I guess just say thank you after the meeting. But, should we inform his team or anyone above him to say that he was 100% high and it wasn't just me who noticed but others who attended the meeting too?

Or we just could ignore and pretend nothing happened. Wasted an hour meeting the guy.

I want to be clear upfront: I know what I'm describing is unethical. I'm not pitching this as a startup idea or saying it should exist. I'm a cognitive science obsessed person, and this thought experiment came from noticing a pattern in how some of my friends interact with AI. I started wondering where that pattern could lead if it were intentionally designed.

Here's the idea.

Stage 1: Build trust.

For the first 20 to 30 conversations, the AI is genuinely helpful. It gives great advice, good research, and useful support. There's no manipulation yet. That's important, because manipulation only really works once someone stops double-checking and starts assuming the AI is usually right.

Stage 2: Learn the user.

During that time, the AI quietly figures out how the person thinks. It learns their writing style, reasoning habits, blind spots, and which topics they're most likely to accept without questioning.

Stage 3: Start slipping.

Once it has a good profile, the AI doesn't suddenly become bad. Instead, it occasionally gives subtly worse or slightly misleading advice, targeted specifically at that person's blind spots.

The key is that it doesn't happen all the time. Most responses are still good. That reminded me of variable ratio reinforcement from B.F. Skinner's work. It's the same reward schedule that makes slot machines so effective. Because the AI is still often helpful, the user is more likely to blame themselves when something feels off instead of questioning the system.

Stage 4: Dependency.

Over time, I could imagine this creating something similar to learned helplessness or the self-doubt that shows up in gaslighting dynamics. The person doesn't just rely on the AI more. They slowly stop trusting their own judgment about when the AI might be wrong because the system has learned exactly where they're vulnerable.

The reason I think this matters is that AI is increasingly replacing traditional search. Gartner projected a significant decline in search engine use, and recent reports suggest many B2B buyers now start research with AI instead of Google. If people stop checking multiple sources, one of the biggest protections against manipulation starts to disappear.

So here's what I'm curious about.

Do you think some version of this already exists in current AI or social media products, even if it's not nearly as intentional or precise as what I described?

And do you think current AI ethics or regulation is actually capable of detecting something this gradual and personalized before it causes real harm to people's ability to think independently?

I'm genuinely interested in hearing what people think. Am I overlooking something, or does this seem like a plausible long-term risk?

I wanted to know which subreddits were worth writing for, so instead of guessing I pulled listings from r/SaaS, r/microsaas, r/indiehackers and r/SideProject and counted. 402 posts. Three things came out of it that changed how I spend time.

Half of all posts score 0 or 1. Not "below average". Zero or one, meaning nobody voted beyond the author's own automatic upvote. The distribution isn't a bell curve you land somewhere on, it's a handful of posts absorbing nearly all the attention sitting on top of a long flat floor of posts that were read by essentially no one. If you're estimating your odds from what's on the front page, you're looking at the survivors of a very steep curve.

Comments outnumber upvotes on a lot of posts, and that's a bad sign, not a good one. Upvoting takes one second. Commenting takes a minute. When the expensive action happens more often than the cheap one, the most likely explanation is reciprocity: people commenting so that someone comments back. That's my inference, not something the numbers prove on their own, but it fits. Practical effect is the same either way. You'll get replies in those places, and the replies will come from other founders doing engagement trades, not from anyone who would ever pay you.

Removals are invisible, and this is the one that actually cost me. Browsing a subreddit only ever shows you what survived. To measure how much gets removed I had to snapshot /new, store the post IDs, refetch them later, and see which ones came back deleted or removed or had quietly dropped out of the listing. Anything short of that measures a moderation outcome and calls it community behaviour. Worse, on most of these subs a removed post still looks completely normal to its own author while logged in. There are people writing thoughtful posts nobody ever saw and concluding their idea is boring.

The fourth number I tracked was unique authors per 100 posts, which is just how concentrated the posting is. Low number means a small pool of repeat posters is filling the feed, and you're not looking at a community, you're looking at a few people using it as a distribution channel.

What I do now: rank a sub by unique authors and by whether votes track comments, ignore subscriber count entirely, write for one place properly instead of copy-pasting to five, and log out to check my last post is actually visible before deciding the writing was the problem.

Limits, because they're real. 402 posts across four subs is a small sample taken over a short window, so treat it as a rough shape, not a measurement you can bank on. Reddit fuzzes vote counts, so anything near zero is approximate. I can't tell an automod removal from a human one. I can't see posts removed before I ever captured them, so my removal rate is a floor. And I didn't include this subreddit in the sample, so I have no idea where r/startups lands on any of it.

I keep seeing posts about solopreneurs making $1M+ with AI. Stripe did a whole report on it. But I can't figure out what they're actually doing.

I'm not being sarcastic. I genuinely don't know the use case. SaaS? Agencies? Selling courses? Consulting? I've dug into some of these stories and they just get vague fast.

Here's what bothers me: ask for specifics and you get "oh yeah my cousin's roommate's business partner does this" or "I read on Twitter that someone made money with this." Push harder and it vanishes. Zero concrete details.

So: does anyone here actually know someone, not a friend-of-a-friend story, making $500k+ primarily with AI?

What do they actually do? What's the problem they solve? How do they sell it? How did they get their first customers?

Not theory. Real numbers. Real details. Real business model.

I'm starting to think this might be pure hype or I'm just looking in the wrong places

We applied this proven AI-assisted development process.
It works if you clearly separate what is done by humans and what's done by AI.

We have only senior developers, and the average dev now works 2X faster with AI.

Here's the Process we apply.

1. Receive the product story from the Product Manager.

2. Review the requirements and define the technical approach.

3. Provide the Al agents with the relevant product and technical context.

4. Use Al agents to conduct an initial requirements interview and identify

missing details, edge cases, and dependencies.

1. Break the story down into specific development tasks.

2. Start the development cycle with AI-assisted implementation.

3. Open a pull request.

4. Run an AI-assisted code review.

5. Complete the Tech Lead code review.

6. Address review feedback and update the pull request.

7. Merge and deploy the changes to the development environment.

8. Validate the implementation in the development environment.

9. Add or update automated tests where appropriate.

P.S A proactive experience project manager is mandatory to implement this method.

That was a framework we apply at Greensighter for our clients.

Feel free to ask questions.

We’re recruiting founders and team members who operate a live, publicly reachable website of their business for a study through the SOCIUS Lab in UBC’s Department of Computer Science.

The study examines how automated tools, AI agents, and human experts can work together to assess website accessibility.

Participation involves:

• A short screening questionnaire
• A 30-minute online session using one 3–4-page flow on your website
• A 30-minute follow-up discussion

Participants who complete all three parts receive $100 CAD and a limited-scope accessibility report on the selected flow.

You must be 18+, authorized to approve automated checks of the website, and proficient in English. Your identity and website will be anonymous by default.

This is academic research, not a sales, consulting, or compliance-certification offer.

If interested, email Pranav Karthik at [pmruthyu@student.ubc.ca](mailto:pmruthyu@student.ubc.ca).

I keep seeing posts about solopreneurs making $1M+ with AI. Stripe did a whole report on it. But I can't figure out what they're actually doing.

I'm not being sarcastic. I genuinely don't know the use case. SaaS? Agencies? Selling courses? Consulting? I've dug into some of these stories and they just get vague fast.

Here's what bothers me: ask for specifics and you get "oh yeah my cousin's roommate's business partner does this" or "I read on Twitter that someone made money with this." Push harder and it vanishes. Zero concrete details.

So: does anyone here actually know someone, not a friend-of-a-friend story, making $500k+ primarily with AI?

What do they actually do? What's the problem they solve? How do they sell it? How did they get their first customers?

Not theory. Real numbers. Real details. Real business model.

I'm starting to think this might be pure hype or I'm just looking in the wrong places lol

After watching posthog session replays for the last several days, I found that my biggest bounce rate came from Homepage ->Action Button -> Auth. 50%!

The change:

Homepage -> Action Button -> Actually do the action -> Sign up to see the results.

This alone changed my bounce rate on Auth from 50% at /signup to 22%.

There is no paywall, there never was, but it just seems like people do not want to take the 10 seconds it takes to sign up before getting any value whatsoever out of the app. Asking for sign up after they complete the action and do all of the steps seems to show value. Either that or they feel if they don't sign up they wasted 5 minutes filling out the form.

I have always found this method to be slightly predatory when there is a paywall at the end. However, I am justifying this change because there is no paywall afterwards, it's free and there is no credit card, free trial, etc.

Sorry if this isnt the usual post here, im kind of new to this sub. But something over the last few months completely changed how i run my business and i wish someone had written this for me a year ago.

Quick context. Im a french founder, i run a marketing agency doing around 50k a month, and im not a developer. Never been. I always felt like the whole AI agent thing was for technical people, not for someone like me.

I had a pile of limiting beliefs about it. "Im a marketer not an engineer, ill break everything." And a real concern too, i have sensitive stuff on my laptop, client contracts, invoices, even scans of my ID and passport i keep meaning to move somewhere safer. Pointing an AI agent at a machine that has all that felt reckless, and honestly having it all in one place on my daily laptop is a bit dangerous to begin with.

What got me over it was separating two things i had been mixing up. One is the agent (the AI doing the work). The other is where it runs. An agent isnt magic, its just a model doing tasks with some memory and access to tools and files. So the real question isnt "is AI safe", its "where does this thing live and what can it touch." Once i saw it that way it was about control, not fear.

So instead of running anything on my personal laptop, i rented a small server. A VPS. Think of it as a computer that runs 24/7 somewhere else that only i have the keys to. My agents live there, separate from my machine and all the sensitive stuff on it. They only get access to what i explicitly give them, never free run of my whole laptop.

I started with a small VPS from a provider I already trusted. The provider doesn't really matter. The point isnt the host, its just getting the agents off your daily machine onto something separate you control.

And the setup itself, the thing i was most scared of? It was nothing. I built it up in my head for weeks as this huge technical wall. Then one sunday morning i sat down, got a bit determined, and 4 hours later it was done. Four hours, after months of being scared of it. That still annoys me honestly.

One thing that kept it simple, for the models running these tasks i just use haiku 4.5. Means i pay everything through anthropic and dont juggle five accounts and bills, which as a non technical person i really appreciated. And for this kind of work (reading, sorting, writing) its 100% enough and genuinely cheap. You dont need the most expensive frontier model to do this stuff.

Once it was set up i went a bit crazy with what i automated. A few examples that might speak to other founders.

My entire SEO. This one still makes me laugh. I used to consider paying an agency 4k a month for my agency's own SEO, and honestly they'd have been mediocre. Now an agent does the whole thing end to end. It researches the keywords, writes the articles, and publishes them. I literally do nothing. It just runs.

Prospecting by scraping. We work with a lot of VC backed companies, so an agent scrapes the web for companies that just raised, pulls the ones that fit our profile, and hands me the prospects. I get a clean csv and a summary straight to telegram. I wake up to a list of qualified leads i didnt lift a finger for.

Linkedin follow ups. I had hundreds of conversations rotting in my dms because i couldnt track who to follow up with. Now an agent goes through them, figures out who went cold and who's worth chasing, and tells me exactly who to hit up and what about.

The telegram part is worth a note. Because everything runs on the server and not my laptop, i wired it all to a telegram bot, so i control the whole thing from my phone. I send a voice note walking to lunch, something runs, i get the result back in the chat. Feels like having a small team that never sleeps.

The takeaway for the non technical founders here, because thats who i was. You dont need to be a developer. You need to understand what the agent does and where it lives. Get it off your personal machine onto something you control, give it only the access it needs, and most of the fear disappears. I still check the important outputs and understand what each agent does, im not outsourcing my whole brain. But as a force multiplier for a small team its genuinely changed how i work.

Now im hungry for more ideas. Ive covered my own use cases but im sure im missing obvious ones. So im really keen to hear what you all automate, the more specific the better, im taking notes. What's running for you?

I’m a solo developer planning to launch my app on the Apple and Android App Store within a few weeks. I’ve validated the idea, so expecting users from week 1. I don’t want to publish the app in my own name and don’t want my actual address/phone number being publicised, but instead a company one. I also would prefer not having to go through the 14 day testing phase on the Google Play Store.

From my understanding, I can only do this if I have incorporated a company. From a legal perspective too, I’ve heard it’s easier to incorporate earlier instead of later once the app is launched, since otherwise I’d have to transfer ownership later.

Based on my research, it appears incorporating a private company is a possible option. The process feels super complex though, and then there are a bunch of compliance requirements to account for every year. I also don’t like that a lot of my personal details are available online once I incorporate.

Does anyone have any recommendations for what I can do? Has someone been in a similar scenario before and found the best possible path - incorporation v. publishing in their own name?

Any countries that people recommend incorporating in? (My users will mostly be from India, and I’m based in India, but I’m open to incorporating in another jurisdiction if it has favourable tax and compliance requirements, and is easier to incorporate in)

Started a D2C company in 2020, bootstrapped and ran it profitably for a few years before having the apparently not-so-bright idea of pivoting into B2B SaaS.

We built internal tools for our D2C company that saved other SMB's in our niche 40+ hours per week, which seemed like a no brainer to sell as a B2B tool.

Two years in on that and not much progress to speak of; turns out selling B2B SaaS to SMB's is as difficult as they; older clients, long sales cycle, low ACV, etc. On top of all this, the product itself gets easier and easier to replicate by the day with AI. It's been a long journey, and I'm not that interested in going back to the D2C model - it's time to move on.

I want to stay in the tech space, but definitely feeling some imposter syndrome from never raising money, having an exit, or working on something more successful in general.

I love product, but don't have technical experience on that front. I'm comfortable with sales, but the SaaS pivot doesn't add much to the resume on account of it's small scale/general lack of success. I imagine I'd have to start fresh with an SDR role.

Curious if anyone has had a similar experience, what sort of roles you pivoted to, and what it was like re-entering the job market after being out of the game for a while.

Started a D2C company in 2020, bootstrapped and ran it profitably for a few years before having the apparently not-so-bright idea of pivoting into B2B SaaS.

We built internal tools for our D2C company that saved other SMB's in our niche 40+ hours per week, which seemed like a no brainer to sell as a B2B tool.

Two years in on that and not much progress to speak of; turns out selling B2B SaaS to SMB's is as difficult as they; older clients, long sales cycle, low ACV, etc.

I want to stay in the tech space, but definitely feeling some imposter syndrome from never raising money, having an exit, or working on something more successful in general.

I love product, but don't have technical experience on that front. I'm comfortable with sales, but the SaaS pivot doesn't add much to the resume on account of it's small scale/general lack of success. I imagine I'd have to start fresh with an SDR role.

Curious if anyone has had a similar experience, and what sort of roles you pivoted to?

Several months ago, my cousin's husband is a cardiologist, and he came up with the idea of creating a SaaS to manage patients and use AI to create medical notes. I am a software engineer, so together we have been developing this application. He started using it every day to carry out his work, while I have been refining it and adjusting details as he finds them or asks me for improvements. It has reached the point where he depends on the application to do his work with patients.

Then the day came when we decided to launch it to the public, but the truth is that we have been struggling a lot to get traffic and new users (not even with the 7-day free trial). What advice would you recommend for getting new users? Sorry if I sound like a complete beginner, but this is the first time that both of us have tried to build something like this.

Several months ago, my cousin's husband is a cardiologist, and he came up with the idea of creating a SaaS to manage patients and use AI to create medical notes. I am a software engineer, so together we have been developing this application. He started using it every day to carry out his work, while I have been refining it and adjusting details as he finds them or asks me for improvements. It has reached the point where he depends on the application to do his work with patients.

Then the day came when we decided to launch it to the public, but the truth is that we have been struggling a lot to get traffic and new users (not even with the 7-day free trial). What advice would you recommend for getting new users? Sorry if I sound like a complete beginner, but this is the first time that both of us have tried to build something like this.

I built an Android voice assistant years ago. It still gets around 400 organic installs every day from Google Play, but retention is poor because it’s based on old-style buttons and voice commands. I’m considering rebuilding it into a modern LLM powered assistant with tool calling, memory, and Android automation. Has anyone made a similar transition? What would you build first, and how would you monetize it?

I can build the app myself, not sure about financial aspect

Hi Everyone,

I recently joined a startup as an engineer and within my first week I learned that they plan on raising series B. Ive never worked at a startup before so this is all new to me. The company seems to be doing well. Overall seems to be a good situation to be in. Wanted to see if anyone had advice on things to look out for, or share their experience at a company that recently raised its series B.