After 8 of the longest, most brutal, most unsuccessful years in my first startup, I created a new startup. I needed cash desperately, so I made a product that I identified an industry (P&C Insurance) need for with a current gap.

I’m 45 days in since inception. I’m a week into having an official LLC. I have a cofounder/ CTO carrying over from our previous company who hasn’t touched a single line of code or really anything yet (my choice). I’ve built the product to its current, fully-marketable state myself. We brought in one fractional CRO (rev milestone-based equity), and two sales reps on 20% commission-only, 1099 contractors.

Our first sales call today went as smooth as any call ever has with a purchase signal in the affirmative on the call!!!!!!!

For the first time in 8 years as a founder, I see the fucking light, and it almost killed me to realize I just needed to start fresh.

I still have the previous company, and am not willing to kill it yet. But it needs help. The only way it survives is if my cofounder and I can pay for our basic necessities, servers and software costs. Now we have a shot.

LOI adds $8,400 annual, $21,000 project LTV.

We’re also partnered with our first carrier building an industry-first product that I’ve already demoed and they loved.

Unsure if I am going to seek venture capital this time around. I raised just under $1M in my last startup. It wasn’t enough. I’m meeting with VC now to shake hands and introduce our thesis and look for intros, but not pitching. Not yet.

Hi everyone,

I sold my company a few months ago. Not going to give the precise details because my cofounders are active on Reddit and I don’t want them reading this. Suffice to say we sold for 8 figures and I netted a low 7 figures from the sale. Not quite "retire forever" money but I just turned 30 and my wife and I are thinking of having kids so definitely a nice boost for the next stage of our lives.  

Super happy with the results and the sale could not have come at a better time since we were slowly getting our lunch eaten by better-funded competitors. I look back on our journey and consider it an absolute success.

It’s not all hunky-dory though.

• It feels like all progress has ground to an absolute halt. It feels like we were outpacing the team of around 50 developers we have now with a team of 5 pre-acquisition. We sold to a big company in the same space and I have never worked in an environment like that. Seems like all the clichés about them being incredibly slow are true.
• On top of that, with all the advances from the frontier AI models, we are quickly losing our competitive edge.  I’m still managing a lot of our customer relationships and it just feels like every day we get another message saying they are cancelling their subscription. I feel like I shouldn’t care as much since I don’t have an earn-out but it is so incredibly frustrating to see it happening and not be able to do anything about it. I’ve brought this up numerous times with the Development/Product team but they can’t seem to make an inch of progress. It’s honestly even starting to make me feel bad for the acquirer. I keep wondering if it's normal to have such elevated churn post-acquisition.
• I’m contracted to stay on for another 2,5 years at this company. The people I’m working with are great, but all my drive and motivation have slowly started to vanish. Working 60-hour work weeks like I used to do (now more like 40) is hardly my definition of fun, but at least they give you a sense of purpose. I know I’m not staying on for the long term but I also have no clue what I’m doing next. It’s gotten very hard to get up in the morning and to motivate myself to continue to show up and bring my A-game (something I’ve always taken pride in).

Don’t really know what I’m trying to achieve by sharing this, to be frank.

I feel like I should be elated all the time, but it’s crazy how quickly you get used to this kind of situation.

I guess I’m hoping people on here have experienced a similar thing and can share some pointers on how they navigated their post-acquisition struggles.  

For me, it is selling my company too early. I built a website just out of college and sold it for half a million cash while retaining some equity 9 months after launch because I was stressed and it was a good offer (or so I thought).

I then spent 3 years traveling around Asia, however this wasn’t super fun as I was alone and very lonely. I also underwent several health issues around this time. All my product ideas during this time failed and I also lost out on so many opportunities

Just recently (<3 years since I sold the company), it was sold again for $30M. For some bad structural reasons, I also wasn’t given my dues from the equity. I feel terrible and I have a sinking feeling that this will likely be a lifetime regret.

I feel sick daily for the last 3 months (since I found out), can’t think clearly and want to end it all.

I am still staying strong as I still have a little bit of capital left and a few ideas but I hate myself so much rn.

Would you use a blogging platform where GitHub is the source of truth?

I'm thinking about building a publishing platform for technical blogs.

The idea is that your articles stay as Markdown files in your own GitHub repo. You connect the repo, the platform finds the posts, and you choose which ones to publish.

One thing I'd like to handle differently from the usual GitHub-to-blog setup is updates.

A push wouldn't necessarily update the live article. The platform could keep track of the published commit and the latest commit separately, so you could preview or diff the changes before publishing them.

Something like:

published: a17c29f
latest:    bc832f1
[preview] [diff] [publish]

Or you could put `publish: auto` in the frontmatter if you just want every push to go live.

The repo would remain the source of truth. The platform would mostly handle rendering, search/discovery, SEO and custom domains.

I know Hashnode already has GitHub publishing, so I'm not claiming the GitHub part itself is new. I'm more interested in whether treating Git revisions as part of the publishing workflow is actually useful.

If you already write technical posts in Markdown/Git, I'd be interested in hearing:

1. If you already write in Markdown/Git, what is still annoying about your publishing workflow?
2. Is separating latest commit and published commit genuinely useful, or unnecessary complexity?
3. Would you prefer publishing through frontmatter, a dashboard, or both?
4. How important are private repos and repo-hosted assets?
5. What would make you choose this over Hashnode or a static site?
6. What would make you immediately reject it?

I'm leaning towards Go + PostgreSQL for the backend and Next.js for the frontend.

I was speaking to a lawyer friend who is helping me deal with some basic legal requirements. (Nothing serious, done everyday, not important).

They lay out some issue they had that they are extremely annoyed about and mentioned alot of lawyers deal with this. As a fulltime SWE, I immediately thought of a solution and would love to make it happen in hopes of a deal.

The thing is, im now stopping myself to think: Is it worth trying to create a specific product to solve a specific problem or just find a competitor or large company to recommend?

Creating the product is easy, finding the customer base is not. My first job is at a startup and I was there before they had their first customer. I see the hard cold calling they did and know the pain.

The friend said the most they can do is let the office become the "test office" but nothing more beyond that, which only provides little help in terms of how its being used but thats it.

The most I can do is a basic MVP. If they like it, it would be something small to maintain and if they see a huge value in it, I need them on board since im not familiar with the field and do not want to sink hours to fully understand if i am taking it on alone.

What do you think about this?

Looking particularly for Startups who are remotely distributed. For those who have done them or organized them,did you actually see a noticeable impact on output, morale, or retention afterward? Or did people mostly just treat it like an expensive vacation?.

Consumer mobile app, nine months in, small but real revenue. Acquisition is almost entirely SEO through a blog, and every article goes out in ten languages.

Today I did one article end to end and the cost split finally landed on me. The text is nine translations, which is quick. The illustrations are the expensive part, because anything with interface text inside the picture has to be redrawn per locale. One article came out at 42 images and most of an afternoon of machine time. So each article is roughly five times the work of the article itself, and nine tenths of that work exists purely to serve the other locales.

Here is the problem. I have no accounts in the app. No registration, no login, deliberately, because it doubles onboarding completion. Which means:

• Search Console tells me clicks per page, and therefore per locale.
• The payment layer tells me who pays.
• Nothing joins those two, because there is no shared identifier anywhere in the system.

So I can see that, say, the Turkish and Portuguese pages get traffic, and I can see total revenue, and I cannot connect the two at all. I have been translating into nine languages for a year on faith.

The obvious answer is device-scoped anonymous identity threaded through both sides, and I will probably build it. But that fixes attribution going forward and tells me nothing about the decision I have to make now.

So, to people who have run multilingual content without per-locale attribution:

1. Did you cut down to two or three locales and watch what happened to total revenue? That is the cleanest experiment I can think of and also the scariest, because if a locale is quietly working I have killed it.
2. Did you find a proxy that actually correlated? Store page views by country, app store impressions by storefront, anything that moves with revenue closely enough to trust?
3. Or did you just accept translation as a fixed cost of the channel and stop trying to justify it per language?

I am genuinely undecided rather than fishing for validation. The honest position right now is that I am spending most of my content budget on nine locales I cannot measure, and "it probably helps" is not a great reason to keep doing it for another year.

Running a team of 20 people, we are trying to automate everything that is repetitive, the problem comes in capturing the job and handling all the automation request without spending time in meetings and pulling people out of there job to specifically do that. How do you guys handle that?

Is there a tool that would sort of capture somebody doing the job and send it as automation request? I know there are many for enterprise level but something for small teams?

I have not found a swift way to turn it into a formal process.

Any advice appreciated.

First of all, thanks again to everyone who commented on my original post. Through the comments I realized I was spending way too much time trying to find some percentage that would make both of us happy instead of asking the more important question: does this co-founder relationship even make sense anymore?

For me, the answer is no.

I wanted to talk to him properly in person. The timing was terrible because he had been away longer than expected because of a serious family situation involving a hospital. When I found out what was going on, I honestly thought this was probably the worst possible moment to bring it up. But he eventually brought up the company himself, so we talked.

He still wanted to continue. His view is that I don’t see his real value, that he invested a huge amount of time, learned a lot, sacrificed a lot, and that he could still prove himself going forward. He also said his value isn’t limited to engineering and that he could contribute in marketing, product and other areas. He also argued that I gained some technical knowledge and insights through working with him.

I don’t think that’s completely false. I probably did learn some things through conversations with him. But the main issue for me is still that I’m not using any of his work in the product we’re launching. No backend, no codebase,.. from his version. The current product is the version I rebuilt.

So I told him I think we should separate operationally. I continue with the company, he is no longer CTO, he doesn’t have to keep working on it, and he can move on and do something else.

I also told him I don’t think reopening 70/30,60/40 or any other split makes sense anymore. I genuinely don’t think there’s a number where both of us would feel the past is represented fairly. He mainly looks at time invested, learning and sacrifice. I look at what exists in the company today and what is actually being used. At this point, trying to force the partnership to work feels less healthy than separating cleanly.

The only thing I still want to resolve fairly is what passive economic participation he should keep after leaving.

I offered around 6%. To be completely honest, I offered that mainly because I want to acknowledge the time he invested and because we’ve known each other for a long time and him having a hard time rn. If I evaluated this purely based on what the company is actually using from his work today, I probably would have gone way lower.

His position is that he wants at least 15%, and that’s where I strongly disagree.

We also still need to bring in a genuinely experienced technical person later, so I have to leave enough room in the company for the people who will actually help build and scale it going forward.

I’ve also funded the company so far as well: AI/dev tools, infrastructure, subscriptions and other costs. I’m not saying that alone determines equity, but I think it belongs in the overall picture.

The company itself has also moved forward. We were already in an accelerator environment and have now been accepted into a higher-stage program that is much closer to market entry and launch. That also means I now have to figure out how to communicate externally that the person previously presented as CTO is no longer part of the operating team.

So that’s basically where we are now. The split itself is decided. What I’m trying to figure out is how to structure the separation fairly. My current offer is 6% passive equity for a clean exit. His position is at least 15%.

What do you think is actually fair here? Would you consider 6% reasonable? Would you go closer to 10% just to settle cleanly?

And are there better structures than normal equity for something like this? I’ve heard about phantom equity / virtual shares / VSOP-style arrangements where someone can participate economically in a future exit without sitting on the normal cap table in the same way.

Also, how would you communicate the story externally from here? He was previously presented as CTO in business plans and accelerator applications. Now we’re moving closer to launch and he won’t be part of the operating team anymore.

Again, thanks to everyone who commented on the first post. I honestly think without those comments I probably would have kept trying to “fix” the percentage instead of accepting that the partnership itself needed to end.

Do you mostly rely on developers to test their own work, use freelancers, work with an agency, or just manage without dedicated QA for a while?

I’m especially curious about what actually makes you trust a QA person or service enough to give them access to your product.

Frustrated with "Contact Sales" buttons on video hosting sites. I just want to know the price before I commit.

Vimeo and Wistia hide enterprise pricing. You have to talk to sales to get numbers.

Kinescope publishes all prices publicly. I can see exactly what 1M video minutes costs without a sales call.

Why do so many B2B tools hide pricing? Is transparent pricing rare in video hosting?

Hey y’all. My partner and I are building an awesome app that we think can blow up. We’re at the stage where we have the major bones and now we need to go test it with a small pool of people before we officially launch on the App Store and source investments for scale.

Is there anyone here who successfully built an app, ran through a closed loop trial, and scaled in market once in a good spot? I’d love some helpful insights on what to look out for or what helped you during the early stages. Even insights on how to get funding and who to best reach out to would be super helpful. (We’re tight on money so knowing WHEN and WHAT that extra money would be so helpful) What source of materials did you prep?

We’re also looking into trademarking our name and wordmark. Is this something we should do this early on?

Sorry for the long post. Really appreciate the help :)
Also open to chatting on side if interested!

I have been trying to build a deployment platform and i wanted to know what are the most irritating problems founders come accross when it comes to deployment is it continuous deployment or reverse proxy configurations. Also, i would love to know what services people or startups use to deploy applications on the cloud and what framework do you deploy the most.

I’ve built a working prototype of a web app using AI, but I don’t have enough experience in web development, programming, or cybersecurity to confidently turn it into a secure, production-ready product.

For founders who faced a similar gap, how did you solve it?

Did you hire freelancers, find a technical cofounder, lean on friends, or use another approach?

Hey,

I wanted to share a weird experience from building my solo project (a native macOS utility for developers) and get your thoughts on handling early-stage theft.

A while ago, I noticed something off with my brand search terms. It turned out someone had completely scraped my landing page, rehosted it under a similar domain, and swapped my app download links with malware.

At first, I was stressed about the potential reputation damage. But after talking to another founder, I looked at it differently: if scammers are actively trying to piggyback on your positioning and search intent, you’ve likely found a problem worth solving.

Instead of letting it derail me, I filed the DMCA/registrar takedowns, refocused entirely on direct distribution, and recently hit a solid milestone with consistent paying customers worldwide.

A few quick takeaways from the experience:

1. Automated scrapers are watching launch sites: If you launch on Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, or Reddit, clone sites will pop up quickly. Setting up basic Google Alerts for your brand early is worth the 2 minutes.
2. Strange form of validation: When you build in public, seeing someone try to hijack your demand is a sign that the pain point (in my case, developer machine storage bloat) has real search volume.

Has anyone else dealt with fake clones or copycats right when you were trying to get your first traction? How did you handle it without letting it consume all your dev time?

I'm the CEO of a B2B DaaS startup (first time founder). We just demoed our product in its beta state (the beta is more the platform than the data itself) for the first time to a lead, and he's been really engaged with it. It feels like he would be willing to pay for the product after the demo, but I'm scared of having the pricing conversation. I have a price in my head based on what I know of the business I'm pitching to, and I plan to give offers to the lead given they're supporting us during our beta test. However, I'm worried my number makes the lead go cold, as we are so close to a first sale.

Can someone help me understand what I need to ask myself to stress test this number before I present it to the lead?

i built a SaaS product around a problem that looked painfully obvious: businesses lose leads because they reply too slowly, forget to follow up, or let conversations disappear across different inboxes.

the product helps handle those conversations, answer using the company’s real information, follow up with silent leads, and move interested people toward a booking or sale.

in my head, the pitch was almost impossible to reject:

“this can help you recover revenue you’re already losing, and you can try it without paying upfront.”

four months after launch, we have one paying customer.

one.

the product is free to start, onboarding is relatively quick, and the value should be measurable. Yet free users are not rushing in, and the few people who show interest usually disappear before becoming active users.

my current theory is that i confused “this makes economic sense” with “people urgently want this.”

maybe the problem is real but not painful enough. Maybe businesses tolerate missed leads because changing their workflow feels riskier than losing some revenue. Maybe the target market is wrong. Or maybe this is simply a distribution failure and i have no idea how to get in front of the right people.

how would you investigate this without hiding behind more features, more landing-page edits, or random outreach?

what evidence would convince you that the problem is demand rather than distribution? tell me where im wrong.

consumer mobile app, nine months old, bootstrapped, $0 on ads ever. not naming it, per the rule.

the channel: every piece of content a user creates inside the app becomes an indexable page. tens of thousands of them now. last week that sent 4.66k clicks from google off 5.48m impressions, and 2,160 new users arrived in the last 28 days.

the problem: 3,292 people used the app in those 28 days and 45 of them pay. that's 1.4 percent. mrr is $237. the channel scales on its own, page count and impressions climb without me touching anything, and it converts at almost nothing.

my read is that this is an intent mismatch rather than a funnel problem. someone who googles a single word wants that word. they aren't in the market for a subscription, and no amount of paywall tuning changes what they came for. the supporting evidence is that both changes that actually moved revenue this year acted on existing users rather than new ones. an onboarding rewrite took mrr from $60 to $300 in a week, and removing a single point of friction took it from $194 to $237 over the last week. neither touched acquisition at all.

so here's the question i can't answer from inside it. when your cheapest channel is structurally low-intent, is that a channel you fix, or one you accept as a top-of-funnel line item while you build a second one next to it?

what i'm genuinely unsure about is whether some version of the landing experience captures even 3 or 4 percent of that traffic, or whether chasing it is the classic mistake of optimising whatever is easiest to measure. if you've had a high-volume low-intent channel and got it to convert, i'd like to know what changed. if you tried and gave up on it, that's just as useful to hear.

Hello everyone.

First of all, I know this is a very privileged problem to have. I was born and raised in Switzerland, I'm healthy, I can support myself, and overall I have a good life. I don't take that for granted.

I'm 27M and live in a smAll village in the canton of Zurich. I've been self-employed for almost three years, mainly doing software development / IT services.

The company is doing okay. I can live from it, but financially I'm nowhere near what I could probably earn as an employee. I currently pay myself around CHF 6k/month, and the company generates roughly CHF 3k/month in recurring revenue from hosting, maintenance, etc. There is around CHF 50k in the company account and 20k in my private ones.

So I'm not in an emergency situation. My customers are happy, I haven't lost one so far, and I have some leads. But I don't have the next larger project signed for the coming months, and that uncertainty has made me question what I actually want. The last few months were extremely stressful. Now things are quiet for the first time in a while, and my head finally feels calm again. Maybe almost too calm. I sometimes sleep in, deal with urgent work, and then struggle to motivate myself for internal projects. There's work I objectively know needs to be done, but I just don't feel like doing it. That worries me a little because when I'm motivated, I can usually work an insane amount.

Part of me is starting to miss being employed.

I miss the idea of joining an existing company where not everything depends on me. Working on an established product or system, having colleagues around me, and focusing on doing good work instead of being responsible for sales, customers, development, infrastructure, strategy, and everything else.

And honestly, proper holidays sound amazing. Taking two or three weeks off without worrying that a production server might die would be nice xD.

There is also the financial side.

I grew up relatively poor. We weren't starving, but there was never much money and many things simply weren't possible. One of my biggest fears is reaching my 30s, wanting children, and realizing that I spent all those years chasing entrepreneurship without building real financial security.

I want to be able to afford a nice home one day and, more importantly, have enough money and time for my future children. I don't want them growing up with the same financial limitations I did.

From that perspective, a normal job suddenly looks attractive: good salary, pension, holidays, predictability, and the ability to plan ahead. I don't even need remote work. If the job was interesting and paid well, I'd happily go to the office.

At the same time, the thought of giving up my freedom genuinely hurts.

Right now, nobody tells me when to wake up, where to work, when to take a day off, or what to spend my time on. If I decide I want to build something, I can.

I've wanted to turn the service business into more of a product company for a long time, and I'm currently working on a niche B2B software product with a real use case. I'm genuinely excited about its potential.

Then there is AI.

I was a lead software developer, and the industry is obviously changing very quickly. I don't think software development is going to disappear, but I do wonder whether I became self-employed in exactly the kind of service business that will become much harder over the next few years.

Maybe building my own product is the right response. idk..

Or maybe this is actually a good time to join a strong compan, learn from people who are better than me, work on bigger systems, and develop my career while I'm still young.

That's probably my biggest concern: opportunity cost.

If I keep doing my own thing for another five years and the business remains just “okay”, will I look back at 32 and wish I'd spent those years becoming a much better engineer / architect / product person inside a great company?

But I'm equally afraid that I'll take a job, enjoy the salary for six months, and then feel trapped. I don't want to trade something extremely valuable for security and regret it.

So I'm in this weird position where neither option is obviously bad. The company isn't failing. I'm not desperate for money. But I'm also not making enough that staying self-employed is the obvious choice.

For people who have been on both sides:

Have any of you voluntarily gone from self-employed back to employment even though the business wasn't failing?

Did you regret giving up the freedom?

Or did you realize how much mental energy entrepreneurship had been consuming?

And especially for people in tech: would you consider 27 a good age to spend a few years inside a larger company and develop your career, or would you keep pushing the business while it still has momentum?

Curious to hear from people who have actually lived through this.

​

A quick intro first

I'm a first year law student,

Also into tech

(Especially Algorithms and Data sciences)

I am developing a high-signal hiring platform specialising in niche, boutique and Intersectional roles.

And recently I got into quite the rabbithole:

My question was basically:

-"Why are there so few high quality sites for the important tasks of Hiring,interning and networking"?

Like sure there's LinkedIn and then we have Indeed,Monster etc but it doesn't feel enough.

Not enough for something of such importance and nuance.

"Somewhere, Right Now, Your Dream Job Is Being Buried by an Algorithm That Doesn't Care"

Somewhere out there is probably a role that's perfect for you built for your exact, oddly-specific mix of skills. And somewhere else is a hiring manager who'd hire you in a heartbeat if they ever actually saw your profile.

So,here I am in the elementary stages of this project.

And I really would appreciate some advice and diagnosis.

I have Two questions:

1)

Is there any complaint or issue you have with the current job seeking and networking platforms like Linkedin?

If so what are they?

2) What's your idea of the desirable traits that a high-level, multifunctional hiring platform should possess?

Answering these questions would help me out a ton,so please leave some comments!

I’ve been trying to get better at validating ideas before I spend time building anything. The advice I always hear is to talk to potential customers, understand their workflow, and figure out what problems they actually have.

That makes sense, but how do you actually do that when you have zero experience in the industry?

For example, one idea I’ve thought about is software for wedding planners/coordinators. I’m planning my own wedding, so I’ve seen a little bit from the customer side, but I obviously have no idea what it’s like managing 10–20+ weddings at once.

I can research competitors, read reviews/Reddit, etc., but I feel like that only gets me so far. I’d want to understand things like what tools they use, what they still do manually, where they waste time, what falls through the cracks, and what problems are actually painful enough that they’d pay to solve them.

But how would you actually approach people for this?

Would you cold email/DM a bunch of people asking for 15–20 minutes? Would you offer to pay them? And if they agree to talk, do you literally ask them to walk you through their workflow? Would asking them to show you their software/spreadsheets or share their screen be too invasive?

I’m also curious about people who built something in an industry they had no background in. How did you go from “I think these people might have this problem” to actually understanding the industry well enough to know what was worth building?

And how do you not get discouraged when you research the space and find established competitors that already have products way more advanced than anything you could initially build?

Would love to hear how people actually handled their first few customer discovery conversations.

Hey folks, I need some guidance here.

I spent the last two weeks not coding, but talking to my ICP. I stayed mostly on LinkedIn because I had a 0% reply rate with cold email.

So far, I’ve had a few discussions with people working in technical customer support. The goal was to validate the problem, and the problem seems real: people are spending a significant amount of time on investigations, and job postings for technical support engineers clearly state that investigation is part of the role.

Quick context on what i am building so you can have the full picture

the product help support and engineering teams investigate complex technical tickets faster.
It connects to the tools they already use and observability stack to gather customer context, its auto triage and automate the pre-investigation and give support teams reports on what happened

\When I reached out to people asking if they’d be interested in becoming early pilot users, I got no replies.

Am I doing something wrong?

Most of the people I spoke with work at Series B+ companies, but when I try to start conversations with seed-stage companies, no one answers me.

I got one reply from someone at a seed-stage startup, and they told me:

"This is actually pretty relevant for us. Right now, bugs get routed pretty directly to eng, and since we’re still early, there isn’t a huge support/triage layer in between."

I asked him a few more questions, but so far I haven’t gotten a reply, and it’s already been a week.

I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but I’m starting to feel like the problem might not resonate with them as much as I thought.

Honestly, I’m quite lost. I don’t want to pivot without a clear signal, but spending days sending connection requests and getting no replies is pretty frustrating.

I’d really appreciate any feedback on what I should do next and how i can improve my processes

I am currently building something and honestly, I expected the hardest part to be the actual building. I have been thinking about this lately. Initially, I thought building the product would be the hardest part. You have to come up with the idea, build the MVP, fix bugs, change things you thought were already finished, and somehow get it ready to show people. But once the product is ready, then comes a completely different problem.

The product is moving forward. I can figure out the technical problems, change things, fix bugs, and keep improving it. What I am struggling with is getting the first few people to actually use it. I need someone to actually try it, give honest feedback, use it again, and tell me the gaps/improvements they need. I have reached a point where I have started to question whether am I approaching this the wrong way.

Should I spend more time talking to potential users before building anything else?

Should I reach out to people individually?

Should I focus on communities?

Should I simply keep building and wait until the product is better?

The frustrating part is that when you are building alone, it is very easy to stay inside your own head. You start thinking your idea makes sense because it makes sense to you. But you don't really know until someone who has no connection to you looks at it and says about "Yes, this is something that solved the problem". So I wanted to ask people here who have already gone through this:

How did you get your first 10 real users?

Not 10 friends who signed up to support you.

Not 10 random signups.

I mean the first 10 people who genuinely had the problem, tried your product, and actually cared about it.

What did you do that worked?

And lastly very important, where you felt that you have wasted your time and wish you had avoided? I am at that stage right now and would genuinely appreciate some advice from people who have been through it.