r/startups

TL;DR: My 50/50 cofounder handles development and finances; I handle strategy, design and marketing. I lack financial visibility, which recently caused planning issues. After spending some time this week communicating, I thought we’d resolved things, but he’s now questioning his sacrifices and our partnership because of the burden of explaining things.

The context

We’ve worked together for years and are building an ambitious deep-tech startup with a 50/50 split.

I handle strategy, design, marketing, investors and user testing. He’s a full-stack engineer managing development and finances.

He also runs two businesses established to fund our startup. I helped establish them, but he eventually took over while I focused on our company. My work and future depend on their operations, yet I have little financial visibility. I’ve repeatedly offered to help, but he wants me focused on our startup.

He’s exceptionally capable, works incredibly hard, and I recognise his sacrifices. My concern isn’t his competence, but understanding the financial variable affecting our main company.

What happened

Recently, a project I’d organised materials and external collaborators for was cancelled because we couldn’t afford it. He’d mentioned financial difficulties, but I hadn’t understood their severity. He insists he’d communicated this, but we clearly weren’t aligned. In my opinion this was no one’s fault but a fault of the communication.

We subsequently spent 3ish hours discussing the finances over the past week. He was frustrated explaining things, but I was genuinely grateful and then was happy we were finally on the same page. Those conversations gave me the information I needed to understand our constraints, make informed decisions and plan my work, rather than simply making me feel better.

However, today he’s still upset about those conversations and questioning whether our partnership is worth his sacrifices, despite me thinking we’d resolved things, because he had to communicate what’s happening in more detail and answer my questions. I realise now that while I felt we’d resolved the financial misunderstanding, he clearly didn’t feel we’d resolved the underlying communication issue.

The communication conflict

My background is in creative production, where collaboration and understanding the variables affecting a project are essential.

He works differently. He says he’s communicating to his “absolute maximum” and prefers executing without explaining, citing successful solo projects where communication wasn’t necessary.

From his perspective, he’s already working at maximum capacity, and explaining things takes time and mental energy away from earning money and executing our plans. I recognise how exhausting that must be.

But we’re building a complex deep-tech company together. I don’t need every technical detail, just financial visibility and strategic alignment. As what happens on his side influences my work too.

For example, he’s complained about me contacting him while working on one of the businesses. I deliberately avoided weekends, unaware he now also works on it during weekdays. He’d never told me this. To me, this illustrates why communication matters.

The actual time involved

I wanted to make a calculation of time spent because I was confused by how much of a burden and impact on execution the time spent was:

Over eight months, we’ve spent approximately 10-15 hours discussing finances (not just shared work).
Of 5,840 total hours, subtracting seven hours of daily sleep and 2-4 hours of personal time leaves 3,163-3,650 available work hours.
That’s 0.27-0.47% of available working time.

I understand cognitive exhaustion isn’t proportional to time spent, but how has small amount of time spent brought us to questioning our partnership? Especially when it’s been beneficial for me which means beneficial for the company?

Where we stand

Today, he questioned whether he should continue sacrificing financial opportunities to build something together when he has to explain things which obstructs execution, and whether I’d make the same sacrifices.
I was shocked.

Of course I would. We’ve supported each other’s ventures for years and share a long-term vision. I trust him enormously and see communication as part of building our company together, not a meaningless personal sacrifice.

Am I unreasonable for expecting transparency and strategic alignment?
How do other founders balance communication with execution?
How can we resolve this?

I’m genuinely open to opposing perspectives. Thank you.

Or at least it seems that way. For example I still remember e commerce and dropshipping in the beginnings people made the most basic websites no targeted marketing or brand building still being profitable like 2015. Nowadays no chance getting sales that easy. Same with apps in the AppStore, back in the day people discovered you just by scrolling in the AppStore. Today you need to do heavy A/B testing data analytics with ads influencer marketing Ugc etc.

Every new niche or topic fills up so quickly, because of social media and because everything is so easy to copy. My question is: is it harder to make it today than like 10-20 years ago? Like not from a standpoint of possibility. Of course you can build everything with ai have more information and just need a phone. Thats not the point. The point is from gaining customers without that much effort. Today it seems marketing is much more important than having a good product and the barrier to entry is much lower but the barrier to succeed is much higher.

I know people still make it but just wanted to know what you guys think and what you experienced.

Hey all,

Before we pick next year’s marketing priorities, I want a proper look at what our competitors are doing: conferences and events, paid, influencers, AI SEO, social and content.

How do you handle this at your startup? Do you use one tool, a mix, or keep a spreadsheet updated by hand? I’d like to hear what actually works and what turned out to be a waste of time.

Has anyone used Claude skills for this? If they worked for you, which ones would you recommend?

[I'm not working for a competitive intelligence tool; neither do I want to promote them]

So, I have a good idea for a SaaS, I know I'd be first to market with it, and based on a somewhat similar product I have seen before, this is certain to be a profitable endeavor.

I also have worked as a solo founding engineer in a startup previously, bringing other products in the same industry to life and getting it to profitability, so I know exactly how to execute this. I know there is a demand, I know the customers, I know the technical limitations (and honestly, the technical limitations of this is where I excel at, I'd say there are like a dozen people in the world which are better at this than me).

My conservative estimates are that I'd need around U$55k and 6 months to get the product to the market and start getting some revenue, but the actual window of release would be somewhere between 3 and 9 months from today, the actual date depends on factors outside of my control (when I say first to market, I mean it, the largest barrier for releasing it is outside of my own control).

On the 6 months timeline:
- U$42k would be to pay my own salary (U$7k/mo, which is substantially below my previous salary, but still enough that I can focus on the 100% of my time on the project).
- U$2400~3000 in AI subscriptions.
- Remaining amount would be for operational costs near launch period (very little hosting costs, but I'd need domains, some marketing materials, ad spend, etc etc).

There is also a possibility of spending on legal fees to resolve a possible legal issue which I will describe at the end of the topic. This is not included in the U$55k estimate I mentioned above.

The upside:

To be clear, although I strongly believe this is a profitable idea which is very likely to result in a profitable product, I know there is a ceiling for it. I don't know what the revenue ceiling is, but it exists. I see three possible outcomes for this company:

1. We increase our MRR with this first product to a point where we are profitable enough to self-fund additional products and low-effort spin-offs of the first project (I know exactly how these spin-offs would work and what they could bring to the table).
2. Exit within the first year or two by being bought out by a VCs with similar companies in their portfolio.
3. Exit shortly after getting to market, being bought by one specific individual. I can't go in detail but I know that if this idea blows up within the first few months we will receive an offer from this individual.
4. Exit later in the life-cycle due to the valuable customer base.

Risks:

There are pre-release risks. There is a non-zero chance that we can never get to market (won't go into the details publicly), the only way to avoid this would be to wait enough time that we wouldn't be able to be the first to market.

How we got here:

I came up with this idea while working in my previous employer, a small company in the US (~100 employees). A little bit ago I became the leader of a department which was focused almost exclusively in building this sort of project, however, leadership had twisted ideas of how this sort of thing worked, they wanted me to build 9 SaaS in 9 weeks, and I was responsible for doing it from scratch, I told them it was impossible to do it at that rate solo considering I had to do literally everything. They would only tell me the idea and I would be responsible for every single thing, from designing the UI/UX, architecture of the software, development, entire devops, support, marketing materials, demo for customers, security, quite literally every single thing. I was creating the entire product based on 10 words describing what they thought would be a good product (even though they had 0 experience creating this type of product, and I had like 7 years of doing it). We ended up launching two products in two months

First product was the most promising one and the one I believed in, within the first month it got operationally profitable, but due to a factor outside of our control, the addressable market of that product got a lot smaller. It would still be a profitable product, but I can't see it bringing more than a few thousand dollars per month.

Second product was less promising, it was also an idea I was told to implement without the option of refusing. I had actually built that product already when I worked at a startup 2~3 years prior to that, I knew it was more of a dud, and I knew there was competition (which was also poorly managed), but from a technical standpoint there was almost no difference. On the other hand, it's pretty much just passive income. Almost 0 operational costs, but specially with the leaderships pricing structure I knew this would never pay for my salary.

The idea:

While working on these two other products, I noticed an opportunity appearing in the market. Once I identified it, I brought the idea in vague terms to leadership's attention and told them I wanted to start working on it ASAP, they gave me the green flag as it was obviously a good idea. But they never gave me the time to really go into it. At the time, the release date of the dependency I need for this idea was unclear but could have been October. I dug around with some insiders and was told that it certainly would not be October.

I then decided to take my vacation so I could be ready to work on it as soon as the tools were available. And when I got back from vacation, my contract was terminated citing an internal re-structuring, since I was the only one actively working on those types of products (the main revenue of the company came from other streams), I believe they gave up on that sector entirely.

And if they haven't, I know they are incapable of implementing my idea any way, so at best they would pursue the other product ideas they already had in mind. I say this without any sort of disrespect, but the average SWE in that company is bad, and even though there are a handful of good ones, they don't have the specific skills needed to take this project to market. Plus I don't think they would have terminated my contract if they wanted to get this out of the door since it was clear to everyone that I was the most capable to work on it.

The legal issue:

My contract with the previous employer assigned inventions while under contract to the company. As described above, I had the idea while under the contract and mentioned it to them, reading the contract naively, the most likely answer is that they have ownership of the idea as a company invention. And although I am not a lawyer, I strongly believe the contract wouldn't hold up in court given a series of circumstances I won't be disclosing publicly.

And while in the area of speculations: I don't think they would pursue this legally.

My question is: Where do I go from here?

I mentioned above I got laid-off very recently, and I am considering pursuing this idea, but I also need to survive. I have enough savings for 3 "ok" months, I could get to 6 if I really stretched things out, but I wouldn't be able to focus on the development (or pay the tokens I would need to actually get this out of the door in this timeline).

I have a ton of expertise on what I do so finding a new job wouldn't exactly be hard, and I even believe some of the people I know (CEOs, founders) would be interested in hiring me to develop this product for them (paying me a much bigger salary), but then I'd have little to no ownership.

i will not promote. I’m considering a small B2B service that gives German businesses API access to open-weight models hosted in Germany, with clear retention controls and optional dedicated capacity. My early sketch assumes five to ten customers, but I have not bought hardware or signed customers.

For founders who have sold infrastructure or technical services to small businesses, what did you do to validate demand before making a large capital purchase? Would you try to sell paid pilots using rented GPU capacity first? What customer evidence would you consider meaningful, such as a paid trial, a letter of intent, or a committed minimum monthly spend? I’d especially value advice on finding the first few customers beyond asking other founders whether the idea sounds good.

19, no degree and my long-term goal is to eventually build an internet business/startup.

Right now I'm trying to figure out what would be the highest-leverage way to spend the next few years learning.

I'm considering getting into tech sales as an SDR, where I'd learn prospecting, cold calling, discovery, understanding customers and how companies actually buy.

Another path I'm considering is GTM/revenue engineering, where I'd learn outbound systems, data, automation, AI tools, CRM and the systems behind acquiring customers.

But I'm wondering if I'm overthinking the job title.

If you were 19 and knew you wanted to build a startup eventually, what would you deliberately try to become really good at before starting one?

Would you focus on:

- sales and customer acquisition

- coding/product development

- marketing/distribution

- working at an early-stage startup

- learning operations and business fundamentals

- building small projects on the side

- or something else?

I'm less interested in "become an SDR" vs "become a GTM engineer."

I'm more interested in what skills and experiences actually compound when you eventually become a founder.

Would love to hear from people who have actually built startups and what they wish they had learned earlier.

Building a deep research product with the best width and depth of any tool, and data persistence. I need to market to companies that aggregate data, synthesize that data, and make predictions or decisions based on it. The catch is, I can't seem to talk to anyone in the space because they're all so damn hard to reach compared to other ICPs I've talked to in the past for other products. What to do?

Honeypot tried to reverse the hiring and recruiting process: You would post your own profile, and companies would approach you. Focus was mostly on IT and adjacent industries, I understand.

Apparently, it did not survive. I am curious to learn why, as I kinda like the idea. I found only very generic information stating that Covid hit them hard, and not much besides that.

Does anyone know a bit more? What exactly was the problem?

Alright guys I have a quick question. Next week I'm onboarding two new mentors to my startup. Right now they're saying they want to talk once every two weeks/ helping me design and put my demo together but my question is when should I offer the other two equity and how long should our relationship be before I offer the other two equity?

The two mental states running a startup: thinking I need to find a new job, to thinking I'm the smartest person alive (and can't believe everyone else isn't trying to build the same thing).

I've hit both in the same week... sometimes in the same day.

How do you fight the doubt and keep pushing forward?