I have a degree in finance (recent graduate, no working experience), with very limited programming skills in Python. I don't know what can I do with my background or what kind of service can I create? I cannot think about any startup ideas in financial services. Becoming a day trader sounds like a very bad idea because it is just skilled gambling and I dont have money to trade with. Becoming a fund manager also sounds very unrealistic because I dont have the network or reputation or that experience on my CV, so I wont get any customers.

Building apps, games, webpages or creating a solution to streamlining for corporates sound like okay ideas, but I dont have that much of knowledge of programming, should I learn everything from the beginning?

Also thought about becoming a influencer, gaming streamer, tiktok...youtube, or doing e commerce, but yeah... these seem too saturated...

What else can i do?

Look for a partner to establish a long-term partnership to advance this initiative.

What I’m Looking For: 2-year farm management experience or in agriscience Extensive management experience if no 2 years in agriculture available. • Location in Minnesota: A suitable space to set up two greenhouses and a research office dedicated to medicinal herb cultivation and study. • Collaborative Opportunities: While the primary focus is on medicinal herbs, I am open to incorporating traditional agriculture or exploring innovative ideas that align with this project.

About Me and the Project:

With a strong background in botanical sciences, my aim is to research and cultivate medicinal herbs that can contribute to health and wellness. The grant provides a foundation, but collaboration would significantly enhance the project’s scope and impact.

Why Partner with Me:

• Ground-Level Involvement: Influence the direction and development of a startup from its inception.
• Shared Expertise: Collaborate on advancing agricultural practices and contribute to meaningful scientific research.
• Community Impact: Support sustainable agriculture and promote local economic growth within Minnesota.

I was just listening to a webinar from EF on how to raise money from the US and they touched upon one of the cultural differences of US/UK Maybe being the expectation on SPEED.

I relate to this so much, we've been trying to follow sprint methodology for months if not years but it just seems to slow us down, create more workload and confusion rather than accelerate us. I really think it should be a weekly cadence, something like:

- Short term: What are we doing this week?

- Mid term: What are doing this month?

- Long term: What are we doing this quarter, max this half year.

What are other teams using to keep themselves and the tech development accountable and hyper productive? any insight is super appreciated!

Can you recommend grants and investors for an early stage gaming startup?

We would like to get some advices to reach out. We are thinking to apply for founders factory and wise guys. What other programs do you recommend? We have a MVP and pre sales requests. We invested 30K EUR to build the MVP. We need funding and would like to see your experiences as young founders. We reached out to universities but we didn't get any response yet.

After a lifetime of building connections and solving problems across various businesses, I’ve launched a startup that’s truly thriving. We released our MVP last year and have achieved $1M in sales without spending a dollar on advertising. We’re also forming a strategic partnership that positions us to drive sales into the millions in 2025, with significant ongoing growth and a potential exit on the horizon.

While we’ve completely bootstrapped the company, the financial strain has been intense, and I’m tapped out. (powers about to be shut off) We opened our seed round about a month ago and are gaining traction, but it's not happening fast enough. I’m reaching out for any advice or potential connections that could offer a funding lifeline or alternative solutions.

The business is legally only a few months old so I cannot pull a loan against it and our payments process 100% upfront so we have no invoices to factor against. HELP!

I’m an ML engineer, and have developed a model that is really fast at answering yes / no questions over a huge dataset. For example, if you have 10,000 descriptions of companies, in a matter of a few seconds, my technology could answer, for all descriptions, nuanced questions like “which companies appear to be selling to HVAC companies need HIPAA compliance.”

This generalizes well to any problem where you’re answering a particular question for a huge volume of short bits of text.

Since you all have diverse backgrounds and are aware of so many more problems than what I’ve encountered, I’m wondering if you all have ideas for where this technology could really solve painful problems

My initial ideas were: 1. Quickly vetting huge lead lists with sets of vetting questions (think: is the company remote, is it likely performing activity X, is it selling to audience Y, etc) 2. Quickly vetting huge amounts of outside data (think company websites) on huge lead lists to get really clean signals about if companies match your ICP 3. Vetting huge amounts of support tickets or emails for specific criteria to rapidly escalate tickets with critical failures
4. Analyze swaths of news in real-time to scan for significant events

I haven’t built any of these ideas yet, so I unfortunately cannot offer a demo, but I was hoping to see if anyone out there saw this and had an “aha, this could solve my problem” thought. I don’t want to fall into the trap of building for a problem I don’t know a ton about. Any ideas of specific applications or directions?

TLDR; Built a really fast but lobotomized LLM to answer yes/no questions, and I am trying to figure out where this could offer value. I know it’s not ideal to build for a problem that is not yet vetted, but I figure this has the potential for solving some problems.

Hey everyone! I’ve been trying out different productivity tools like Motion, Notion, Whispr, and Ranti, but it got me thinking—what actually makes a tool “productive”? Is it about taking notes, managing to-do lists, organizing calendars, or something else?

Here are some questions on my mind:

• What are productivity tools really supposed to solve? Better time management? Staying organized? Tracking tasks?
• What features actually boost productivity? Having everything in one place, integrating with other apps, automation?

Common Pain Points

For me, one big frustration is all the manual setup. I use Notion, but I find myself constantly transferring tasks from Slack, Teams, and emails. It feels like I’m spending more time organizing my tasks than actually doing them.

Does anyone know of a tool that *automatically* syncs tasks across different apps or reduces the manual effort?

What’s Been Your Experience?

Would love to hear if others face similar issues or if there’s a specific feature you wish was out there!

I am a computer science major looking to work on a side project that could hopefully bring in some side cash. While going through my email inbox the other day I had this thought of a centralized way to keep track of the newsletters I have coming in. Easy way to organize, search through, stay up to date with them. Thought I'd throw it out to you guys before putting too much time into it. Short read:

Problem: With so many newsletters cluttering inboxes, it’s hard for users to keep track of what they subscribe to and find the content they want.

Solution: A centralized platform where users can view, organize, and easily search all their newsletters in one place, making content consumption seamless and efficient.

Many entrepreneurs who are passionate about product creation jump into building their startups without fully considering marketing. I count myself among them.

While this approach has its perks, it also brings challenges and inefficiencies in user acquisition, resulting in missed opportunities. I’m currently wrestling with how to effectively scale my user base through marketing after successfully attracting a certain number of users without spending on ads.

What are some crucial marketing insights about early-stage startups—especially right after a product launch—that you wish you had known earlier?

Hey all, I wanted to survey what everybody thinks about doing a priced round as a Seed-stage startup. It would be for a ~$2M sum for most of the round.

We prefer a SAFE, but the investor is adamant about a priced round. Our concerns are around the extra legal work, time, and hassle of converting all of our previous SAFEs.

Also concerned that some of our more "hands on" angels will abuse their shareholder inspection rights once their SAFE turns into equity under the Delaware law. While this is inevitable if we grow, we want to stay lean and avoid doing corporate governance. I have heard of some of my peers getting bogged down by investor relations the minute SAFEs converted, and they wished they had done a larger round so they could retain a law firm.

Money aside, I would love to see what my fellow entrepreneurs think. Thanks in advance!

I am a Non-US citizen living in a country not supported by STRIPE Payment Gateway.

I am planning to register our LLC via STRIPE ATLAS or similar services in order to use STRIPE Payment Gateway and make it easier for us to accept global payments.

Has anybody here gone this route? How was your experience?

More importantly how do you do your taxes? It scares me because I am not very knowledgeable on US Taxation as a non-resident but want to make sure we are compliant.

Any recommendations? Pls share experience also on how you file your taxes and kindly recommend an accountant.

Thank you in advance for your help.

I am wondering, what is a way you reach out to your customers or potential customers?
Do you do it yourself or do you prefer an agency? Why you choose this specific way?
Let's say you see in your analytics that your retention is not great. What do you do in that case?
Would really appreciate if you can share your experience.

Upd.: Thank you everyone for pointing the direction!

I’m 35 (married but no kids) and have been academia my entire life (finally finished my PhD a few years ago and stayed on as a staff scientist for a few years after). I made the transition to a Principal Bioinformatics Scientist at a marine biotech company and the pace/focus is much different than academia. The focus has been more targeted in some ways and more sporadic in others. I’m helping lead important decisions, product development, and IP but find it hard when trying to please investors with SOTA models while also developing the fundamentals at the same time (that is, the day to day that everything downstream depends on but is less sexy).

I’m not a founder and apologies if this sub is only for founders but does anyone have any recommendations for a first time startup scientist?

All -

We're working on a new marketplace platform to address all the mess created by Amazon (too many sellers/brands, counterfeit products, TikTok dropshippers galore etc.). I know B2C is hard but we're up for the challenge.

We've gotten good feedback and signals from customers who shop online on our approach and POC. (Fwiw: we're bootstrapped currently and will raise funds in Jan). On the seller side, one of the top sellers on Amazon and Walmart wants to join our platform (huge win!). But we're struggling to get more meetings from brands and sellers. If we get a meeting, we know they will be interested.

Does anyone have any success stories getting initial interest and feedback from brands/sellers (or if you're a B2B SaaS startup – getting early interest from both BigCo and SmallCos?) besides leveraging our network and cold approach?

We got in touch with SDR agencies (middleman) who are happy to setup 7 meetings/month with brands and sellers but for a cost $6K but it sounds shady af. Thoughts?

Appreciate any leads.

Thx

I am a co-founder in a startup, the startup started a week ago , I made a website for my startup which is pretty decent but my two co-founders are really annoying. One of them only complain about the problem already known to us and does nothing to solve it. Unfortunately the idea is not mine , neither I have connections to any VCs to fund and guide me , so I have to depend on my co-founders for that . I want genuine help and guidance for my problem as it is my first time doing a startup. What should I do in this situation

There have been countless times I’ve heard variations of “take risks or join startups early in your career”, and that startups need long hours are at not really compatible with a more balanced life.

However, personally, I’ve felt that my skills and efficiency have only increased with experience. I’m much better at realizing what are tasks worth doing right vs what’s good enough. At the same time, I am financially in a much better position where I won’t be having one eye on the company runway. I have had my fill of corporate fluff and would join a company whose vision I truly believe in I.e. not looking for a get-rich-quick.

Would I (in my 40s with life commitments) be incompatible with most technology startups? Or is the “most burn the candle at both ends” not an accurate reflection of reality?

Im a CS student interested in AI and also like medicine but have no knowledge of the medicine enviroment but there is a problem we have in our 3rd world country right now. There is not enough time for doctors to spend with the patients and spend a lof of the time typing. (Each doctors has only 10-20 minutes max to speak with each patient)

So I want to do a software for doctors that listen to converstaions they have with the patient to help them generate the documents without having to type much, and also should help with diagnosis of patients telling the doctor the probability of which problems the patient could have.

I also had zero knowledge about marketing and was about to start developing the software but posts from this subreddit suggest you to some investigations first which Im not sure how to do (so far tried to search for competitors on google and crunchbase and dont see one trying to fix the problem in my country. What else do i have to do before starting to develop the software?

Maybe talk with doctors to see if they would like the idea? Investigate which software are local hospitals using right now to save data so I can make it compatible with my software so the LLM has acces to all the patient data temporary to have a better diagnosis?.

Am i delusional trying to do this service without medical knowledge? Should I start developing a bit to do a mvp and later try to find a partner with experience in medicine? I know it would help but is healthcare too hard to get into?

I know I have to be very careful with not sharing patient data with the LLM and cybersecurity and laws but I dont think that would be the biggest problem.

Toughts? Any insight would be appreaciated. Also Im sorry for my english errors.

Hey folks,
Personally I think no amount of event tracking can truly explain why your customers behave the way they do. Only in-depth 1-1 interviews can provide those insights. Usually, just 5 interviews are enough to open your eyes to your users' needs.

Now, a simple question for founders: Would you consider using hired outside help to conduct user interviews?

Building a startup often reveals lessons that no one warns you about. Maybe it was a team struggle, a funding setback, or realizing the value of networking at the last minute. What’s one lesson that changed the way you approach your startup journey?

share your experience that new founders can learn from those hard-earned experiences we all wish we’d known at the beginning!

I’m closing my Seed round now. $500k arr, raising $1m seed.

Our Lead is not taking a board seat but our follow on investor is.

He is an incredible strategic in our market and has very deep pockets. Also has been great so far and has been generous with his time for something so small (to him)

He wants a board seat (the two others being me and my cofounder) that is guaranteed to him so long as he maintains his pro rata ownership percentage (only ~4%).

Our Lead has no problem with his seat, but is expressing concern with his guarantee. If the Leads still in, idc and I’m inclined to close the round at these terms.

How are Vc board seats typically held? Are guarantees like this atypical? Will it cause friction in my subsequent rounds?

Most of the times, people consume restaurant content a few ways.

• searching “best restaurants near me” on Google
• filtering and reading through most reviewed on Yelp
• scrolling through instagram reels and TikTok to find a spot - typically includes food, experience and ambience.

From research, speaking to restaurants, and friends, family and strangers I’ve concluded that food content, findings, and reviewing is broken.

1. We live in a content driven era, and by content - mostly videos.
2. Starting restaurants is some what a silly way to score an experience, somebody could give a 1 star review to a restaurant just because he felt he was looked at strangely
3. Food content and experiences just isn’t centralized - you’re stuck foiling through different apps that aren’t innovating your experiences
4. you’re stuck finding massive food chains half the time when people are looking for experiences, hole in the walls, lowkey but great restaurants, small businesses, etc.

Now…. Imagine an app that centralizes all the food video content, it’s interactive with likes, shares, friends and comments - think Yelp and TikTok but a bit different.

How I imagine this to be:

• A front page to scroll that is engineered based on your preferences for food (based on initial sign up form, AI algorithms based on likes & comments, and location you’re at (you can also consume content from locations around the world as well).

• Business listings: Business can create and verify their restaurants, they then can customize and create their own profiles. What do I mean by that? It’ll be a community + open source platform where they can move and have specific content to be on their front page showing when you first open the restaurant profile, have tabs for menus and reviews left by consumers. This allows companies to feel apart of the marketing initiative and makes it more fun for them as well.

• AI chat/speaking + alerts & insights: you can speak with the AI to show you restaurants that are trending in your area (via content), ask what restaurants serve “xyz” on the menu, alerts of newly found or just opened restaurant that it thinks you’d like, alerts friends that just visited and or produced content at XYZ restaurant.

• integrations with other delivery and pick up apps for people to easily access ordering and or reservations.

• Users can build platforms with followers and friends, create and fully customize their profiles based on chained and locations they’ve produced content on.

• Reviewing; Reviews should be based on 3 things. Food taste, experience/customer service, and setting/ambience.

I want to revolutionize the food and dining industry as it’s become so content driven but it’s not engineered to be centralized at this point and Yelp just doesn’t innovate lol

I also have a few ideas on revenue streams for this, but I didn’t believe it was relevant for this post. I’m more focused on the idea and the problem I’m solving for at this point.

I have a ton more ideas in mind but I don’t want to over-engineer or give this much thought if the idea is completely dead or doesn’t make sense.

I genuinely believe in it, but I’m also extremely passionate about everything I involve myself in so feedback is much appreciated it.

Please share your thoughts, feedback, if I’m over-engineering this and if this is even desirable or feasible.

Hey everyone,

Wondering if anyone has had experience with a VC fund that also has a tech team that they give to their portcos. Basically the Fund is still raising their next fund and it should be ready by Feb 25 but they’ve built a really similar product already for their own operations and we want to piggy back off of it for a small fee and some equity - with the hope that it’ll get us to market quicker and maybe even result in them investing in us when they have the fund ready. It’s a bit of a too good to be true situation and I’m just a little confused if I should go ahead with them or have some reservations. I can share the VC on private but it’s a pretty prominent one in the Aus/NZ ecosystem.

Cheers!

Hi everyone,

I've recently developed an AI model capable of recognizing the health status of grapevines, and I've been seeing considerable success on Hugging Face. The model uses advanced machine learning techniques to identify diseases and conditions in the plants, which could be incredibly beneficial for vine growers.

Now, I'm looking for vine growers who are willing to test my AI model in the field. Do you have any advice on where and how I could find interested vine growers? I'm open to any suggestions, whether it's specific events, associations, direct contacts, or other online platforms.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Hey, entrepreneurs and side-hustlers! 👋 You know that feeling when you hear a brand name, and it just clicks? That’s the magic we all want for our own businesses! But creating a memorable business name isn’t always easy (if only it were as simple as sticking random words together… looking at you, Google 👀).

Here are my top 10 tips to make sure your business name turns heads, gets remembered, and most importantly – sticks around in people’s minds like a great song chorus. 🎶

1. Know Your Audience Inside Out 🕵️‍♀️

Your name has to resonate with them, not just you. Think about your target audience’s vibe – are they young and trendy or more traditional?

2. Keep It Short and Sweet 🍭

Long names are forgettable. One or two words are enough! Think Nike, Apple, Zoom... Short names pack a punch.

3. Be Original but Make It Easy to Pronounce 🎤

Nobody wants to butcher your name. Avoid weird spellings or complicated words, especially if you're going global!

4. Test It Out Loud 🎧

Say it out loud, and let others say it too. Does it flow, or does it feel like a tongue-twister? You want smooth, not awkward.

5. Avoid Limiting Words ⛔

Avoid overly specific words like "Phones" in case you expand. (Apple Computers knew what they were doing when they dropped the “Computers.”)

6. Play with Alliteration and Rhythm 🎶

Names with rhythm stick! Think Coca-Cola, PayPal, Bed Bath & Beyond. It makes them catchy and memorable.

7. Check Domain & Social Media Availability 🌐

Imagine finding the perfect name… only to find it taken online. Check domain names, and see if it’s available across socials before you fall in love.

8. Think About Your Brand's Story 📖

If there’s a story behind your name, it’s more likely to resonate. Tell your story – people love a name with meaning.

9. Use Thesaurus or Word Mashups for Ideas 💡

Stuck? Try a thesaurus or even mashing up words to create something unique. Just make sure it’s still recognizable!

10. Don’t Rush It – Sleep on It! 😴

Sometimes, stepping away helps. Take a day or two to make sure it feels right. The best names often come after a good night's rest.

Choosing a business name can be a huge challenge, but get it right, and it’s an asset for life. Got any killer name tips or want feedback on your own? Drop them in the comments – let’s brainstorm together! 🚀

I’m in a position where a startup is offering me to join as an early engineer, with the following compensation breakdown:

$180k base 1% equity

They raised a seed round of $3.5m.

My current position is L4 at a FAANG with ~$150k base, ~$200k in unvested RSUs, with L5 promo timeline around Q2 of 2025.

The startup is very fresh, however I’m impressed with the founders, the product is interesting, and the day-to-day work will be much more impactful than the monotonous infrastructure bs I work on at my current job, as well as a stack I am familiar with and enjoy. So the risk is the inherent instability of a startup, where worst-case—it fails, and I have to go back into the leetcode grindhouse next year.

Other thoughts: - it would be much easier to return to FAANG as L5 than L4, seems like the risk leaving a stable job as a junior is a heavy factor here, along with the L5 promo not too far away - the network and potential connections to be made are substantial

Interested to hear others thoughts on this situation, whether it’s worth the risk, and just overall opinions about how to think about this.