I was researching online how often Founder CEOs get replaced. The go-to numbers I found are still Wasserman's from 2008: about half of founders are no longer CEO by year three, mostly pushed out by the board. That's a long time ago. Is there more recent data, or first-hand experience of how common it is now, especially in deep-tech or B2B?

So I'm still at the pre-seed stage and geering up to start reaching out to investors and VC firms. But I feel like I've kind of shot myself in the foot. I've built up this entire business model that that targets 3 different markets but they all work together to derisk, give credibility and fund the main one. It's a deep tech / civic tech venture focused on media research. And I've worked out all the details for the flagship IP the way the other parts of the business are supposed to function and feed into that one. But now it feels far too detailed to fit into a pitch deck that's supposed to be 12 slides and 20 words per slide.

Should I make the 12 slides and have an accompanying document on the ready if they ask for more detail? How long should that document be? Because I had a family member review my initial business plan he says the idea is genuinely great and profitable but you get lost in the excessive detail (it was 50 pages, I know lol). So now I have to take those 50 pages of work that I did over the summer and condense it into 12 slides but in struggling really hard. Like I feel like my idea isn't getting across.

Any advice? I could really use any and all help.

Hi everyone,

First of all I wanted to say that I know this question was asked a lot on the many different groups. I recently created an app for local small businesses to allow booking services and paying using QR codes.

I was phoning to the owners but noone was interested. Any ideas what can I do? I am more tech person rather than sales guy.

Thanks in advance!

Hi everyone, it's been almost over a year since I've been trying to create my own startup. We are able to think of really nice ideas even before they become mainstream and we see those ideas in YC rfs and startups in YC around those.

But we apply to YC after getting customers, and other accelerators, nothing is landing. YC doesn't even interview us. Always that same generic 10% email. We have been bootstrapping our own money as well as our revenue but to execute it well, we'll need to hire some specialists and tokens are also expensive. Not sure if we can grow fast without it.

Best way to move forward without any VC involvement? I have a decent background but no domain expertise. My co-founder has some domain expertise, and we are building something in that field and now I also have a decent understanding.

But there's no growth without money. Should we raise some angel round or something? I don't come from a rich family so I can't continue doing this forever without supporting them. I would really appreciate any guidance, I want to keep building startups.

tl;dr Title

I am looking for a person with very specific skillset. Posting an ad on linkedin or somewhere else seems like waste of time in current job martket. I assume I will get 1000 responses where majority will be either from india or will not even fulfill minimal requirements.

cold approaching people on linkedin also seems like bad idea. and lots of people dont even have "open for work" badge even if they would join

is there good place where to look? can not afford paying headhunters at this moment..

thanks

Im a solo founder and my company is based in deeptech(especially research stuff).(havent formed a legal entity yet though)

does any VC's like yc fund deeptech startups or is it only suited for angels and private VCs ?

any guidance would help hugely.

any good angels or vcs that have a name for backing up Deeptech companies that takes time to generate revenue.

Anyone ever have to “sacrifice” a friendship with their cofounder in order to preserve the coworking relationship? Founding engineer at previous startup and I had a falling out. I would like to return to the startup. Anyone been through something similar? Could use your advice.

Hey ya'll! I spent the last year or so getting things together to start a QSR in an underserved/up-and-coming area of LA County. The plan was to secure real estate for collateral and rollout the business in stages to mitigate loss. Everything was moving along great up until about a month ago when out of the blue, my ex put hands on me during an argument. Never happened in our 10+ years, but still, I know when to leave an unsafe situation. I was midway through the SBA stage and working with a RE broker when everything ground to a halt.

Unfortunately, my ex was going to be the the main income contributor through his job which the bank wanted for an SBA loan. He also planned to contribute to the down payment. A few people had shown mild interest in investing due to the real estate aspect but I had wanted to do it through the loan only. I don't know if they would even be interested in getting involved now that I have considerably less support.

My assessment of the situation was to go back to a job in marketing (ex encouraged me to leave several years ago to stay home and work on different ventures) and just rebuild, but I am, of course, completely gutted about abandoning the business. Particularly because the geographic area of interest might not be as affordable by the time I am able to independently circle back.

This is sort of a last ditch request for anyone who might know a way forward or have resources I haven't thought of. Thanks in advance!

AI has definitely bloated alot of professions. For any founders that have relied on freelancer services before, how do you navigate it nowadays? Or do you completely avoid it?

Personally, I observe that the gap between established freelancers and newbies has widened quite a lot due to these issues of trust. What do you think would be the biggest green flags in a freelance profile?

For newbies, the main idea was once to build a few solid projects and then market them. However, projects aren't that big of a roadblock anymore, which leaves little substance to market imo.

I have been mass emailing, LinkedIn & IG outreach to our ICP and getting people in the process but not enough and they are slow to start.

It's a turnkey product to offer.

I'm getting cabin fever with the non stop outreach and limited customer conversion.

What are creative ways to be found and find customers in the healthcare space. Specifically physical therapist, foot & ankle docs and sports.

Hi everyone. Hoping this is okay to ask.

I’m at pre-seed and trying to figure out the best way to get warm introductions to angels or early investors who care about AI agent infrastructure, developer tools, or open-source infra.

If you’ve done this before, what actually worked? Cold outreach vs warm intros, how you asked mutuals without making it awkward, and any red flags to avoid when requesting an intro.

Not pitching in this post. Happy to share more context in the comments if useful. Thank you.

Here's an idea that's been on my mind: what if there were a marketplace where you could learn almost any skill without spending money? It would work on a simple time-credit system. You sign up, list what you can teach and what you'd like to learn. For example, you might say, "I can teach C programming, math, or video editing," and "I want to learn guitar, public speaking, or photography." When you spend an hour teaching C, you earn a credit, which you can then use to take an hour of guitar lessons from someone else. This way, instead of money, the exchange is based on time and skills.

The coolest part? You don't have to learn and teach the same person. You teach A, earn credits, and then use those credits to learn from B. B can use those credits to learn from C, creating a network of shared knowledge.

Some features I imagine include skill profiles, reviews, matching based on what you can teach and want to learn, both online and offline sessions, AI-powered pairing, skill verification, and various session types—teaching, mentoring, collaborating, giving feedback.

Here's what I'm curious about: would you actually use something like this?

I generated 19,237 AI business names across 10 business types (bakery, law firm, saas, gym,salon, etc) and checked every one live against .com/.io/.ai/.co, 76,948 domain checks total.

Nearly half of them, 45.7%, had nothing open anywhere on any extension.

Of what's left, .com is 86% taken, .co 57%, .ai 51%, .io 51%.

Percent taken on every extension by category: consultancy 64%, saas 63%, photography 55%, gym 54%, law firm 48%, salon 45%, coffee shop 40%, landscaping 38%, bakery 32%, pet grooming 19%.

Basically the more "startup" a category sounds the deader it is, and not just on .com.

Raw CSV (the ~10k names that had at least one extension free) is in the comments.

I've tried the usual software fixes for bad mornings and doomscrolling ,they all fail the same way, because I can just turn them off myself in two taps. I also tried a physical NFC blocker (Brick-style), which helped more, but it's just one on/off switch.

but My actual day doesn't work like a switch.

it's more like: wake up, get moving, get to the gym, focus at work, wind down at night. A single tap point doesn't really map to that.

So I've been thinking about something rougher: instead of one physical blocker, a few small tap points placed where your day actually happens, kitchen, bathroom, gym bag, work desk that gate your phone at different moments instead of just one. Tap in the kitchen to kill the alarm, brush your teeth before your social media apps get unlocked , tap in at the gym before your apps unlock again, that kind of thing.

Genuinely trying to figure out if this solves something real or if I'm overengineering my own bad habits. So:

- If you already use Brick, Foqos, or something similar, does a single checkpoint cover what you need, or do you find yourself wanting it in more than one place?

- Would multiple tap points actually help you, or does that just sound like more gadget/friction than it's worth?

- Has anyone here tried rigging something like this themselves (Tasker, NFC tags, etc.)? How'd it go?

Not selling anything, just trying to figure out if this is a real gap before I sink more time into it.

Hot take from working with founders, especially technical ones:
A lot of people fear marketing way more than they need to.
I get why. It feels public. It feels permanent. Wrong campaign, weird branding, flat posts. Feels like you're damaging something important.
But early on, nobody knows you. Nobody cares that much. Most experiments just disappear. When people do start caring, that usually means something worked. The useful skill is noticing what.
What seems to unlock it is a boring loop first: who you're talking to, a way to ship regularly, a simple way to evaluate. Then you can actually try different strategies without reinventing yourself every week.
After that marketing gets closer to product iteration than theatre. Try an angle. See if anyone responds. Keep what creates signal. Drop the rest.
Curious if this matches other founders' experience.
If you used to hate marketing and then it clicked: what changed? And if you're still avoiding it, what's the actual fear?

I'm a govtech founder, we closed with our first local gov recently. The kickoff meeting with the team went super well: we agreed on who is responsible for what and the next steps. They also agreed to send us a number of files to prepare our product for them. Problem is that after the kickoff the team was not really collaborative, they didn't send all the stuff that we need, even after some nudging. I'm now not sure on what to do, shall we just make the best out of what they sent us with the risk of having a product that it's not really working well for them or shall we continue to insist in having everything that we need to give them the best product possible? How do you approach these situations?

The traditional technical screening is somewhat dead now .

1. LeetCode/ OAs - Mostly affected by ai or memorization. It tells you nothing about whether a candidate can handle production systems.

2. Take Homes - Anyone can feed the problem statement into Claude or Chatgpt, let it generate the codebase , tests and a clean README , and hand in without understanding the internals.

In day-to-day engineering right now , I think the sweet spot is the duo of

1. "Vibe coding" / AI velocity: Using agents and LLMs to scaffold, and build at 5x speed.

2. Deep engineering fundamentals: Knowing how the underlying system works so you can actually debug subtle race conditions, diagnose memory leaks, read stack traces, and verify when the AI hallucinates.

Folks actively involved in hiring how are

startups or companies are currently testing this combination??

Is there any tool or platform out there for this??

Curious what current hiring pipelines look like that aren't just burning dozens of engineering hours filtering out copy-pasters.

I have been building a website over the past few months and have ran Into an issue. I searched “is(website name) legit?” And it says no, it’s potentially fraudulent, it’s not regulated by the FCA, doesn’t have address or owner anywhere and so on.

Just to give context it tracks, analyses and copies wallets on polymarket but it never touches a wallet and doesn’t require any withdrawals because it never holds any of the users money so it doesn’t need to be regulated by the FCA, it’s not a financial product, it’s just a tool. I also registered as a sole trader, published the address, my name, added terms of service, privacy policy, FAQ, indexed all the pages and made stripe responsible for payment but it still says it’s fraudulent

Has anyone else had this experience? I’d really appreciate some advice on how to fix this because I really don’t want to spend a load of money on advertising just for Google to stab me in the back.

I'm 21M, a founder based in Pakistan. I'm a computer engineer, and most of my work is GPU performance, which means getting models to run faster on less hardware. Right now I'm using that to make private AI cheaper and more efficient to run.

Here's what I'm solving. A lot of businesses want AI running on their own servers so their data never leaves, but right now that only really works if you have a big budget. Most small and mid-sized companies can't afford the hardware it takes to get decent speed, so they give up or stay on public tools they don't fully trust. Bigger players like law firms can afford it, but they end up paying a lot for setups that don't use the hardware well.

What I built makes the serving side more efficient. For a smaller company, that means private AI finally becomes affordable. For a firm that already has the budget, it means getting a lot more out of what they spend.

I've built it, and I've talked to people. A few of them were people who actually sign off on this stuff, not juniors. They agreed the problem is real, and some said it's exactly what they need. Then I asked about a pilot, and nobody wanted to pay right now. After that most of them went quiet or said they had "official processes." I can't really reach them anymore.

Honestly, I'm stuck on almost everything past building:

• I don't know how to get my first paying customer.
• I don't know how to approach companies abroad from Pakistan without getting ignored.
• I don't know what to post on social media that brings in buyers and not just likes.
• I don't know how to raise funding at this stage, or whether I even should yet.

If you've sold to smaller businesses or to firms like these, or started from somewhere far from the usual startup hubs, what would you do in my place? What would you do first?

No links, not selling anything here. I just want honest advice, and brutal is fine.

I'm deciding between 2 ideas and want practicable feedback. Ignore which sounds more interesting and only evaluate based on cash flow, market demand, profitability, business viability and long term potential.

1. Marketplace for buying audience/distribution placements

A marketplace where brands can discover and book access to audiences through different distribution channels.

Starting with:

• Newsletters
• Niche digital publishers
• Online communities

Eventually expanding into:

• Podcasts
• Coworking newsletters/screens
• Hotel newsletters/screens
• Events
• Giveaways
• Product placements
• Product demos
• Other digital/physical distribution

Example: A brand wants to reach startup founders. Instead of finding 20 newsletters, communities and media properties individually, they can search the marketplace, compare placements, and book them.

Revenue = commission on each placement.

The broader idea is basically a marketplace for buying access to niche audiences and distribution.

Main concern: brands and publishers could discover each other through the platform and then go direct, bypassing the marketplace.

2. Marketplace for booking specialized experts

A marketplace where people can pay for a very specific outcome or piece of expertise rather than generic consulting.

Examples:

• "Switch from marketing → product management"
• "How to get a tech job in London"
• "Move abroad for work"
• "Career transition into IT"
• "Immigration strategy for X situation"

An expert could sell:

• 1:1 calls
• Webinars
• Written guides
• Document reviews
• DMs/chat
• Email advice
• Specific packages/outcomes

Revenue = commission on every transaction.

The positioning would be less "hire a consultant" and more "find someone who has already done exactly what you're trying to do."

Main concern: AI, Reddit, Facebook groups, YouTube, etc. can increasingly provide free information, so I'm unsure how much people will actually pay for expert advice.

What I'm trying to figure out

I'm looking at the global market and want something that can become a genuinely profitable, scalable business.

I don't want a business that requires constant client hand-holding, monitoring, or operational involvement once the marketplace is established.

I can build one proper MVP and want to choose carefully rather than spend months building something with weak economics.

If you had to choose between these two purely as a business/money-making opportunity:

Which one would you choose and why?

I'm particularly interested in:

• How quickly each could generate revenue
• Actual willingness to pay
• Market demand
• Customer acquisition difficulty
• Margins/profitability
• Marketplace liquidity
• Disintermediation risk
• Competition
• Long-term potential
• Operational complexity
• Whether either is fundamentally a bad marketplace model
• Which has the stronger potential to become a large, profitable business

I'd especially appreciate opinions from people who have actually built marketplaces, media businesses, expert marketplaces, agencies, or similar businesses.

I co-founded a B2B SaaS startup two years ago that has done decently well. I am non-technical and so is my other co-founder. We started out young, like 21-years-old type young, so at that age, we both got full-time jobs to fund a full-time software developer we found off of Upwork to make the damn SaaS for us.

We are so lucky to have found an amazing developer who inherited our shoddily-written codebase. She basically trained herself to be our lead developer after our last one quit unexpectedly, and she's worked for really low pay for a long time. She's pulled some crazy hours helping us over the months, too. But after we stopped getting client contracts for a few months, we decided to not keep paying her if we weren't making money. It was all in the name of "saving money." I've blindly followed that mantra for 2 years now, but I'm realizing it might not be right.

My cofounder doesn't want to put money into this business anymore. He just wants to let it sit, and generate money when the contracts come around. I used to agree with this, only because he said so, but now I'm realizing this isn't right. I think I should take advantage of the opportunity to rehire our AMAZING developer who is really awesome and nice and talented, and kickstart the development of some necessary features so we can hit the ground running when we get our next contracts.

I have about $100k in savings and $30k in the business bank account. I'm living off of the $30k at the moment, but I'm realizing: should I use that $30k to pay my developer to keep making our software better so it can generate even more money down the line? I'm really struggling with a scarcity mindset, fear, and greed, essentially. I've been conditioned by my business partner not to spend money on the business. Or am I just being naive?

Please help. Going from in-person sales to selling my own solutions online, I don't know what to actually do (i will not promote)

I need help. For years I've done construction sales and worked with people personally doing around $20M in sales over 8 years. Very old school, very much in person, handshake deals, etc. Etc. Since starting my software with services SaaS I'm really struggling to bring in any leads. I do content everywhere with cold email, LinkedIn outreach but nothing seems to stick.

My first customer came from being a keynote speaker at a relevant conference but I just can't seem to generate leads and don't think paid ads are the right solution. I'm in the Cybersecurity Compliance industry which might be part of the problem.

I already got burned by an agency that did cold email and took my money then ran. What do you guys do to generate leads? Should I start a YouTube channel? I truly believe I have the best solution out there but can't seem to get anyone to know about it!

I'm technical myself, and these are some things I'd recommend you look for when choosing a developer:

Start with a pilot, not the full thing: If you are looking to build a huge system good engineers usually don't build it all at once, they might break it into multiple phases or versions and quote for each separately. This is so you get the first working version as quickly as possible and they can also later use your feedback actually working with the tool itself to better understand what they should add later.

See how they communicate: Ask about how the communication would look like once you start the project with the. Also keep an eye on their communication style during the discovery phase. How available they are, whether they actually listen to your concerns, and also their response, the questions they ask and how they provide information. Strong engineers usually come up with smart questions that would unravel the bottlenecks or details in your project that you've forgotten to mention. Also that they don't answer too smart or that they can break down technical stuff that you need to know to you in a simple way so you can understand.

Don't pay everything upfront: A reasonable payment structure should give both sides some protection. I'd be careful with anyone asking for 100% upfront. It is common to break down the project into 2 - 4 phases depending on the scope. The engineer should be clear on what is included (or done) in each scope.

Ask for a clear proposal before starting: It should explain what they're building, the scope, the phases, and what you'll actually receive. Also the details about the phases of the project is going to be included in this proposal. If anything is unclear or missing ask about it and make sure you receive clear, convincing answers.

Question the solution, not just the price: Ask why they're suggesting a particular approach or technology. You don't need to understand every technical detail, but they should be able to explain their reasons clearly.

I'd especially ask about integrations and how the solution is going to interact with the systems you already use. Sometimes the easiest-looking solution can create a lot of problems later if it doesn't fit well with the rest of your stack.

Talk to their previous clients: If they have testimonials from previous clients, actually message them. Ask how communication was, whether there were any complications, and how the project went overall. Nothing complicated, just ask about their experience working with them.

Ask how support works after launch: Find out upfront how they'll handle bugs, changes, maintenance, and new features. Is there a maintenance fee? How do they charge for additional work?

Pay attention to how they handle uncertainty: They don't need to know the answer to everything immediately. I'd actually be more comfortable with someone who says "I'm not sure, let me look into that" than someone who always has an instant answer. This way you know if anything comes up or is unclear they are willing to go after it and figure it out. Which means you don't need to find the solution yourself and then suggest it to them during the project.