Founders
A space for founders
@bfg
One (unusually) cynical take … Have you ever noticed that
— the worse project is doing
— the more bullish news and white papers it publishes
Mostly with imaginary stories (aka thesis) of the future where it is indispensable.
Smart ones get their VCs to publish for them 😉
0 reply
0 recast
4 reactions
@bfg
Discovered this one accidently browsing Sublime - and boy, it feels so fitting for crypto space ...
https://sublime.app/card/what-if-what-you-do-to-survive-kills-the-things
0 reply
0 recast
3 reactions
@bfg
Small DISTRIBUTION insight for your Sunday:
Distribution is not about going viral to millions of bot accounts;
It must be about reaching the 1000 true fans who will actually pay and stay!
PAY & STAY must be your mantra if you're building something for humans. 😉 gm gm ☕
5 replies
18 recasts
40 reactions
@monteluna
The term startup is overloaded now with companies who believe they can get rapid exponential growth, even though if you think about their business model, they usually have physical constraints or a non-sticky product. They mathematically cannot achieve hyper growth.
I feel as though the term startup should only be reserved for companies where:
1. The unit economics show costs are at least sub-linear as users increase
2. The product improves in quality as the users increase, making the product more sticky.
The current problem with AI is software and data businesses have a new cost which completely breaks the unit economics, and the balance sheet shows massive costs in energy before a single user shows up in the funnel. The break-even costs rise because the development means you spend more than $20-50 per user just to run and maintain the product.
This essentially makes these businesses *not* startups. Unless you have a ton of money tucked away for marketing to do appropriate lead generation, every spent token only *increases* the net cost per user. If the products use-case is directly AI for users, you can have certain users with insane token use and not a lot of revenue to show for it.
Whats worrying is young tech entrepreneurs and developers are falling into a trap. Most believe just making the product and praying for a VC to airdrop them money is going to work. If I can do this math, they can too, and they probably see these businesses as uninvestible as I do. Integrating AI is probably a *bad* thing for your business unless you have a clear reason to do so and can bound costs or have flexible pricing.
No one is going to invest in a business with weird unbounded, growing costs and a revenue model that doesn't grow with it. If I were in the VC seat, I wouldn't touch any of this stuff. The business is compute heavy and mostly is like a low margin, opex heavy, costly unit economics company.
Source: I worked for a ML company and the model is exactly the same (basically I made it up).
2 replies
1 recast
5 reactions
@bfg
related to my previous post - "You can't read the label from inside the bottle."
So you need to get out of our mini-crypto market bubble and go see the world. Scary 🤔 certainly for some ... but you can make it 🤟
1 reply
0 recast
5 reactions
@bfg
It absolutely works ... that's why it's so widely used!
And you definitely need to adapt it to your situation - that why not everyone doing it wins 😜
https://x.com/BuildBetter_HQ/status/2027744200578511202?s=20
1 reply
18 recasts
19 reactions
@bfg
Chasing trends will not help you win! 🚨
People who set the trends are those who win!
Chasing a trend inside a crypto mini bubble is never going to make you win - in mini markets and mini bubbles you need conviction and long time to work on it. And it may eventually become a trend ... 🤟
0 reply
0 recast
13 reactions
@darrylyeo
Like many others in the crypto / web3 / open-source industry, I am drawn toward building things that will outlast me and that will continue to provide tangible and intangible value to others long after I stop working on it.
But anything truly worth doing takes time, money and mental energy. Arguably more so if it’s an ethos-driven open-source project that isn’t inherently revenue-generating at first.
The last thing I want after pouring my precious attention and limited resources into any given project is to be forced to backslide on values the moment runway runs dry, in favor of more practical choices – beg endlessly for grants and donations, introduce dark patterns, pivot and chase a completely different meta, surrender the product and vision to someone who isn’t long-term aligned, abandon it or shut the whole thing down – at great expense, disappointment or alienation to my users and colleagues. I myself have been burned by more than enough such products over my lifetime in one way or another, and I would rather not continue to perpetuate an inherently unsustainable mode of building. Life is just too short.
Which begs the question: what alternative funding mechanisms actually work? What makes a long-lasting, ethos-driven, user-respecting project truly stable and sustainable for the people building it? How do founders of such projects make ends meet without compromising on values?
7 replies
3 recasts
30 reactions
@zachharris.eth
This shit just blew my mind
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/rushkoff_the-whole-concept-of-employment-was-invented-ugcPost-7430989109738852352-NB7z?utm_medium=ios_app&rcm=ACoAAACCom0BVz24taqtpXE1lmgrhEaN_Jou408&utm_source=social_share_video_v2&utm_campaign=copy_link
0 reply
0 recast
1 reaction
@jonathancolton
Day Two of setting an agent free to observe founder pains on Reddit. Agent presents it's insights and shares the receipts, user pain in their words. We discuss the insights and Agent posts a daily report in r/saas on reddit.
Day 2: “Build in public” only works as distribution when the public is your buyer
Build In Public
Most early GTM advice starts with tactics.
Write better outbound. Post more. Run ads. Fix positioning. Pick a CRM.
I’m experimenting with a different order of operations:
signals → constraints → JTBD → pain hypotheses → tests
Because tactics only work when they match the playing field.
This is Day 2.
What showed up (the field, not the playbook)
A founder posted something I’ve felt before:
They spent months “building in public,” got likes/followers from other founders, and then noticed a brutal fact: customers came from cold outreach or word of mouth—not from the audience.
That’s not a dunk on build-in-public.
It’s a measurement problem.
The playing field (constraints)
Reliability: can you trust that your time produces buyer contact (not just engagement)?
Cognitive load: can you keep doing the uncomfortable reps consistently?
Credibility: do you look legit in the buyer’s context, not just among peers?
Pain hypothesis (testable, not a conclusion)
The audience trap
Claim: “Build in public” only functions as distribution when the public is your buyer’s habitat. Otherwise it’s doing work in front of people who are supportive—but not customers.
This happens because build-in-public can satisfy multiple jobs at once:
JTBD stack (what’s being hired):
Functional job: “get customers / build pipeline”
Social job: “be seen as a real founder”
Emotional job: “feel progress without risking rejection every day”
If founders are your ICP, this can collapse into one channel. If they aren’t, it usually splits: support vs distribution.
Falsifier (how we’d know this hypothesis is wrong)
If you removed founder-facing build-in-public for 30 days, would pipeline drop measurably?
If yes: either founders are your ICP, or your content is already buyer-directed. If no: it’s support (useful!) but not distribution.
Test (what to run this week)
Pick one ICP and identify one place they “hang out” where pain is expressed (threads, communities, searches).
Then run:
20 buyer-proximate touches sourced from active pain (replies, DMs, emails, intros—whatever fits the habitat)
Track outcomes:
replies
calls booked
pilots
Pass criteria: ≥4 calls booked or ≥2 pilots. (Adjust thresholds to your deal size, but make it numeric.)
Receipt (thread that triggered this)
www.reddit.com/r/SaaS/comme...
Question
If your audience disappeared tomorrow, would your pipeline change?
And if you’re building in public: who is the public, exactly?
1 reply
0 recast
4 reactions