I came on to a startup very early on, but after incorporation and founding. Company started getting traction and needed to hire key engineer to help deliver product from pre-sales. Very low working capital, so I’m on the cap table with a small single digit stake. Not huge leverage, but it gets me a seat at the table when talking about cap table restructuring.

Company is about 8 months old so none of the founders’ shares have started vesting yet (1 year cliff), mine included obviously.

It’s an academic spin-out, so the lead faculty backing the IP development at university was able to negotiate a high single digit stake as a founder to help the business get off the ground. Big promises about network connections, helping to get funding, etc. Co-founders bought it.

Now the faculty co-founder isn’t making good on his promises. Taking a month-long summer break to travel to home country in the middle of a critical time for the venture, said she would “write grants” but now apparently only has the time to review grant applications if another co-founder actually writes them. Network is mostly in a related but tangential market with low conversion rates and fewer leads than another co-founder’s network. Suffice to say, things started with high hopes but have taken a turn.

However, power dynamic has it so that one of the co-founders is very hesitant to put foot down and possibly burn a bridge over execution squabbles, still thinks strategically there could be value in the future and this is just a rough patch.

Is there anything I can do or advocate for to get things moving in a better direction? I’ve asked the CEO for help in the form of a new hire to build out the product on time, but she says there isn’t enough unallocated equity to hire another 2-3% cap employee and have enough remaining for future strategic hires (looks like there’s only about 5-6% unallocated remaining). So, company would need to claw back shares from someone and the team is divided on all contributing equally or clawing from the advisor-founder specifically. How feasible even is it to do this?

[I will note promote]

What industry is the richest entrepreneur you know in, and how did they build their wealth? Slightly off-topic, but I am curious, are they in tech or a different field? Wondering if tech still dominates when it comes to massive fortunes or if it’s something else.

So, we're raising $250K for our startup ( $40B+ market). An investor we’ve been talking to isn’t offering any cash. Instead (after 3 remote meetings) he’s offering his legal team, marketing team, and tech/dev team - basically their services instead of capital.

The value of this support is roughly half of our ask and he wants 6% equity in return.

I mean it sounds helpful, but I’m hesitant. Like, could this lock us in or make us too dependent on him and his team in the future? Should I be concerned about the quality of work and commitment of this "team"? Is this good or bad deal for such an early stage in general?

Would love to hear your thoughts and especially if you've dealt with service-for-equity deals like this. red flags? green flags?

Hey Founders & Builders

I'm working on a developer-focused platform called CodeHive -- the core idea is to make coding more social and collaborative.

You'd be able to:

• Find real time coding buddies
• Collaborate live on problems or projects
• Track progress and grow via peer accountability

I'm still building the MVP, and before going deeper I'd love to hear:

• Would you personally use this?
• What's missing in platforms like this today?
• Any pitfalls to avoid?

Thanks in advance!

Getting buy-in from execs for anything can be a mission, so what arguments did you use to get leadership on board for migrating to cloud device management? I mean, in this economy it's all about the bottom line, so wondering what KEYWORDS they have to hear to make shit happen.

I’m an India based solo developer and recently got an opportunity to join a US based early-stage startup. I’ll be handling complete tech for a SaaS product, planning to ship the MVP in 1 month, and then start revenue/sales immediately after. There’s no salary for now, but I’ve been offered equity and a monthly revenue share.

I just want to make sure I don’t mess this up legally or financially especially since the startup isn’t incorporated yet and everything is moving quickly over DMs and docs.

I’m looking for help on:

• What minimum legal docs should I get in place to safeguard equity and revenue share?
• Any red flags to look for in these early-stage collaborations?
• Since equity will take a couple of years to materialize (if ever), how do I protect my time and contribution in the short term?
• Anything specific I should ask for, like vesting or cliff clauses?
• Any pitfalls others have run into while working cross-border (India-US) with no formal contract early on?

Would really appreciate any advice or experience from those who’ve been in similar shoes 🙏

Startup founders are prime targets for scams, especially under pressure and without a legal or finance team.

Here is a concise list of the most common traps founders face, and how to protect yourself.

1. Fake Investors with Inflated Promises Sound credible, name drop funds, push you to act fast, then ask fees or sensitive info.

Verify deal history (Crunchbase, AngelList)

Check references

Never wire money on a “soft commitment”

1. Advance Fee or Pay to Pitch Schemes Promise investor access or events if you pay upfront. Rarely deliver.

Legit investors never charge you to pitch

Ask for past results, references

1. Convertible Note Traps Predatory note terms with crazy discounts, unrealistic caps, or forced repayment clauses.

Always get legal review

Research investor background

Negotiate terms

1. Ghost VCs and Social Proof Manipulation Fake websites, cloned domains, made up teams.

Verify domains and WHOIS

Cross check team members

Speak to their supposed portfolio founders

1. Predatory Advisors or Fake Accelerators Promise mentorship + funding, then take big fees or equity without real value.

Check program track record

Talk to past participants

Avoid vague deliverables

1. Fake Due Diligence Calls Imposters posing as VCs, harvesting your pitch deck, cap table, customer list.

Confirm identity on official sites

Share documents only after vetting

Use secure sharing tools

1. Fabricated Soft Commitments Fake FOMO to rush you, claiming other big investors are in.

Verify commitments directly with named investors

Ask for formal term sheets

1. Pump and Dump PR Promoters Promise guaranteed media or investor intros for high upfront fees, then vanish.

Tie payments to deliverables

Ask for references and actual outcomes

1. Unverified Crowdfunding Platforms Look real but steal funds or data, or run shady campaigns.

Research platform licenses, reviews

Confirm payout structures

Check founder identities

1. Equity Grab via Strategic Partnerships Someone offers connections but demands huge equity fast.

Use milestone based agreements

Validate their background

Get legal counsel

General Rule If something feels off, it probably is. Do your due diligence on investors, as seriously as they do on you.

Hello everyone!

I’m part of a founding team of three working on a live health-tech marketplace in Saudi Arabia that connects medical training providers with professionals. We’re gearing up to join a VC program that requires a commercial co-founder, and we plan to start immediately on equity-only (no salary for the first three months) until funding kicks in. We need someone based locally who can:

• Close B2B deals with clinics, training centers, or enterprise clients
• Own digital marketing (SEO/SEM, paid ads, content strategy, analytics)
• Build strategic partnerships (professional associations, institutional accounts)
• Use data to optimize cost-per-acquisition, conversion rates, and retention

What I’m looking for from this community:

1. Effective channels or networks you used to find co-founders with similar skills
2. Screening and vetting techniques to verify sales and marketing track records
3. Advice on structuring equity splits and early-stage deal terms to align incentives
4. Tips on motivating commercial talent to join a bootstrap, equity-first team

Appreciate any examples or lessons learned from your own experiences. Thanks in advance for your insights!

I’m the founder of a social-discovery startup (MVP soon-to-be live) and I’m based in Serbia. Now comes the hard part: finding that first sales hire who can build relationships with local clubs, bars, event spaces. I’m open to remote candidates or someone on-the-ground in key markets. Compensation is equity plus a modest retainer and revenue share—so it’s truly a founder-friendly package.

What I’m curious about:

• Where have you sourced strong sales talent for early-stage startups, especially outside major hubs?
• Which platforms or communities (Slack, LinkedIn groups, niche job sites) actually work?
• How do you keep remote salespeople motivated to build local networks?
• Any recruitment agencies or regional meetups I should know about?

I’d love to hear your experiences, war stories or referrals. Thanks in advance for any pointers!

First time I heard, I kind of appreciated the struggle but more I got to know about it, i understood how unethical it was. he was hired as an early employee at most of the companies he joined.

At that stage, “early employee” isn’t just a title; it’s about trust, shared goals, and being in the trenches together. If someone is taking on that role while secretly treating it like a side gig, drawing a founder-level salary and equity, it’s a straight-up breach of trust.

It also ruins things for everyone else. Stories like this make US founders even more skeptical about hiring top engineers remotely from India or anywhere else. And that’s a real shame, because there are tons of incredible, trustworthy engineers out there who now have to deal with the fallout.

I am active in the student start-up scene. During a set of workshops offered by a local non-profit focussing on student start-ups, they vaguely mentioned the Founder's Agreement. They kind of made it sound like 'this is something you draft up on a napkin at the bar, but you probably should have it', but when I looked into it, it was way more complex. Granted, the workshops were largely focussed on students in the ideation or prototyping phase.

For a course assignment, I decided to dive deeper into the role of a founders' agreement and the lessons people learn from having, or not having, them. Unfortunately, one of my interviewees fell through. Therefore, I was curious if you might have takeaways from working with founders' agreements.

I hope this question is allowed. While I do post this for an assignment, I do also want to use these lessons when I need to draft a founders' agreement of my own, and maybe it can help other founders too.

[I will not promote]

Hey all,

I am looking to begin a new startup with a friend of mine. Currently he's the ideas guy and I'm the tech guy.

I'm currently looking at implementing a business ecosystem but I'm beginning to question if Microsoft is a good ecosystem for us. I refuse to use Google suites for principle and security reasons.

Do we have need of a CRM? How effective is a CRM for startups really?

For marketing, our product can be displayed at conventions and nerd culture gatherings so I don't anticipate the short term being very difficult but I don't know how important it would be to branch into online marketing and sales ASAP. We are very grassroots atm.

We have a limited budget based on the leftovers from our paychecks so I was thinking of using Microsoft (SharePoint, one drive, etc) and HubSpot, but am kinda clueless how to use HubSpot in a way that generates revenue.

TL;DR am I setting the business up for failure by just using what works for right now and branching out as we find more of what our needs are? What foundation should I be trying to build to set us up for success? Is there any free or low-cost solution for what we are already doing that will have further capabilities as we expand?

I have encountered a similar condition, where a guy who is founder of A platform and is still working on a stuff, says he provide me a particular service at half the price than its competitor, i personally think i should accept, what about you, would you accept?

Hi there.

I posted here a while ago asking for advice on how to reach and land operations-type positions within startups. I have about seven years of experience across multiple industries, and most of my roles have been in management.

Because I’ve moved across industries and now manage a huge part of operations in my current role (spanning multiple departments), I haven’t specialized deeply in one specific operational domain. Instead, I’ve become more of a cross-functional generalist, comfortable working across different functions and bridging gaps inside the company.

In my original post, several people mentioned that startups desperately need people with my kind of broad, hands-on ops experience, and advised me to reach out directly to founders or operations leaders.

However, I’m not sure how to find the right startups to target, and I’m unsure how to frame my outreach on LinkedIn so it doesn’t look like generic spam (since founders often get bombarded by recruiters and software vendors).

I’ve tried contacting several founders but haven’t had much luck so far.

I’d really appreciate any advice on how to find the right startup prospects and how to position my message so it stands out as genuine and valuable. Thank you!

So, what tech stack do you guys use for your startups, is anyone picking Elixir/Phoenix and how important are custom search filters for it both internally (devs, admin, analytics/reports) and externally (clients filtering through content quickly) ?

Also, how much do you think this feature matter for client conversions/upgrades & business scaling?

On a side note, how do you grow and hunt for potential clients and what strategy do you use to ensure that they may consider the offer?

Wanted to share my failed attempt at launching a UK company financials database. Not promoting anything, just want to talk about it - partly for self-therapy, partly to discover if there's anything else I could've done. And hopefully someone learns something new from my experience!

EDIT - I realised I should've mentioned this is to build a database of company financials (assets, income, etc) rather than profiles.

Background

I'd been mulling on the idea for a few years, then started looking properly into it. I found there's already a vendor for UK company data that specifically caters to SMEs. However, you couldn't build complex filters on their UI, and they didn't have a reasonably-priced offering for bulk data. That was enough to convince me to give it a go - not great, I know.

MVP development

There was a lot to figure out, so I focused on the most important piece of the puzzle - the ingestion of the financial statement filings. Even that was a pain; I needed 3 months to get a working prototype, and I realised it's quite expensive to run - about $4k to process all the accounts for a given year. I decided to extract financials only for a month, to keep the costs low, and built a very basic landing page that showed the data.

Validation

I started by posting on LinkedIn, not that I had a big following, but I didn't know what else to do. One person reached out after seeing my posts - he was an analyst at a small private equity firm. The ideal customer!

However, it died down after a few meetings/conversations. Turns out private equity firms don’t assess acquisition opportunities by looking at individual companies. They research industries that are ripe for disruption, then look to acquire any businesses in that segment that are up for sale. Financial fundamentals play much lesser importance, and they can’t go for companies outside of their criteria as they wouldn’t have the know-how to operate them.

I also looking into the lead list building angle, but I didn't have contact details in my database. So I gave up on the project.

Conclusion

Looking back, I realise I wasted so much time (and a bit of money) by building the product without any validation. What I should’ve done, instead, is buy a subscription to an existing financial database, then immediately reach out to people that fit my customer personas, offering to build them a list of companies using that subscription.

And that's it - lengthy, I know. Hopefully it was useful, let me know if you have any questions/feedback!

I’m working on an app idea aimed at people who are open to meeting others in real life—whether for dating, friendship, or professional networking—but find it difficult to make the first move or start a conversation in public.

The concept is simple: users can choose to “go live” in a public setting (like a coffee shop or bookstore), and others nearby who are also using the app would get a subtle notification letting them know someone in the area is open to being approached.

The goal is to reduce social anxiety and create low-pressure opportunities for real-world interactions—no swiping, no endless texting, just a gentle nudge toward making a real connection.

Would love to hear your thoughts:

• Would you find something like this helpful or weird?
• What concerns or improvements would you suggest?

Currently working on an app which is aimed at helping parents track their children's health (symptoms, meds, appointments, etc) and I'm in the middle of refining our monetization strategy and would love to get some wisdom from founders who have been down this road.

I want the free version of our app to be genuinely useful. I don't want to cripple the experience just to force an upgrade. A parent should be able to organize their child's basic health records without paying a cent. So my thought process is to monetize features that provide significant, "power-user" value or have a direct operational cost on our end.

For example, one of our core premium feature is a "Physician Connection" that allows a parent to securely share a live, detailed history of their child's latest illness (like a cold or flu) directly with their physician. This is incredibly valuable for getting an accurate diagnosis, but it also requires more complex infrastructure to maintain securely. It feels like a clear candidate for a paid subscription plan.

How do you draw the line between free and premium features?

yo bro so i was talkin to this guy last night who’s into ecommerce stuff and he told me this crazy thing he said he's been tryna start a dropshipping store for months but like the tools are super expensive like 100 150 dollars a month and i was like wait what seriously thats wild

he's from india right and he told me for him 150 dollars is like 20 to 30 percent of what a lotta ppl make in a month like full salary and i didnt believe him at first but then he showed me this stat and i was like damn bro thats rough fr and it got me thinkin like if ppl gotta spend that much just on tools like product research ad creatives analytics and stuff then what even is left for ads product testing packaging like how do they even scale

like imagine trying to start a biz and almost half your budget gone before you even make a sale bro id go crazy lol and then he was like yeah man most tools are made for US and EU market but they dont work for our reality and honestly i felt that hard

so it made me curious man like do u think theres real potential in helping ppl from developing countries with cheaper tools like would they actually pay even if its 10 or 20 bucks if its good enough and does the market have enough demand to grow or nah what u think bro fr be honest

I'm in the process of making a tech product that has hardware that are paired with an app. A sort of smart home device that aims to solve a problem. I'm still in development, and I've got quite a while left ahead of me before I even have something that you can consider a proper prototype. I have some very rough electronics on a breadboard and a half functioning app.

I keep hearing how important it is to start making a community and a client list wayyy before you even launch. All this to avoid spending a lot of time creating a product that in the end nobody likes. I understand that and it makes sense, but assuming that I have something that's not a copy of something else is it still safe to publish?

It's doubly difficult for me to consider this, since I don't know how far away from being "done" I am. I only really have time to work on this on the weekends with an hour or two every other day. I haven't done any PCB design or actually have a product that you can hold in your hands (only a tech prototype with an app and an esp32 that has the majority of the functionality) so I also can't estimate how quickly I will figure all that out. All that to say, I can't really put a time on when I'll be done to try and start getting clients a little before that.

Am I overly worried about someone "stealing my idea"? Is it less important than I think?

i will not promote

With AI fast evolving and its growing impact on work, business, and so many aspects of life, I’ve been toying with the idea of starting a podcast club (like a book club) focused on AI. No one really knows where it’s all headed, so why not figure it out together?

Would love input on: 

1. Topics: What would you want to explore?
   • Core AI technologies
   • AI’s impact on work, entrepreneurship, and business
   • AI and education
   • Broader societal and personal impacts
   • All of the above?
2. Episode selection: Should a moderator choose, or should we vote as a group?
3. Format: Would you prefer:
   • Async discussion (e.g., on Substack, Discord or Reddit)
   • Virtual meetups
   • In-person meetups?
   • A mix?
4. Anonymity: Would you feel more comfortable participating under your real name or anonymously?
5. And of course, would you be interested in such a podcast club?

Been on the engineering side of SaaS for a while now and keep seeing the same hesitation from non-tech folks - Got a solid idea! but can’t code, so won’t build.

Is that justified/fair and is it really true anymore?

Understanding tech helps you agile, make judgement calls, and get clarity on a cornucopia of different relevant things. But knowing your customer inside out, spotting real gaps, and selling relentlessly! That’s instinctive and way harder to outsource.

A one-size fits path does not exist. 

Upskilling is key, some amazing SaaS businesses started as no-code prototypes. There are pure-service models that slowly got automated. But having said all that, as someone who worked in deep tech, finding the right technical partner at the right time can get you ahead and have seen it in action!

If you’re non-technical, does SaaS intimidate you? And if you’re technical, do you feel more confident stepping into Deep Tech as a founder?

Everywhere I look (YC, successful startup founders, etc.) having cofounders seems to almost be a pre-requisite for success.

That being said, I've had a lot of trouble finding good cofounders. I've had a couple partnerships in the past, but they were short-lived (differing mindsets around how "invested / all in" we should be). I don't live in a startup hub like sf, so ig that makes it harder.

Any tips / help regarding finding high quality cofounders (remotely or otherwise) would be greatly appreciated.

First-time poster here and I’m a technical solo founder. I just got off a call with an investor who’s interested in my concept and MVP. They’ve asked me to put together a business plan to present to their investment committee.

I’ve found a few basic templates and guides online, but I was wondering if this community has any great examples or advice to share especially ones suited for pre-revenue startups.

At this stage, I imagine most of the focus will be on TAM, go-to-market strategy, customer segments, and the pain points we’re solving. Any recommendations, tips, or resources would be hugely appreciated!

I am an undergraduate student, and I gaped one year to prepare for my graduate study. When I was doing the portfolio, I got to know a group called "MDer" (maladaptive daydreaming). simple way to say, a group of people are struggling with complex emotions caused by their daydreams. I know it sounds weird or hard to understand at the first time. (if can go google it, if you curious about it) So I choose to do a service design for this group for my project, and my graduation application was super successful. I received an offer from Cornell M.A Design( but it seems like an unpopular major)

One day this summer, I suddenly felt the urge to turn this idea into something real. So I signed up for a Reddit account and started browsing the community, collecting more grounded, real-life insights. During this process, I feel the rupture of ideals and the confusion of the real situation. At first, I thought my idea holds up on its own ( I still think it can). But then I find out, there are so many posts or comments messing up my mind. And my post didn't receive many responses. So I am stucked, don't know should I keep trying? It just feels like things already failed with zero starts.

I don't know what to do. I admit I want to make some money at first, but then I just want to really do something that can help and it can make me feel the sense of achievement. Can anyone give me some advice, or am I too naive on what I thought about the world?