elsewhere, I’m not getting selected, and most companies are offering only 20–30% hikes on my current salary.

Would genuinely appreciate advice from people who have moved to startups later in their careers or from finance professionals working in tech startups.

Thank you 🙏🏻

i have a startup idea that is to make luxury perfume brand in India. I will make some first batches precisely and post their aesthetic regularly and sell them with premium packaging. I want to make affordable luxury perfume brand. I will back-test my perfume.

I can also start with alcohol free perfumes.

I will sell small samples to try if they like it they can buy proper bottles. I will give a card along with the samples saying that post your unboxing experience and tag us.

Can you help me catch my mistakes and pain points

Thank you

I’ve noticed that people already use Instagram, TikTok, Reddit and Google Reviews to discover places.

But even after seeing:

• ratings
• aesthetic reels
• reviews
• vlogs

places still often feel completely different in real life.

Like a café can look amazing online but:

• be too crowded
• awkward for working
• bad for conversations
• overhyped
• or just not match your vibe at all.

So I’ve been thinking about building something more “experience-first” where people share:

• atmosphere
• social energy
• comfort
• crowd type
• hidden gems
• real moments
• whether a place is good for solo/date/work/groups/etc

instead of just generic ratings or edited content.

The hard part is:
how do you make people trust and contribute to something like this consistently?

Would genuinely love brutal opinions before I spend more time building it.

A year ago I started running a weekly data pipeline on the Indian D2C market. At the time I thought I'd do it for a few months, get a clear picture, and stop. I haven't stopped because the data keeps showing things I didn't expect.

For context: impuls8 now tracks 3,500 brands across 429 micro-niches, with Instagram, YouTube, Google Trends, Reddit signals, and Meta ad presence all updated weekly. We also have 54,975 product listings with actual price points mapped by niche. This is what a year of running that consistently actually shows you.

The thing that surprised me most early on was how misleading brand count is. I used to look at a niche with 12 brands and assume it was 4× harder to enter than one with 3. That's not right. In almost every niche we track, the actual competitive threat is 2–4 brands — the ones with genuinely rising Trends scores and growing social followings. The rest launched, got some initial traction, and are now coasting on Amazon listings. They show up in the count. They don't show up in the fight. There are niches in our weekly movers right now with 10+ brands where the top 2 are growing fast and the other 8 are essentially flat. You're not competing with 10 brands. You're competing with 2.

The pricing data took longer to make sense of, but it's the thing I find myself coming back to most. With 54,975 listings you can see the actual ₹ bands that are congested vs thin — not "premium vs budget," the specific ranges. In specialty coffee, the ₹350–₹650 range has 9 active brands. Above ₹1,200 in the D2C channel there are fewer than 3. The people who'd happily pay ₹1,500 for 250g of single-origin are being served by imports and tiny artisanal roasters with no distribution. That band is just empty. Same pattern in natural skincare — a ₹400–₹700 cluster with 15+ brands, almost nobody credibly above ₹1,200 with a clinical story. The premium end isn't defended, it's just unoccupied. Most founders go where they see other brands, which is the congested band. The data makes the empty one obvious.

The Reddit pipeline is the signal I trust most for actual unmet demand. We mine Indian subreddits for threads where someone describes specifically what they want — not a general complaint, but "I need X" — and the replies have no Indian brand recommendation in them. The gaps that show up consistently: Indian swimmers asking about hydration products for water-based training, with every reply pointing to an American brand or nothing. Adjustable dumbbells under ₹5,000 coming up constantly in r/Fitness_India with "import it" as the only answer. Women's gym wear designed for Indian body proportions mentioned repeatedly in r/india with real frustration, always answered with international brands or "just buy men's fit." These aren't trend signals. These are people describing exactly what they'd buy if someone made it, and getting no Indian brand name in response.

The ad data was the most counterintuitive finding. We pulled Meta ad presence for 62 brands across 5 niches — 87% are actively advertising. The headline number is less interesting than the outliers. There are brands with 200,000–300,000 Instagram followers running zero paid ads. In gold jewellery, one of the highest-followed brands in the niche has no active Meta campaigns at all. Their entire acquisition is organic. A new entrant with even a small media budget is not competing with them on paid — the paid channel in that niche is far less contested than the organic follower counts suggest. The opposite situation is baby care, where brands with relatively small followings are running 25–30 active creatives simultaneously. The paid battle there is aggressive even at small scale. That's useful to know before you decide how to enter, not after.

The other thing the weekly data shows clearly: the brands growing fastest right now are almost never the ones you'd pick from Indian startup media. Funded brands with press coverage and large follower counts are not the ones with the fastest week-over-week Trends momentum. The fast movers are mostly names I'd never heard of — small brands in specific niches that clearly found a customer segment or channel or product angle that the established players haven't prioritised. Their Trends scores are rising 3–5× faster than the incumbents in their categories. The signal is in the trajectory data, not in who got covered on YourStory.

The last pattern I keep coming back to is adjacency. When you look at the full 429-niche map, the most consistent thing you see is a dense niche sitting right next to a nearly empty one, serving the same customer. Whey protein has 10+ serious players — plant protein for the same fitness community has 2–3. Hair growth serums are saturated — scalp care as a distinct product category (exfoliants, scrubs, scalp routines) has almost nobody despite the r/IndianHaircare community having clearly moved in that direction. PCOS supplements have 4–5 growing brands — postpartum nutrition for the same woman a few years later has essentially no Indian D2C option. The adjacency play is usually easier than finding a genuinely empty category from scratch, because the customer already exists and the category proof is already done one step over.

Comment to get access.

What's the niche you're looking at? Drop it in the comments and I'll pull what the data shows for it.

After my last post, I ended up having way more conversations than I expected in the comments, in DMs, with people who are actively searching, people who gave up, and people who found someone but it didn’t work out.

A few things kept coming up. Thought it was worth sharing.

The babysitting problem.

This one surprised me. Multiple people said the same thing you find someone with the right background, bring them in, and then slowly realize you’re managing them. Assigning tasks. Following up. Checking if things got done. At some point you think if I have to do all this, what’s the point? A co-founder owns their domain. They don’t wait to be told. That ownership mindset is everything and you genuinely can’t tell if someone has it until you’ve actually worked with them.

Everyone jumps from “let’s chat” to “are you my co-founder?” with nothing in between.

Two good calls. Some excitement. Then suddenly you’re supposed to decide if this person is worth five years of your life. No wonder people ghost. The jump is just too big. Someone said it well you wouldn’t sign a business partnership after two coffee chats. But that’s basically what the co-founder search expects you to do.

Sharing your idea feels risky but not sharing gets you nowhere.

Almost everyone brought this up. You need to share enough to get someone genuinely excited. But sharing publicly feels dangerous. So people end up doing all kinds of manual workarounds screening calls first, staged sharing, DM-only approaches. It works sometimes. But it’s exhausting and there’s no real structure to it.

Skills are visible. Personality isn’t.

Resumes tell you what someone has done. They tell you nothing about how that person handles pressure, disagreement, a bad month, or a pivot. And those moments are exactly what make or break a founding partnership. Everyone knows this. Nobody has a good answer for it.

The wrong person is always worse than no person.

This came up more than anything else. People who rushed into a co-founder relationship and had to undo it described it as genuinely awful legally messy, emotionally draining, set them back months. The ones who waited and were patient about it, even when it was frustrating, were in a much better place.

None of this is groundbreaking. But it’s striking how consistently the same things come up across completely different people with completely different ideas.

If your experience was different or if something else came up for you drop it in the comments. Genuinely curious.

Looking to understand how people use scented candles

Hey everyone,

We’re building a recycling/waste management startup from the ground level and are looking for passionate peoples who want to work with us on-field and help build something meaningful from scratch.

This is very early-stage, so we need people who are ready to learn, experiment, solve real problems, and grow with the project. The work will involve field research, connecting with local vendors/collectors/businesses, operations support, and helping shape the startup from day one.

If sustainability, recycling, circular economy, or building something real excites you, this could be a great opportunity to be part of it from the start.

DM me if genuinely interested & Let’s build something impactful ♻️

Hi,

I am an experienced e-comm guy looking for a consultant that can help me take my formulation to the market.

That is FSSAI compliance from classification, to testing, to due diligence with manufacturers and all the way to first batch.

Quick context: I built a free Splitwise alternative for India. Started 6 months ago. Sharing the real numbers because every "how I grew my startup" post I read was either fake or missing the painful parts.

The numbers:

- 720+ users (Android + iOS combined)

- Under ₹5k total spend (UAC ads, hosting, domain, tools)

- 4.9 ★ across 32 reviews

- ₹0 revenue (free forever, no plans to monetize yet)

- One Reddit post that hit 104k views — still my single biggest traffic source

The biggest lesson, and the one I wish someone had screamed at me on day one: discovery beats polish, every single time.

I spent weeks on:

- Rewriting the Play Store listing 4 times

- A/B testing app icons

- Tweaking onboarding flow

- Building a landing page with comparison pages for every competitor

None of it moved the needle. Because nobody was finding the app in the first place.

What actually got me users, in order of impact:

1. One Reddit post (144k views)

2. Word of mouth from those early users

3. Direct "Splitwise alternative India" searches (tiny but consistent)

4. UAC ads — and these actively hurt me, more below

The UAC ads disaster:

I ran Google UAC for 6 weeks thinking cheap installs would kickstart things. They did bring cheap installs at ₹8-12 per install. But quality was garbage. People installed, opened once, never came back. Retention tanked. Play Store algorithm noticed and suppressed me organically. I spent ₹15k to actively make my organic visibility worse. Took 2 months to recover.

What I'd do differently:

- Skip ads entirely for the first 1000 users

- Write 1 honest Reddit post per month instead of 1 blog post per week

- Talk to users in week 1, not month 4 (I had 500 users before I'd talked to 30 of them — embarrassing)

- Stop building features users "asked for" — I built 4, less than 3% touched them

The Splitwise moat isn't features, it's verb-status. "Splitwise it" is a verb in Indian friend groups. You don't compete with that by adding features. You compete by being the app the *next* generation of users default to — which means showing up where they're already complaining about Splitwise.

Happy to answer anything — costs, what tools I used, why I'm still doing this for free, etc.

This bothers me more than it should.

On paper, India has a supply surplus of engineering talent. 1.5 million graduates. Lakhs of bootcamp completers. Millions of experienced engineers across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai.

And yet, every founder I talk to says hiring a solid developer is one of their biggest bottlenecks.

I think the problem is the signal layer, not the talent.

The hiring system still runs on:
- Self-reported resumes
- College tier as a proxy for ability
- Years of experience as a proxy for skill
- A 45-minute interview that tests anxiety as much as knowledge

None of these actually tell you if someone can build.

The result: great engineers from tier-2 colleges who can absolutely ship get filtered out early. Engineers who went to IIT but haven't written production code in years sail through.

Both groups lose. The company loses. The market loses.

What's your experience been? And has anyone found a hiring process that actually surfaces real ability regardless of college pedigree?

Hi,

I am looking for some company to build a custom erp for my ecommerce. Any company who has worked on custom erp, please connect. No freelancers, only companies please.

Why it's terribly hard to find clients of web development...

I have tried a lot by a lot I mean I have tried really really hard to find didn't got any....

I have tried to find on Instagram, reddit, discord, facebook....but got no clients at all....

I am a MERN stack developer and I need clients.....😭😭

Hey everyone,

I’m working on an idea for a new carpool/ridesharing app focused on making daily commuting more affordable, reliable, and community-driven.

There are already apps in the market, but many people still face issues like:

- Drivers cancelling rides

- Safety concerns

- High platform commissions

- Poor matching of routes/timings

- No proper verification or trust system

- Lack of ride flexibility for office commuters

- Bad UI/UX or slow apps

Before building it further, I genuinely want feedback from real users.

If you use or have used carpool apps before:

1. What problems do you face most often?

2. What features do you wish existed?

3. What would make you switch from existing apps?

4. Would you prefer:

   - fixed office commute carpools

   - one-time rides

   - women-only rides

   - verified corporate users

   - live tracking

   - wallet/reward systems

   - subscription model instead of commission?

5. What made you stop using current carpool apps (if you did)?

Also open to any crazy ideas, suggestions, or frustrations you’ve experienced during daily commuting.

I’m trying to build something genuinely useful instead of “just another ride app,” so honest feedback would really help.

Thanks!

So me and my friend are planning to build an agency, we have some clients rn but that isn't enough so we're trying to get foreign clients. Linkdin is not working at all, people who post related to our work, we reach out to them but get zero response, Upwork is little expensive for us tbh so what are the other ways to get clients?

Been using Wise for international transfers for about 2 years. Rates used to be great but I feel like the fees have crept up.

Not looking to ditch it entirely but want to know what else is out there. Main use case: receiving USD from US clients, converting to INR. Secondary: occasionally other currencies. What are people using? Anything interesting?