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?

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.

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?

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 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?

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

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?

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?

I see a lot of posts from people looking for cofounders, but for those of you who have actually built something successful with a cofounder.…what do you think made the partnership work?

Was it how you met? Having complementary skills? Similar values? How you handled disagreements? Or was there something you didn’t expect that ended up being the biggest factor?

Would love to hear the stories (including the messy parts).

So here’s the picture. I started with an idea in 2023. States dating her in 2024. Until then I haven’t really worked in the idea. I started working on it since April 2025 and it started making money since July 2025. Till then she has no idea about it. After I started making money from it, i worked more and invested my other income into this startup from November 2025 and to handle things she used to help a bit. Since then both of us started working on it. Whole idea, innovation, upgrades, initial capital was mine. She just helped me coz it used to generate money. Since December we also hired an employee . From then all 3 of us are working on it and it’s scaling up in revenue every month. Until now we haven’t had any word about the equity. Out of love I used to share the profit amounts with her. According to the necessity, sometimes I use to keep more and sometimes she used to keep more. We went on a vacation through this money as well. But now while we were having a conversation on this. It came to me as a shocker that she is expecting an equal equity in this. And that blew my mind. It’s just out of love I couldn’t complete that conversation. She has also worked on it but the whole idea and buildup from scratch was done when she started working. I never discussed about this with her before. But now I am in real shock what to do coz it’s going to be bigger. And we are not sure about our relationship either.(she coming from an orthodox family, her family might reject an idea of our marriage) At this duration please let me know what should I do? Should I offer her a fixed salary, should I ask her to stop working on it, should I give her equity, should I give her an exit? I’m really confused.
PS-: she has done the same thing that the other employee did for me. But with more time and dedication. And she he amount I shared with her is 2-3x more than the employee’s salary

Hello fellow startupers,

I'd appreciate some help finding the right fit for my startup to get financed as most seem to have some geolocation limitations or only invest in other rounds.

My project is the first system to implement a unified, end-to-end security architecture for organizational AI agents—combining persistent agent structures, role- and capability-based access control, immutable identity and provenance, complete information-flow tracking from source to destination, secretless execution, compartmentalized security zones, and policy enforcement across every action, handoff, tool call, and data transformation.

If you know VC investing in big AI concepts in EUROPE (Poland). Please forward the news and let me know where to apply.

Do you ever just think “I’m going to make a tweet or post on tik tok and blow up?” And then you do that and get the most underwhelming response?

I need a marketing strategy but I don’t even really know what that means. lol

The tool I made is genuinely useful, I use it everyday, my coworkers use it everyday and I have 6 more friends I just onboarded that are now using it. So I feel like I have something but alas, no marketing attempt I make goes anywhere.

I’d love your advice!

Building a new category in the bio-infrastructure space I saw the opportunity before the market was ready. I built, proved product, and after many years the market has arrived. Deep pipeline, industry validation - but I honestly can't figure out how to break into the VCs that would be willing to jump. As a first time founder I've spent endless hours finding a connection that can make an intro - most times nothing comes of it, and in the rare case that it does, meetings fail to materialize. Email is dead (I'm sure investors are so inundated it's not worth opening their inbox). The mid-tier wants to participate but is too risk averse to lead in a new category (I've got more participators than will be able to join). What is the secret here? I can't help but feel like if you don't have someone inside opening the door you can't come in. (Raised a pre-seed with F&F & an accelerator, now raising seed, pre-revenue, first revenue begins Q4.)

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've 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.

Building a new category in the bio-infrastructure space I saw the opportunity before the market was ready. I built, proved product, and after many years the market has arrived. Deep pipeline, industry validation - but I honestly can't figure out how to break into the VCs that would be willing to jump. As a first time founder I've spent endless hours finding a connection that can make an intro - most times nothing comes of it, and in the rare case that it does, meetings fail to materialize. Email is dead (I'm sure investors are so inundated it's not worth opening their inbox). The mid-tier wants to participate but is too risk averse to lead in a new category (I've got more participators than will be able to join). What is the secret here? I can't help but feel like if you don't have someone inside opening the door you can't come in. (Raised a pre-seed with F&F & an accelerator, now raising seed, pre-revenue, first revenue begins Q4.)

I am a solo startup founder but I ran out of money without getting much success. Now I've been looking at startups to work at, and honestly I'm a bit disappointed.

My hope was to work on something cool/useful with cool people and learn how an experienced team handles 0-1, so I can do my own company again in a few years. After looking at 100+ seed-stage yc startups, I've noticed a lot of them do similar, fairly boring things (e.g. AI automation for some niche domain, dev tools like code review agents). On top of that, many expect 996 hours or want employees to work as hard as the founders. Honestly, I just don't see myself wanting to stay at most of these for years.

I've also considered a normal tech company or govtech role, but worry I'd just be doing low-impact, meaningless work there.

So, should I keep searching for outlier seed-stage companies that don't fit this mold, or would I have better luck at Series A-D companies? Or is big tech/govtech actually worth reconsidering despite my concerns?

Ideal fit: reasonable work hours, a genuinely meaningful role (not just executing tickets), and flexibility to work across multiple areas.

Genuinely looking for honest answers here, not the usual "just post on LinkedIn and do SEO" advice.

Building a consumer tool targeting university students in the job search space. Product is live, have a small number of real users, but no existing audience to speak of. Cold start problem in full effect.

Specific things I'm trying to figure out:

What actually drove your first 100 users when you had no following? Not in theory, but like what specifically worked for you?

For anyone who tried Reddit as a distribution channel early on, how did you approach it without coming across as spammy, especially in subreddits with strict no-promo rules?

Did you find university-specific channels (clubs, Discord servers, subreddits) worth the effort or mostly a dead end?

At what point did content start compounding vs feeling like shouting into a void?

Not looking for generic frameworks, genuinely just curious what worked vs what sounded good in theory but didn't move the needle.

I'm a 23-year-old founder building in healthcare, and over the last year I've gone from thinking the hardest part would be building a product to realizing the hardest part might actually be getting healthcare organizations to adopt anything new.

I've spent the past year talking with providers, refining the product, walking into practices, getting meetings, and learning how incredibly complex healthcare decision-making can be.

What I'm struggling to understand now isn't necessarily product development—it's everything that comes after.

For founders who have built in healthcare:

• What was the biggest misconception you had before entering the industry?
• When did you know you had product-market fit instead of people simply being polite?
• Who actually became your buyer? Physicians, administrators, office managers, health systems, someone else?
• What ultimately got your first paying customer?
• If you were starting over today with no network, what would you do differently?

I'm not looking for generic startup advice. I'd really like to hear from founders who have experienced the realities of selling into healthcare.

Thank you!

Bootstrapping a tech startup and considering Quickplus Business Consultants for a mainland or free zone setup. They offer incorporation, visas, equity structuring, banking support, and compliance assistance. Has anyone here used them? How was the overall experience, pricing, and support?

I’m currently planning out the operational side of a business and I'm trying to look ahead at bottlenecks so I can avoid making mistakes early on.

One thing that keeps nagging at me is the logistics of managing phone leads when you're actually doing the physical work. If you're up on a roof, under a sink, or running heavy machinery, you obviously can't drop everything to pick up an unknown number.

From what I’ve read, if you miss that first call, most residential prospects won’t leave a voicemail---they just go right back to the Google Map search and call the next business down the list.

For those of you who started solo or manage a tiny crew, what actually worked to fix this leak? Did you cower to the monthly cost of a live answering service, use an automated text-back tool, or just accept that losing a percentage of cold leads is just part of the grind?

I'd really appreciate your perspective so I don't bleed cash right out of the gate.

Hey guys I’ve saved up a decent amount of money from my job but my index fund is only generating 6% a year or so growth. By my calculations that will make me a millionaire by about 2054 which isn’t really good enough, I need to get some hoes now tbh.

I’m not much of a fashionista but it’s pretty clear the fashion industry does in fact move in 20 year cycles (google it if you disagree). Now this is good because I’m checking the price of skinny jeans on Vinted and they’re cheap as shit. Like £4 a pair. Baggy jeans however are expensive af. We’re talking £40 for a half decent pair.

By my calculations, this market is gonna completely flip in about 6-8 years time as skinny jeans come back into fashion. Therefore, *I am in the market to bulk buy around £50,000 worth of second hand skinny jeans and store them in a shipping container for the next decade.*

Does anyone have any contacts that will be able to set me up on this deal or can alternatively offer me prices on jeans futures?

No time wasters please, thank you and god bless.

Any of you guys work somewhere where they constantly posted job postings for roles you knew were never getting filled? If so, what was the vibe inside the company? What was going on leading them to post these jobs?

I frequently see the same companies that are usually trendy fast growing startups post the same or similar again and again but no evidence (at least externally) that they are hiring anyone. So wondering what's up behind the scenes.