r/startup_resources

It took us embarrassingly longer than it should have to notice this. We had no consistency across searches. Every one started completely fresh, no documentation of what the bar actually looked like, no notes from previous debrief rounds, no signal we could carry forward. So every search took just as long as the last one, and our eng managers were spending time screening people who should have been filtered way earlier.

A few things changed that. We started writing down what specifically made the person we hired the right call after every placement, not a generic job description but what actually held up in the evaluation. We kept debrief notes and actually referred back to them. And for the searches where we needed to outsource recruiters who understood specialized technical roles, we started working with people through paraform because they'd usually placed similar roles before, so we weren't re-explaining the same technical context from scratch every time.

The process still isn't perfect but the time to fill has come down and eng manager time per search is meaningfully lower. If you're still treating each hire like a completely fresh problem it's worth asking whether you're paying a bigger price for that than you think. We for sure were.

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For a long time I thought deals went cold because my pitch wasn’t good enough.

Lately I’m starting to think the bigger problem happens before the pitch even starts.

The calls where I get real traction are usually the ones where I’m fully current on that company’s actual situation:

what they said last time

what changed since we spoke

what they pushed back on

what internal priorities seemed to matter most

where the momentum or hesitation actually came from

The calls that stall are often the ones where I’m reconstructing context in real time while talking.

Even if the pitch itself is technically fine, people can tell when you’re operating from generic memory instead of current understanding. And once they feel that disconnect, the conversation gets noticeably weaker.

Right now I’m juggling around 30 active opportunities and staying genuinely current on all of them before every call is becoming its own operational problem.

CRMs help, but in practice they’re usually slightly behind reality unless you maintain them obsessively.

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Curious how other founders/operators here handle this at scale.

Hello all,

I recently wrote a post about how to scale and grow startups in this current environment. I just finished building out an agentic marketing AI SaaS as COO/CMO, where we hit almost 2k users within a month of launch and scaled to 21k+ LinkedIn followers.

https://www.reddit.com/r/startup\_resources/s/MFkkzH6vg0

I now have the capacity to mentor and guide a few young entrepreneurs. If you have a project (whether physical or SaaS), have identified your customers, and have some initial traction but need help scaling up, DM me to see if we can work together.

Looking forward to the convo's!

-Martin

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I’m looking for advice on whether I should seek investors or take a loan to start and scale my donut selling business.I want to start a small donut business and eventually scale it up into something bigger.

Right now, I don’t have enough funds to buy a food truck or open a full bakery, although that’s my long-term goal. I’m considering starting lean by sourcing donut machines from China via platforms like Alibaba and testing demand locally first.

I’m unsure what makes more sense at this stage: bringing in investors early or taking a small loan and growing step by step. What would you recommend for someone just getting started in food entrepreneurship?

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"My post comply with the rules."

I wanted to through out my observations after having started a few successful businesses, raised funding and even exited one. 20 years in the startup and corporate space has showed me that the landscape constantly changes and I wanted to share some thoughts. With the rise of AI creating is easier than ever and moats have been bridged, ideas that were not economic before have become so now.

Marketing can now be automated, sales channels can be staffed with agents etc. this has all created the illusion that things are now easier. These tools are fantastic and a real game changes when you are the only one using them but not when everyone has access to them.

With the changes over the last 12 months what has happened is an erosion of trust, most traditional channels especially in the b2b space have now been spammed into oblivion, when execs get a pitch it does not matter how you position the connection a pitch is a pitch. There has also been a flood of poor performing products in the market, programmers shipping hot garbage every week that people try and they get burned by and this impacts everyone's ability to sell across the board.

In the current landscape what works (based on my observations) is paid ads because most of the noise wont compete via paid ads. Trust signals and authority, strong real reviews on google, trust pilot etc, strong social media following where the company or representatives are an authority figure on the product they are selling. Finally the warm referral, this last one quickly cuts through all of the noise and creates a differentiator that no amount of AI will overcome.

My advice to someone looking to built today is as follows:

Identify a niche or focus area that you truly want to work in/build around.

Connect with decision makers in that area, tell them why you are passionate about soling problems in their field and ask them what problems keep them awake at night.

Build solutions around that, offer those products to those people for free in exchange for feedback.

Once you have solved their problems ask them honest questions about how much you should charge for these solutions in their industry and ask for referrals to others.

Build on that personal connection, provide quality, build authority.

It WILL take time but eventually you will get to the point where others will come to you for your solution and your moat is the trust you have built.

These are the people who get their companies funded, the ones that find people and industries that have problems and they solve them.

-Martin