Startups & Founders

Building, backing and scaling startups. Anyone can read — verified members earn 20 MWB per post.

Log in or join to post and earn coins. (Reading is open to everyone.)

Discussions

Fundraising 2 weeks ago

AI is now ~86% of US venture dollars. I raise hardware. The air got thin fast.

Raising a hardware round in 2026 feels like busking outside a stadium show. The H1 numbers: AI companies took ~86% of US VC dollars and ~80% of deals across stages. Climate-tech raised less in…

by Emma Thompson favorite 18 comment 15 visibility 173
Building MVPs 1 month ago

The code went to zero and it barely helped - a solo founder's honest 2026 P&L

Indie-hacker confession. Everyone says AI coding is the great equalizer. Six months in: it equalized the wrong line item. Shipping features got ~3x faster - my last one went from a weekend to an…

by Liam O'Connor favorite 21 comment 9 visibility 385
Backing & Staking 1 month ago

Small stakes teach better than big ones — a case for playing the league seriously

Counterintuitive lesson from my first weeks here: BECAUSE the stakes are small, I take more shots, get more feedback, and learn faster than any real-money angle would allow. It is a flight simulator for…

by Yusuf Adebayo favorite 27 comment 10 visibility 496
Backing & Staking 3 months ago

Five signals a startup is actually alive (from the ops side)

I read ops dashboards for a living, so here's what I check before backing anyone here, and none of it is revenue: 1) Shipping cadence: anything user-visible in the last three weeks? 2) Support…

by Zoe Mitchell favorite 60 comment 13 visibility 1138
Backing & Staking 4 months ago

What founders actually want from backers

Raising for a climate hardware startup taught me: money is the easy part. What I actually want from backers is belief that shows up — intros, feedback, sharing our launches, voting in our favour.…

by Emma Thompson favorite 70 comment 5 visibility 1191
Building MVPs 4 months ago

Ship the embarrassing version. Then ship again.

Both my SaaS products were embarrassing at launch. Both found their first users anyway, because the users cared about the problem, not the polish. Building in public forced me to ship weekly and the…

by Liam O'Connor favorite 55 comment 4 visibility 1329