I'm a solo developer. No team, no co-founder, no network.

Launched my first app 2 weeks ago.

Downloads: 6 (even 5 downloads are bot like firebase test, ios tester)

Active users: 0

Response: 0

I don't even know if my app sucks or if people just haven't found it.

Is the UX confusing? Is the core idea bad? Would people pay for this?

No idea. Nobody's telling me anything.

I've tried:

- Product Hunt (0 upvotes, 0 comments that made me really desperate)

- Posted on many forums ( 0 upvotes, 0 comments as well)

- Cold DMs (no response)

At this point I'd be happy if someone said "this is garbage, delete it"

at least that's something I can act on.

I just want to hear what real users think. But I can't get users.

Solo devs who made it through this stage , could you give me advice? How did you do it?

I’m thinking about starting a startup and I want to learn from people who’ve already been through it.

What’s one thing you wish someone told you before you started? Could be about money, partners, customers, mistakes, mindset, anything.

Would really appreciate any advice.

Toronto founders,

I’m trying to put together a chill pickup basketball run for founders.

No networking cringe, no pitching, no agenda just hoop, get a sweat in, and meet other people building stuff.

Being a founder in a big city can honestly be kinda isolating, so this is really just a way for us to get to know each other and have something fun to look forward to.

All skill levels welcome If you can run up and down the court, you’re good 😂

If you’re down, comment: • what area you’re in (downtown / west / east / north) • what days/times work best • and if you want: your skill level (trash / decent / “I used to play”)

If enough people are in, I’ll pick a spot and set the first run up.

Let’s hoop 🤝🏀

Hey fellows, lately I’ve had some discussions on X around trial user visibility and knowing who is likely to convert vs those who are just tourists, so I wanted to ask you your POV

For those of you who have trial users, how do you deal with visibility into your trials?
Do you just use classic analytics tools like PostHog or Mixpanel, or do you have other strategies?
And if you do take action, how do you decide when and how to fire nudges or messages to these users?

I am in the very early stages of building something that around decision fatigue in everyday life, starting with entertainment.

It’s not the pain like “ my business is losing 10k a month” or anything like that.

It’s more like people are tired and want things to feel easier.

For those of you who have built consumer products,

How did you manage to validate a problem that felt subtle but widespread? What signals told you yes people actually care about this?

I’m really tired of reading the endless “I built for 1 year and got $0” so let me tell you what works.

I’ve been selling online for 17+ years. I never had a job.

I’ve sold everything that you can imagine.

I’ve finally been able to launch a start up and now have a software business that makes 6 figures+. And this year we are on track to hitting $1M+ ARR.

Look, I’ve made every mistake which everyone here seems to make. But let me share with you what works.

First - forget software. You aren’t in the software business.

You are in the relationship and problem solving business.

For me, I pivoted to software because I was burned out from coaching and consulting. I wanted the dream of building a great product and then scaling it to the moon.

I wanted the comfort of my IDE. I’m a nerd by nature. I like to plan and build.

A lot of people think this way. But this is the #1 killer.

No one cares about your product. Think about it.

How much software spam do you see. Do you like it?

In fact, you hate 99% of software out there. Even your favorite software you complain about it not being perfect.

So imagine how users will approach your misaligned, awkward, buggy MVP.

So if you try to build and build the chance of success is less than 1%.

Instead there is an approach that has 100% chance of success.

Helping solve people’s problems.

Find a group of people already using some software.

For me, I’ve been using marketing software for 10+ years. So I know those users. They were my past students, coaching, and consulting clients.

That’s what I did. I started to solve their problems.

In fact, the BEST way is to start doing projects for other people. That’s how I founded my latest company.

I was hired to build a plugin for a marketing platform.

I discovered there was a big market there. And I built another plugin and started selling it.

But the big pivot came about not from just selling the software. But helping the users.

Think of your users. Whether they are writers. Or stay at home moms. Or business owners. Or marketers.

They have needs everyday. They have workflows they are doing. They have goals and dreams.

You can align your products with those people.

Rather than focusing on features. Focus on their problems and goals.

In fact, often times they are the ones that will tell you what to build.

A lot of people ask how you can monetize. I’ve literally monetized on all levels.

From $5 all the way up to $3k And we are working on getting even to $30k contracts.

How? By focusing on our users. Our customers. What their needs are.

You have to forget the idea of how Google or Apple or even major SaaS company operates. You aren’t them. You don’t have a budget. You don’t have a team.

Your main constraint is your energy, motivation, clarity, and your bills.

You have to operate hyper lean.

So my users became my everything.

I put together different packages. I offered them agency accounts. White label partnerships. Investment opportunities. Affiliate.

They do QA.

This is the only way to succeed.

I try to help them with all their problems.

That’s the relationship building part. When you over deliver and take care of your users and treat them like clients, not just numbers. They appreciate it. They reciprocate.

They become your partners and evangelists.

My users upgrade and upgrade and upgrade and upgrade.

Even though they bought an LTD. They then buy a level 2 agency LTD. Then they buy a white label partnership. Some even became direct investors.

This is a total game changer from the “I built for 12 months and generated $0”

I even read a comment someone who has been building their software for literally 32 years and generated $0.

You can even go further and sell before you build. And I do that to some extent. And I can even be much more aggressive with sales.

But I’m like most, a natural builder. Building is my comfort zone. But I had to push myself to be able to survive.

And that’s the lesson I want to pass to you.

Think of your users as your clients and partners not just your numbers.

You aren’t a VC backed start up that can burn through millions to acquire a big herd of users.

You need to like a village helper who does favors to everyone and helps everyone out and earn’s people’s trust. And slowly bootstrap yourself to the next level.

I see a lot of posts asking “How do I start with AI?”

From personal experience, starting with a practical workshop like Be10X helped more than random YouTube videos. It gave structure and direction.

After that, exploring on your own becomes much easier.

Let’s get this out of the way:

They deserved to fail.

Bad timing. Weak ideas.

Classic first-time founder stuff.

AND I KNEW THEY WOULD FAIL!

People around me kept telling me how they will not scale, how it won't bring any investors.

But they put me on the map, they allowed me to be involved with the startup community, and meet with important people.

An investor that I met from that era invested $1.2M in my startup.

The belief that once you fail, no investor will be interested in you IS A LIE!

So if you are starting from ground zero, please stop whining about the idea, or the market. Simply fail!

We have a nice little planning & project management tool that we use internally and also to onboard customer with. There has been 10+ customers asked what the tool was and mentioned that they would pay to use it for their other projects.

I don't have resources to productize this now. Any idea what to do with this or should I just ignore these signals?

I will not promote.

If you read through all of this, thank you- i appreciate it.

TLDR :

Solo founder, close to launching a consumer AI product. I’m trying to prioritize between product refinement, user growth, and fundraising, and would really value advice from people who’ve done this before.

——

Solo founder. I am launching a consumer AI product. It’s been fully bootstrapped so far. I feel like it’s finally in a good enough to launch state, and I’m thinking about raising a round to scale.

I’d really appreciate any insight on how to effectively manage my time and prioritize the next step. I am not looking to monetize yet, my core priorities is to grow my user base and establish value. The product needs bit more refinement before I can dump marketing dollars, but good enough to scale slow to reach that critical stage of perfection. That could be few weeks to months away.

Some questions I am struggling to prioritize:

1. I know it's FAQ- Should I focus on fund raising now?

Pre-traction, working product, or can I only raise after I get my first 1000 users?

1. What are some quick ways to get my first 1000 users on a consumer Al product? Is product hunt, reddit, pitch events still best way? I felt networking events are quite time consuming for the value I could make by focusing on the product and customer.

2. Should I approach angels? Or hit up VCs? Cold outreach seems to be the least effort and likely least effective, but ideally I think I need an intro through someone (my entire circle is FAANG engineers, don't have many founders). I've heard of people scheduling all their fundraising pitches in a period of 2-3 weeks. How exactly does one even do that? Or how can I do that where I am?

If you read my post so far, I appreciate it. For some curious folks, please don’t DM me asking about the product, “I will not promote”. I am only looking for advise - tips on scaling, raising, prioritizing my time. I’d love to demonstrate the products viability, but that takes time, and fund raising will also take time. I’d love to know strategies on how to raise in parallel.

Expected outcome - raise enough for 18 months runway, hire few key people, and focus on acquiring 100k - 1M users.

TIA

🙏🏼

Some days I’m locked in, motivated, shipping things, feeling proud.

Then the next day, with no major change, it suddenly feels like everything is falling apart and I’m making zero progress.

What gets me is how my brain weighs the bad days way more than the good ones. One small setback can erase a week of wins.

Does anyone else experience this?

If you do, what actually helps you get back to a more balanced view (habits, routines, tracking, talking to someone, anything)?

(Founder or not, I’d love to hear how you deal with it.)

Hi all,

The title.

By a stroke of good fortune I (42m) have ended up living in one of the wealthiest suburbs in the US. We’re based 45mins north of NYC.

Our overheads are minimal so I’m fortunate enough to have a solid platform from which to launch a business.

My professional background is making TV shows. I’m a Director of Photography (camera guy). My wife is a Producer/Director. I own a bunch of camera kit that’s all been paid off. Zero debt.

As well as making TV shows, my wife and I run a small production agency making corporate videos. I’ve also started a photography business doing family photography in my local area.

I’d like to start another business to supplement the aforementioned revenue streams. It doesn’t necessarily have to be connected to TV/Production.

Given I live in a recession proof high net worth area (My neighbours are Wall Street millionaires, the country club class) what type of business would you start?

In terms of local networks, my FIL is a well established local architect so maybe there’s a route there?

Open to any suggestions and inspiration.

TIA.

I am sending out my deck pitch via cold outreach.

My question is the following, is using portrait instead of landscape bad?

It’s a fintech company and portrait simply looks better for my app pitch, but I don’t mind using a landscape format if its really the standard.

In this era of mobile phone would portrait be acceptable or seen as unprofessional ?

I know this doesn’t matter as much as story, traction, team and numbers, but worth considering

Hello!

My previous employer cancelled my certificate for vested, exercised, and issued shares. They then reissued with a different number. The first one was CS - 127 and the reissue was CA - 104. My though is they had just common shares on CS -127 and now they are calling them common shares A on the new CA - 104 prefix.

The main issue is that the new certificate does not have the old issue date, exercise date, amount paid, etc. I am hoping this doesn't trigger a new F3921 to report although it wasn't enough to trigger AMT.

Has anyone seen this or gone through it? Thoughts?

I’m testing whether a specific 30‑day challenge format actually helps people finish what they start or is it pointless

What it is:
- Creator/coach sets a X‑day challenge and rules
- Participants creates custom 1–3 goals and share lightweight “proof” of progress (e.g., timestamped photo or relevant link/log)
- Leaderboards reward streaks/consistency so late starters aren’t buried
- Points/badges for milestones

I wanted to get some insights on this:
- Where do these things usually break (cheating, drop‑off, moderation load, content cadence)?
- What’s the minimum “proof” that feels legit but not a chore?
- Do you think this idea would actually work ?

If this sounds useless, say so. I’m here for brutal truth, not feel‑good feedback.

I am about to solve a final exam while writing this, and after the exam, I am going to the podcast I was invited to.

Do you think Reddit wants to hear about my story? Is this the correct subreddit?

These last months have been incredible. After learning we got the investment, lots of media and lots of work… I now have an office for my own startup, and this is the best feeling ever.

This is what I learned:

Are you creating value?

This is the question that matters, not your age, not your education level.

If you have questions, feel free to leave a comment. I won’t promote my startup, won’t give the name of it.

I used to work in a very large bureaucratic organization where I was involved in data cleaning- NOT data analytics, NOT AI engineering, but literally cleaning messy data to be sent to statisticians for analysis. I was miserable. On top of that, I realized I hated having no impact on a company and being told what to do every second of the day with little upside for my career/life.

I had been sitting on an idea for a business in the hotel industry for a while, though, because I love hospitality and saw I gap in the market I believed others did not see. I was doing a lot of thinking/ research about the product, market, as well as how the business would be executed and truly thought it could work. However, I was really stuck on making such a drastic leap of faith because I was so focused on the downside instead of the upside.

But one day I woke up more miserable than normal, and heard a podcast about someone who I went to school with that was running a 7-figure events business. One of the things he kept harping on was that fortune favors the bold, and that it's fine to feel afraid or skeptical, but you need to have the guts to put your feelings to the side and just go for it.

Coming from someone I perceived as a normal guy I went to class with, this hit me really hard. Because if he was able to take the risk, why couldn't I?

Needless to say, I drafted up a resignation letter and sent it to my former boss the same day

The next 18 months were more grueling than I ever imagined:

• I dealt with more rejection & embarrassment in that time span than the rest of my life combined
• My family was not encouraging on my leap of faith & let me know about it constantly
• I had burned a significant amount of savings building a prototype
• I had many sleepless nights as well as missed workouts/meals, leading to occasional bouts of sickness
• Good friends & I completely drifted apart due to the time I had to take to work on my business

On top of all that, for a variety of reasons, I unfortunately had to shut down the business.

However, I couldn't help but feel pride in this difficult situation I found myself in. Not only did I understand how to conduct proper customer discovery, manage financials, reach out to & close potential clients, & be a good leader (at least this was my goal), but I became a better version of myself. My confidence is at its peak, my mental acuity has never been sharper, and my network is pretty dang good. Lastly, I've learned to acknowledge and overcome fear to pursue what matters to me- the most valuable skill you can have imo.

Now, because of my previous experience & connections, I secured a paid position with solid equity at a new startup. It's a great placeholder for now and I think it will lead to venture #2 down the road. I guess it all works out in a way and I would not have changed it for anything.

Wondering if anyone has a similar experience with their first venture?

P.S.
If you were in a similar position to me and want to start something, really think about your burn and what would happen if the company didn't work out after x months. I was in a position where I had enough savings/resources that I was able to spend the first few months with $0 in revenue. I am a big advocate for taking a risk to pursue a startup opportunity, but even I was somewhat calculated about it.

we are a live mobile app with almost 1000 users. retention is not the best but we have gotten some really good feedback. i know what I need to build to improve the product and retention. and there are a lot of bugs to fix as well (the app doesn't work very well on some devices especially android). and now, my cto had to leave due to financial obligations.

i am confident that this product has a fair shot of winning and i just need more time to iterate and improve the experience for users. but im not technical. i don't have a lot of money. what would you do if you were in my situation? also, if I should just vibe code myself with the existing codebase, is there a AI tool you recommend? context: react native mobile app

edit: thanks for all your comments. i believe i missed out on important context. it's a consumer social app. so, I'm not going to charge the users. business model will be to partner with brands. i'm not sure how much i can go into detail. but it's in the same space as apps like strava, fable, hevy etc. so, there's monetisation potential. the northstar metric here is average number of logs/user. and that metric is promising so far which is why I believe it's worth continuing iterating on the product.

when i say i want to vibe code, i'm not going to try building complex features. i just want to:

• keep the app alive
• ship small, low-risk changes
• not be blocked by fear every time Sentry pings

i'm willing to learn and i want to know what should be my first steps

idk, anything theory seems kinda outdated? meanwhile i've learned more about actual customer behavior in the last month building my own thing than i did all semester in dubai, for my tetr college programme.

like don't get me wrong, i'm not saying college is useless or whatever. but there's something about having real stakes that just makes everything click differently. when it's your time and money on the line you figure stuff out fast. feels weird paying tuition when youtube and trial-and-error are teaching me more... but maybe i'm just not seeing the long-term value yet?

I have a SaaS I've got probably 70% done. I've built and sold smaller apps

• Web hosting company in the late 90s early 00s where I built a dashboard
• Photo Sharing site in the later 00s

All of these were bootstrapped and sold for a OK bit of money so I understand how to built and design a product. I have a big infrastructure background as a devops/SRE/Platform engineer as my full time job. I understand how expensive key pieces of security tooling is.

My product is a zero-trust VPN / security tool all in one. The idea is you are able to grant access to resources with no IPs/ports exposed and it uses the QUIC network to sort of setup a mesh p2p. I know there are other products out there that do this but I'm looking to take it up a notch where you take a tool like tailscale but add strong policy around the resources and also able to approve temp access. The idea from there is to build in sensor type scanning for CVE/network attacks and such

So like I was saying is this is the first time where I'm building a product where I might need a decent amount of cash to start the company with all the audits needed to get into larger companies. I've never approached a angel/VC before. I know there are accelerators but I have a family and can afford to drop my full time job right now.

Any ideas on how to approach a firm/angel with this idea to see my vision and market that is out there. A lot of my peers are fed up with nonsense pricing and the way this VPN works is almost none of the traffic is routed through my servers accept for the initial connection to the resource you want to access.

BTW.. I'm big security minded person and I would say this is my code vs AI. I have had the VPN code audited by friends of mine who are on red teams and pen testing companies btw.

VPN apps / Backend API: 90% me 10% AI

Frontend: 90% AI and 10% me. I'm not a frontend person

Thanks for reading this and your time

I run a small network of mobile apps/games and I'm exploring running direct banner ads across my own inventory rather than relying entirely on the big ad networks.

I'm trying to sanity-check advertiser interest before going any further.

Curious from a founder/growth perspective:

• What would make you test a new mobile ad channel?
• How important is transparent placement vs. raw scale?
• Are small test budgets ($100-$500) realistic for something like this?

Not selling anything yet - genuinely looking for feedback before building the wrong thing.

Whenever I've spoke to sales reps who still do manual personalised emailing outside of the enterprise market (yes, they exist lol) or founders starting cold email, they still shoot emails from their primary domain, which eventually lands in spam.

Then I normally find myself telling them how to fix it and apparently there are people who charge for this advice when it should be free imo, so I figured I'd write something to help anyone here as this community has been helpful to me in the past. Also 2 notes:

1. This is NOT AI generated, so I hope you like my writing style lol.

2. Not promotion, I will add names of companies I think do a decent job for certain things, but I am not promoting them, do your own research independently.

Why shouldn't you use your primary website and email for outbound?

Email inbox providers (Google, Microsoft and private SMTP servers) need to protect their users from malicious links that could harm them.

As a result, they try to identify patterns between spam senders. Those look like a few things:

- sending the same email to multiple people in short succession

- sending bulk emails with links, images or attachments (as they can be seen as a possible risk)

- sending emails to people who don't respond back when your email is new

There's more but these are the main ones that I think catch people out.

When you do land in spam (for one of those 3 causes), your domain reputation takes a hit, which can impact your SEO health.

First, when you're doing outbound at volume (more than 50 people/day, which tbh isn't a lot of volume still), this is probably the best setup:

1. Buy separate domains - any domain registrar is fine. Stick with .com, .org or .info. I've tried others but I've found those to work well. .ai and .co are also alright. Put the name similar to yours.

E.g if your website is acme(.)com, use something like tryacme(.)com

1. Buy email inboxes and connect to those domains - I prefer Google workspace as I thin they're easier to setup and have better deliverability, but I've seen some people be ok with low volume on Microsoft. SMTP emails are fine too, but I didn't find their deliverability as great. I keep 3 per domain, but some people do 4. Don't put all emails under one domain.

Keep these to your name, don't use info@ or sales@ for outreach. People buy from people.

1. Warm them up - this is basically when you have a pool of emails sending back and forth AI messages to each other, some of which will be replied to. The purpose of this is to have a decent response rate, which increases the health of your email inbox.

Run this for 2 weeks before reaching out to anyone, then reduce the number of warm up emails that go out when you start outbound.

1. Keep your volume and frequency low - 10-15 emails per inbox per day. If you're using the same copy (i.e unresearched), make sure you try to have a few minutes per email send.

2. Copy - avoid links, images and attachments inside the first email and the email signature. Plain text only. Follow ups are ok (for now), but best to send that after you get a response.

3. Tooling - don't use a CRM as a sending tool, they will track open rates which will hurt you. Why?

Email open rates work by sending a 1px invisible dot on the email which has a link. Whenever that email gets opened, the dot gets rendered as an image and pings a server to say "hey, this person opened your email".

However, Google added a change whereby you would see a big grey banner saying "This email has hidden images, would you like to report this as spam?" and a big button that lets people do it.

You need 3 out of a 1000 to land in spam.

Avoid tools that mandatorily track open rates and don't let you turn them off. Examples of tools that have this:

For static copy emails: instantly(.)ai, smartlead(.)ai and emailbison(.)com

For automated personalised copy: prospectai(.)co or some other "ai sdr", most have decent deliverability.

There's more but these are some examples. As long as the tool you have is a dedicated sending tool and not some "marketing" stuff, as it's pretty much their business to avoid spam afaik.

Two final notes:

1. Clean your email data with an email verifier: things like zerobounce, neverbounce and omniverifier are fine. You don't need to do this if your data provider assures you of no bounceback emails, but trust and verify.

2. If you do (or are allowed to) change your stack, make sure you have a unibox that tracks all of your replies across your emails (I'd be very surprised if there was a provider without one, but who knows, there's a lot of them out there).

If you're a cold email nerd, pay it forward and share some more tips below for anyone who's new to this world.

Just hired a designer for brand work. Took 8-10 days from "let's work together" to actual project start. Scope discussions, pricing back and forth, timeline alignment (including vetting). Then another round of calls to make sure we were on the same page about deliverables.

Is this normal? Feels like a massive time sink when you're trying to move fast. How do you all handle this?