I read this article by sequoia a while back and at waterloo I met a company called sequence holdings at a networking event. Essentially what they do is they buy a company and turn it ai native and hold forever unlike a traditional PE firm. They only raised $75 million but they bought Baldwin group with the dell family office for $7.7 billion. Long Lake bought Amex GBT for $6.3 billion.
I had coffee chats with engineers there and tbh they're both hiring the most talented engineers I've met - other than maybe frontier labs. I really think that this industry is like working for the next ramp and palantir - so many great founders have come from there. Ik palantir is rightfully very controversial but so many great founders were ex pltr FDEs. These companies do kind of the same thing as Palantir in terms of integrating the product but instead own the stack.

I strongly agree with the points made in the article and both companies have adopted the philosophy. I realized that while creating a B2B, selling to customers in a vertical where AI integration would be highly beneficial the company could be so much more profitable and agile. Sequoia mentions for every $1 spent on software $6 is spent on services and instead of selling a product maybe you should sell the service. What are your guys thoughts?

btw I can't send the link for some reason but check out services-the-new-software from sequoia.

​

I'm a software engineer, and on the side, I work at a local game store. I noticed most of these shops don't have a system to manage inventory, orders, or customer data, so I built a web app (web app is mobile friendly but scanner tool to add inventory probably might feel better in an app) and soon a mobile one that works great at my shop. I’m stuck on what to do next. I know there's a market for this, but I don't have a marketing background or a huge budget. Some have suggested partnering with Square or PayPal since I’ve already integrated them, but I don't know how to start. I’d love some advice from people who have been there. I really think this could be a game changer for game stores, but I’m not sure how to scale it.

Canadian founders with international (non-US) co-founders: how did you structure your business? Did you open a Delaware corp and a Canadian holding corporation that owns your shares?

At some point, your business will become profitable beyond covering your salaries, and you will want a tax deferral vehicle. Is it better to own the shares personally initially and then create the holding corporation? Is it worth doing it right away to avoid headaches later? Paying an accounting firm $5k+ a year just to maintain this structure definitely hurts before I can start collecting deferred income in the holding corp. But at the same time, I understand that it will pay off eventually, and sometimes you just have to take risks.

We are fully bootstrapped and profitable, but not paying a fancy lawyer to set up everything for us kinda profitable. I'm aware that this step will require some investment, but I don't want to throw money away on unnecessary services.

Lost my user acquisition channel (I will not promote)

Hi,

Intro:

Over the last few months I've been making an engine for finding TCG cards similar to one you love (based on artwork). I originally intended to make a shopify app for TCG card shops on shopify where they could use the engine to add recommendations on cart/product pages to increase sales, but recently I felt the engine was good enough, and accidentally noticed in one of my test tools that it was pretty fun to just start from a card and find more card -> open that one, find more, repeat. So I decided to make a website over it.

How it went:

It went great I found a subreddit of very art focused pokemon collectors, and made comments on requests for similar cards for a binder page theme suggesting people use my website.

I was getting ~30-40 users daily out of which 25% came back for at least 2 sessions separated by at least 30 min, and 15% coming back on multiple days.

Then the subreddit banned any form of promos because people were making posts promoting their every other minute, and now I'm down to 0 users after 2 weeks of being unable to promote there.

I've tried reddit ads/google ads, but the traffic is very poor quality so far mostly instant bounces on google and reddit I cant bid high enough as its a free service and theres no ad, only affiliate links.

I was pretty happy just seeing people use it and coming back to it even though It wasnt generating money at all.

Now I'm just looking at my lack of traffic and feel pretty depressed and dont know what to do from here.

Anyone else had similar things happen to them? How did you manage to get over it?

Building a deep research product with the best width and depth of any tool, and data persistence. I need to market to companies that aggregate data, synthesize that data, and make predictions or decisions based on it. The catch is, I can't seem to talk to anyone in the space because they're all so damn hard to reach compared to other ICPs I've talked to in the past for other products. What to do?

Hi everyone,

I’m doing some early research into how companies currently collect and prepare data for Scope 1, 2 and 3 carbon accounting.

I’m particularly interested in people who work inside companies and are responsible for collecting/validating emissions data, rather than consultants.

I’d love to understand things like:

• where your data comes from (invoices, PDFs, Excel, ERP, suppliers, etc.)
• how you turn that data into the format required by your carbon accounting software
• how much manual work is involved
• what tends to go wrong
• which part of the process you’d most like to automate

I’m not selling anything and I’m not looking for beta testers at this stage. I’m simply trying to understand the problem from the company’s side before deciding whether there is a product worth building.

If this is part of your day-to-day work and you’d be open to a 20-minute conversation, please comment or DM me. Happy to keep it informal and, if useful, I can also share what I learn from the research afterwards.

Don’t confuse “people like it” with validation [i will not promote]

Someone saying “that’s a cool idea” is nice, but it doesn’t tell you much.

Stronger signals are things like:
Someone gives you their time to try it
Someone comes back without being reminded
Someone changes their existing workflow
Someone asks when they can use it
Someone pays
Someone recommends it to another person

I still like compliments, obviously.
But when evaluating an idea, I’d pay much more attention to behavior than enthusiasm.

24M here and im planning a clothing business to start. As an introvert, I find myself hard communicating with people who are in well established business. How do you guys approach them? Out of nervousness my mind goes blank and voice gets too low and cant even speak properly like i stutter sometimes.
Any tips?

19, no degree and my long-term goal is to eventually build an internet business/startup.

Right now I'm trying to figure out what would be the highest-leverage way to spend the next few years learning.

I'm considering getting into tech sales as an SDR, where I'd learn prospecting, cold calling, discovery, understanding customers and how companies actually buy.

Another path I'm considering is GTM/revenue engineering, where I'd learn outbound systems, data, automation, AI tools, CRM and the systems behind acquiring customers.

But I'm wondering if I'm overthinking the job title.

If you were 19 and knew you wanted to build a startup eventually, what would you deliberately try to become really good at before starting one?

Would you focus on:

- sales and customer acquisition

- coding/product development

- marketing/distribution

- working at an early-stage startup

- learning operations and business fundamentals

- building small projects on the side

- or something else?

I'm less interested in "become an SDR" vs "become a GTM engineer."

I'm more interested in what skills and experiences actually compound when you eventually become a founder.

Would love to hear from people who have actually built startups and what they wish they had learned earlier.

Alright guys I have a quick question. Next week I'm onboarding two new mentors to my startup. Right now they're saying they want to talk once every two weeks/ helping me design and put my demo together but my question is when should I offer the other two equity and how long should our relationship be before I offer the other two equity?

The two mental states running a startup: thinking I need to find a new job, to thinking I'm the smartest person alive (and can't believe everyone else isn't trying to build the same thing).

I've hit both in the same week... sometimes in the same day.

How do you fight the doubt and keep pushing forward?

Honeypot tried to reverse the hiring and recruiting process: You would post your own profile, and companies would approach you. Focus was mostly on IT and adjacent industries, I understand.

Apparently, it did not survive. I am curious to learn why, as I kinda like the idea. I found only very generic information stating that Covid hit them hard, and not much besides that.

Does anyone know a bit more? What exactly was the problem?

We're building AI B2B SaaS Dev tool (duh) and i feel like we're banging against a wall. We have a free tier for regular users, we give all of our features for free, for open source (we pay for ai inference completely) but we still have only one installation (github app), that is currently cold and not going anywhere.

We tried auto GTM services (one of the ads you see on reddit) and it's been completely rubbish, 60 dollars spent for 0 hot leads, nobody is interested, even though we sent like 2k cold emails. Manually we sent personalized and customized 100 emails (rookie numbers i get it, but it's hard to email something significant and i'd rather be silent than spam people via github), we tried three different email strategies, one of them was "converting" into thank you's and not any installation. We tried LinkedIn ads - it also did not lead to anything, even though we had more than 30k views on the post (public demonstration). We tried guerilla marketing (albeit small sample size, still working on it), it also did not yield anything to date.

I really don't want to launch on PH before we get any traction, i need installations and usage before we get listed on any benchmark (and i'm 100% sure we'll get one of the top spots) and i'm at the point of just saying F it, giving everything for free (we have 25k USD to spend in infra and ai inference) and just figuring out how to throw this money on fire to actually get any feedback from anyone 😅

Welcome to this week’s Feedback Thread!

Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:

• Feel free to request general feedback or specific feedback in a certain area like user experience, usability, design, landing page(s), or code review
• You may share surveys
• You may make an additional request for beta testers
• Promo codes and affiliates links are ONLY allowed if they are for your product in an effort to incentivize people to give you feedback
• Please refrain from just posting a link
• Give OTHERS FEEDBACK and ASK THEM TO RETURN THE FAVOR if you are seeking feedback
• You must use the template below--this context will improve the quality of feedback you receive

​

Template to Follow for Seeking Feedback:

• Company Name:
• URL:
• Purpose of Startup and Product:
• Technologies Used:
• Feedback Requested:
• Seeking Beta-Testers: [yes/no] (this is optional)
• Additional Comments:

​

​

​

This thread is NOT for:

• General promotion--YOU MUST use the template and be seeking feedback
• What all the other recurring threads are for
• Being a jerk

​

​

Community Reminders

• Be kind
• Be constructive if you share feedback/criticism
• Follow all of our rules
• You can view all of our recurring themed threads by using our Menu at the top of the sub.

Upvote This For Maximum Visibility!

I'm researching how businesses actually handle forecasting, and I'd like to understand the workflow before building anything.

If you work with things like sales, demand, inventory, revenue, staffing, or other time-series data:

• What are you currently using for forecasting?
• Are you using an existing SaaS tool, Python libraries/models, spreadsheets, or something you built yourself?
• How much work does it take to clean the data and get forecasts running?
• Do you regularly backtest your forecasts against historical data?
• What's the biggest pain point with your current setup?
• If there were an API where you could send historical time-series data and get forecasts back, what would you need it to do for you to actually use it?

I'm particularly interested in hearing from people who have actually had to deploy forecasting in a business, rather than people who have only experimented with forecasting models.

I'm not selling anything right now. I'm trying to figure out whether this is a real problem worth building around.

Just want to be right for once. I know starting from a solution and then looking for customers is a bad Idea, and I truly feel like I'm not doing that. However, anytime I discuss a product with friends it turns into a 10 minute rant where they basically call me stupid and naive or imply I don't understand people. Makes me feel like shit. Am I just that stupid? How is it I can't think of a single useful thing.

This is for both in-person and recorded demos/pitches. It's incredibly easy now to make a crazy 5d lightshow of a pitchdeck using AI. I'm tempted to build a deck that is just above old-school-powerpoint level of dazzle just to see how it hits.

I've also purposely stopped using any buzzwords or even polishing my speaking style to be perfect. I think I come across as way more genuine and trustworthy if I'm speaking from the heart and avoiding the razzle dazzle. I don't even care about stumbling on words or saying "I don't know" if it's answering a question I don't have the answer for right away. Making shit up on the spot is an easy tell.

Maybe it varies from industry to industry. Interested in thoughts.

I'm at verge of shutting everything down and quitting the startup game permanently I've been told this advice countless times build something people want now what am I supposed to do when businesses outright don't want to try out my application

I believe I should quit the startup fantasy and start working a 9-5 as much as my ADHD brain hates a regular old job

every day I wake up and hate myself for dropping out of university and building my startup, my family hates it, I hate it and I Know if I give it X amount of time it will eventually work but I need it to work now to survive

anyone got any advice ?

I open Twitter/X once in a blue moon, when someone posts a link to it. I’ve never found it interesting. However I keep hearing that this remains the platform with most VC investors and tech founders. Do you think that Twitter has been useful for you to be up to date to the latest developments in the tech startup world? If yes, which accounts for you follow?

It seems most people forget that everything is a process, whether it's marketing strategy and execution or design of creative assets.

The steps between a starting point and a good outcome are important. But the issue is that I'm seeing most AI design tools skip every one of those best practices and steps and try to go from beginning to end straight away. Someone types a prompt, gets a graphic back, but then spends the next half an hour or more prompting it, trying to edit some kind of final version that really was wrong from the beginning .

The tool never really gets to fully understand the brand, or look at the context of where the design is going to end up.. and it's producing layout without understanding what it is that it's promoting. I've always felt this way about Canva too. They've got millions of templates. You find a template that looks kind of cool and what you want, but then you spend ages customizing it and changing it to look like your brand.- Its completely backwards. Neither approach is treating design as a sequence of decisions. They're both trying to jump to that end point as fast as possible.

A designer who actually knows what they're doing works through something closer to this:

1. Read the source material for what would be good to highlight in an ad
2. Check it against the brand and any existing materials
3. Decide what to feature, based on who's going to see it
4. Build a layout around that specific content
5. Rough it out before committing to a final render
6. Check the result against real criteria, not a A template or an AI saying, "Yeah, that's great."
   
7. Revise based on specific feedback

Skip hese steps steps and jump straight to a finished image and you get something that looks okay, and kinda designed but really, it wasn't. The layout is plausible, but the wrong things get emphasized, the copy doesn't sound like the brand, and the "finished" asset needs a human to basically start over.

So absolutely, people should be using AI, but they should be doing it following best practices, step by step, not trying to jump straight to the end. And then you can use AI. to just compresses the time between them. Reading the material, checking the brand, picking the content, laying it out, roughing it out, scoring it, revising it, none of that disappears just Have a machine doing it faster. It still has to happen for good output.

I like to say things like "Research best practices for XYZ" and then ask it to, step by step, go through each of these things, asking me for approval before you move to the next step.

Would love any other people's thoughts or tips on this type of stuff.

What country is best to register a tech company when the founder lives abroad?

I need the company to get a DUNS number for Google Play and Apple App stores.

By best, it should:

1. Be easy to manage from abroad.
2. Have as little red tape as possible.
3. Negligible fees.
4. Tax favourable
5. Easy online banking services.

Got UK from an AI but I wanted to get some human experience too.

Used to frequent the DIY Drones space back in the 2010's and was into the hobby side of it a bit.

Recently had the incling to look into what the drone inspection/surveying landscape was here in the NW of the UK as it's an industrial/agricultural zone.

However I'm coming at this with no experience in the value-proposition and deliverables.

Current bonus is living near a working farm with potential contacts to understand what problems could be solved if any.

I have a DJI mavic camera drone and will be looking at testing out some basic mapping this weekend.

It seems like all the pieces are generally available with a bit of investment - drone platforms, lidar, IR, software etc, it's stiching it together into a package that delivers something valuable and easy for potential customers and then marketing.

Of course I'm not expecting to get into this with a consumer camera drone and a prayer - just looking for advice from those who've been there on whether there's too much friction/saturation in the idea to get serious.

People always throw out 40 or 50 employees as the point where you need full-time People lead. Is that actually based on anything?

It seems like hiring pace and how many countries you operate in would matter more. We are considering Hawkwood partners who offer both fractional and permanent People hires, which made me wonder if using one firm for the transition helps, or if it just gives them a reason to push the permanent search sooner.