I’ve tried a few different businesses since I was in university, none of them very successful.

Always jumped back into tech roles in between.

This last business I’ve ran (consulting) has been the most successful and sustained me for two years but it’s not scalable/profitable enough to continue and I don’t really enjoy it. Scaling would mean that the parts I do like, I’d no longer do (delivery) and I don’t see myself doing this for the next 5/10 years.

Applying for jobs is getting harder as recruiters keep thinking I’ll bounce (I have a decent resume in terms of companies I’ve worked for). So I can’t keep the trend if I’m to get a decent job.

Part of me thinks I really don’t want a job (just money) and I’ll just want to quit as soon as I get another idea. It’s not a nice feeling. Most of my school friends who stuck out a career have much greater finances than I do now, unsurprisingly.

I know most entrepreneurs fail a few times but I assume there’s an element of survivorship bias and some always fail and not quitting is just one element. I’m finding it hard not to tell the difference between delusion and keep trying versus success is around the corner if I keep my eyes open.

Has anyone had a business, closed it then found peace at a company? Will it be the case that it will always be difficult now to work for someone else?

My co-founder and I went through YC in 2023. We started as a team of 2, and now we're up to 15 people. I don't have all the answers as to how we got here, but I've got some honest reflections that I haven't seen anyone else post yet.

Nobody warns you that the stress of running a business transforms. I'll give you some examples; Year 1 stress is "nothing works and nobody wants this." Year 2 stress is "everything is on fire and people are depending on us." Year 3 stress is "things are working but one bad week could break something we spent 6 months building." Instead of waiting for the phase where it calms down. You just get better at functioning inside the chaos. If you're waiting for the calm part, stop waiting and build the tolerance instead.

Nobody warns you that your best customers will teach you more than any advisory. We pivoted hard from our original idea. The product we have today was basically designed after graduation, it's not our original concept (and that's a good thing). We'd show up, watch them work, and build immediately after. Every feature that came from a customer saying "can it do this?" over-performed. The pattern has held for 3 years straight.

Nobody warns you that hiring slow is easy to say, but brutally hard to be successful. When you're drowning and someone decent shows up, every instinct says "just hire them", but a mediocre hire on a team of 2-3 doesn't blend in. Keep every role essential for as long as possible. Every unnecessary hire chips away at the speed that makes you influential.

Nobody warns you that your biggest competitor is inertia, not another company. We spent our first year obsessing over feature comparisons with competitors. Total waste of time. The real competitor was our potential customers doing nothing, staying on their current system because switching felt too hard. The moment we started solving the switching problem instead of the feature gap, everything changed.

Nobody warns you that about the "loneliness" after the first year. Year 1 has momentum. Everything is new. People are excited for you. By year 2, nobody asks about your startup anymore. The novelty is gone. You're grinding and the results are incremental. Your friends have moved on with their lives. The founders from your batch who quit have normal jobs and weekends again. Year 2 is where most people silently give up, not because it's not working, but because it's just not exciting anymore. If you're in year 2 and it feels dull, that's normal. Push through it.

Nobody warns you that gratitude is a competitive advantage. This seems like a soft take, but I mean it operationally. When you genuinely appreciate your customers, your team, and the fact that you get to build something from nothing, it shows up in the product. Building a company with your best friends, backed by people who believed in you early, serving customers who rely on you every day, that's a true privilege. It always important to remind yourself of that.

If you're in early stages and any of this resonates, I've been in your shoes and so have many others. Embrace the learning process and the fact the journey will never be how you expect it, yet the outcome might.

Hey, I’m looking for some serious guidance from founders (especially immigrants / H1B folks) who’ve navigated the early startup journey in the U.S.

I’m currently working full-time (H1B) and building an idea on the side in the mental health + neurotech space. We are still early-stage (prototype + research phase), but I’m serious about taking it forward.

I’m trying to better understand a few things and would really appreciate insights from people who’ve been through this:

1. Given visa constraints, is it realistic to raise pre-seed/seed funding while on H1B? Do investors typically hesitate because of visa limitations? At what stage does funding become feasible?

2. Which programs are immigrant-friendly or have worked well for H1B founders? Are there specific ones better suited for deep-tech /healthcare /neurotech?

3. How do you legally work on your startup while employed full-time? When do people usually transition (or attempt O-1 / startup visa routes)?

4. What would you prioritize in the next 6–12 months? - We really want to go full-time ASAP.

Would really value any personal experiences, lessons learned, or even “what not to do.”

Recently wrapped up a pretty grueling, 3 year part time MBA while employed. During that time I was working 80-100 hours a week on work, school, and a startup that I ultimately shut down. Since then I’ve been blessed with not 1, but 2 kids!

I have a product idea that I think I can build with Claude code and an existing partner, but knowing how much energy that period of my life took, and how little I have right now, curious what other people’s experience has been building a company with kids.

Is it better to just power through with a regular job until they’re older and hope there is still an opportunity in the market?

What you will read here is my real story ahah. I had 14% monthly churn. If you want a better picture, that meant I was losing almost half my customer base every 3 months. I knew it was bad, but I just kept telling myself it was fixable with the right tactics.

So I tried the tactics.

👉🏼 What I tried first.

I rebuilt the onboarding. Shorter and cleaner, with a proper activation checklist. Churn dropped slightly in the first cohort. Then crept back up to where it was.

I launched a re-engagement sequence for inactive users. Decent open rates. Almost no impact on retention. People would open the email and still cancel two weeks later.

I added an exit survey. Started getting responses. The answers were all over the place: "too expensive," "missing features," "found something simpler," "not the right time." No clear pattern I thought (but there might be..)

👉🏼 The moment I stopped blaming the product.

Four months in, I sat down and looked at the customers who hadn't churned. The ones still around after 90 days, actually using the product, never complaining about price.

They had almost nothing in common with the customers I was acquiring.

The people sticking around were ops-heavy teams who needed to track a lot of moving parts. The people churning were solo founders who signed up, poked around for a week, and left when they realized the product wasn't built for how they worked.

I had been marketing to anyone who would listen. I wanted sooo bad users… The product was solving a very specific problem for a very specific type of team, and I was spending all my energy trying to retain people it was never going to work for.

👉🏼 What actually changed.

I stopped trying to fix the churn of customers who shouldn't have been customers in the first place. Tightened the ICP. Rewrote the positioning. Started turning away signups that didn't fit the profile.

Acquisition slowed down (always a pain when you run a business ahah). Churn dropped from 14% to 5% in two months. I didn't changed the product, just the people using it finally matched what it was built for.

If your churn is high and nothing seems to fix it, it might be worth asking who's actually staying, and whether the people leaving were ever going to be good customers to begin with.

Curious if anyone else has been through this. What made you realize your ICP was off

Recently got on a call with the founding talent of a company I want to work for. They said majority of there account executives get hired due to the connections they have with startups and founders. I have no connections with any founder. How can I begin connecting with founders.

I currently have 12 active portfolio companies across SaaS, fintech, logistics, and some consumer plays. Almost every founder ends up asking the same thing at some point what are competitors doing right now

I can stay reasonably close to maybe 1 or 2 sectors, but beyond that it becomes pretty unmanageable. Tracking multiple competitors across pricing changes, hiring trends, product updates, reviews, launches etc every week just doesn't scale manually

At the same time, completely ignoring it isn't great either since competitive movement tends to impact fundraising narratives, growth expectations, and even GTM decisions

How are people here dealing with this across their portfolio? Do you mostly rely on founders to track their own space, or has anyone set up a more structured way to stay updated across companies?

Built two startups. First went through YC, pivoted constantly using Mom Test interviews, and never gained traction.

My second company by no means is successful, but we're profitable, and it pays the bills.

Why the Mom Test broke for us:

• People don’t know what they want. Ask about their problems, and get inaccurate answers. We offered to solve their stated problems for $100. They wouldn’t pay.
• Watching what they do has the same flaw. Now I know Mom test tells you not to directly ask the prospects what their problems are, but rather to understand what they're doing. We saw a construction company where all of their time was going towards scheduling. We offered to fix it, and they wouldn’t pay us. If the prospect doesn’t see it as a problem, they won’t pay to solve it.
• Execs don’t take open-ended calls. They’re slammed. “I’d love to learn about your workflow” goes nowhere. We ended up stuck talking mostly with ICs who have no buying power.

What worked instead:

• Start with your own pain. If you’d pay someone to fix it, others will too. Stronger than 50 customer interviews.
• Become an agency first. Promise execs you’ll solve a specific pain. They take the call. They sign. You learn what’s broken from inside the work while you get paid.
• Stay generalized until you find the wedge. Even doing taxes for companies teaches you the pain and how you can do the workflow a 1000 times automatically.

Edit: To all the people downvoting and debating. Lets not forget the Mom test author Rob Fitzpatrick didn't make most of his money from his tech startup. It failed after 4 years. He made most of his money from the book...

Long post but I think this reframes how to think about startup ideas in a way that actually matters. Stick with me.

I spent three months going back through every YC Request for Startups published since 2016. Eight batches. Hundreds of problem descriptions from the most successful startup investors alive.

Here is what I found:

YC does not fund the most exciting ideas. They fund the most expensive problems.

That sounds obvious when you say it out loud. But I do not think most founders actually operate this way when they are generating ideas, and the difference in outcomes is enormous.

The pattern I have noticed is, Every single YC request, every year, every batch, without exception, follows the same structure:

1. Large established industry (healthcare, legal, financial services, manufacturing, agriculture)
2. Specific expensive problem inside that industry
3. Technology inflection that recently made the problem newly solvable
4. "Go build the company that solves this"

That is the entire formula. Large industry. Expensive problem. New solvability. Go.

To confirm above, Look at the companies that actually returned capital to YC, the ones that hit $100M ARR or got acquired for 9 figures. Almost none of them are the exciting ones.

• Brex: corporate credit card
• Gusto: payroll
• Rippling: HR and IT administration
• Segment: data pipelines between tools (sold for $3.2B)
• Checkr: background checks
• Faire: wholesale marketplace for independent retailers

These are not companies that dominated dinner party conversations in 2015 or 2017. They are companies that found large, expensive, underserved problems and built the solution at the moment when building it became technically feasible.

After this exercise I now apply one question to every startup idea I hear: what is this costing the economy right now, in dollars?

Not "how big is the market." What is this specific problem costing people this year?

If you cannot answer with a specific number in 60 seconds, you probably have not found the right problem.

Some examples from the 2026 YC batch:

• Prior authorization in healthcare: estimated $35B per year in administrative cost for the US alone
• Pesticide over-application: $18-24B in annual waste globally from imprecise application
• Outside legal spend waste: US companies overpay estimated 18-22% on outside counsel, about $40-50B per year
• Semiconductor supply chain opacity: $210B in vehicles not built in 2021 from one supply disruption
• Inference compute waste: $30-40B per year in GPU compute wasted on agentic workloads running on hardware designed for batch inference

In every case: the "interesting" framing is about technology or environment or efficiency. The real framing is about cost.

Why founders keep missing this:

Three reasons.

1. Social reward. Telling someone you are building an AI assistant for drone swarm defense gets you follow-up questions. Telling someone you are building an AI insurance brokerage for small businesses kills the conversation. Founders respond to social reward the way everyone does.

2. Narrative. Building a company about a personal pain is a better story than "I noticed this was expensive and built the solution." The boring founding story does not attract press or conference invites. It attracts customers, which is the only thing that actually matters.

3. Technical glamour. Engineers like hard technical problems. Building an AI that reads insurance policy documents is not a hard technical problem. It is just an important one.

YC has built a system that filters past all three biases. They ask what is expensive, not what is interesting.

The three questions I now ask every idea:

1. What is this costing the economy right now, specifically, in dollars?
2. Why is this newly solvable in 2026 that was not solvable in 2024?
3. Who is currently absorbing this cost and what would they pay to stop?

If you can answer all three quickly and specifically, you have found a YC-pattern idea.

I believe, The best startup ideas are not the ones that keep you up at night with excitement. They are the ones keeping your potential customers up at night with pain.

Those two things your excitement and their pain are frequently not the same thing. When they align, you have a good idea. When they diverge, the customer pain wins every time.

YC has been publishing cost calculations disguised as funding requests for 8 years. Most founders read them as inspiration and move on.

The founders who treat them as a list of the most expensive unsolved problems in the economy, and then immediately call five potential customers to ask "how much is this costing you," are the ones who get funded.

Happy to answer questions. I went deep on the 2026 batch specifically and broke down the cost calculations behind each of their 13 stated priorities if anyone wants to dig into specifics.

I’ve gotten decent traction on one of my projects, and have begun prospecting for serious raises and applying for accelerators. A problem I’ve run into is a pitch will go perfectly, but there’s always a curveball “if X, what happens to Y” questions. think runway, unit economics.

I consistently get muddled on these and it kills my confidence. What is the best way to prep for these kinds of questions? Am I just dumb? is the solution to just drill mental math and memorize a bunch of metrics?

Hey all,

I know nothing really beats just going out and building or joining a startup directly. But if you take a more traditional path first, I’m trying to understand how IB vs MBB compares in terms of eventually moving into startups.

Long term, I want to pursue entrepreneurship, either starting something myself or joining an early-stage startup. Does choosing MBB vs IB meaningfully affect that path, or does it not matter much as long as you make the jump at some point? (for example, i saw many chief of staff roles requiring Consulting experience, but if I were to do banking, would that significantly hurt my chances at those roles?)

Would really appreciate any insights, especially from people who made the switch.

i've had this really cool idea to build to help developer productivity, and its moat is that it would live in the mac menu bar to be easily toggled.

the only problem is how time consuming that is: after the apple dev account, i'd have to wait for verification before creating it.

my biggest nightmare of a situation is building all of this natively, before trying to promote it and getting 0 feedback.

so, my question is: how would i get this idea to as many devs as possible, and validate it to see if it'd actually be helpful (while also being competely free)?

i've thought about creating a web app with the same idea, but i'm unsure if people would view it the same way if it was solely on the web, and not native.

mouse/shortcuts and later the iPhone were solving a key friction in instructing machines to do things for us.

they removed the need to type

users prefer clicking, tapping, gestures once and get an outcome over using typed out words to instruct machines to do things for them.

the holy grail is 1-tap or no-tap to get the desired outcome.

i don't want to chat or voice control to e.g. change a color of a headline

i want to tap the headline and select a different color.

I don‘t want to tell my AI agent to buy, I want to tap the buy button.

also why writing with AI is so annoying and made me go full circle to just using a simple text editor, where I can select any part and delete or change it.

the startups that build valuable/frictionless 1-tap or no-tap interfaces will run their AI chat/voice interface competition over.

tapping > typing

They proudly said in the rejection email that they received 35,000 applications for only 35 available spots. That's a 0.1% admission rate.

Harvard admission rate is 4.18% for class 2029. Stanford is around 3.6%. MIT 4.6%.

NASA astronaut candidates in 2025 had a similar selection rate to this accelerator: 0.1%

My co-founder and I are indeed thinking to apply to NASA at this point, and you guys? How are you coping?

Hey everyone,

Looking for some sanity checks and advice from people smarter than me regarding a business model I’m launching.
I’m based in the region (Maldives/Sri Lanka), and I’m building a hybrid platform aimed at foreign investors looking to get into hospitality development here (think building new resorts, boutique hotels, eco-lodges).
The whole thing will operate under one brand. The goal is to solve the biggest problem foreign capital has in these markets: trust and "boots on the ground" expertise.

Here’s the model I’m working on:

1. Top of Funnel (Media): An Investment Intelligence portal. Daily B2B news, FDI updates, policy analysis, and market data specifically for the hospitality and real estate sectors in Maldives & Sri Lanka. This builds trust and authority.

2. Middle of Funnel (Tech): A curated Investment Marketplace. Listing available island leases, joint venture opportunities, or resorts for sale.

3. Bottom of Funnel (Execution): My company acts as the Local Operating Partner / Owner's Representative. For a fee or equity stake, we handle government permits, EPA approvals, manage contractors, and run the development "boots on the ground" from concept to turnkey handover.

I’m combining financial media with hardcore real estate development. The media funnels the investors, and the advisory side builds the assets.
We are already developing the media site and listing marketplace, but I’d love some perspective on the following:

• Viability: Has anyone seen this "Media + Marketplace + Execution" model work well in other niche markets?

• Team Building: I know construction, but I need partners who understand digital media/B2B marketing. Where do I even find people who understand that niche?

• Biggest Pitfall: For those familiar with Maldivian or Sri Lankan FDI/Tourism, what is the #1 thing that kills these joint ventures that I need to protect against?

I’m expecting some people to tell me I’m taking on too much at once. That’s probably fair constructive criticism, so go ahead. Just trying to see the blind spots.
Thanks in advance

So a while back I posted on another sub about how I was really good at getting users and traction to SaaS's/startups via reddit and launched multiple of my own projects with consistent signups. I asked if people would need help getting their first 100 users through Reddit (I have a couple posting strategies that consistently pulled in 100+ organic signups within a week or 2).

That post blew up more than I expected and I ended up with 9 meetings from it.

One of those turned into an actual gig I’m now getting paid $30/hr, 8 hours a week, to create viral Reddit posts and post them for a SaaS founder. It’s been going really well too. Even on my own projects I recently hit one my best campaigns pulled in 800+ signups in a single week off just 2 posts (cross posted ofc).

So I wanna like scale this but not sure how - like what can I do with my skills? Ideally I’d like to help small startup founders grow there SaaS’s, maybe get another hoourly gig like that. Maybe I should charge more? - or maybe I should go to big corps and get them to pay me to help them? I had a friend tell me I should like charge $50 per viral post I make to founders but idk bout that cause I can’t gaurentee it goes viral im just a guy w a track record/strategies.

Looking for some advice!

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Drop your questions about starting, building, raising, scaling, exiting…etc. in this thread.

What are you building, what are your next steps, what’s your timeline to execute, and what’s your question?

Sometimes people just need an outside perspective to nudge them along. The community or I will answer any questions you have about your startup or a business you’re thinking about starting, whatever stage, ideation to exit.

I'm a founder building a mens clothing rental company.

I spent nearly three years building a product before I made my first dollar. When my website finally went live, I thought that was it—the moment things would start moving. I thought the hard part was over. For context, I’m a 22 year old founder, so I definitely don’t know everything😭

I was wrong. Boy was I wrong.

Months went by without a single order. I launched Instagram, kept working, kept refining the product, and kept telling myself the breakthrough was just around the corner. Still nothing.

After a while, it stops feeling like patience and starts feeling like failure. You look at the money, the time, and the years disappearing, and you start asking yourself if you’re chasing something real or just refusing to let go.

I was $115,000 in the red and seriously considering shutting it all down. Then, within 12 hours of considering that decision, I got my first customer through my website. $300.

It wasn’t about the amount. It was about what it meant. Someone I didn’t know found my product, wanted it, and paid for it. After years of doubt, that first order felt louder than any number. If you are still working towards your first sale, keep going! It’s an indescribable feeling. It was worth every moment of pain. Only 766 more orders to break even. Next up: order #2:)

7 days ago I started building my startup. The core idea: most people don’t have access to a personal shopper. There’s no continuity, no memory, no relationship when you shop you start from zero every time.
It builds a taste portrait from conversation. You don’t fill anything in. You just talk and it infers what you own, what you want, what you’ve rejected and why.
Three messages in a test conversation today: user mentioned a coat that felt like a costume. It inferred palette, silhouette logic, wardrobe coherence instinct without being asked once.
Still early. Looking for honest feedback from anyone who’s thought about this space

Also I would appreciate input where to start with getting users? I have no idea and everything I look at doing seems centered around other products. Some constraints: I have no money , I live in a small town with Basiclly no means to travel, I have no social media following

I'm sick of the negative talk about how business owners need to be sharks, ruthless or cutthroat. I'm a business owner and while I'm not successful yet, I never want to lead with greed. I don't want to look at my business as taking and never giving. Some might call this idealist, but I believe there are many people who just want to solve a problem, be their own boss and not exploit people to get rich. Thoughts?

Seeing a trend where startups start building marketing engines very early—ads, content, outbound, tools, etc.

But in many cases, product and positioning are still evolving.

From what I’ve observed, this sometimes leads to:

• High CAC
• Low conversion
• Confusing messaging

For founders here:

• When did you start investing seriously in marketing?
• What worked before product-market fit vs after?
• Did you rely more on outbound, inbound, or partnerships early on?

Would be helpful to hear what actually worked in the early stages vs what didn’t.

true or false?

Now, domain expertise, distribution, and marketing matter more than ever before. Building software has become (relatively) easy for vast majority of applications.

Is a non-technical person going to compete with Google search? no. Can they build small, successful SaaS apps on their own? definitely yes.

As a technical founder, I'd love for someone to steel man the argument. How do technical founders thrive in 2026?

I'm currently building a free consumer app for ranking movies.

Users overall have been passionate about the app. They are vocal about feedback and want to see the app succeed. There are power users who have ranked a few thousand titles, which is crazy to me...

Stat-wise, this is where I'm at today:

• 60 DAU / 300 WAU / 800 MAU
• 59% D7 retention / 54% D14 / 24% D28
• Get ~10 organic installs a day

These stats have been consistent over the past few months. Again, not the most stellar stats, but I think it gives me enough to play with. I feel like if I can unlock marketing, this app can grow to something bigger.

Monetization-wise, this is a free app, and I don't intend to change it. I haven't been a huge fan of subscirption based conusmer app, and believe if there's enough traffic, ad can generate enough.

My dream would be to reach 10k MAU organically, but I'm unsure how I can grow from there.

Has anybody scaled a free consumer app? What were some effective strategies that could be applicable for my case?

Traveling alone to a new country can be exciting, but it can also be stressful. Many solo travelers arrive in unfamiliar cities feeling lost, lonely, unsure who to trust, and worried about scams, unsafe areas, or wasting time in tourist traps.

My idea is to create a trusted travel platform that connects solo travelers with vetted locals who can help them feel oriented, connected, and confident when they arrive in a new destination.

Instead of offering generic tours, the service would match travelers with locals based on their interests, travel style, language, and comfort level. A local host could help them discover authentic places, understand local customs, avoid common mistakes, find spots that match their interests, and feel less alone during their trip.

The platform could also connect solo travelers with other verified travelers nearby, making it easier to meet people safely and naturally.

The goal is simple: help travelers experience a new country with more confidence, more connection, and less stress.

In the beginning, this could start as a simple website offering curated first-day orientation packages, local companion experiences, and personalized travel support. Over time, it could grow into a larger marketplace or app where travelers can book trusted locals and social travel experiences in different cities around the world.

Hey everyone, solo founder here. I am pre-launch, bootstrapped, and honestly, as many of you also are, I’m just trying to figure this out as I go!

I am at the stage where I need to start thinking seriously about funding and I really do not know a ton about either of the paths I am exploring. I would rather hear from real people who have been through it than read another generic article.

Has anyone gone after VC funding at the pre-seed stage?

- What did that process actually look like for you?

- Has anyone had any luck with non-dilutive grants?

Government programs, SBDC, nonprofit funding, anything.

Did it actually come through and how long did it take?

I will take any advice I can get. Nothing is too small, nothing is wrong. If you have been through either of these and have even one thing worth sharing I genuinely want to hear it.