Hi everyone! I'm 25F, graduated a year ago, and l've always wanted to start a business with my sisters and build something of our own. We believe that now is the right time to do it.
We don't currently have the funds, and for personal reasons, we don't want to take out a loan.
What advice do you have for us? How should we get started? What things should we look out for or be cautious about? What about licenses and permits? How does renting a space work and what should we know before signing a lease? Any negotiation tips would also be greatly appreciated.
We're also thinking about finding an investor. If you have experience with this, I'd really appreciate any advice on how to approach investors, what to expect, and what we should be careful about when accepting outside funding.
Any advice or resources would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you 😊

Hi,

Just wanted to share my own personal experience as a senior full stack developer. Loads of experience across different stacks and architectures and here are my concerns with Supabase, having actually rewritten a commercial project to use it. Regretted it hard.

Supabase is a weak choice to build a clean codebase with proper separation of concerns and CI/CD.

Especially in this day and age with AI, there just aren't any reasons why one would use RLS and Edge functions to define critical business logic and not own the auth schema. An after insert trigger on auth.users and surfacing every failure as a vague 500? Never again am I buying into these awful anti-patterns.

Personally, found even a stack like PHP Symfony with Doctrine to be a way better developer experience in 2026, although my go-to these days is a monorepo using nestjs, ts-rest, nextjs and react native.

Expect a lot of hate for this, but Supabase is a massive marketing charade and SQL was never meant to go this far. PostgREST is an interesting experiment but c'mon any serious company will use Spring Boot or .NET. Literally anything but this.

There is no gain in velocity, you're building a house on weaker grounds for absolutely no reason other than a lack of experience and/or understanding the consequences.

I will get downvoted by supabase fanboys and people that don't understand what I'm saying and that's okay, but if I convince at least one founder not to use it, I've done my job.

Thanks for reading and happy coding.

I’m non-tech and I know with the amount of AI tooling out there there’s probably an argument that I should just be able to go and build something myself.

The thing I’m struggling with though is knowing what I should be building.

Once I start thinking about an MVP it gets overwhelming, I’m thinking of things like: What should be in it? What shouldn’t? What’s the user flow? How should each screen interact? Is the journey even right? Am I solving the right thing? etc etc...

I’ve done some early user research and spoken to a few people and I’ve spent a lot of time using ChatGPT to basically think through the product, what I want it to be, how it could work and all of that.

But then when I tried to move that into Codex and plan/build it feature by feature, it just started feeling like AI slop. Individual bits technically made sense, but it didn’t feel like one coherent product or like there was proper thought behind the experience.

What’s the process for getting to an MVP?

For context, I’m building something in the consumer nature/wellbeing/walking space and I’m part of an accelerator atm. I’d ideally like to get an MVP in front of investors, other founders and some early users in the next month, preferably in the next couple of weeks, although this maybe ambitious.

Mainly trying to understand the logical process people follow to get from “I’ve spoken to users and have an idea” to “here’s a relatively robust MVP users can use”.

Appreciate any advice and kindness as well - not everyone is proficient at everything and I’m very much learning the technical side as I go.

Hi,

I'm pretty new to YC and recently created a Co-Founder Match profile just to see what's out there. I didn't really spend a lot of time filling out my information as I wanted to quickly create a profile (to browse) and then edit it later. So I didn't really expect anyone to reach out to me as my profile contained very little substance except for where I graduated and that I want to be the technical guy.

Yet I already got over 10 messages from other founders in a matter of days. I'm quite surprised. I want to know how legit those founders are and how to best judge them.

It's almost like creating an empty profile on a dating website and have a bunch of people reach out to you. It just feels fishy.

Thanks

shipped an open source dev tool a few months back. tried one of the smaller launchpad sites: $40 for the launch slot, $50 for a newsletter addon they upsold alongside it.

the launch itself brought almost no traffic. about 100 views, no bump in github stars. fine, that was a bet and it didn't pay off.

then the newsletter ran and did the same, basically zero clicks. emailed the guy running it and said straight up, the post barely moved the needle and that's a risk we took, but it left me with little to no faith the newsletter would do any better. asked for a refund on just that part.

he refunded it, no argument.

net spend ended up $40 for the whole thing.

anyone else run into these launchpad plus newsletter bundles? worth it for you or same story?

Hi! Does anyone have a recommendation for a startup lawyer who can advise founding teams where one of the founders is on a U.S. work visa? We’re looking for guidance on incorporation, founder equity and vesting, and structuring the founder’s involvement appropriately from an immigration perspective. Ideally, someone practical, affordable, and familiar with early-stage startups. Thank you!

Hey all,

For the past several months, I been in contact with an potential B2B Client. The long story short, I meet the executives of this organisation via an warm lead (friend) and I pitched them an AI Saas product that will automated a lot of their pain points. The pain points beeing essentially document ingestion, and extracting metadata and organising it to structured data.

This is not a brand new idea, it has been done before many times. But I have this wedge in a nieche but yet very lucrutive industry here in UK.

I built the product, and in 2 days we are starting an 2 week pilot where they will use it extensively in their organisation. From demo days, to early feedbacks, they want to use this tool to replace their entire process. I am very excited about this.

I am anxious about this pilot launch, I been an engineer for the last decade, and I worked in many startups. But I never managed to build something on a side that took this much interest from someone, and it is an B2B client.

It has been hard sorting everything out whilst being fully employed, but the grind never stopped (AI helped so much).

For founders who’ve run early B2B pilots, I’d really appreciate advice on:

1. Defining success: What should I agree with the client before day one so that, at the end of two weeks, we both know whether the pilot has worked? What did you measure beyond “they liked it”?
2. Feedback and scope: How did you get honest feedback from the people actually using the product? I am setting up posthog to measure my own KPI's
3. Converting to a paid customer: What would you establish about pricing, the buying decision and idea about pricing?

I am not a salesman, but I have to be now. And the next part is eating me. I want to make good money on a side on this and have an light at the of the tunnel that will allow me to quit my full time job and pursue this.

How would you go about Enterprise pricing?

I want to pitch 3 tiers (or more?) something basic like: Starter, Pro, Ultra... whatever

The highest tier I want to be around £8,600 a month (I still think this is a crazy number). But I genuinely think they would consider paying this.

Each tier will have its own limitations or feature lock ins. Each tier comes with pre-paid credits for usage, so even if they went in Pro, and managed to use the software so much, they would need to pay extra on their invoice, if they go over their usage.

Any wisdom from this subreddit be very much appreciated!

We're a remote startup of 6, each working with our own assistant agents (hermes, codex, cc).

Discussions and decisions are made in slack & each of our assistants has read access to slack. We've seen Shopify (River), Ramp (Ingest) & Paradigm (Centaur) all praise the benefits of having a multiplayer agent in Slack.

Has anyone tried this?

How do you deal with permissions (does the agent have team-wide credentials or individual credentials)?

Do you host your own agent or use a hosted version?

I run a hotel consulting agency in Thailand, and 12 months ago I launched a sub-brand organizing corporate retreats for international, remotely distributed tech teams hosting their offsites here.

The backend synergy is great, we can feed to our hospitality partners and can command really attractive rates for our retreats because of it. But the frontend is messy. We have separate LinkedIn and Facebook pages for both brands, but knowing how to brand between the two is confusing. Example, last week we finished a 50 pax retreat and I’m unsure whether to share this on my main business page or specifically on the corporate retreats page or both.

Should I keep the socials completely separate and treat the consulting firm as a hidden engine, or is there a better way to structure two brands like this?