r/startups

I created a B2B BI SAAS tool and have gotten great feedback. I am 27M NYC based.

The problem is

1. I don't know how to market.
2. I don't know how to sell.
3. I don't have time for cool emails and cold calls every day.

I have gotten feedback from my tool through founders, collogues, strangers, family and friends. As someone who has built many things in the past this as given amazing feedback. On top of the feedback, there are very large companies who are starting to build similar tools; however, mine still focuses on a untapped niche with comprehensive features.

I am wondering what is the best step to take. I have money I am willing to spend, but I want to put it in the right place.

Is it better to spend money on...

1. In-person start up accelerators.
2. Paying professionals to help me.
3. Tools to do things for me.
4. Other

If it matters I am willing some serious change (Not to people in reddit who have no proof so I will not respond to anyone who isn't willing to vouch for themselves in the comments first)

hi guys i am current in HS and I am under 18 and a solo founder, I dont know how to proceed with my idea. I am scared because of my age no one will take me or my buisness seriously. It is pretty capital intensive, it is a financial asset exchange using ingredient branding. This requires a Brokerage as a Service and Banking as a Service, causing this to be a very capital intensive idea. I have 100% convinction there is a niche for my product, I just dont know how to proceed. I have made my Delaware c-corp, linkedin, instagram and sign up website.

My plan is currently:

1. File C-corp, get brand identity and make sign up website (complete)

2. Meet with Brokerage as a Service and Banking as a Service provider to see inital cost

3. Make MVP, while simulatious advertising to general public

4. Ship out MVP if I have less than 1,000 sign ups, if 1,000+ go to VC for funding

Tomorrow I have a meeting with a Broker as a Service provider, would I even be considered if i offered equity to get free access to their product while asking for a cut of their PFOF model from the customers I bring to their brand? I will need more than just their Broker as a Service as I will also need their ACATS and KYCaaS.

Any advice is appricated as I am just starting out and I am relatively new to this space!

So I have an app, and I heard you can like get a small content creator to post about it for free as like a collaboration. Is this true? If it is how do you like, go about doing it? Should you contact them in the native messaging of the social media app or should you email them? What's the follower count that's best for this, 1k - 5k?

We keep seeing startups route even simple backend and application logic through frontier models. This includes extracting fields, classifying support tickets, normalizing messy records, matching entities, converting text into JSON, scoring categories, summarizing highly templated notes, and deciding the next workflow step. To my surprise, I recently discovered there is a well regarded (technical prowess) unicorn startup whose engineering team also fell into this tarpit.

Early on, this makes complete sense. Prompting an LLM is much faster than designing schemas, writing parsers, building classifiers, maintaining ETL jobs, or figuring out the proper backend logic. It lets you ship before you fully understand the shape of the problem.

The problem starts when the product actually works. Usage increases. The same prompt chains run thousands or millions of times. Latency starts to matter. Costs creep up. Outputs remain non-deterministic. Core backend logic ends up hidden inside prompts, but the team is no longer sure how to turn those prompts into production-grade software.

My team consists of SWEs, MLEs and applied researchers with more than a decade of traditional ML and NLP experience, so we dealt with it by migrating/replacing many parts of our app post-MVP with more production ready approaches. However, I'm not sure this is applicable to the majority of other founders we see today, many of who are not even technical.

For teams running LLMs in production, how much of your LLM traffic is truly open-ended reasoning, and how much is repetitive extraction, classification, normalization, transformation, or workflow routing? Have costs become a real issue as usage scaled? Have you successfully replaced LLM calls with traditional backend logic, smaller models, or ETL pipelines, or is inference now cheap enough that it is better to keep everything as prompts? How is everybody thinking about this or not at all?

I'm working on a premium ($400) consumer hardware startup in the pet space so certainly not the easiest space to build in being consumer, hardware, and premium. The problem also requires education, but once most of the customers are educated, they're really compelled to make a change. Our product could potentially prevent vet visits (science backed, we've talked to vets as well) that are $400-$1500 though, so it's an investment and it replaces a task that is otherwise very time-consuming (80-150 hrs each year) and quite gross, which is why many pet parents don't do it.

So we first had 150+ quick chats with pet owners just to validate the problem and see if it was even a problem (and it was). Since then, we've had 55 deeper, 15-20 mins customer discovery calls + posting every now and then on FB groups. We built a list of 52 people on the waitlist (at the premium price point).

We switched to a paid deposits system not too long ago and have had 12 people pay $50 deposits for a product they haven't ever seen or used yet, and wouldn't be shipped for another 8+ months (paid based on renders alone). All of these deposits came from the customer discovery calls (minus 1 - which came from an investor at a VC firm that reached out to us).

But not all of the calls were with people that could afford the product (a lot were students, minimum wage, laid off/unemployed) since we live in a very small city that isn't known to be either a dog city nor have lots of wealthy people, and mostly just uni students).

So from the calls, of those that could afford the product (stable jobs, disposable incomes), 39% of them paid deposits for a product they hadn't seen/used, almost a year in advance, and if we put our 'SAM' constraint on (57-60%+ of all pet owners), then 63% of that category paid deposits. Although we have also had people outside of these categories pay (people that don't make a lot, but love their pets, or people that once educated, converted into our SAM constraint).

I feel like we can get a lot more people if we can get in front of more of these people that we know already convert, especially if we invested more money into our video, but it feels that staying in this small city in Canada is just slowing us down (so far the calls came from people I messaged online or from FB groups but most messages go to spam if you don't follow them, and FB allows very limited posts like these).

Most of our deposits came from people we didn't know at all from the US. Is this enough validation to keep on going? Would moving to a bigger city (and thus paying much more in rent) where we know our ICP lives be a good move?

I'd appreciate any insights :)

Hi everyone,
I’m an indie developer and I’m trying to learn how other developers got their first users without spending money on advertising.
What worked best for you?
Reddit
TikTok
Facebook Groups
Instagram
ASO (App Store Optimization)
Blogs
Word of mouth
If you were launching a new mobile app today, what would be your strategy to get your first 100 or 1,000 users?
Thanks for sharing your experience.

Every founder advice article talks about mindset, resilience, and the willingness to fail fast. Almost none of them talk about the thing that actually determines if you survive year one:

domain knowledge

The founders who move fastest come with something. An industry they know cold. A problem they've felt personally. A network that already trusts them.
You can't build credibility and a product at the same time from zero.

What's the domain you came in with?

I’m serving on the technical advisory board for a small early-stage biotech startup. My role is pretty straightforward: I meet with the team once a week for about an hour and advise on upstream bioprocess development. We signed an Advisory Board Agreement that outlines responsibilities, confidentiality, time commitment, etc. So far, I've met with the team three times. However, one part of the agreement the equity compensation was left unsigned. Initially, the CEO and I agreed verbally on 0.25% equity, and when I asked why the equity portion wasn’t signed yet, he explained that the company would have to generate additional shares for the technical advisors, but have not been able to do it yet because it is a considerable expense they can’t afford until they raise their Series A. He said they’ll formalize the equity grant once they raise and have the legal/financial infrastructure to do it. The plan is to raise by the end of the summer.

Basically, I’m trying to figure out how normal this is. On one hand, I get that early-stage companies are often in a cash crunch. On the other hand, I’m already doing weekly advisory work in a highly specialized field, and without a signed agreement, the 0.25% isn’t legally locked in and vesting hasn’t started (I was told that once the company raises money, the vesting would be backdated to the original signing date, though).

Has anyone been in a similar situation? Is it standard for startups to wait until a financing event to actually issue advisory equity?

Hey all, looking for input from anyone who's sold B2B into law firms (or bought software as a lawyer).

Quick context: we've built an IP enforcement platform that scans for infringement across trademarks, copyright and patents, surfaces everything it finds, and packages the evidence automatically. A law firm using it can basically spin up an in-house brand protection service overnight, or use the auto-captured evidence to generate litigation matters. Their clients are already sitting there - big brand rosters, existing trust - the firm just doesn't currently have the tech to monetise them this way.

Our current pricing thinking:
Base platform fee (~$5k/month) for the firm
Per-brand fee at a wholesale rate, which the firm marks up and passes straight to the client as a retainer - so it's margin-positive for them from day one

Here's where I'm stuck. The realistic value to a firm isn't the software cost, it's the downstream work it creates. Enforcement matters, takedown programmes, and litigation cases generated by the platform could easily produce six figures in billables or recoveries per year for an active firm. Pricing at $5k/month + per-brand fees feels like we might be massively underselling against the value created.
But I also know law firms are notoriously slow, risk-averse buyers, and a big upfront number kills deals before anyone's seen the ROI.

Would you anchor low to get in the door and raise later, or price against value from day one and accept a longer sales cycle?

Where would you price this?

Genuinely thankful for any input. It’s a new world to me.

I was hired on to a start-up where I ended up doing work that I felt was unsafe. I raised it as an issue, was dropped to a contractor on a part-time basis, and feel more micromanaged now. Need advice on what to do.

During the interview process, they didn't go into depth on what the field work would be, but did specify I would be doing it. Field work would be taking up about 10% of my time. The other 90% is office work. After going on 3 trips with another person, I went on 3 more trips on my own before realizing I needed to listen to my intuition.

Some examples of what I felt was uncomfortable was spending 16 hours in field on my own, being in unsafe conditions without cell service in rural areas, having to lift and push 100+lbs, working at unsafe heights over 20ft drops with no PPE, climb 10 foot ladders, having to carry around 50lbs, etc. All solo. The drive to the field is 3 hours one way, so combined 6 hours on the road. For reference, I am a short (less than 5 feet) female while everyone else is 6ft+ and a man. None of this work was described to me in the interview process and by the time I realized I felt that I couldn't do it anymore, I was already 6 months in.

When I initially flagged these issues, they asked me what I would need to purchase to make me feel safe. But given the type of work, this stuff definitely needs another person to accompany, which I did flag.

The stress of this part of the role impacted my mental health severely, in addition to other family commitments. When sharing this to the team, as well as my concerns of the above, it was agreed on that I'd be moved to a part-time contract role, without any chance of receiving equity.

I'm am now feeling micromanaged, and unmotivated with the work. While also being stressed out by the company's pace.

I'm wanting to leave but worried about burning bridges and being without income. What should I do?

Looking for your best recommendations to explain entrepreneurship in an accessible, realistic AND inspiring way for young people (18-30) with zero experience.
Any format works: videos, articles, podcasts, quizzes, founder personality tests, etc.
Content can be in French or English! Thanks! 🙌

Reddit just added games, a few months back it was LinkedIn. Facebook did it first. Snapchat, Tiktok is also doing it. Is it a new way for them to make users stay longer on their platform? If it happened slowly I would have not noticed. But suddenly in the past year, every social platform is pushing games. Why are they doing this?

Started moving away from our old provider back in early fall and figured I’d share where we’re at since I couldn’t find many honest mid-process accounts when I was researching.

The good: call handling for standard guest requests like checkout times, amenity questions, and room service hours is running smoother than it did before. Those conversations basically take care of themselves now and the front desk has noticed the difference. That part of the migration went about as cleanly as we could have hoped.

The messy part: anything that touches our property management system has been inconsistent. Sometimes the agent pulls the right reservation info, sometimes it doesn’t, and we haven’t fully diagnosed why yet. Our old setup had the same problem honestly but we were kind of hoping a fresh start would fix it automatically, which was naive.

Has anyone else gone through a mid-migration period with voice ai customer service where the system integration was the sticking point? Curious whether this is usually a configuration issue on our end or something that takes real troubleshooting time with the vendor.

I recently launched my startup and got to 100 users within 5 days.

At the end of this month, a startup accelerator will check in on my progress before deciding whether to accept me.

Right now, about 80% of my growth is organic. I’ve only spent around $10 on TikTok ads.

The mistake I made is that I didn’t use a unique tracking link, so I can’t clearly separate paid users from organic ones. But the TikTok campaign showed a cost per landing page view of about $0.08.

My question is:

Should I keep running ads with a bigger budget to grow faster?

Or could that look bad to the accelerator, like I’m “buying” users instead of proving real organic demand?

Hi all,
I got an offer from an early stage VC (not gonna name names) but they are pretty big in Europe, the exact deal is €50k, SAFE, capped at 1M, for some context: it was a warm intro from a friend, I’m 16 y/o (though the deal was forming when I was 15) the VC tends to be one of those “back the founder not the idea” but that’s actually every vc, right?

Just wondering (because the same friend was like “what the f**k” when I told them about the deal (I know nothing about venture capital) and the term sheet was not signed) how bad is this deal?

This is my value proposition from what I’m understanding so far:

Context: We cut down roughly 30% of the time MEP design engineers spend on X tasks with agents.

Each engineer costs the firm roughly $115k/year fully loaded or let’s say about $90/hour. (Conservative)

X tasks take up roughly 1–2 hours per day per engineer on average.

So we’re saving about 0.3–0.6 hours per engineer per day, or roughly 75–150 hours per engineer per year.

That’s approximately $6.7k–13.5k/year in labor value per engineer.

For a 50-person MEP engineering firm,
that could translate to somewhere around $135k–270k/year in total labor savings

(assuming the time savings are real and will be redeployed into revenue generating work/projects right away).

I want to charge 10% of this labor cost savings, so around 13.5-27k/yr USD for a 50 person firm.

For more context : this industry is heavily capacity constrained and facing a shortage in engineers, blocking most of these MEP firms from taking on more projects,

meaning that this time/labor saved would instantly allow them to redeploy into taking on more projects (direct revenue) the bottleneck isn’t finding projects, it’s hiring

And this would be deployed to every engineer in the firm, not individually

Now I need to know..

Is this the correct way to base our value pricing for B2B software? In terms of pricing at 10-15% off the fully loaded labor costs (time spent) we save the firm?

(This type of value equation is what I learned from YC partner Tom Blomfield - to be clear (on YT)

Is all of this even right? Does it make sense?

Am I missing anything major in this value equation?

Hello! I reached out to the mods and got their approval to post this story our AI reporter published on the weekend. Below you'll find a snippet and I have a paywall-free link at the bottom of this post to read the rest of this story.

>The story of how Simon Eskildsen moved from Denmark to Ottawa and came to run one of the most intriguing companies in artificial intelligence today can be traced to the moment he dropped his iPhone as a teenager and broke the screen. Rather than buy a new one, he picked up an old Nokia phone and enjoyed a world free from a blinking, distracting device. “I feel it has had no major impact on my life to leave it behind,” he wrote on his website.

>This was 2013, before tech detox memoirs were an established genre. His post surfaced on Hacker News, earned a shout-out from the New York Times, and, in his telling, caught the eye of Shopify recruiters who later offered him an internship. He had a precocious online presence, with blog posts about coding competitions and LinkedIn-style lessons from the 30 most productive days of his life. (“I quickly found out that I am already very productive and it proved difficult to cram in more things,” he wrote.)

>He knew of Shopify but had never heard of its hometown of Ottawa. Still, at 18, he moved across the ocean to work as an intern, intending to complete a gap year. When he visited the office, however, he knew: “These are my people,” he recalled recently.

>Mr. Eskildsen, 31, is still in Ottawa and assembling his own crew of like-minded people to build Turbopuffer Inc., one of the fastest-growing startups in Canada that you’ve probably never heard of, unless you’ve needed its services. The company has devised a new, efficient way for AI systems to search for information when serving up answers, a crucial feature for AI to be useful, while slashing costs for an industry that can’t stop losing money. It’s won Turbopuffer some massive customers, including Anthropic, the company behind Claude, now worth nearly US$1-trillion.

>Turbopuffer is an unusual startup.

>Mr. Eskildsen, its chief executive, started the company in 2023 with Justine Li, whom he met at Shopify. The pair could not appear more different.

>Mr. Eskildsen has the ruddy mien of a Scandinavian athlete and appears to be vibrating with so many thoughts that his head is probably a few degrees warmer than it should be. Ms. Li, 31, has the quiet, wispy vibe of the kid trying to go unnoticed at the back of a classroom. What they share is a polymath’s ability to solve hard problems. “You could throw them into any industry, and they would succeed,” said Dale Neufeld, a former Shopify vice-president.

>At less than three years old, their startup is on track to bring in more than US$100-million in revenue this year from about 1,200 customers, and it’s already profitable. While other startups need tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to scale up, Turbopuffer has required less than US$1-million in outside capital. The company has done this with 37 employees, most of whom are abroad, and a cramped Ottawa office down the hall from an online tire retailer, decorated with a solitary Lego-like pufferfish. “I would love to have the luxury of time to design an office,” Mr. Eskildsen said, “but it’s not worth the resources.”

>Turbopuffer might sit more naturally in San Francisco rather than a few blocks from Parliament. While a lot of Canadian talent decamps for Silicon Valley, Mr. Eskildsen has no interest in leaving. He once spent six months in Berlin (“objectively one of the coolest cities on Earth,” he said) and missed running along the Rideau Canal, visiting Gatineau Park and hanging out with friends in the capital. “Turbopuffer has a very strong Canadian heart,” he said. “We want to invest as much as possible in Canada.”

>Now if only he could sell everyone else on Ottawa.

I’m a full time software developer, and I’ve been building a side project (a consumer app) in my spare time. No revenue yet, still focused on organic growth and getting real feedback before touching monetization.

The problem is I only have so many hours after work, and I feel like the product needs more focused attention than nights and weekends can give it.

For people who’ve made the jump from a stable job to full time on their own thing, what told you it was actually the right time versus just excitement talking? And if you waited, what signal made you finally pull the trigger?

Not trying to romanticize the “quit your job” thing, genuinely trying to figure out if this is a smart risk or just impatience.

Hi all me and my friend are currently first time founders both in our final year in engineering and are having extreme difficulties trying to find a “good” startup idea.

Basically background is me and my friend both wanted to create our own startup in NZ and have thought about creating solutions for agriculture to construction to manufacturing trying to just think of a decent idea for any and all kinds of industries. Our main targets are trying to resolve problems or find ways to fit AI in the NZ market but unsure how to go about things.

And our approach to finding ideas are mainly through emailing, asking Ai and phone calls but there hasn’t been much success. We try these approaches since we are I guess ignorant to what is really required out there in the market so we were willing to just reach out and see if there any needs people that are in certain industries may have.

We have tried cold emailing, and phone calls asking companies on their approach to AI but most companies don’t have problems that they could think on the spot about what to do or there is already a company in the space already.

If the issue is our outreach what suggestions do people have since our approach has been mainly asking if there were any bottlenecks in certain industries and then we would go in and do the service for free and then mould that into an idea.

Our other thoughts was to go onto YC and look for companies that have succeeded overseas and try put our own twist onto it and then pitch it here in NZ.

And like all the ideas we could “chatgpt” are either like too niche or are ideas in spaces that are already developed so it’s been hard to think of what to actually do.

Any suggestions people may have on how to move forward cause we really would love any suggestions or if people wanted a solution built we would love to hear from you and take in any advice or ideas or even join a team if people need engineers.

Hudson Leogrande started this weighted-hoodie brand with $50K in his mid-20s, and the one rule he stuck to early on was not touching a paid ad budget until people were already selling the product for him organically.

Quick context: it's a loungewear brand built around an anxiety and mental-health identity, hoodies and blankets in the $55-150 range with flash sales dropping them to $39-59. Launched August 2022. The founder now claims $500M+ in 2025 revenue, unaudited but the traffic backs up a real business, roughly 15.2M monthly visits and climbing.

Here's the actual mechanic behind it, not the highlight reel version:

- over 600,000 commission-only affiliates post product clips through TikTok Shop, no upfront creator spend, they only get paid when something sells
- about 500 of those are "core" creators who each post 20+ clips a day on commission alone
- paid ads didn't start until the affiliate flywheel was already producing revenue on its own
- even now, spark-ad budget only gets applied behind clips that already proved themselves organically, never to originate a new idea
- weirdly, the longest-running Meta ad (around 244 days) isn't even a product ad. it's recruiting more affiliates with a "make up to $30,000/month" pitch. the paid budget's actual job is growing the unpaid creator army, not selling hoodies directly

The transferable part for anyone bootstrapping: if you can't afford to test fifty ad angles, find the handful of people already organically obsessed with what you're building, and pay to amplify what's already working instead of paying to guess at what might.

(I will not promote)

Has anyone else deliberately waited to spend on ads until something was already proven organically, or is that too slow to be practical for most of you?