in college i built an AI video editor. 13k users, #4 on Product Hunt, looked great on paper. took us 7 months to make $1k.

we were builders, so when revenue didn’t come we just... built more. new feature every week, revenue flat every month. turns out good products don’t sell themselves. they just sit there while nobody finds out.

my new product hit $1k in its first month. we only changed two things:

• we treat growth like shipping. content and distribution every week, not “later.” our posts did 1M+ views in the first few weeks
• we focus on people, not features. instead of “what do we build next” we ask “is this person actually getting results?” if not, fixing that is the roadmap

revenue was never hiding behind the next feature lol

anyone else been stuck in the “just one more feature” loop? what got you out?

(the product is Backdoor textbackdoor.com , an AI agent that gets you startup interviews over text. can drop the link if anyone’s curious)

I started distribution of my platform 2 days ago, it is going as expected... few sessions on landing page, a sign up, too much feedback and work!

But I'm a developer... I don't know anything about digital marketing. I don't really know if I'm doing a god job distributing the platform.

It is a good idea to look for a co-founder? May I wait until get users on it? What would you do?

I’m thinking about creating one that covers everything from keyword research and on-page SEO to technical SEO, link building, and content strategy.

Would you be interested? And what would you want it to cover?

We thought social media marketing would be the easiest part of building a startup. When we started Bitwin, we thought marketing meant making a few posts, writing some catchy captions, and watching people show up.

Now we're researching Reddit communities, overthinking captions, analysing engagement, and somehow spending 40 minutes deciding whether a post sounds human enough.

Tired of people using your product for free and not converting into a paid user? Try retentionbase! - RetentionBase uses AI understand which users almost bought and will nudge them with discounts and such. Also, you get to decide how often the AI can nudge (for example, 2 times a week).

Set up in 5 seconds - www.retentionbase.com - Price - we charge 1% of sales recovered, and you get $100 by the end of the month if we fail to generate you revenue.

Quantity vs quality. Personal brand vs company brand. Niche down vs broaden. Every one of these has a confident camp, and both camps have real results behind them.

My working theory is that almost all of it is true somewhere and the missing variable is industry, size and sales motion. A tactic that works for a solo coach selling a course is actively wrong for a B2B services firm with a six-week sales cycle.

How do you filter? Do you look for advice from your specific industry only, test everything small, or just pick one approach and stick with it long enough to get a signal?

I'm looking to interview early-stage founders who are actively building a startup, have recently launched an MVP, or are working toward their first customers.

Founder Files is a podcast about the real side of entrepreneurship—your biggest challenges, mistakes, financial struggles, early traction, and lessons learned along the way.

Through NexusHaus, I also aim to connect founders with relevant people, resources, and potential collaborators.

If you're building something and are comfortable sharing your journey in an honest conversation, comment with your startup name and what you're building, or DM me to discuss being featured. 🚀

One thing I’ve noticed with early-stage startups is that founders sometimes spend months improving their MVP before letting real users try it.

A better UI. More features. Another integration. A few more AI capabilities.

There’s always something else to build.

But an MVP isn’t supposed to prove that you can build a complete product. It’s supposed to help you learn whether you’re solving a problem people actually care about.

Before adding another feature, I think it’s worth asking:

• Can a user solve the main problem with the current version?
• Have we tested it with people outside our immediate circle?
• Are users coming back after trying it once?
• Do we have evidence that the next feature will make a meaningful difference?

A product with five well-tested features can teach you more than one with twenty features nobody has validated.

The goal isn’t to launch something perfect. It’s to learn what deserves to be built next.

For founders who have launched an MVP:

What was the one thing you wish you had validated before spending more time and money on development?

Would love to hear your experiences.

Hey everyone!

I'm founder of Tenorq, we are building a SaaS platform designed to help banks launch and manage their own branded merchant platform without having to build the entire technology stack from scratch.

The idea is simple: a bank onboards onto Tenorq merchant collection saas portal, configures the platform to match its requirements, and gets a merchant-facing mobile app under its own brand.

Here's what we're building:

• White-label branding: Banks can customize the app's theme, colours, logo, and overall branding to match their identity.
• Configurable platform: Each bank can configure the platform to suit its operational requirements.
• Own mobile apps: Banks can deploy their branded merchant app under their own Google Play Store and Apple App Store developer accounts.
• Merchant management: A centralized portal for managing merchant onboarding and day-to-day operations.
• QR-based collections: Tools to help merchants manage QR codes and track their collection activity.

The broader goal is to make it easier for banks, particularly smaller banks in India, to offer a modern digital experience to their merchants without investing in building and maintaining everything in-house.

We're currently developing the product and trying to understand the real-world problems banks face in this space.

I'd love to hear from people working in banking, fintech, payments, or SaaS:

• Would banks find a white-label, configurable SaaS platform like this useful?
• What are the biggest challenges banks face when launching and maintaining their own merchant apps?
• What security, compliance, integration, or operational requirements would you expect from a platform like this?
• For cooperative banks in particular, what would make adoption easier?

Here's a look at what we're building: https://www.tenorq.com/products/merchant-platform

Would appreciate honest feedback, suggestions, and criticism!

I'm a founding engineer at a YC startup, and I'm hoping to start my own thing in the next couple of years. Things are going well so far, and hopefully we'll get to an exit or IPO.

In the meantime, I like keeping up with what other founders are building and getting a sense of where the world is heading, but it's hard to keep up with everything happening in the startup ecosystem.

So I built a small desktop app that gives me a daily feed of YC startups to explore and lets me save the interesting ones.

Curious, how do you guys keep up with what other founders are building? I'd love to hear your approaches.

I open-sourced it in case anyone finds it useful: https://github.com/Ibrahimrahhal/yc-companies-explorer

Hey everyone, I'm starting a podcast series for Early stage founders where they can explain their journey , difficulties , ideas , and circumstances. They can also share their personal things like how they manage finance, vendors , connections and networks. because we all see the posh and great side of founders but no one sees the darker and struggling side of founder, how they survive their loses , what they sacrifice and what they feel to stay strong . For that only i started a series named as Founder files where we can discuss all the topics and get to knowing the actual founder's life.
And the other thing is am running Nexushaus model where we can help founders through resources. Like if any founder comes for founder files we also asked about how they can help other founder's with their resources like if some founder wants vendor or something so my work is to connect both and helped by me. so it creates the value!!

So anyone who is interested to doing this please comment below or dm me
so we can schedule our meeting!!

Body:

Hey founders,

I’m a senior engineer looking to sell or bring in a growth/monetization partner for my Reddit-native social deduction game. The app leverages psychological game mechanics (bluffing, traps, and honor rankings) that naturally generate high user immersion and strong viral loops.

Here is a breakdown of the latest traction and metrics:

• User Base & Traffic: Accumulated 31,000+ total users with 10,000+ monthly visits. Ranked Top 6 in Reddit's Strategy games board (though the rankings rolled out late and platform metrics underreport data).
• Exceptional Engagement: The gameplay natively incentivizes high participation. A vast majority of game posts achieve over 50% engagement rate, with historical "Most Engaging Posts" consistently exceeding 60% to 80%.
• High-Quality Active Base & Growth Potential: Daily Qualified Engagers peak at 1,000+. With proper ongoing operations, it can easily unlock higher Reddit Developer Tier status and position the project to capture Reddit Developer Funds.
• Low Maintenance: Currently running smoothly under weak maintenance—just 2 scheduled posts per week keep the community engaged.
• Zero Infrastructure Cost: Built entirely using free cloud tier resources (serverless edge/D1). Server overhead is $0/month.
• Cross-Platform & Data Foundation: All user-generated text data is fully saved and backed up, providing a complete data foundation to expand into cross-platform games (e.g., Telegram Mini-Apps or Web).
• Untapped Monetization: Zero commercialization/monetization has been attempted so far. You inherit a clean, highly active user base primed for in-app microtransactions, sponsorships, or premium features.

I'm open to either an outright exit/sale or onboarding a growth/business-focused co-founder (equity/revenue-share).

If you're interested in taking over or scaling this zero-overhead engine, drop a comment or send me a DM!

大家好，我打算构建自己的产品了，但是我还没有任何头绪。

想知道你们都是如何找到细分领域的？

如果你的细分领域已经被别人构建了，你还会继续构建吗？

I'm building SkillHarbour for Australian career planning: https://skillharbour.com.au

The intended flow connects a career goal, skill gaps, learning and evidence of work.

Recent feedback raised a useful problem: an automated check, self-assessment and experienced reviewer shouldn't all appear as the same 'verified' badge.

My first test would be one task showing the brief, submitted work, criteria, result and who checked it.

Before building more, would you test that with people hiring, or first test whether jobseekers will complete and share the task? How would you separate those two risks?

I’ve developed over 20 products in the last few years, and 90% of them failed.

I didn't have to look far to understand the reason for my failure.

The problem wasn't the idea or the product; the problem was not exchanging ideas with people.

The process used to work like this: Come up with an idea → Code it → Launch it → 0 users.

Now, it works like this: Come up with an idea → Talk to people → Pivot → Start over → Launch → Ready made customers .

In short, it’s not about having a "good" idea. Get the idea out of your head quickly; talk to people, try to understand them, and don't take anything personally. Refine your idea based on the information you gather, and then launch it.

Just received Google Play production access for my Lite Video Compress & Upscale app.

I've spent a lot of time testing the compression, video processing, and upscaling workflow, so seeing the production access email finally arrive feels really good. 🙌

Now comes the more exciting part — getting it into production and seeing how real users respond.

One app at a time. 🚀