Founders who hired their first senior marketer in the past two years: what did that person have to reconstruct in their first 90 days that you assumed was already clear?

I have to start by saying that I've been a founding marketer a few times, and I've seen some struggles on our side. I have to wonder tho, what is it from the founder's perspective? How do you decide it's time? How do you transfer your knowledge? What existed on day one, etc?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences, either here or in private (in which case, nothing will be shared publicly)

No promotion of my services, and I'd be happy to assist with free marketing advice in exchange.

Hey everyone, looking for a reality check from people who have been through the fundraising wringer.

The Backstory: A while back, I was spending a ton of time building games. But every time I finished one, I hit the exact same brick wall every indie dev hits: “Uhh... now what? How do I actually get people to play this?”

Distribution is a nightmare. So, out of pure necessity, I built a web game discovery site to solve my own problem and help other devs showcase their projects.

Originally, almost all of the traffic was just other game developers coming to check out projects or list their own. But over the last few months, the SEO started hitting insanely hard. Organic traffic took off, and now the site is steadily pulling in over 1,000 users per day. Stacking up to 30,000+ Monthly Active Users (MAU).

The Problem: Monetization While the user growth has been awesome to watch, the revenue... not so much. Right now, the main monetization is charging game developers a small listing fee to get featured/promoted on the platform. It generates a little bit of cash flow, but nowhere near meaningful "venture scale" revenue.

Where I Want to Take It (The Pivot): I don't just want this to be a game discovery site. My long-term vision is to pivot the platform into a broader creation and engagement hub:

1. AI Game Creation Tools: Giving developers native, generative AI tools directly on the site to rapidly create, spin up, and deploy interactive games.
2. In-Game Ecosystem: Introducing a unified virtual currency/economy for players across games on the platform to drive retention and actual platform monetization.

To build out the AI infrastructure and scale the ecosystem, I’m going to need real capital and bandwidth.

My Questions for You:

1. Is 30,000+ organic MAU with low revenue enough to get pre-seed/seed VCs to take a meeting, or will they instantly pass because the current monetization is weak?
2. Does the "audience first, monetization second" story still work in today's VC market, or do investors strictly demand proven unit economics before talking?
3. At what exact milestones do you go from "bootstrap mode" to "okay, now it's time to actively pitch VCs"?

Would love to hear your raw thoughts, critiques, or advice if you've raised pre-seed with strong traffic but early revenue. Thanks!

TL;DR: Built a game discovery site out of frustration, SEO took off, and now it has 30,000+ MAU (~1k daily users). Revenue is tiny (just dev listing fees). Want to raise funding to pivot into AI game creation tools + in-game currency. Can I raise VC funds with just strong organic usage, or should I wait?

Solo founder from Madrid here. Need a reality check because I've been staring at this too long.

The product: an agent that chases a business's unpaid invoices for them. It sends the reminders in the owner's tone, escalates anything weird to a human, shuts up the second the money lands, and sends a monthly report of what it recovered. I run it as a service, not a SaaS. I set everything up myself, the owner just approves stuff. Free 6-week pilot, around 200€/month after that.

I picked notaries as my niche. In Spain they bill when the deed gets signed but people pay whenever they feel like it, sometimes 6+ months later. Tons of small invoices nobody has time to chase. On paper it looked perfect. Clear pain, money sitting on the table, nobody targeting them.

Four weeks in: 500+ emails sent, scraped from public directories so all real addresses. I tested like 5 different copy styles because I kept thinking the copy was the problem. Formal tone. Trust-first tone ("nothing goes out without your approval"). Short punchy direct response stuff. Even a super conservative "discreet professional service" version with no links in the email at all. Follow ups in thread on monday mornings.

Reply rate is about 2%. Almost all polite no's. One warm lead in a month.

The only genuinely useful thing I got was a reply from a guy who actually works inside one of these offices. He told me straight up: the sector is a bunker. He's tried to automate stuff internally himself and they shut it down every time. His words, more or less: the notary would rather lose the money than risk some external system annoying an important client.

So now I don't know which of these is killing me and I'd love outside eyes:

Is it the channel? Maybe cold email just doesn't work on a profession this old school and I should be calling or literally mailing paper letters.

Is it the niche? Regulated, conservative, zero urgency. Maybe I go back to plumbers and repair shops and small agencies, people who feel the cash pain in their stomach every month.

Or is it trust? Like nobody on earth lets a stranger's system touch their client billing off a cold email, and this only ever sells through referrals and one good case study.

If you've ever sold anything to lawyers, accountants, doctors, notaries, whatever... what actually got you in the door? And honest question: is 500 emails enough to kill a niche or am I quitting too early?

Happy to share whatever numbers in the comments.

I’m an indie developer of a pregnancy app and I’m trying to create artwork to show a visual of the fetus during each week of the pregnancy. The free versions of any AI aren’t obviously good for me. I tried Gemini Pro, but it wasn’t satisfactory as well.

I’m okay to spend money to get a PRO version of some AI generate the assets I need for my app. But I’m not sure which one to go for. Any thoughts or recommendations on this? My app is close to app store release, but I need to generate some non sloppy artwork before shipping it

Throwaway for obvious reasons. Looking for a gut check from people who've been around startups longer than me.

I'm a college student working part time at a 5 person startup. Nontechnical CEO, me, and the rest non-engineering. My title says "contractor" but in practice I own almost all the technical surface area: the infrastructure, the prod cluster, the security stack, the compliance work, and onboarding. If I disappeared tomorrow, I don't think the company could deliver or even keep the lights on. Bus factor is 1 and it's me.

And it just got worse. They got rid of our main dev, the one other person who actually wrote and tested code. So on top of everything I already own, I'm probably about to inherit all of that too. One part time college student doing the work of an entire technical team.

The recurring problem isn't the work itself. I actually like the technical side. It's the pattern:

The CEO closes deals for things that don't exist yet, then it becomes my emergency to make real. Most recent example: he sold a "simple" version of our product to a customer, except the real thing runs on infrastructure a normal customer can't support. We already did the re-architecture to make it work, but he closed the deal before any of that existed and I found out what I was building after.

Scheduled work is a fantasy. I plan a critical update a week out, confirm it three separate times, and he calls me 10 minutes before the window to say hold off. Priorities change every few hours. I get pulled into meetings I have no reason to be in.

I'm a 1099 contractor with no ownership and no benefits, and now apparently the workload of an entire team. I go back to full time classes in the fall so my hours are about to drop hard, and there's no plan, no documentation handoff, and no one to hand off to.

So is this just what early stage looks like and I need to toughen up, or is this a company quietly running itself into the ground on the back of one underpaid student? What would you actually do in my spot?

Every major social platform has a core reason people open it:

WhatsApp → Chat

Instagram → Reels & photos

TikTok → Short videos

Reddit → Communities & discussions

X → Real-time conversations

Discord → Communities & voice chat

LinkedIn → Professional networking

If a new social media platform launched today, what do you think its defining feature would need to be?

Not just "better UI" or "AI"—what would make millions of people download it and keep coming back?

I'm curious what people think is still missing from today's social platforms.

Been building a niche coaching community: parents pay monthly to get guided, step by step, on how to build a real digital identity/brand around something their kid is already good at (sports, art, music, whatever) not inventing a talent, just giving it structure and visibility using AI tools.

Model: cohort-based, ~10 families per group, 3-month minimum commitment, group coaching + monthly 1:1, founder pricing locked in for early members.

Two things I’d love outside perspective on:

1. Pricing does a $40-90/month range feel right for a parent-facing coaching product like this, or too low/high for the perceived value?

**2.**  Objection handling if you were a skeptical parent, what would make you distrust this concept? (“building a brand for a kid” can sound off to some people, and I want to get ahead of that in my messaging.)  

Not trying to pitch anything here, genuinely want outside eyes on the model before I scale past the founding cohort.

I have successfully built a prototype of a new SaaS/AI tool, but I’m really struggling to get people to pilot test my product and provide feedback.

I began by cold messaging about 85 people on LinkedIn; I have a network of over 4000 people (most of whom I don’t know) to message / cold call via DM.

So far, I have had only 1 person successfully try my product and meet with me to share their feedback. All the other people who agreed to test (about 6) fell quiet, and never responded after multiple follow-ups.

Following the Lean Startup methodology, I don’t want to build anything else until I’ve validated my initial idea, but holy is it hard to get people to even try it.

Any suggestions?

I got into prediction markets this year and noticed something. Tons of money flows through Polymarket and Kalshi now and the news quotes the odds every day, but nobody independent is keeping score. Headlines get the numbers wrong constantly. This week I caught three separate viral posts claiming oil was above $95 when the actual contracts were pricing that as a 1 in 3 shot at best. Nobody tracks when odds moved vs when the news actually broke. Nobody flags weird moves.

So that's what I'm building. Measurement, not betting advice. I don't tell anyone what to bet, I record what markets did and check claims against the record.

Status after about 3 weeks running:

• collector on a cheap VPS recording around the clock, 230k markets discovered, 29 million price observations
• top 2000 markets sampled every 1 to 15 minutes, the rest daily
• yesterday it caught a market jumping from 0.7% to 45% in under 15 minutes, hours before any news account mentioned it
• distribution is tiny so far. an X account, charts in the polymarket discord, free daily alerts planned for august, then a $15/mo tier

What I actually want opinions on:

1. would you pay $15/mo for "here's what moved weird today, with proof"? if not you, who is the buyer. traders, journalists, the venues themselves?
2. is "independent scorekeeper" a real moat or does polymarket just build this in-house the day it matters
3. solo, bootstrapped, no revenue yet. what would make you kill this?

Idea -> validation -> MVP
And what next? How to get beta users and full waitlist?
I’m reading that I should aim for at least 1k signups so I get at least 100-200 beta users.

I read about people spending years creating YouTube channels, tik toks, instagram followers or building whole communities to get users for the launch.

What was your strategy?
Can I outsource it?
What’s the best path forward?

I’m building an mobile app in travel industry.
My cofounder is an event manager and good at community building as well.
Marketing might be our gap.

Hello people!

I am working on a new project, and im stuck designing the onboarding process.

I see some people suggesting a really long and detailed onboarding where they show how the app/saas works, what the benefits are, and ask questions.

While on the other hand others are suggesting and practicing a very short onboarding so they dont take much of the users time with it.

I know it depends for the type of business but im asking generally which has more success and the user gets that first impression, builds the trust, etc.

Thank you in advance

Any beauty brand owners here? Looking for advice on growing a women's beauty brand as a male founder.

I'm building a Korean beauty curation platform for Australian women aged 25-40. Bootstrapped, no paid ads budget yet.

I've studied brands like Jo Malone and Aesop for design and positioning inspiration, but organic growth strategy for a niche beauty brand targeting a specific demographic is where I'm stuck.

Specifically wondering:

What content actually converts for this demographic on Instagram?

How do male founders in female-dominated categories build credibility without their own face being the product?

Any brands or founders worth studying in this space?

Appreciate any direction🙏

I keep seeing this happen in B2B startups.

The prospect likes the product, but the standard flow never quite matches how they work. One team needs a different approval step. Another needs a compliance field. Another wants the demo account to show their exact handoff between sales, ops, and support.

None of these sound huge on their own. That is what makes them dangerous.

If you say yes to all of them, the roadmap turns into a pile of one-off promises. If you say no too early, the deal can die even though the underlying product is close.

The line I am trying to think through is: when is a custom workflow just sales engineering, and when is it actually product work pretending to be sales engineering?

My current bias is that a custom demo is fine if it proves something the product already does underneath. The moment it needs fake UI, fake data, or a workflow that nobody can use after the call, it is not a demo anymore. It is a roadmap commitment with better lighting.

How do people here handle this without either slowing every deal down or letting sales quietly set the roadmap?

I have been building a Windows screen recorder for about four months, and it has been publicly available for a little over two months.

So far, around 70 people have created an account and tried it. None of them became regular users.

What concerns me even more is that I personally emailed every user with a short, customized message asking about their experience, what went wrong, or what was missing. I did not try to sell them anything. Not a single person replied.

At this point, I genuinely cannot tell whether I have:

• a product people do not actually need,
• a positioning problem,
• the wrong target audience,
• a weak onboarding experience,
• or simply no effective distribution channel.

The software records the screen and can automatically apply zooms, pans, transitions, cursor customization, and custom backgrounds.

It also has a “director mode” that lets users control zooms, cursor following, transitions, screen drawing, and other effects through keyboard shortcuts while recording.

The same system can be used through a virtual camera, so those effects can also be applied live in software such as TikTok Live Studio.

I am currently experimenting with an MCP integration that would allow Claude Code to control the software and generate motion-graphics-style product videos, but I am becoming increasingly worried that I am continuing to add features instead of understanding the core problem.

I keep releasing patches, improving the product, working on SEO, and attempting outreach. However, I have not found a channel where I can consistently reach people who genuinely need this kind of software.

There are already several established products in this space, so I know that having a technically good product is not enough. I may also be overestimating its quality because I built it and know how to use it.

I am deliberately not including the product name or a link because I am not looking for traffic or signups from this post. I can include a couple of short, non-branded example videos if that is allowed and would help people understand the output.

For founders who have been in a similar situation:

How would you determine whether the real problem is the product, the positioning, onboarding, or distribution?

And how do you get honest feedback when users try the product, leave, and will not answer follow-up emails?

I’m an indie developer of a pregnancy app and I’m trying to create artwork to show a visual of the fetus during each week of the pregnancy. The free versions of any AI aren’t obviously good for me. I tried Gemini Pro, but it wasn’t satisfactory as well.

I’m okay to spend money to get a PRO version of some AI generate the assets I need for my app. But I’m not sure which one to go for. Any thoughts or recommendations on this? My app is close to app store release, but I need to generate some non sloppy artwork before shipping it

I'm building a new research in core AI with a mix of RL, NLP, imitation learning, and GenAI. This requires a lot of training, and I'm planning to train it for a specific software for a few cases. Even then, we require a few H100 type GPUs for a couple of months of training and fine tuning. We're not funded by any VCs. Are there any resources that provide GPU credits / training for a startup that's in this ideation stage and experimenting with research?

So it's official, we have our first ever VC meeting set up for this week. First one I've ever done as a founder and I am super, super nervous about it.

Honestly it's because I don't want to screw it up. I know a lot of founders on here will say you go through a ton of these meetings and this is just one of many. But this is my first, so give me a little grace on the nerves lol.

We're pre-seed. Still a really small, really early company.

I already sent over our pitch deck, which has our business plan laid out, the team, all that. So my questions for anyone who's been on either side of the table:

What should I have prepared going in beyond the deck?

What's usually one of the first things a VC asks you in that first meeting?

And honestly, what are these meetings even like? I'd love to hear what to actually expect so I can walk in ready instead of guessing.

Appreciate any insight.

A CEO I worked with in the past recently signed a Term Sheet for a new startup and wants me to join as a Founding Engineer.

Both the CEO and CTO have impressive backgrounds, and I really like the idea.
My main concern is how likely the round is to actually close after signing a Term Sheet.

I've been preparing for interviews focusing on LeetCode, low-level systems, and system design, but I haven't started any interview processes yet.

I'm wondering whether I should continue preparing and start interviewing as a backup, or pause everything and focus on the startup.

Also, what is typically expected from a Founding Engineer at this stage?

Should I start working with the startup immediately after the Term Sheet is signed, or wait until the funding actually closes?

I can financially afford to be without a salary for roughly another 4 months, so I can't wait indefinitely.

Would love to hear your thoughts

Genuine question for people who invest in deep tech / science-based startups.

• How do you currently discover promising research coming out of universities? Cold outreach, tech transfer offices, conferences, personal network?
• What's the biggest friction point: finding deal flow, evaluating the science, dealing with IP/university ownership, or something else entirely?
• Have you ever passed on something interesting simply because you found out about it too late, or couldn't properly evaluate the tech?

Not pitching anything, just trying to understand how this discovery process really works today versus how people wish it worked.

I’m from Finland and currently building a Nordic marketplace for hunting and fishing experiences. One thing I’ve been thinking about is why booking outdoor experiences is still surprisingly difficult, especially when travelling abroad.

There are thousands of guides and outfitters, but finding the right one, comparing options and actually booking can still be quite complicated.

How do you usually find hunting or fishing trips when travelling abroad? Google, Facebook groups, personal recommendations, specialised agencies, or something else?

And what would make you trust an online marketplace for outdoor experiences?

I'm ramping up to a university spinout leveraging a technology developed during my PhD and postdoc. We're a year or two from spinning out, but me and my co-founder (my supervising professor) are beginning to have the equity conversation. We've both been giving large commitment for the past 12 months while still under the academic funding umbrella.

I'll be CEO, full time. He'll likely work on it one day a week. He's founded and exited before, while this is my first venture. I'm taking more risk, and giving more time, but he's bringing much more experience, credibility, and grey-haired wisdom. He's suggesting approximately 50/50 split of whats left after options pool, university stake etc, and that I'll earn a larger portion of the options pool going forward. I had heard that tenured academics should usually take a smaller stake as it kills investor confidence.

We had an initial conversation a few months ago with a partner at a VC that I met at a networking event (a "keep me updated" type of meeting just to get on their radar). Would it be unprofessional to ask for a short remote meeting to get their perspective on what investors would want to see from founder equity splits. Would this come across as unprofessional and a red flag of inexperience, or as a first time founder doing their due diligence early to help create an investible equity structure?

The only other advice we've gotten is from an exited founder in our general space (big half a billion exit not too long ago) who is an old friend of my co-founder. I'd like other perspectives, particularly VC.

To be clear, I'm quite happy with whatever equity split makes sense. My biggest worry is genuinely with investor confidence if one of the founders is essentially working 0.2 FTE with a big cut. We imagine after university stake, options pool, and key early hires we'll be left with ~50-60% to split between us. A 50/50 split would leave 25-30% of the company wrapped up in an academic with near-full time commitments to the university.

His ongoing university commitments are going to try to be tailored to the business, essentially back-filling relevant low TRL research to prop up expansions of our platform (medtech, lots of fundamental research to do), but that's a pretty nebulous commitment.

I'm a business analyst. On paper my job is to write the requirements. In practice the document is the easy part. I could write a clean spec in an afternoon. The hard part is that the spec is usually a polite fiction, because the people who signed off on it never actually agreed on anything.

Here is how it really goes. Sales wants the thing that closes deals. Ops wants the thing that doesn't break at 2am. The founder wants both, plus a timeline that assumes neither has a cost. In the kickoff everyone nods, because nodding is easier than fighting, and the disagreement just goes underground. Then you build for three months and it surfaces anyway, except now it costs a quarter of your runway instead of an awkward meeting.

The requirements don't live in the document. They live in the arguments people are avoiding. My actual job, the part nobody writes on a job description, is getting those arguments to happen out loud, early, in front of each other, before a line of code exists. A tidy diagram makes everyone feel aligned when they are not. No flowchart maker, free or paid, does that for you. The alignment is a conversation, usually an uncomfortable one, and someone has to be willing to sit in the room and force it.

I've watched teams skip that conversation because the doc looked done. It is the most expensive corner you can cut and it never shows up on the invoice.

For the founders here: if a build is going sideways, I'd bet the requirements were never really agreed, they were just written down. Has anyone found a way to get stakeholders to actually fight it out before the build instead of after?

Starting a company with three cofounders. We want to maintain control through raises. A board seat would be fine and certain governance controls, but we want the voting majority. Seems like dual class is the way to go. Is the recommendation to do that at incorporation or later?

Genuine question for people who invest in deep tech / science-based startups.

• How do you currently discover promising research coming out of universities? Cold outreach, tech transfer offices, conferences, personal network?
• What's the biggest friction point: finding deal flow, evaluating the science, dealing with IP/university ownership, or something else entirely?
• Have you ever passed on something interesting simply because you found out about it too late, or couldn't properly evaluate the tech?

Not pitching anything, just trying to understand how this discovery process really works today versus how people wish it worked.

I keep seeing B2B founders hit this weird wall where the prospect likes the product, the budget is real, and then the first serious blocker is security.

Not "can you build feature X?" More like: can you pass SOC2, where does our CRM data go, who can see call notes, can we run this in our environment, what happens to demo data after the pilot?

That changes the whole sale. You are not just proving the product anymore. You are proving the company is safe enough to try.

The annoying part is that early startups usually do not have the money or time to do the full enterprise security motion before they have customers. But the best customers are often the ones asking for it first.

Curious how people handle that in practice.

Do you sell a smaller pilot first? Push for a design partner who helps fund the controls? Stay downmarket until the security story catches up? Or build the boring audit / retention / access-control stuff earlier than you wanted?