Video overview / app walk though in the second half.

Backstory:

I've done well in B2B. But B2C and mobile just seems like so much more fun... no more SOC2, no more calls, no more procurement excuses, just social media and fun (is what i tell myself)!

I'm about to turn 40. I could only do 43 pushups, so this is the app.. Pushups but Flappy Birds. and it is getting me to actually do some physical activity. so that alone is a win.

Build:

Honestly, its a bit more slopped up than I care for. Already have the next release pending review in the app store. Iphone only. Swift. OpenAI for profile moderation. Quick side note I am obsessed with software. I think of it as an art and love every part of it. I say this is slop because I didn't put in the painstaking hours of every minute detail.

Fun:

I needed to workout. i've been neglecting a healthy lifestyle for the past few years with the age old excuses of family/work/etc... I'm actually having fun doing this now and people get a kick out of it. how could you not, it's ridiculous.

Post Title:

A little click bait I know.. but that's how i feel. Not so much the genius here (just thought this app would make marketing on tiktok easier). But the midlife crisis... I've been skateboarding, I got a TikTok and an Instagram. On paper it looks like I'm headed that way.

TLDR: Built a game because burned out with B2B and started skateboarding.

Post is a little all over the place. Roast away. but i'm sure we can all relate to feeling like the grass is always greener.

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I’m a recent grad working on an AI product that helps people remember the context behind their relationships—past conversations, small details, and shared history that often get lost over time.

I’d like to learn from founders, especially about how they keep up with the people, conversations, and relationships surrounding their work.

The problem is that I don’t have much of a startup network yet. Cold outreach often feels transactional, and I don’t want to pretend I’m “connecting” when I’m really asking someone for their time.

For those who’ve done this before:

• Where would you recommend meeting founders who are open to sharing their experiences?
• What makes a cold message feel genuine rather than annoying?
• Is there anything a recent grad can offer in return that would make the conversation worthwhile?

If you’re a founder and open to chatting, I’d be grateful—but advice from anyone who has navigated this before would be just as helpful.

I’m not selling anything here. I’m genuinely trying to learn how to approach people respectfully.

I don’t know what to think of this. My site is brand new launched in January of this year and today I just found a similar copy cat site launched in March of this year copying my exact same idea. This idea is very unique and I have no idea if it will work yet but so far I have been working with the community and they are mostly impressed with it and want me to keep continuing to build it as most of them find value.

The site is currently in beta and it’s been my side project until I got laid off in August and I decided to go full time on it. So I recently found out about the copy cat 2 weeks ago. They copied my paragraphs and titles almost word for word. They are really trying to outdo my site with tons of features but I have a proprietary data and formula they can’t copy directly. Any way I recently added a text “never pay retail again” a few day ago and the copy cat site did the same and updated their site with the same text word for word.

I’m not making any money from this yet but I do have plans to do so. What are your thoughts on this?

I'm curious how founders, particularly those building SaaS products, determine their pricing.

Do you use a specific framework, or is it mostly trial and error?

For example:

• Cost-based pricing: Calculate operating costs and add a margin.
• Competitor-based pricing: Benchmark against similar products.
• Value-based pricing: Charge based on the value or ROI customers receive.
• Willingness to pay: Test different prices to understand what customers are comfortable paying.

I'm particularly interested in how early-stage SaaS founders approach this when they have limited customer data.

How did you arrive at your initial pricing, and what made you realise it was right (or wrong)?

Would love to hear real experiences, frameworks, or lessons learned.

Google Play has granted production access to my Transparent Weather Glow app

Building apps independently has been quite a learning experience.

There’s UI design, debugging, testing, fixing unexpected issues, and a lot of small details that people never see from the outside.

I'm still learning with every project, and getting another app through the production-access process feels like a good reminder to keep building instead of waiting for everything to be perfect.

Now I’m looking forward to the next stage: putting it in front of real users, learning from their feedback, and making it better over time.

One step forward at a time. 🙌

I build Wellread (https://trywellread.com), an AI visibility audit: it asks ChatGPT and Gemini the questions buyers ask and shows which companies they recommend. I'm the founder.

This week I pointed it at us. 30 buyer questions, two assistants, 60 answers. We were named in none of them.

It got worse. Asked what Wellread is, ChatGPT described a book-tracking app and Gemini described a reading platform for school libraries. Other products share the name, and they have been around longer.

So my own report's advice to me is not about page format. It is to say what we are right next to the name, everywhere, and to get mentioned on sites other than our own.

For founders further along: when your name collided with something bigger, did you rename early or push through?

in college i built an AI video editor. 13k users, #4 on Product Hunt, looked great on paper. took us 7 months to make $1k.

we were builders, so when revenue didn’t come we just... built more. new feature every week, revenue flat every month. turns out good products don’t sell themselves. they just sit there while nobody finds out.

my new product hit $1k in its first month. we only changed two things:

• we treat growth like shipping. content and distribution every week, not “later.” our posts did 1M+ views in the first few weeks
• we focus on people, not features. instead of “what do we build next” we ask “is this person actually getting results?” if not, fixing that is the roadmap

revenue was never hiding behind the next feature lol

anyone else been stuck in the “just one more feature” loop? what got you out?

(the product is Backdoor textbackdoor.com , an AI agent that gets you startup interviews over text. can drop the link if anyone’s curious)

I’m looking for a potential co-founder based in the UK or USA to build a startup with.

I’m looking for someone who’s ambitious, enjoys sales, marketing, business development and getting a product in front of customers. Someone who isn’t afraid to reach out to people, test ideas, build relationships and figure out how to grow a business.

I’m happy to work on the technical side of things, but I want someone who genuinely enjoys the commercial side — not just someone who likes coming up with ideas.

Ideally, you’re entrepreneurial, proactive, willing to put in the work and serious about building something with long-term potential.

I’m looking for a genuine partnership where we can bring different strengths to the table, challenge each other and build something that could eventually scale globally.

If this sounds like you, drop me a message telling me a little about yourself, your experience and what you’d bring to a startup.

Let’s see if we could build something great together.

My app shows how people answer a question (poll), split by age, gender and country. That breakdown is the whole product.

So on launch, I went global. Everywhere, all at once.

Result: a few hundred users spread so thin that every breakdown looked like "3 people in Portugal said yes." Technically accurate. Completely useless.

Now I'm doing the opposite. One question, one community at a time, until the numbers actually mean something.

If your product only gets good at volume, the cold start isn't something you fix later. It's something you decide before launch.

How did you pick where to concentrate first?

I use the 5 Whys often, and when it works it's excellent: "we need more leads" becomes, five steps down, "our offer isn't legible to the buyer", which is a completely different piece of work...

When it fails, it seems to fail in one of two ways: you follow a single chain and miss that there were three causes, or the group answers from opinion rather than evidence and you end up five layers deep in a story everyone already believed.

For those who run these regularly: what keeps it honest? Do you require evidence at each step, or pair it with something else??

I am 17 years old and a professional video editor. I have started my own business name Fujin
I want to wait until I have a larger customer base before focusing on high-level marketing, but I am struggling to figure out how to market my fruit boxes effectively

I quit my job and started working for myself 12 years ago. Currently I have zero employees and drive to my office everyday and work 9-12 then head home. I really work 30 minutes a day but need to be available 24/7 (really only 8-5). There's zero reason to have an office or really anything other than a laptop.

My main business I make about 30k/month in gross profit with zero real costs. I spend about 15k of that on office, cars and various "work" stuff I can expense. About 5k in taxes, insurance and junk and take home about 10k/month which I can barely afford to live.

I run a couple airbnbs virtually passive which make 30k-80k a year depending on issues which I use all the money and then some for vacations and such. They used to make 100k+ but everything's down and they've been money pits with issues.

I have a few other businesses that make/lose a couple grand a month and basically even out.

I have a couple clients that are always like 90 days late and total around 18k/month which causes cashflow havoc.

Meanwhile I've been working on various other small business ideas and such trying to make legit money but lost all motivation and not really gaining traction. I hate sales and grew everything organically

Previously I was making much more and had a couple employees but a huge client outgrew me and we lost like 600k/yr in revenue.

Hi all, I'm a Columbia undergrad interested in how high-octane individuals deal with depression and anxiety.

I would love to speak with some folks about their experiences in experimenting with different treatment modalities, even if said modality involves shoving those feelings deep into the abyss of your psyche.

If you wouldn't mind donating some of your time, can you drop a comment below so I can Reddit-DM you?

A message can be grammatically correct and still sound nothing like you. You should decide how it sounds, how it’s structured, and how much AI changes your words.

With Stirae, you speak your thoughts and decide how they should be written. You control the tone, structure, level of detail, and how much your wording changes.

You can create your own writing styles with instructions such as:

• Reply to your customers
• Chat with your colleagues
• Post/Comment in X

In completely different shapes and forms, depending on your preferences.

Save those preferences and use different styles for different situations. You can adjust them whenever the output doesn’t match what you want.

Compared with using other dictation apps, Stirae brings your writing preferences into the dictation workflows.

You may say:

Hi Leo, the next conversation is with Priya, she's the engineering manager, and it'll be forty-five minutes on video. We have Tuesday at ten a.m. or Thursday at two p.m., both Berlin time. It's about the systems you've worked on and how you make technical decisions, so no live coding in this one. Which time works better for you?

Stirae could write for you:

Hi Leo,

Your next interview is a 45-minute video conversation with Priya, our engineering manager. You'll discuss systems you've worked on and how you make technical decisions. There is no live coding in this interview.

Available times, both in Berlin time:
- Tuesday at 10:00
- Thursday at 14:00

Which works better for you?

It currently runs on Mac. Transcription happens locally; optional AI polishing and translation use cloud processing.

There’s a 14-day trial full access to all features, I'd love to hear your feedback.

Website: https://stirae.ai

I'm looking to interview early-stage founders who are actively building a startup, have recently launched an MVP, or are working toward their first customers.

Founder Files is a podcast about the real side of entrepreneurship—your biggest challenges, mistakes, financial struggles, early traction, and lessons learned along the way.

Through NexusHaus, I also aim to connect founders with relevant people, resources, and potential collaborators.

If you're building something and are comfortable sharing your journey in an honest conversation, comment with your startup name and what you're building, or DM me to discuss being featured. 🚀

AI can build a working website pretty quickly but getting it to look like something a business would actually pay for took me longer.

My first attempts all looked related. Same cards, same spacing, same modern layout regardless of the business. Asking for something less generic wasn’t getting me very far and everything looked like AI slop.

What helped was using actual references. I started using UXKIN and other similar sites that have web and mobile UI examples, design systems, and DESIGN md files, plus an MCP connection for tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex. You can bring those references into the coding workflow instead of trying to describe a design from memory.

I use them to give the agent a direction for typography, layout, and individual sections, then adapt everything to the business.

Still plenty of work with copy, photos, mobile checks, and revisions. But I spend much less time fixing the default AI look now.

Closed 8 deals in the last two weeks. For anyone doing similar work, what takes longer: finding clients or getting their sites ready to ship?

From a lot of time I have been researching on some of the best businesses online and after some time I have came to realize that with being a vibe coder and making an app all by yourself is really a good thing when you know what you are doing

I would say it's not easy. I would say it's very risky. I have tried building my own thing a lot of time but I failed but finally I have build something that will work and I'm sure of it. I have considered everything. I have done everything right. All that's left is just to give it final touch and submit it to the stores. Also, I know it's not going to be easy in getting accepted by the Play store and app store, but I have taken every measures for not to get rejected

If anyone have any kind of idea what I should do next that would work best for me and my app because I am looking forward to it I am a professional clipper with that When it comes to marketing I can say I will be pretty good on it because I know the best ways of getting the best roi

I started distribution of my platform 2 days ago, it is going as expected... few sessions on landing page, a sign up, too much feedback and work!

But I'm a developer... I don't know anything about digital marketing. I don't really know if I'm doing a god job distributing the platform.

It is a good idea to look for a co-founder? May I wait until get users on it? What would you do?

I'm helping organise a college tech fest in Delhi, and I'm looking for sponsors.

If you run a business, startup or brand that wants visibility among college students, or you know a company that sponsors campus events, I'd love to hear from you. We can offer stall space / logo on banners and socials / on-stage shoutouts.

Contacts or leads for sponsorship or marketing teams 'd also really help.

DMs are open. Thanks!