I’ve been talking to a startup about taking on an advisory role. Initially offered 0.25%-0.5% equity. I thought that was reasonable enough.

On talking about further roles/responsibilities, it seems the position the founder has in mind is a more involved position that to me feels like an executive level role. His initial email described taking “ownership” a few different tasks that were pretty central for this startup. So so the further clarification I think he does need more of a CMO level role.

So the question I have is how much more is this worth? I’ve got a full time job, wife and two little kids at home.I’ve got to make sure the commitment is worth my time

Hi there! I'm building a startup for women and already talked to FFF, social media followers, friends of friends, and constantly reach out to random people on Instagram (my ICP is women in their 30s), but reaching out to women on Instagram is time consuming and have made around 10 interviews per week, spending my whole time recruiting them for 30 min interviews.

Any relatively cheap options / ideas where to recruit more people? I'm out of ideas.

Welcome to this week’s Feedback Thread!

Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:

• Feel free to request general feedback or specific feedback in a certain area like user experience, usability, design, landing page(s), or code review
• You may share surveys
• You may make an additional request for beta testers
• Promo codes and affiliates links are ONLY allowed if they are for your product in an effort to incentivize people to give you feedback
• Please refrain from just posting a link
• Give OTHERS FEEDBACK and ASK THEM TO RETURN THE FAVOR if you are seeking feedback
• You must use the template below--this context will improve the quality of feedback you receive

​

Template to Follow for Seeking Feedback:

• Company Name:
• URL:
• Purpose of Startup and Product:
• Technologies Used:
• Feedback Requested:
• Seeking Beta-Testers: [yes/no] (this is optional)
• Additional Comments:

​

​

​

This thread is NOT for:

• General promotion--YOU MUST use the template and be seeking feedback
• What all the other recurring threads are for
• Being a jerk

​

​

Community Reminders

• Be kind
• Be constructive if you share feedback/criticism
• Follow all of our rules
• You can view all of our recurring themed threads by using our Menu at the top of the sub.

Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!

I've been mentoring startups for many years now. Thought I'd share some advice over a few posts that I always end up giving new entrepreneurs starting out. Here's one:

Founders can often be the constraint for growing their company.

Founders are often smart people with a very healthy ego built around their company and their accomplishment in building and running it.

As a result they often build their companies with a structure that looks like this, /\\, with themselves at the top and everyone else in the company below them (intellectually, experience, knowledge). As a result, they are not likely (beware of generalizing, there are always exceptions) to hire someone smarter than them.

It might threaten their view of themselves and their perception of how the world views them and their company. They feel they must be the leader.

When I mentor founders, I always advocate for wrapping their success and ego up in the company outcome, not just it's structure. In other words - the company's success is their success.

In other words, I advise consciously building a company that looks like this, \\/, with themselves at the bottom. If they can manage to focus their ego on the outcome of the company and not the need to be at the top (intellectually, experience, knowledge), they will have an opportunity to hire much smarter people than themselves and they will have an opportunity to learn a lot from them.

In essence, in the first case, the founder becomes the limiting factor in the company's success to protect their own ego and perception of a founder. In the second case, they have an opportunity for their company to have an unlimited upside where they are not hindering their own success.

This is a very difficult thing for a founder, as it seems contradictory to the very qualities that allowed them success in starting their company.

It's definitely a different skillset to learn to lead people smarter or more experienced than you, but definitely worth learning.

More in future posts. Hope this helps some.

What have you all found to be the cheapest way to get SOC2? There are tons of online vendors who claim to do it so no idea which is actually good.

I care mostly about price, ease of use, and speed. Also if you've had bad experiences with any of the platforms feel free to steer me clear of them.

I started building my ai governance consultancy few months ago. Currently i offer

\- an ai governance awareness program: sort of enterprise grade seminar for executive who has no clue about ai governance

\- ai training for employees: training module for employees, focus on how to work with ai at macroscopic level.

\- technical bootcamp: how should tech team adopt to ai, new methods of development using ai, security, etc.

\- iso 42001 consultancy

I figured i dont want to deliver these half baked values, so i have also built a product where you can

\- quickly create ai policy,

\- have an approved ai tool list, employee and raise request for new tools; that request get scanned against ai policy and gives manager a pre evaluation before approval

\- integrated training videos on this platform

\- a feature to raise ai issues to upper management

(Upcoming: will add soon in next iteration)

\- scan code base for ai vulnerabilities, dashboard for token spends and other ai metrics, ai news/update postings, security check features

My question is i am a good builder, i have great communication skill. But where do i go to find my first client? My target audience are small medium business & startups. Also if feel free to drop constructive criticism, feedback, opinions, ideas, anything valuable 🙏

I'm a bootstrapped solo founder for over a year. Have pre-sales with 200+ paying customers.

Product is still under development with fleshing out the features and am convinced there is a good PMF that we will find/create as the problem solution is huge. Now after this time developing full-time I will need to get some funds either myself working jobs freelance, full-time, or raising.

Full-time, I probably could not do both. Its too time intensive..

Raising is big chore and you sacrifice ownership. What freedoms do you actually lose when you raise vs own everything? Think this could be the big factor for me. The raise would be relatively lean comparatively as I am not looking to hire unless there would be a no-brainer situation in terms of speeding things up.

Hi, everyone, I'm a solo pre revenue founder. I just got my first ten active users on my website. I'm going to a government meeting tomorrow to potentially integrate my startup as a B2G startup. So this is a pretty big deal for me at least.

My older brother told me I shouldn't go. In his defense he says that I should try to develop my company further before talking to people but my mom said it's good to make connections right now instead of waiting for the perfect moment but my older brother says I'm just going to look stupid in front of important people.

I just don't know what to do... I have a MVP so I'm going in with something.

Technical founder here. Building the product is the natural part - vague requirement in, working thing out, ship it, move on. No drama.

Then I sat down to write marketing copy and just... froze. Cursor blinking. I'd write a sentence, decide it sounded like every other SaaS, delete it, and go tweaking some features instead. This happened on repeat, week after week. Not because I didn't have time. Because there was no forcing function, and it was genuinely more comfortable to do work I already knew how to do.

What eventually helped wasn't a burst of inspiration or a copywriting course. It was noticing WHY code doesn't freeze me: there's a spec, a scope, a definition of done, and a place the work lives whether or not I feel like doing it. Marketing had none of that. It was one giant undifferentiated blob labeled "do marketing," which is the kind of task no one starts.

So I set up a engineering-like scaffolding:

1. A fixed set of content angles. Instead of "what should I write about," I picked from a small closed list. My current list has four:

• a decision I made, including the options I rejected and why
• something I got wrong and what it cost
• a mechanic - how a specific piece of the product actually works under the hood
• a pattern I keep hearing across user conversations

Now the question is "which angle this week," which is a choice in four options instead of an infinite blank page. For getting words out of me, that change did more than everything else combined.

2. Every marketing item is a ticket - tracked as engineering work, same board. A post is a ticket. A landing page rewrite is a ticket. Testing out a channel another. It has a scope and a done state. If it's not a ticket it doesn't exist.

3. A fixed publish cadence. A committed, non-negotiable day, whether or not the piece feels good. Deadlines beat standards early on - the version of me optimizing for "is this good enough" published nothing for weeks.

4. Process tracked separately from outcomes. Did I ship on cadence? Did every planned item become a ticket? Those I can measure now. Traffic, signups, whether any of this converts - I genuinely can't say yet. It's too early, the sample is tiny, and I'd be making up a story if I told myself the numbers meant something.

5. A review loop with actual kill criteria. This is the newest part and the least tested. For every 10 pieces I check three signals per angle, none of which are traffic: does anyone reply or ask a follow-up question, does anyone quote it back to me unprompted in a DM, and do inbound questions start landing inside that angle's territory. If an angle keeps producing zero of those, it gets cut and replaced.

Honest caveat: I don't know if this works. I know it moved me from producing nothing to producing consistently, which is a prerequisite for finding out I guess, but is not the same as working. Ask me in 6 months and I might tell you the whole angle list was wrong.

The narrow question I actually want answered: where do your content ideas come from as an input, mechanically? I'm trying to figure out if my closed list of angles is a good system or a cage. Specifically, do you:

(a) keep a fixed rotation of angles/formats like I do

(b) keep a running capture list you pull from

(c) derive topics from sources like support tickets, sales call objections, search queries, community questions, or

(d) something else?

If you're doing b or c, what's the actual trigger that gets an idea into the list?

Almost a year ago, we successfully secured $500K in pre-seed funding. It's been quite a year, building the team, facing countless challenges, and learning a lot. Here are some of the most important lessons I learned about working with an investor.

1. Raising money and negotiating with the investors and then communicating with the investor(s) is a full-time job. I believe one co-founder's job should only be keeping the current investor(s) happy and negotiating for the next rounds of fundraising. In my startup, this, alongside the partnership negotiations, was the job of one of the co-founders.
2. Keep your investors informed, but don't give them too much data, talk to their level. Sometimes giving too much detail may confuse and even scare them, especially when facing a kind of challenge that they don't know about, for example, technical ones. One mistake I made was that I gave them way too many technical reports that they did not understand, and for a period of time they felt like we were scamming them!!! (Our investor was completely non-technical while investing in an AI startup.)
3. Keep everything documented, every decision, every change, and every meeting. Sometimes people forget what they said. I know this may seem a little too simple, but when everyone is expecting a startup to be agile, we may ignore some basic stuff.
4. If you feel like your investor has a different culture from you and your team, ignore the offer even if it's the biggest offer you could ever imagine. Different working cultures may fail your startup. You think about the money, but you walk into a minefield of business.
5. Treat your investor's money as if it were yours, so that you build trust. NEVER let that trust fade away. If this happens, you'll face real issues that are not easy to solve.

If you have any questions, shoot them over. I'll be happy to talk.

IMO video is still one of the most underrated ways to actually stand out as a brand.

But most founders I know just don't do it. And I don't think it's pure laziness. I think there's an actual reason behind it, and I genuinely want to know what that is.

Is it a barrier thing? Like not knowing how to use editing tools or it feeling too technical? or you don't like being on camera? waiting for the perfect background?

Personally, I think founders who use video build strong connections with their ICPs, especially if you're building a SaaS.

I keep seeing newer founders like Ben Cera from Polsia or Farza from Click, both solid filmmakers, absolutely dominating on X because they're genuinely good at making video content.

And Farza is not even waiting for the perfect office space to shoot.

So if you're not making video for your product or for yourself, what's actually stopping you? Is it hating being on camera, not knowing what to say, no time, already tried it and it didn't land, or just thinking it's cringe?

Honestly, in this AI-saturated world, standing out matters more than ever, and I don't think there's a better way to do that than making video that's genuinely well-shot and aesthetic.

Reason I'm asking: I have skin in the game here. I've been building a tool to solve this exact video problem for myself, and a few months in, I'm finally starting to put out videos I'm actually proud of. Sample size is still small, but I'm already seeing how much founder-led video can do.

Hey guys,

Have a work trial (likely 1 day) coming up for an health early stage start-up, team is around 4/5 at the moment in London.

I figure most of it is culture fit, how well I 'vibe' with the others, asking good questions, ability to work hard and push back/hold opinions on specific topics.

I've worked in clinical healthcare as a doctor and used to just getting thrown into stuff but the startup environment is of course different for a operator role.

What would reflect best to prepare? Mostly been focused on improving my understanding of AI tools, building AI agents.

Hi, I dont even know if this subreddit is the right place to ask. If not, it would be awesome if you could give me a hint into the right direction.

The Background:
I have built a software platform over the past 16+ months that is similar to n8n, Flowise, or Dify: You visually build (or auto-generate) AI-Workflows that you can chat with - or use in automations.

I describe it on the landing page as "An open-source, local-first platform for building MCP-powered AI workflows: model management, MCP servers, a visual flow builder, chat, and headless automation in one app. Your keys and data never leave your machine."

imo, it is an extremly strong and capable tool and solves a lot of the pain points one experiences when working with AI. It's well past a Demo or MVP not only do I use it in its own production (an automated software development lifecycle where it improves and supervises itself), but it is also deployed at a customer site where it manages virtual machine statuses of their intranet systems.

It's a free app, open source and MIT-licensed, currently sitting at roughly 600 stars on Github. We had some initial traction after "Cline", an agentic-coding extension for VSCode twittered about us in the early development, but at the moment daily user numbers seem to low.

There is an online-demo, to click around and try - but the app, as it currrently is, is supposed to be self-hosted; that means you download , install and use it on your own computer or server. I can share the demo link in the comments, if that makes any difference.

Now my problem:
I want to do the next steps. I may be biased but I think a lot of features in this app are on-par or even superior to competitors. I want to 1) extend the reach and 2) build a business around that: a subscription service that lets you either sync your workspaces between machines or allows you to work online (or from your mobile device), on a private cloud computer we provide.

What it needs is more capital, more marketing, more users. But I am a technical person - I don't have a network, I dont know anything about seeding rounds, I suck at doing marketing. I could of course start working on all these pillars right now: create promotional material or hire an agency, do more market research, do some ad campaigns, get more people to talk about it.

But all that takes a whole lot of effort and time (and skill) - and if I could choose, I would rather spend that time building great solutions, because that's what I am really good at.

So I guess my question is:
What route should I take? Should I invest the time myself and figure all this out? Should I find someone to invest in my idea myself - or do I rather search for a team that supports me with that (i.e. I find someone to find someone to invest)?

I worked on an idea nights & weekend for a full year before quitting my job & going full time. That & subsequent pivots didn’t work out. I made many mistakes. The biggest one was leading with idea not market validation. This was all solo & 18 months full time.

I feel I’ve learned my biggest lesson. I’ve been exploring another idea with a friend who could become a partner. It feels promising. However I feel tired. My mind says to keep going with it. But my body feels it needs a breather.

The tiredness is from wasted effort & not knowing if this next thing will work. I feel if I had some positive signs of traction I’d be unstoppable though. Is this burnout?

I know a lot of success stories point to a trajectory where nothing seems to be working for years until it does. And often it’s accumulation of knowledge & experience. I do not want to quit. But still need some validation & support.

Question is: should I continue pursuing now OR take a break.. find a job for a while. The risk here is that I may not return if I stop now. That I can’t bear!

Any feedback is appreciated.

Spent 18 years at TD Bank and recently left to build a consumer stock tracking/watchlist app.

We have ~60 early users, but I am struggling to transition from developer mindset to distribution. For those who built consumer fintech tools, what non paid channels actually moved the needle for your first 500 active users?

Thanks in advance

Not to investors. Not to users.

To yourself.

There's this performance you do every morning where you open the laptop and act like yesterday's doubt didn't happen. Like the 2am thought that maybe none of this was going to work has been resolved somehow by sleeping on it. Like you're the confident founder you describe yourself as in every conversation with anyone who asks how it's going.

How's it going.

Fine. Good. Making progress. Exciting stuff happening.

Meanwhile you're refreshing a dashboard that hasn't moved in four days and trying to figure out if that means something is wrong or if that's just how this goes and you're catastrophizing again.

The internal experience of building something is so far from the external version of it that sometimes they feel like two completely different stories happening to two different people.

I have a product that works. Real users. Real feedback. Some days I feel completely certain about where this is going.

Other days I am genuinely unsure if I'm building something real or just doing an increasingly elaborate version of keeping busy so I don't have to face the possibility that it might not work.

Both of those things are true on alternate days. Sometimes on the same day.

Nobody talks about this part because it doesn't have a clean resolution. There's no moment where the doubt permanently leaves. You just get better at working next to it.

Is it just me or does everyone doing this live in that gap between the external version and the internal reality?

I have been trying to raise capital for this startup for pretty much the last 6 months. We’ve had some big meetings, most recently with the biggest VC in the world. I feel like we’re progressing but due to the binary nature of fundraising if it isn’t a cheque then you haven’t really moved the needle. We’re completely bootstrapped and tbh I’ve run out of money to actually fund the build any further.

The one thing these VCs keep saying is “we believe this is where the market is headed”. So we don’t need to convince them that we’re building is the right thing to build.

For context: I’ve decided to build my first ever startup in the hardest possible market for a first time founder - consumer fintech. The reason for this is because I frankly don’t give a shit about anything else. I don’t want to become a founder because I think it’s a way for me to get rich quick. I want to build what I’m building to solve a real pain. A pain I’ve felt deeply in my life. Ive validated the thesis, it’s a pain that’s shared by many and with the emergence of AI it can truly be solved at scale now and the market itself is at an inflection point.

We keep getting told “you’re a bit early for us” but when we’re building a consumer fintech you can’t just vibe code a product and launch it and get there. There’s regulation, compliance, user trust, brand awareness, consumer duty, infrastructure that costs 100s of thousands. How am I supposed to get traction on something we need capital to build. How can we prove anything to any institutional investor without at least raising a pre seed to prove it. It just doesn’t make sense to me. I thought venture was all about taking risks, most VCs agree that the market is headed in the very direction we’re building towards. But they don’t agree we’re ready to raise yet because we’ve not proven our model.

I guess what I’m struggling with the most is - when do you know it’s time to wrap it up and focus energy on other things ? I’ve been rejected and ignored more time in the last month than most people do in a lifetime. I’ve run out of ideas on how to get the traction we need to raise the round. I honestly thought at least one VC would be willing to take a calculated bet on us. We’re a solid team with solid experience and we’re building something proprietary backed by published research with a strong data moat. We’re not something that can be vibe coded in a weekend and that’s what makes us defensible. I’m starting to think that it’s not the idea but it’s me. I’m not your quintessential startup founder, I have no network, no rich family member, no family or friends in high places, no big name company on my CV and I didn’t go to MIT/Oxford But I did graduate from a top university in the UK, I am a strong product operator with 8 years of experience and my co founder is a theoretical physics grad turned AI researcher. We’re not by any means unqualified to pull this off. But I don’t know how much more of a beating I can take. We need traction to raise money, to get traction we need money. To get money we need traction.

I’m sure this isn’t a unique experience I’m going through. If someone out there can offer some advice or help me identify a blind spot I’d greatly appreciate it.

I’ve tried raising from angels, family offices, VCs. So far it’s resulted in 0 raised and I don’t really know what else to do at this point.

We’ve been working on a multi-tool platform (combining calculators, self-assessment trackers, and personal dashboards), and we’ve run straight into a classic UX headache: information architecture.

Seems, the offering a broad toolkit seems like a great benefit. In reality, giving new visitors dozens of choices right on the landing page leads to decision paralysis. People land, get overwhelmed by the options, and bounce before trying a single tool.

We are currently testing a few ideas to clean up the flow:

⚬ Grouping tools into high-level pillars.

⚬ Hiding granular tools inside a personalized user dashboard after onboarding.

⚬ Highlighting just 2–3 "flagship" tools on the main landing page to reduce cognitive load.

Since we are still iterating and trying to figure out the most natural experience, I’d love to hear perspectives from both sides:

For Makers: How do you decide what earns a prime spot on the homepage versus what stays inside the user dashboard?

For Users: When you land on a multi-tool website for the first time, do you prefer seeing the full catalog of features right away, or a clean, minimal page that highlights just one main starting point?

Hi everyone,

I’m a technical founder based in Canada, developing a reformed methanol fuel cell, or RMFC, system.

I previously built an approximately 1 kW integrated prototype and developed four related IP assets. The project is currently around TRL 4–5, with the next objective being a customer-defined engineering prototype and a TRL 6 demonstration.

Architected specifically for cost efficiency, the system offers substantial capital savings over comparable fuel-cell platforms while delivering lower operational fuel expenses than conventional diesel alternatives.

The main challenges are securing some funding for the next development stage and reaching credible early adopters. This creates a catch-22: customers want a proven system, while investors want customer validation before funding the demonstration.

I would appreciate candid advice from climate-tech investors and energy-hardware founders:

1. How investable is a project at this stage? What are the key trends in early-stage energy investment right now, particularly in US?
2. What milestones must be completed before early investors would seriously engage?
3. What is the most realistic strategic path for a deep-tech startup to cross this valley of death and break through early commercial bottlenecks?

Any introductions or leads on climate-focused angels, energy-hardware accelerators, strategic pilot partners, or veteran founders in the clean-tech space would be immensely valuable.

Thank you.

I write this in hopes others can learn from me and hopes that voicing my flaws will help me better understand them and improve upon them.

Last year I had reached out to the team at Enhanced Games. Essentially they've taken the world by storm by being the "enhanced olympic games", where athletes can use PEDs in order to shatter world records.

I had reached out as an applicant to be a participant in the games, scored an interview and actually pitched a sponsorship and my SaaS to them, and with great success. They loved what they heard and wanted to know more.

They requested a pitch deck and then consequently followed me up twice. I ignored both follow ups out of paralysing fear of my product not being good enough and fear of rejection and judgement.

Enhanced Games has a wide portfolio of companies under the umbrella and they're not 'just' an event. Their coverage and exposure was beyond insane, Enhanced Games IPO'd NYSE at a IPO value of $1b.

Essentially, I fumbled the potential of working with a $1b company whos founders are in both tech and fitness. Essentially my ideal partners and it was all because of fear.

In tech theres a saying "Move fast and break things". I did neither. I fumbled and froze.

My 2c, go out, find opportunities and don't let fear stop you from the unknown.

This is one of my biggest regrets of my business journey,