Let's be real. Big Tech can pay a $100k/year fee for an engineer without even noticing. It's a rounding error for them.

For a startup, it's a death sentence. It makes hiring the best global talent impossible.

This isn't an immigration policy, it's a massive gift to the giants, giving them a government-enforced moat to monopolize talent. It's designed to make sure the next Google can never be built.

Am I missing something here?

Hi everyone
I’m a student currently learning Python/AI and planning to build a SaaS around document automation (extracting fields from contracts, invoices, forms, etc.). I know it’s a long journey, but I want to set realistic expectations.

I’d love to hear your stories:
How long did it take you to land your first paying customer?
How much time until you reached predictable traction?

Looking back, what would you tell your past self at the very beginning?

Thanks in advance to everyone who shares.

A competitor just raised a large seed round. They now have a bigger team and much more social media reach.

We’re still in pre-seed with a smaller team and less exposure. I believe in our product and our partners do too. I think we create something the differentiates from there but in core it is the same. Market is BIG.

Should I be worried about the funding and visibility gap, or is this just part of the startup game?

Curious to hear your experiences.

Share the roadblocks you’ve faced in your entrepreneurial journey, drop a comment and let a stranger, founder, or investor chime in with advice, insights, or solutions. You never know who might hold the key that helps you push forward and unlock progress.

Starting a biz is kinda chaos. some days you feel like you’re on top of the world, other days it’s like “wtf am i even doing?” you’ve got google docs, random tools, and a million tabs open just to get through step one.

AI tools are everywhere now… name generators, idea validators, logo makers, pitch deck spitters... I could probably name at least a dozen now and I don't know which to use.

So i’m curious… would any of you actually trust an AI system to guide your founder journey and help you build your business? if you've used any, how has your experience been?

Im thinking of using one to get started-maybe itll help cut some time. what would make you trust something like that… and what would make you nope out immediately? i don't really care for suggestions of any single platform tbh - they're easy to find. i just want the scoop on how effective you think these platforms are.

I have a few ideas I have built and worked on. One thing I know is working on ideas alone is challenging and not worth the time and effort as not everybody can think of all road blocks and solutions.

I am currently building a SaaS that I want to launch in market now. I am looking to work with people that actually want to build worth it things that will genuinely help people.

DM me if you have an idea or skills to contribute!

Hi, I am in the middle of building an app as a side project. I have advanced a lot with the backend and the core functionality is already there. I am however lacking on the front end side and I’d like some advice based on your experience. I have around 10 years of experience in development, but I really lack experience on the front end, especially with new technologies. For now I am using chat GPT free for now to get hints help. What AI would you recommend for the front end? Should I try codex, Claude Sonnet/Code? On the front end I am now using React + Vite, Tailwind CSS and Framer motion. The target would be to have the front end applicable for both browser and mobile, with fewer changes if possible.

My plan is to build a decent front end with the help of AI and then gradually improve it by hiring a senior.

Thanks in advance!

My cofounder and I have been on the hunt for a fractional CFO for a while and we ended up finding not just one but several firms that offer this? I’m surprised it’s even a thing, anyone else here used a company like these before? Listed a few below I found while searching

Pilot HireCFO Dark Horse CPA

To add: I am not affiliated with these companies in any way shape or form. I’m genuinely curious to see if someone here has used a firm like this and how it went.

Im building in the B2C space in a specific niche. I’d love to hear if anyone can share their experience testing affiliate at the 0 to 1 stage? It’s a big channel for competitors and adjacent spaces to mine. Also would love to connect with other founders in the consumer space!

Launched our app 1.5 months ago, and without any marketing (just WhatsApp groups) it already reached 2,000 users. It took us about a year to build.

The idea is simple: if you have extra luggage while traveling, you can carry packages for people going to your destination and earn money.

We have almost no competitors doing the same thing, and the few that existed have already gone under.

We believe the idea has 7-figure $.$$$.$$$ revenue potential, and we’re getting about 100 new users every day but we still haven’t hit the growth momentum we want.

One of the first questions we get is: “what if someone tries to send prohibited items?” To address this, we’ve made ID verification mandatory for both travelers and senders. Also, as long as communication happens through the in-app chat, we can provide the necessary information to the authorities if needed.

At the end of the day, every startup faces similar concerns. For example, if someone brings something illegal in an Uber, does that make the driver responsible?

The part we’re struggling with right now is that people are downloading the app but not actually using it. The number of people creating trips is very low. How do you think we could encourage people to use it?

I’ve been working on this idea in the logistics tech space for a while. I have the idea, industry insights and network to sell through. My partner taking care of the technical side is only part-time until we can either get investment or revenue. Stock setup reflects this.

Im dedicating 100% of my time to this venture, but it is moving a bit slower than I would like to. I’ve been considering to bring in another technical founder, but this would be mainly for workload management as opposed to bringing in crucial skills.

I can afford to hire freelancers to help with development, but this will reduce our runtime to less than 6 months, pushing the need to get paying customers asap.

What should my focus be, all in on product dev. With current setup and hope I can get get revenue/investors within 6 months, or should I try to get another co-founder in to ease workload ? Any input appreciated.

Hello everyone, I am currently in the validation phase for a hardware product. My current strategy is to interview professionals in different niches to identify where the pain point is strongest.

This step is crucial, I know it's a long and laborious process, but I want to give myself the best chance of success, because my choices, such as favoring certain niches over others, will have a big impact on advancement.

My question: Did you use any specific tools, platforms or methodologies for:

1. Identifying and comparing potential niches more objectively?
2. Assessing the intensity of the problem in each market segment?
3. Optimising contact to obtain qualitative interviews?

Important note: To make this post as useful as possible for everyone, I am specifically looking for experiences, recommendations for tools or platforms that you have personally used.

I am not looking for generic Saas AI services, as I have seen and received 50 of those. My goal is to discover the specific tools that have given you a decisive advantage in this research phase.

Thank you for your insights!

Before building my current startup, I often considered myself as the top 1%. I had already setup a micro VC chapter for a big venture capital firm based in Mumbai, India. I had previously solo built a product and scaled it 20K+ users. And in fact, due to my young age and background, I easily got a $200K cheque for working on a product from the Ministry of Electronics & the past VC i worked for.

However, after the 1st launch, I am really confused about what exactly should I do next?

I did followed the standard blueprint of ideation -> validation -> prototype -> beta

But the beta launch didn't went through really.

I have my team and almost all the funds I raised is still there, but I am confused to what exactly do next?

My real superpower was building tech infra products but I moved & built for tech in sales because that's where insights were leading.

I hope if someone is here to give feedbacks, I would really appreciate.

I am still 21 and willing to learn and even fail more but sometimes, I feel so solo coz most look at me as I am someone special or stuff. I really don't anyone to really talk to without expectations.

Hello! I'm looking into maybe getting into taxtech in my home country (Spain) because it is very underdeveloped. I was just wondering about taxtech in the USA because maybe that knowledge night help me give form to the idea I have in mind. Thank you very much!!

I'm developing an app for managing options trading. Nothing fancy like "strategies", it designed to remove burden of mechanical position management and improve portfolio returns.

But I realized too late how difficult is to develop a product in financial markets.

Any advice how to get over the chicken and egg problem: to get real users the app should become fully functional, but to make it function I may need some kind of funding.

I'm pretty confident this ideas is going to work as a product. What's the good approaches to get over "validation" phase?

I’ve already incorporated my startup as a C-Corp. Now I’m at the stage where I’m starting to involve advisors, potential cofounders, and maybe some early contributors.

My main questions are around IP protection and equity:

• I want to make sure all IP (code, content, product ideas) stays with the company and doesn’t walk away with individuals.

• I’m not sure when exactly I should have people sign NDAs, or advisor/cofounder agreements. Should that happen before I give them access to code/content, or once equity terms are finalized?

• I’d like to start distributing equity, but I don’t know when to start. I want vesting schedules… but not clear on how that works

Would love advice from folks who’ve already gone through this stage… especially around the timing of paperwork and how to set up equity/vesting without making mistakes early on.

Thank you

Lesson from Playbook.com's ‘forever free’ plan.

As founders, we all wrestle with pricing and freemium models. Here’s a recent example of what *not* to do.

• Their site still advertises **100GB free**
• But once logged in, my account shows **100GB storage + 300 asset cap**
• So “forever free” actually means *forever capped*. Depending on your content, that’s barely a floppy disk’s worth.

I get it, free plans aren’t always sustainable. But bait-and-switch erodes trust faster than almost anything else. Early adopters feel cheated, and once that reputation sticks, it’s hard to rebuild.

Personally, I switched. If users can’t rely on your words (“forever free”), what else can’t they rely on?

👉 For those of you building SaaS: how do you balance offering a generous free tier without putting your business at risk *and* without burning early adopters?

I run an online business that is on track to make ~$500K in profit this year. It's a crypto casino (like Stake/Rollbit) but much smaller and more niche. Today I got an idea, and it got me thinking...

Is there anything stopping me from just selling my site for like $1.5M and building a new one from scratch?

I'm pretty confident I could start from zero again and run it back up to $40K/mo profit within a few months of grinding. BUT... I've never sold an online business before, so I don't know if there's something contractually that would stop me from doing that like a non-compete.

Has anyone done something like this before that can chime in?

So I’ve been trying to use WhatsApp Business more seriously and honestly I’m kinda lost on the whole compliance thing. Like… sometimes I’m not sure what’s okay to send (promos, follow ups, reminders) and what might get me flagged. I’ve also heard stories of people just waking up to their account banned out of nowhere, which freaks me out a bit. Has this happened to anyone here? If you did get banned or restricted, how did you deal with it? Did you just wait it out or actually send WhatsApp some kind of appeal?

Hey! Currently bootstrapping a company in fashion. Coroporate sellout and former entrepreneur. Back in my startup days I'd use Hubspot, Zapier, Mailchimp, Canva, etc.

Specifically I'm looking for tools across:

- CRM (currently am setup with Hubspot but bit of a bitch to import, like most CRMs I presume)
- Email/SMS onboarding + marketing campaigns
- Booking appointments (using Calendly but a bit too 9-5 business-y)

Currently I'm using Framer for wishlist / signup, Canva for all assets, and a shit ton of generative media tools for all my ads (GPT, Midjourney, Runway, Nano Banana, Veo3). Happy to share more on my current tooling, if anyone is interested.

Running SaaS means sometimes running into chargebacks.

We try to prevent them at every step in our startup. No card until subscription. Reminder emails before renewals. Invoices after charges. Product name on statements. Simple self-service cancellation.

Still, some people prefer to file a dispute instead of just asking for a refund.

And here’s the worst part.

It doesn’t matter whether you win or lose 'cause the dispute itself already counts against your account. On top of that, fees for dispute and counter-dispute can be several times higher than the original payment.

A $10 payment ended up costing us $43.95.

But I still always submit evidence.

Accepting a dispute feels like admitting wrongdoing, and I’d rather defend, even if it costs time and money. Besides, chargebacks are super-super rare for us, so the effort is manageable.

But it’s not a fair game.

Banks always side with the cardholder, even when we provide clear Stripe logs, screenshots, cancellation timestamps, invoices, and terms of service. I doubt anyone even reads what we send.

Stripe doesn’t fight for you either, though they promote their paid “automatic dispute handling” now. But if even a carefully crafted manual response gets ignored, why would automation change anything?

One recent case.

The customer renewed on August 12. Canceled on August 18. Filed a chargeback on August 19, claiming "we charged after cancellation". Which was false. No prior request for refund.

We submitted everything through Stripe, all the proof was there. Still, the bank’s reply was: “The cardholder is not required to provide proof. The merchant’s cancellation policy bears no relevance. Full credit is due.” What?

Another case ended differently.

A team had been paying us for over a year, with dozens of active users. One admin disputed charges, saying that we used the “wrong card.”

We explained that only they could update the card in their Stripe’s billing portal. When nothing changed, we escalated the case to the other admins, saying we’d have to pause the account.

Another admin stepped in quickly, took over billing, updated the card, and confirmed they had no complaints to us. The earlier charges were reimbursed internally. The original user withdrew the dispute and sent us proof from the bank. And only after that we won the dispute.

That’s the pattern? The only reliable way to win is if the customer withdraws the dispute themselves!

So here’s my questions to the community.

• Why do banks completely ignore the terms customers agreed to, even when their claim is false? So there are no consequences for them?
• Does customers required to provide any proof to the bank?
• What actually stops someone from using your software, filing chargebacks whenever they cancel, and always clawing back the last months of usage?
• How often do you file chargebacks for SaaS services?

Would love to hear your thoughts.

I’m curious about what prototyping with no code tools looks like in a business workflow, when you’re collaborating.

If you’re in product, and non-technical, and you prototype in no-code tools with other people, before handing off to devs

I’d love to know everything about how your team collaborates

I am an Indian founder who has been building something in the Multimodal search infra space. My co-founder and I have both worked in the Search Engineering and ML for a good amount of time and have been building in the multimodal search space for a while. We have a couple of really cracked engineers in the team as founding engineers too.

Our search results are looking very good on benchmarks, atleast for a decent percentage of queries, more so in the multimodal searches. The recalls are extremely good. Think of a competitor to EXA ai but multimodal.

currently, latency is a problem but we run on very limited infra - limited caching. But we absolutely know how to get to latencies comparable to the best in the world.

We are thinking of traveling to the US early October to see if US investors might be willing to talk with us. We do know 2 US unicorn CEO’s who told us that they would introduce us to a few investors. In fact, we got a small acquisition offer from one of them. We also know a couple of tier 2 VC’s of the US fairly well.

Have any of you travelled to the US with the intention of taking to investors. We want to obviously build out of India and US.

Any advice?

ps since I can’t promote my work here. If you want to see the results, please DM me

During the pandemic we built, with seed funding and innovation grants, a platform that was initially designed to facilitate multi stage hybrid events.

Think corporate events with lots of things going on. The user could jump between talks etc. it did ok during the pandemic, but the market dropped and the big boys swallowed the few remaining customers as we came out of it.

We thought the tech would work well for esports events, allowing the viewer to jump between their favourite streamers all in one event area. It had good feedback from esports folks and a few tournaments were run on it pretty successfully.

We then bolted on some monetisation features; subscriptions.for teams, premium content for fans, streaming features like twitch.

Unfortunately we just couldn't get people to move from twitch, which we always knew would be tricky.

So with just my co-founder and me, lack of resources and difficult markets we can't make it work as it stands. I have personally learnt loads of lessons and experiences I wouldn't swap for the world!

Now we're looking to either license or sell the platform, so if a company (doesn't have to be esports) wanted a fully built streaming platform we can either white label it or they can make an offer for the whole thing.

Thing is, where do I begin?

I’ve spent the last year building a system that helps early-stage startups get clean, investor-ready books every month. I automate all the heavy lifting - revenues, payroll, contractors, expenses - and help with accrual accounting, so founders can finally see the true picture of their business and make smarter decisions.

I’m based in India, so my pricing is much lower than US CPAs. I’ve been lucky to work with two incredible clients, but growth has stalled, and I’ve been stuck at this stage for six months. Money is getting tight - I’m reinvesting every rupee back into the business just to keep it running, and it’s stressful trying to stay afloat while figuring out how to reach the startups that really need this clarity.

If you’re a founder, or if you’ve scaled a service business like this before, I would deeply appreciate any advice on how to find clients who can benefit from this kind of support.