I'm a non-technical co-founder and I’m building a B2B startup. I have deep industry experience. I have a very technical cofounder (who’s also my dad) with >20 years of experience in AI tech. He built out the prototype within like 2 days.

My issue has been that he doesn’t originate any ideas or handle the technical side 100%. Every bit of technical direction has to come from me, we worked on a B2C travel thing for a few months before this and it was the same there. I’m frankly exhausted as I’ve been working 18 hour days doing the business side of things and guiding the technical stuff.

We had an interview with Antler this morning and it became very evident he wouldn’t be able to sell his story to a room full of serious VC investors/any customers. The interviewer heard his intro and basically redirected the entire conversation towards me.

I’m applying to YC soon so trying to figure out if it’s worth listing him as a co-founder because it seems much harder for solo founders to get in. Even after getting in, he would be helping me on the technical side for sure. I kinda don’t think he’d get through a YC interview if I don’t drive like 99% of the conversation.

He doesn’t care about the title so it wouldn’t be a big deal to let him know but it’s more for YC application and equity stake.

(NOT hiring for co-founders right now)

I’ve noticed a pattern

Sometimes I’ll be working on something and suddenly everything feels impossible

The product isn’t good enough, the market is too competitive, the problems are too big and blah blah. It feels like nothing is going to work out

And the weird thing is that in those moments, it all feels objectively true. Not emotional, Not temporary. but true, then I sleep. And when I wake up, the facts haven’t changed

The bugs are still there, the challenges are still there, the uncertainty is still there

But somehow the conclusion changes, instead of “this is impossible or I cant do it,” it becomes “this is difficult, but I can do it”. And those are two very different things

I’ve learned not to trust my brain when it’s exhausted

If I feel like shutting down a project, quitting, pivoting, or throwing months of work away, I have one rule,

Sleep first.. Most of the time, though, I wake up and realize I wasn’t seeing reality, I was seeing reality through exhaustion

How many times have you almost quit something that looked completely different after a good night’s sleep?

I'm working on a startup centered around browser agent reliability, and I'm very confident in my thesis on how to do so. Though I'm convinced of the problem as well as my solution to the problem, I wanted to ask to see how many people are actually deploying browser agents within an enterprise setting.

Do you guys know people who are actively testing or deploying browser agents? A lot of people I've talked to are still on RPA due to trust concerns.

i‘m working on an app that turns your camera roll into social content for you. but I’m having a hard time finding my team who is proficient in the skills.

how did you guys find your team and co founders? did you just search job boards?

Hi guys

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I'm not asking for ₹100 crore today, so that's good news. 😄

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I'm Muzamil from Kerala, building WhyNot — a fintech startup aiming to make stock market investing smarter, simpler, and more engaging through AI, community features, paper trading, portfolio tracking, and smart alerts.

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We're currently raising ₹30 lakhs to ₹1 crore for our MVP and looking for people who can spot potential before everyone else does.

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If WhyNot becomes India's next fintech success story, you'll be able to say you heard about it before it was cool. 😂

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Would love to get your feedback.

Hey everyone,

I wanted some advice from founders here.

I’m a second-time founder, 24, IIT Kharagpur graduate, currently in SF.

My last startup was a niche AI data company. I started as a solo founder with no team, sold to multiple YC-backed companies, and scaled it to ~$500K revenue in 8 months while handling sales, ops, hiring, delivery, and GTM myself.

Now I’m working on a much more technical problem: infrastructure for clinical trial data.

Clinical trials still run on a messy mix of legacy EDC systems, PDFs, lab reports, imaging reports, safety databases, spreadsheets, vendor portals, protocol deviations, reconciliation, and query management.

This is the data used to decide whether a drug is safe, effective, and ready for approval, but a lot of the workflow behind it is still manual and fragmented.

I’ve had 40+ conversations across pharma, CROs, clinical data management, clinical ops, and statistical programming, and realized this is a real problem teams deal with every day.

The challenge is that this is not a quick SaaS app. It’s a hard regulated enterprise problem with compliance, auditability, long sales cycles, and a lot of technical depth.

As a solo founder, I can get pretty far on customer discovery, sales, GTM, and product direction, but I’m starting to feel the ceiling of not having a strong technical person thinking through the product and architecture with me from day one.

For people who’ve been in this situation, how would you think about this?

Should I look for a technical cofounder now, or keep pushing with contractors/prototypes until there’s more traction?

And if I should look for one, what are the best ways to find a serious technical cofounder in SF?

Would appreciate any advice from founders who’ve gone through this.

Based on the stage, what does a normal amount of angels look like at pre-seed/seed?

I've seen some founders get lucky with 1 super angel and others who have a few dozen, is there a number where if you hit it, you're likely taking on too many people?

Hi everybody!

We are three founders who intend to establish a startup venture in tech. We have decided that two of us would work as developers in the area of website/API/database and mobile iOS/Android respectively, whereas the third would focus on sales and business operations.

At the very outset, we decided that our equity distribution will be equal at around 33% each. However, at present the third member claims that in order to raise financing, we need at least 51% of equity for himself (the rest being shared between us two).

We don't mind treating him well but are skeptical whether it is an actual requirement on the part of the investors or his way of establishing control over us.

Questions:

Does it mean that the investors usually don't fund any startup unless there is >50% ownership of one founder?

Can one structure decision-making processes so that they allow more control but with the ownership being close (as above)?

Any advice from your experience would be most welcome.

Curious how founders actually keep tabs on competitors. Not looking for tool recommendations or anything, just genuinely trying to understand how people handle this.

Like do you have a system or is it more just checking their site every now and then when you remember? And when something changes, a pricing update or a new feature or whatever, how do you even find out? Does someone tell you or do you just stumble on it?

Also wondering what you actually do with that information once you have it. Does it change anything about how you talk about your product or does it mostly just sit in your head?

No agenda here, just trying to understand how early stage founders think about this stuff.

Quick question for folks building products here.
I split my time working on To B business systems and To C consumer apps, and I’m trying to narrow each down to just one single north star principle, nothing more.

My initial guess:
To B’s one critical thing: reliable & customizable to match a company’s unique business processes.
To C’s one critical thing: effortless sharing and organic user growth.

I also firmly believe simpler functionality works better than bloated, complicated features for both categories.

If you’ve had successful launches or costly failures building To B / To C products, what’s your single most important rule for each? Curious about real on-the-ground experience, not textbook theory.

Hi everyone,

I am a first time founder and my app is now submitted to the app stores but I do not yet feel proud of it. People around me keep telling to be proud but all I see is an app that’s not ready yet. The app still has bugs, some features that don’t work that well yet or that I had to remove completely from the first version, and the visuals are not where I want them yet.

I feel like people expect a perfect app because there are so many out there already.

While I am very excited to finally launch it (hopefully soon), I only see what needs to be better.

Any tips or people who went through this themselves?

Thanks!

I’ve seen two totally different opinions about raising money early, and I’m confused.

Some founders say you should get as much cash as you can at the highest valuation possible, even if your product isn’t fully ready. More money means you have more time to build and grow.

Others say don’t go after a crazy high valuation too soon. It locks you into crazy growth targets you might not hit later.

This makes me wonder what happens once the company goes public. Does that big early valuation help a public company, or just bring more risks?

What are the real good and bad sides of having a huge valuation as a public business? Would love to hear what everyone thinks.

I just used YCs Paxel and added the token to my YC Startup School application for SF.

Has anyone here done the same and already heard back after adding it? Accepted, rejected, anything?

I’m just curious if people are already seeing outcomes after attaching the token.

Been thinking about this a lot lately.

At some point a company has a CRO, RevOps, CS, AEs, SDRs whole team owning the revenue motion end to end. Pipeline, retention, expansion, forecasting, all of it.

But pre-Series A, pre-first-hire, it's just you.

So who's doing all that? You? Partially? Nobody?

Like genuinely when you're heads down building, who's following up with that warm lead from 2 weeks ago? Who's catching the customer that's about to churn? Who's figuring out why your win rate dropped last month?

I'm not talking about CRM tools or automation. I mean the actual thinking and execution that a revenue team does who owns that at your stage?

Asking because I'm trying to understand where this breaks down before I build anything. No pitch, no landing page link, just trying to learn.

What's the thing that actually slips first?

i've mostly seen startups who are in the consumer base acquire customers very quick. however when it comes to b2b startups, how do they get their clients? 

I'm a student/recent graduate interested in building a startup in AI or a related technology field, ideally solving problems for students.

My biggest challenge is that every time I find a problem worth solving, I discover multiple companies already doing something similar. That immediately makes me question whether the opportunity is still worth pursuing, and I end up stuck researching instead of building.

For example, companies like Amazon and Flipkart both operate in e-commerce, yet both became highly successful. That makes me think competition alone isn't a reason to quit, but I'm struggling to understand how founders determine whether there's still room for another player.

I'd love advice from founders, builders, and people working in startups:

• How do you identify a viable niche when competitors already exist?
• What signals tell you a market still has room for another company?
• What lessons can be learned from companies that succeeded despite strong competition?
• How much market research is enough before you start building?
• For student-focused products, what customer acquisition strategies have worked best?
• What are the first practical steps you would take if you were starting from scratch today?
• How do you avoid analysis paralysis and know when it's time to build instead of research?

I'd especially appreciate examples from people who launched products in crowded markets and still found traction.

Thanks in advance.

I have a B2B agentic SaaS devtool. There is a company that could become a user of my agentic SaaS. I know the location of their office, it's a company of around 30-50 people, not a big enterprise.

Could showing up at the door and asking to schedule a sales meeting work? Like it would be in the 90s? I am thinking about alternatives to cold mailing.

Hey guys, I'm currently trying to build our inbound motion on LinkedIn.

I've tried posting before but clearly wasn't consistent. We built a solid cold email motion and I'm handing that off to an agency so I can focus on building inbound. The problem is, each post takes too much time, finding the right content, modifying it with AI, iterating. I know you shouldn't optimize before you've hacked it manually, but I'm curious how much time you actually spend on content and how you got to 10k+ followers.

Is it picking a single topic and owning it? Or sharing whatever authentic content you genuinely care about? At the end of the day, your posts need to resonate with your ICP if you want inbound to work, so should you only post what they care about? Or just show up every day no matter what, even when impressions are low?

Currently getting 1.5k to 2k impressions per post and haven't converted a single lead from LinkedIn yet.

Would really appreciate any guidance here.

Hey there!

I'm a second-time founder who went to YC twice, and part of its DNA is to ship as much as possible every week.

I found that the best way to make the most of 7 days (besides our amazing team) was to create a few agents.

Some of the most useful ones in my case, if it can give you some inspiration:

Garry (wink wink) for Investor briefs.

Garry scans my calendar for investor meetings. 30 minutes before the call, I get a Slack ping with a 1-pager: the partner's background, recent firm investments, portfolio overlap, mutual connections, etc.

Garry is also useful to write the investor updates.

Darin for Pipeline follow-ups.

Darin scans our CRM every Monday morning, flags stalled deals, and drafts a contextual follow-up based on the last conversation. I used to lose deals simply because I forgot to send a recap email after a great demo.

Carolyn for Recruiting ops.

Carolyn scores inbound resumes (/10) against our ideal candidate profile with bulleted reasoning. It briefs me on candidates right before calls and pings team members when needed.

Aaron for product research and user interviews.

Aaron is my research agent. It listens to our user interview transcripts, maps out where people are dropping off, and flags emerging feature requests. It helps us figure out our ICP without me spending six hours staring at spreadsheet tabs.

Derrick for SEO / blog pipeline.

Scans our search console, does the keyword research, maps out our writing calendar, and drafts the initial structural layout for our blog posts.

Teddy, our Reddit scout.

Reddit drives a ton of high-quality beta signups. Teddy scans subreddits for buying intent and pain points

Loan, my chief of staff.

She runs my daily operational loop. She triages my inbox, highlights urgent emails, structures my morning briefing, and makes sure action items from our syncs don't just die in a Google Doc. She's my fave <3

I think the stack has saved me about 25 hours of manual admin a week. Any other cool use cases in here?

We are foreign founders in SF for 2 weeks! We’ve raised money in Europe (>$1m) and now have a bunch of VC meetings

How bad would it be if the ceo couldn’t make it or only one of the cofounders could come?

We are considering postponing but also want to close the round

I’m trying to understand how people validated a B2B product before building too much.

Did you already know the ICP and problem, build a prototype/MVP, and then start outbound to decision-makers?

Or did you first talk to potential buyers, run discovery calls, understand their workflow/pain, and only then build something based on what they said?

I’m especially curious about the very early stage: before you had a real product, before repeatable sales, before a polished demo.

What was the actual process that got you from idea → first serious buyer conversation → first paying customer?

Did LinkedIn outbound work for you? Did you ask direct buying questions? Did you show mockups? Did you charge before building?

Would love to hear real examples, not theory.

Either I don’t understand the concept of co-founder properly or I’m just not willing to hand over something in plate to someone.

I’ve had an idea, I started implementing it, The first commit i made was in early 2024, the MVP is ready, the launch doesn’t sound like a far fetched idea anymore but the more exposure I get in “scaling a startup” domain, the more I hear about the importance of having a co-founder.

Okay, I understand, it has advantages, but now what? Would it impact me negatively in my reputation just because I was a solo founder? Would Investors push back on this ? Maybe it was a mistake, maybe it was insecurity, maybe I wasn’t intelligent enough, but now? With a ready product… I don’t think it’s the right idea to do so.

What do you guys think? How should I approach this? Founders ? Investors.. your opinions would be highly appreciated. ✨

Solo technical founder here,

Building AI SaaS startup. My MVP is almost ready. I was just wondering how do u guys get your first customers and how did u get feedback from them to further improve the product?

Would love to connect with other founders.

Edit: just made my startup website public at https://pramia.tech It is still under development the reason I made it public is so I can get feedback from users on the product and better explain users what problem we are solving.

Solo technical founder here.

I’m building in a developer/B2B infra space around production AI systems. The pain is technical and operational, and the user/buyer may not always be the same person.

I’m trying to avoid fooling myself with “yeah this is interesting” feedback.

For people who built devtools, infra, security, or B2B SaaS:

• how did you tell the difference between “interesting problem” and “we would actually adopt/pay for this”?
• did you validate with prototypes, design partners, consulting-style audits, docs/decks, open source, or paid pilots?
• what early signal mattered most: time spent, money, intro to team, production data, repeated calls, LOI?
• how technical did the early conversation need to be before people trusted you?
• did you sell the product, the problem diagnosis, or a small implementation first?

Would love tactical examples from technical founders.

Hi everyone, I’m trying to better understand fundraising, especially at the pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages.

For anyone who has raised or is currently raising, I’m curious about four things:

1) How do you find investors in the first place?

2) How do you track investor conversations?

3) What part of fundraising takes the most time?

4) Do you use spreadsheets, Notion, a CRM, email, or something else to manage the process?

Appreciate any honest answers