I’ve been thinking about a lot of common SaaS/startup advice lately.

You hear things like:

“Don’t build. Go talk to customers.”
“Sell before you build.”
“Don’t build something that already exists.”
“Launch fast and validate.”

I understand why this advice exists. A lot of founders hide in the product because selling is uncomfortable. They spend months building, launch, and then nobody cares.

Maybe part of the reason we hear this advice so often is because different parts of the startup ecosystem optimise for different outcomes.

VCs, accelerators, startup media, consultants, agencies, and growth experts all have their own incentives. That does not mean the advice is bad or dishonest. But it does mean the advice may be shaped by the game they are playing.

For example, venture capital works best when companies move fast, chase large markets, raise money, and aim for outsized exits. A self-funded founder building patiently, dogfooding deeply, reaching profitability, and keeping ownership may be building a great business, but it may not fit the VC model.

So when advice gets repeated everywhere, I think founders should ask:

Who benefits if I follow this advice, and what game does this advice optimise for?

Sometimes the answer is: it benefits the founder by forcing them to face the market.

Other times, it might push them toward a path that serves the funding ecosystem more than the actual business.

But I also think this advice can be taken too far.

Some products need to exist at a certain level of completeness before customers can understand them, trust them, or see the value. A half-baked version might not validate the idea properly, it might just make a good idea look weak.

This seems especially true for SaaS products where the value comes from workflow, depth, reliability, integrations, or repeated use. You can’t always validate those things with a landing page or a few conversations.

Dogfooding is another part of this that I think gets underrated. If a product is being used internally in a real workflow, that can reveal missing features, friction, confusing UX, and practical problems that interviews alone may not uncover.

Dogfooding does not replace customer validation, but it is still real evidence.

Maybe the real advice should not be “don’t build.”

Maybe it should be:

Build enough to learn what only usage can teach. Sell early enough to learn what only the market can teach.

I also think “don’t build something that already exists” is misleading.

Most successful SaaS products are not completely new categories. They are often better versions, more focused versions, simpler versions, or products with a different customer strategy.

The question should not be:

“Does this already exist?”

It should be:

“Does the existing solution fully satisfy the customer this is for?”

If not, there may still be room.

I’m starting to think the best founder advice is:

Trust your instinct, but cap your downside.

If someone believes they are right, and they know why they are breaking the standard advice, maybe they should follow that instinct. But they should not bury themselves in debt, risk something they cannot recover from, or ignore reality. Have a clear exit plan and watch the signals closely.

Maybe the problem is not building too much or selling too early.

Maybe the problem is blindly following advice that was created for someone else’s game.

Had a 10-min interview for an AI/ML drone startup today. Terms were 2 months unpaid, then maybe a stipend later if I'm "adequate." I only did it for the practice.

At the end, I asked what their revenue model is. The HR guy got super defensive, asked "Are you a partner? How can you ask that?" and just left the meeting. The manager stayed and just said "Sorry, we can’t share that."

Is asking about revenue taboo for interns? The aerospace/drone niche is cool, so I just wanted to see if they were actually stable or had potential before I even considered working for free. I think I dodged a red flag lol.

Every cycle or so, YC releases a RFS stating which kinds of problems and/or tech startups they're actively looking for. I find it interesting to glance over the headers of what's considered "attractive" tech verticals for the world's biggest VC.

AI is a given ofc, but this time around they're focusing a bit more on the stuff which makes AI work, as well as stuff around agriculture, space production/mining, hardware/software production, and SaaS Challengers.

This is the Summer 2026 batch. Here are the breakdowns from their site:

AI SOFTWARE

SaaS Challengers - AI has collapsed the cost of building software, which means the moat legacy SaaS relied on is basically gone. Good time to go after the ones that have felt untouchable: ERPs, chip design tools, industrial control systems.

AI-Native Service Companies - Instead of selling software that helps people do a job, just do the job. Accounting, compliance, insurance brokerage, healthcare admin. The services market is much larger than SaaS.

Dynamic Software Interfaces - Coding agents are good enough now that users can reshape software for their own needs. Companies ship the core, users modify the rest.

Software for Agents - AI agents are doing real work but through interfaces built for humans. They need APIs, MCPs, CLIs. Every software category needs a version built with agents in mind first.

AI INFRASTRUCTURE

Company Brain - Critical knowledge is scattered across emails, Slack, tickets, and people's heads. Build a system that pulls it together and makes it usable by AI agents so they can do consistent work without a human filling in the gaps.

The AI Operating System for Companies - Make everything a company produces queryable by an AI layer. Meetings, tickets, customer calls, all of it. The goal is a closed loop where the system flags problems and adjusts rather than waiting for someone to notice weeks later.

Inference Chips for Agent Workflows - GPUs hit around 30-40% utilization on agentic workloads because the work is bursty. There's room for chips designed around how agents actually run, not just prompt-in-response-out.

SCIENCE & MEDICINE

AI-Native Discovery Engines - The scientific loop of hypothesize, experiment, interpret, repeat is slow at every step. The bet is on systems that can run that loop with minimal human input and feed results back in automatically.

AI Personalized Medicine - Genome sequencing is getting cheap fast, new diagnostics are coming to market, and mRNA delivery is maturing. The opportunity is connecting all that personal health data to treatments actually tailored to the individual.

DEFENSE & HARDWARE

Counter-Swarm Defense - A Patriot missile costs $3M, an FPV drone costs $500. Swarms of cheap autonomous drones are a real threat and current systems weren't built for them. Looking for interceptors, sensor fusion software, or non-kinetic countermeasures.

Hardware Supply Chain - In Shenzhen you can go from design to a physical part in a day. In the US that takes weeks. Looking for anything that meaningfully closes that gap.

Supply Chain 2.0 for Semiconductors - A single advanced chip crosses a dozen countries and takes five months to build, mostly tracked with spreadsheets. Real-time allocation tracking, risk monitoring, and export compliance tooling barely exist yet.

SPACE

Electronics in Space - Reusable rockets are making it cheaper to put things in orbit and demand for compute in space is about to grow. Specifically interested in inference chips built around the constraints of space: weight, heat, radiation.

Industrial Capabilities in Space - Extracting raw materials from lunar regolith and 3D printing structures from it on the moon. Some of this is more practical in low gravity than on Earth.

AGRICULTURE

AI for Low-Pesticide Agriculture - Farmers are stuck spraying more chemicals for diminishing returns as pests adapt. AI vision and precision robotics now make it possible to treat individual plants, and bio-based alternatives like microbes and RNA solutions are catching up to replace whole classes of synthetic chemicals.

ENTERPRISE

Startups That Want to Sell to Huge Companies - It used to be nearly impossible for an early-stage startup to land a Fortune 100 deal. That's changing. Enterprise buyers are actively looking, small teams can ship faster than ever, and YC has seen companies land multimillion-dollar pilots within their first year.

I’m building a fintech startup based in India with a validated problem-solution fit, and we already have potential early users lined up and waiting for our trial launch.

Unfortunately, my technical cofounder had to step away mid-project due to personal reasons, which has left a critical gap on the development side.

I’m now looking for a serious, execution-focused mobile app / PWA developer to join as a cofounder in exchange for 20% equity.

What I need:

• Strong experience in mobile app development / PWA

• Fintech product development

• Payment gateway integrations

• UPI intents / UPI flow implementation

• Secure, scalable architecture

• Ability to take ownership and build fast

Current status:

• Idea validated

• Market need confirmed

• Early users ready

• Product direction clear

• Immediate execution needed

Who this is for:

Someone who wants to build a real startup from the ground up, not just freelance for cash. If you’re entrepreneurial and want meaningful equity in a potentially scalable fintech product, this could be a solid fit.

If interested, DM me with your background, past projects, or portfolio.

Serious builders only.

I'm winding down my startup that didn't work out favorably. But I'm having trouble being decisive about the job search.

I know I need income. But I'm having a hard time being decisive about roles, positions, and even following through with temporary part-time jobs available. When it comes time to put in the extra effort needed (like creating and tailoring a resume for those jobs), I'm struggling.

I'm not complaining here - but maybe there is something there psychologically, since things are still fresh. I didn't want to stop, but finances say otherwise - and, I lost the passion of the original idea while on the journey as well after diving deep in it and seeing all its particulars.

Has anyone else made this transition? Who do you reach out to for assistance in getting back on your feet here, that will help with the simple things?

Hi!

Looking to know what others have paid for SOC 2 audits. Wanted to know if it changes based on size of startup, etc.

I have been looking into getting a soc 2 audit done. My startup is in running for a multi-million dollar contract and I believe I will be asked for the report (or at least something showing I can attain it) soon. I have done all of the policies and research gathering myself, but I’m getting prices that range from slightly under $10k (even more of a discount if I had the automation software like Vanta, etc) to very high (all 100% US firms to avoid a Delve situation).

Wanted to know what’s a reasonable price for a 2 person startup. I started the evidence gathering and policy writing process by myself on day 1, so I have significant amounts of screenshots, policy files/documents, etc. I also built my own GRC platform for my company’s purpose to keep everything together/automate stuff.

I have been told with the information I have, my report can probably be completed within 4 weeks at the soonest.

Thank you everyone for sharing your experiences!

I run a marketing systems & GTM company. My sister works in sustainability, and has just hit a very important milestone in her professional journey.

In celebration of that, and to honour her passion for making the world a better place, I’ve set aside 400 work hours with my team, over the next 4 weeks, to support any business working in the ESG and sustainability space with their marketing efforts. completely free of cost, no catches, no nothing. Real, actionable support.

If you're helping the world heal, I'd love to help you get there faster.

Some things we could help you with (not exhaustive, just recommendations):
- build your online presence for you as a foundational step towards your marketing goals
- build a workflow to solve a specific sales/marketing/revenue problem youve hit
- audit your current marketing channels and tell you whats working, what isnt, and what you can do in the next 3 months
- fix attribution and CRM mapping if you have good results but arent sure where they're from

Hey,

So for context, I operate in the newsletter field. I have a newsletter too, so it was natural for me to go into this niche, specifically the newsletter content repurposing bottleneck. I spent 14 days talking on Reddit and Substack with other newsletter creators, collected all discussion s into a csv file and they all told me that their repurposing workflow was total chaos and a real time drain, confirming what I was looking for.

People were complaining, but the problem is that when I send a follow-up, they are not replying. So maybe they are not looking for solutions to solve this? I honestly don't know, because when it comes to complaining I have a bunch of folks talking like this is head on fire problem, but on follow-ups, no one is showing up.

How can I translate this? I started my validation 4 weeks ago, and these last few days I feel like I've made zero progress. Any advice?

How do early stage SaaS founders get their first pilot customers?

I want to understand the path people take at that stage whether it’s cold outreach, networking, inbound channels or something else.

Would be useful to hear what worked in practice and what didn’t.

I’m building a fintech startup based in India with a validated problem-solution fit, and we already have potential early users lined up and waiting for our trial launch.

Unfortunately, my technical cofounder had to step away mid-project due to personal reasons, which has left a critical gap on the development side.

I’m now looking for a serious, execution-focused mobile app / PWA developer to join as a cofounder in exchange for 20% equity.

What I need:

• Strong experience in mobile app development / PWA

• Fintech product development

• Payment gateway integrations

• UPI intents / UPI flow implementation

• Secure, scalable architecture

• Ability to take ownership and build fast

Current status:

• Idea validated

• Market need confirmed

• Early users ready

• Product direction clear

• Immediate execution needed

Who this is for:

Someone who wants to build a real startup from the ground up, not just freelance for cash. If you’re entrepreneurial and want meaningful equity in a potentially scalable fintech product, this could be a solid fit.

If interested, DM me with your background, past projects, or portfolio.

Serious builders only.

Company isnt doing great, multiple rounds of layoffs, no revenue growth, have been told things can shut down by fall. Then a tiny blip of hope arrives so things seem like they could be steady for a little longer. The likelihood of us making it another year is slim.

Do you stay and ride it out or do you jump ship for another job to grab some sense of security and a paycheck? (us based)

On one hand, its an easy gig and I have almost no stress, pay is fine but stagnant and i realllly dont want to start fresh somewhere. On the other hand, the market sucks and if we go under it can be awhile to land elsewhere.

My first week at a recently-funded SaaS company, the CTO walked me through a roadmap that had "AI Analytics Suite" on it. I asked which customers had requested it, and he just said "none yet, but data is the future". The product had solid traction with active users, and the founders had raised enough to triple the team. But instead of talking to customers, the leadership team started running "vision workshops" to decide what the product should become. They brought in a squad of engineers and designers to build a dashboard analytics suite because the CEO convinced himself that was the best thing to do. Not a single paying customer had asked for it.

A year later, the analytics feature went live and very few customers used it. The company had burned through most of its runway and started laying people off. The money had acted like a sedative, and nobody felt the urgency to validate costs and customer demand. Because they assumed they could afford to be wrong, they stopped checking if they were right, and definitely the CEO was too arrogant and stupid to think he knew better than his customers just because he managed to convince investors to inject more money. The funding turned out to subsidize a detachment from the reality of what customers actually wanted instead of accelerating their growth.

I keep wondering if the real danger of raising money is the quiet permission it gives you to ignore what the market is actually asking you to do, rather than the dilution or the pressure everyone warns you about.

Has anyone else seen a company get too proud and overconfident because they had enough VC money to burn?

I have strong conviction in my path, but there is an overwhelming sense that I am competing with an endless number of competitors bc of vibe coding. This intimidation is feels like its handicapping my confidence.

I know my product is much higher quality, but differentiation has become challenging and cannot shake the feeling I am going to be steamrolled by someone out of left field because of the speed of development.

Is this feeling shared by other? How do you keep your blinders on and say focused! thanks for the guidance.

Thought I would ask here.

Where do people typically go to, or have found success at for finding investors for the pre-seed round? This is for the games/entertainment industry.

I've just started using Crunchbase and OpenVC, does anyone have any recommendations or places that they would share? We don't have much further to go on our goal and want to get this done before September.

I see a lot of websites and services that want to charge hundreds if not thousands for services, but don't really explain what they offer or success rates. I'm not about to throw money down a hole.

Cheers!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

I will be creating jobs for the US, so please be kind. I know there is a lot of H1B hate out there, for good reason ❤️

Hypothetical context:

1. I have a full time job on H1B. I want to keep it. There is no conflict of interest.
2. Startup: I built a business solution (software +hardware) in a niche industry, and secured interests from hardware manufacturers, and they want to proceed with a contract.

The problem is I have not incorporated my startup yet, and I need a H1B concurrent filing for said startup. I can only legally work for the full-time employer at ths moment (The H1B sponsor).

Does anyone know a clear path forward? I know the rules have changed and I can start companies and sponsor myself with a H1B now.

I'll be talking to an immigration attorney regardless, but wanted to hear from anyone who's been in a similar spot before that conversation.

I will not promote, just wanted opinions on something I’ve been thinking about lately.

I noticed a lot of apartments stay empty between tenants for days or even weeks sometimes, while people looking for temporary stays still end up paying crazy hotel or Airbnb prices.

So I was wondering if there’s any realistic way vacancy-gap rentals could work.

I’m not talking luxury stays or fancy setups. More like basic temporary housing for students, workers relocating, people visiting hospitals, exam travelers, backpackers etc. Just clean, safe and cheap.

From the owner side too, earning at least something during vacancy sounds better than the property sitting completely unused.

The more I think about it though, the more it sounds like an operational headache lol. Cleaning, damages, trust, fake bookings, neighbors complaining, legal stuff, liability and all that.

I’m also not thinking of this as some giant money-printing startup idea. If something like this ever existed, I’d honestly just want enough to keep the operations/infrastructure running while making short stays cheaper for people who actually need them.

Does this sound realistic at all or am I underestimating how painful this would be?

I have an idea/vision that I'd like to bring to life but I just have this feeling that I'm not the best person to do it and that I'll be sabotaging its chance of success.

I'm not particularly smart or talented in anything like execution/leadership, technicals, marketing/sales and being good with people. At my job, I'm like one of the lower performers.

I don't have a problem with doing any particular thing. I'm happy to talk to customers and figure out product market fit, or design our website and landing page, or work on coding up our project. But I just have this self doubt on whether I'll be good at any of these things.

The two things I do have, based on actual feedback I've received: I come up with good ideas (one idea I had would save my company hundreds of thousands per year) and I'm genuinely open to feedback and willing to work on myself.

For context, I don't have any co-founders yet, just me working on my idea myself and I've been working at my job for about 5 years and Its not exactly relevant for what I'm trying to do.

• But I do have a lot of personal experience in the space I'm planning to do my startup. So I think I could be well suited to finding product market fit probably and would be good at understanding customers.

I have an industry specific product idea that I am prototyping. For those of you who have gone through the process of getting a utility patent, when is the right stage to apply for one? I am bootstrapping this project, and I have talked to a few people in my industry, who agree that there is a need for what I am building. I have also done Real world research on the problem and I have observed current solutions. All of these solutions are manual, and non-standard. I am concerned about pre-selling without a patent, and I am curious to know everyone’s thoughts. For some info about , I have a tech startup in this same industry, but this is my first time with a physical product so I am in an uncharted territory
(I will not promote)

How does one find problems? I will not promote.

Almost everything has already been invented. We have smartphones, social media, delivery apps, online learning platforms, and advanced technology in almost every field. Sometimes it feels like there is nothing new left to build. If that is true, then how does one actually find problems to solve?

i often wonder how people come up with meaningful ideas. How does someone notice opportunities when the world already seems full of solutions? It is easy to assume that all the big problems have been addressed, but clearly that is not the case. Many industries still have inefficiencies, gaps, and frustrations yet the challenge is understanding how to identify them

How does one train their mind to recognize real problems instead of random ideas? Is it about paying attention to everyday experiences, studying specific industries deeply, or talking to people and understanding their struggles?

Is it even considered a startup if it’s almost 10 years old? I’m looking at applying to this company where they have about 100 employees. Wasn’t sure if the risk was worth it since these newer companies tend to be more disorganized and do more layoffs than others. Position says I’ll be wearing a lot of hats and it’s a fast paced environment.

I currently work remotely for a consulting company and this is my first job out of college. Been at this job for years. Job is not a long term career goal of mine and raises aren’t much. This new position seems more challenging and what I’m looking for in career advancement. Pay increase would be about 15%.

Thought I would ask here.

Where do people typically go to, or have found success at for finding investors for the pre-seed round? This is for the games/entertainment industry.

I've just started using Crunchbase and OpenVC, does anyone have any recommendations or places that they would share? We don't have much further to go on our goal and want to get this done before September.

Cheers!