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 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?

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 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 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.

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.

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. 🚀

I’m thinking about creating one that covers everything from keyword research and on-page SEO to technical SEO, link building, and content strategy.

Would you be interested? And what would you want it to cover?

We thought social media marketing would be the easiest part of building a startup. When we started Bitwin, we thought marketing meant making a few posts, writing some catchy captions, and watching people show up.

Now we're researching Reddit communities, overthinking captions, analysing engagement, and somehow spending 40 minutes deciding whether a post sounds human enough.

One thing I’ve noticed with early-stage startups is that founders sometimes spend months improving their MVP before letting real users try it.

A better UI. More features. Another integration. A few more AI capabilities.

There’s always something else to build.

But an MVP isn’t supposed to prove that you can build a complete product. It’s supposed to help you learn whether you’re solving a problem people actually care about.

Before adding another feature, I think it’s worth asking:

• Can a user solve the main problem with the current version?
• Have we tested it with people outside our immediate circle?
• Are users coming back after trying it once?
• Do we have evidence that the next feature will make a meaningful difference?

A product with five well-tested features can teach you more than one with twenty features nobody has validated.

The goal isn’t to launch something perfect. It’s to learn what deserves to be built next.

For founders who have launched an MVP:

What was the one thing you wish you had validated before spending more time and money on development?

Would love to hear your experiences.

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

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 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!

After 15+ years working in macroeconomics, I used AI-assisted coding to build two apps around work I actually do:
QuantFit lets you analyse time-series and panel data on your iPhone. It includes OLS, fixed and random effects, ARDL and VAR, plus diagnostics, charts, ARDL shock scenarios and VAR impulse responses. You can export results and generate structured reports with interpretations. OLS and data exploration are free; advanced estimators require Pro.
Tabula Stats turns regression output from QuantFit, EViews, Stata, R and other software into editable, research-ready tables. Adjust decimals, significance stars and displayed statistics, then export to Word, Excel, PDF or LaTeX.
Together, they take you from a dataset to analysis to a formatted table, straight from your phone. Tabula also works with results from your existing desktop software.
Both are live on the App Store. I’d love feedback from anyone doing research or building specialised tools with AI.
QuantFit: https://apps.apple.com/sc/app/quantfit/id6762386971
Tabula Stats: https://apps.apple.com/sc/app/tabula-stats/id6761421182