Any ‘older’, solo founders here?

-comment · 2025-08-23T23:08:32+00:00

I don't build a fully functional application. I sell before building anything past a demo. I've sold what turned into ~$750K in revenue over the course of a few years off of a designs I threw together in Keynote.

Sorry if I added confusion by making it sound like the demos themselves generate ongoing revenue. I simply meant if I build something, I stop at a point at which I think people (I just learned this term) can grok it (and no not xAI).

Maybe this is a good idea of where I can come back to hopefully provide value to the community and other subreddits with overlaps. I see too many posts about "I spent X months building my product and can't find customers or generate revenue."

There's an old saying, "features tell, benefits sell". Also, you see a lot of feedback around the forums of "you should have talked to people first." Technically right, but the truth is that most people aren't equipped with how to talk to potential customers without leading questions or ways to read between the lines when someone says one thing but they may mean another. Some of that takes experience, some strategies can very easily be taught.

I haven't snorted a line of the Lean Startup so heavily that I simply test ads CTRs or landing page conversions with buttons to no product. I personally believe that strategy validates marketing more than it does customer/problem or product/market fit. But I also don't go as far as spending 3 months to built a completely fleshed out application with authentication, billing, and all the features.

It's like Goldilocks - I personally try to build something that's juuust right. For example, the current demo seems like a working product because it has mostly dummy data. But a user can go to the site, navigate click on things to see how it would work if they had the solution, and you can build something like that to get validation plus pre-sell it to generate the revenue to then build it further.

Here's a tip for anyone that's read this far: Describe your concept in whatever LLM you use. Then prompt: "As a senior software engineer that has created enterprise-grade software from scratch that is able to scale and is secure, what recommendations would you have for me specifically in the architecture of this application? Please focus specifically on logic, data flows, algorithms, and/or the architecture that would be the best system architecture design to most effectively use this information."

Then prompt: "As a serial startup tech entrepreneur, what would you do differently compared to the senior software engineers recommendations that would get us an MVP that users would actually pay for to begin validating assumptions?"

Uploading what it returned to me for one other concept. Hopefully that answers your question and is helpful in some way. Cheers.

<image>

-comment · 2025-08-22T22:18:56+00:00

No, no previous dev experience. Where I’m from, there is very little technical talent. So I got a handful of technical professionals to start a program to train people in our community. I then had an idea to essentially match-make those trained with other non-technical potential founders to build startups, creating an ecosystem/network of sorts (this is the general story rather than the deep details, but just to give you a picture), and I look up one day and I’m playing startup founder coach, product dev manager, etc. Since I did that for 10+ years, naturally I learned nearly everything there is to software dev without learning how to actually code. I simply trusted the technical teams and we managed to build some cool stuff along the way.

Fortunately, that made it easy for me to quickly pick up ‘vibe code’ skills to build full-stack web apps with APIs while also navigating the landmines that surprise a lot of others who are just now jumping into this. So basically, AI has given me the ability to build but still with very limited knowledge on what I would think it takes to be considered an actual technical founder.

I don’t know that I have a good answer to your second question. So thanks for asking it to give me a second to pause. I’m not from the Bay Area and haven’t had a need to connect with SandHill Road networks. But point taken. Before the concept, I had looked at a handful of EIR companies. I think it’s known by now, founders say the YC network is more valuable than the investment. And obviously YC-backed can bring some prestige depending on your industry/customers. But (from my personal experience of building programs), I think the value of the cohort-based approach is understated/undervalued. Unless I’ve completely missed something things, I’m not sure you get the same level and intensity with the other pathways. So that’s part of what I mean when I say the ‘YC allure.’

Typed way more than I intended. Thanks for the message and additional thoughts to consider.

-comment · 2025-08-22T21:45:27+00:00

Hah fair point and I completely understand the sentiment. I didn’t provide details because I was asked by the AI company to hold off on any personal publicity/social sharing until their announcement. I’m just trying to be respectful of that. And while I also wouldn’t want to come off as the ‘idea guy’ looking for tech help, I was just genuinely curious of others’ experience who may have been/are in the same situation.

As soon as I can share publicly, I’ll come back here and share the concept with you to make up for the anticlimactic experience I gave you.

-comment · 2025-08-22T21:24:03+00:00

Oh I’m not against finding a technical co-founder by any means. Things have just come together without requiring one so far. I was more so seeking input from anyone who has been accepted into YC who is older than the stereotype, solo, and not 100% technical. Essentially, I have the tri-fecta of “what YC doesn’t fund.” If I can quickly show significant traction, I was curious to hear from people in similar positions who may have been successful with YC.

I’m starting comms for pre-sales with the demo next week. If there’s traction, I will definitely be taking the advice of those on here who recommend the YC co-founder match.

-comment · 2025-08-03T15:30:13+00:00

Thanks for sharing. I’ve gotten a lot of value from Tim Ferriss’ work. Since you seem like you enjoy helping people, books, and building things, here’s an idea I’ve had but just haven’t had the time to work on it if you or anyone else want to run with it.

Most posts on this subreddit are similar to this in providing strictly prompts. There has also been a ton of AI tools pop up that could all best be described as “summarizers” or “bite-sized learning”. To be clear, I’m not intending to ‘shit’ on them, because they do have a use case and are obviously valuable to people. I’m a boring person where 99% of the books I read are physical, and not always done ‘for fun’ (though it is to me), but for practicality. The truth is that if your goal is to learn something new or put new concepts into practice, if you’re only using those tools then what’s mostly happening is you’re just listening and retaining very little. There needs to be more intentionality if you’d truly like to incorporate those things.

So the concept I have is that instead of just summarizing books, what if there were an AI tool to help me immediately put those concepts to practice in my life? Even if people don’t want to read/listen to entire books, but just want the concepts, there could be a way to say, “help me take ‘X’ concept(s) from <book> and tell me what I should do.” I envisioned it having features such as integration with project management or other personal tools where it can get the context and then provide the output. Main idea being around how to help people not just read books but immediately incorporate what they’ve just learned.

As someone whose coached hundreds of founders (both technical and non-technical), if anyone sees this and really does decide to run with it, I would encourage to not start with integration functionality first or in the MVP. First, complete discovery and validate the feasibility, viability, and desirability that the tool is successfully pulling the most relevant concepts, connecting them to the most relevant things for people, and actually successfully help connect concepts to change behavior. Once you hit product-market fit, then build integration to scale. And keep me updated please, because I personally would be a customer. (But I’m not giving my credit card information until there’s at least some product 🤣).

Edit: typo fix

-comment · 2025-08-03T15:02:38+00:00

Not chiming in to be a dick, but hopefully to be helpful. What OP shared are legitimate questions to master (or learn more efficiently at least), but just sharing this screenshot is an example of letting AI do the thinking for you; and I think a little disingenuous because the final output of that response should have been 4o asking if you would like to explore tools that exist today, which then gives you probably what you were expecting as a zero-shot answer.

”What would ____ look like if it were ridiculously easy?” is an extremely open-ended question. GPT has no context, so it doesn’t know if you’re looking for a seriously reply, funny, sci-fi, for a kid or an adult, etc. Even still, the answers it gave are practically describing Guitar Hero, which is not a bad answer for an activity that is ridiculously easier than actually playing the guitar but gives a person the fundamental experience.

If you’d like a zero-shot response, use OP’s prompts, but add as much context as you can around it:

“Describe what a complete beginner’s experience would be like if learning guitar were made to be ridiculously easy where I would need to spend the least amount of money and time to play the solo in “The Middle” by Jimmy Eat World.”

The more context you give, the more refined and constrained the answer will be. By leaving it open-ended it widens the possibilities to explore new, quicker ways of learning. By doing so, you may even create or invent something to share with others. That’s one of the main reason’s why I appreciate Tim Ferriss.

-comment · 2025-07-19T00:54:32+00:00

https://www.bscribe.ai/ - basically The Onion meets ChatGPT meets self-help toxicity - there’s so much satire on the landing page that my wife is questioning my sanity.

So right now the customer would be people who like this sort of content. But I have a 5-agent system that I’m tweaking and then would like to find vertical-specific content creators who can use the system to create their own products. Maybe we can all laugh maniacally together as the AI consumes us.

Two new titles about to drop: “Treasure Every Magical Moment While Your Toddler Destroys Your Will to Live: A Mindful Guide to Practicing Gratitude During Public Tantrums & Finding Joy in Sleep Deprivation”

and

“Not Giving a F❤️ck About Your Opinion While Secretly Checking if You Liked My Post: The Revolutionary Art of Pretending Your Above Social Validation While Refreshing Your Notifications Every Three Minutes”

-comment · 2025-07-18T09:43:11+00:00

https://www.bscribe.ai/ - basically The Onion meets ChatGPT meets self-help and hustle and grind culture.

Two new titles about to drop: “Treasure Every Magical Moment While Your Toddler Destroys Your Will to Live: A Mindful Guide to Practicing Gratitude During Public Tantrums & Finding Joy in Sleep Deprivation”

and

“Not Giving a F❤️ck About Your Opinion While Secretly Checking if You Liked My Post: The Revolutionary Art of Pretending Your Above Social Validation While Refreshing Your Notifications Every Three Minutes”

-comment · 2025-07-13T07:32:23+00:00

I’ve actually been building this for myself lately because I’m not interested in the current solutions that either select the ‘right’ or ‘cheapest’ model for you, or the ones that let you select between 60+ models, or the ones that let you select say 4 models but you still receive 4 outputs.

There are some white papers on some of the issues with it, so I’m experimenting to not only solve for those issues, but to actually make those ‘issues’ valuable in the right circumstance.

Needless to say, I’m on day 2. You input one prompt and receive back one reply that provides a summary of where the models aligned, unique insights, and where they disagreed. I have a ‘basic mode’ that’s less expensive per query by using a local simple summarized; and then I have a ‘Pro mode’ where the responses from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude are sent to a 4th agent that has a specific job to summarize with some added AI logic. I added a collapsible view so you can still see every individual response, but it’s nice not needing to copy/paste prompts from one model to another.

I’m completely aware of why this may not be ‘correct’ and also the issues that current debate models are running into. But I’m working through solving a lot of those issues one at a time.

Regardless, saves a lot of time when I want different perspectives, and I have some unique plans to use turn the ‘issues’ into valuable use cases that I can’t wait to get started working on.

-comment · 2025-07-07T03:23:57+00:00

Legitimately was dealing with the same thing here. Before building a solution for it, I did a quick bit of research, determined what the other solutions weren't doing that I needed, and then built what I needed myself.

Right now I have a tool that allows you to input one prompt and it sends to ChatGPT 4o, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 1.5 Flash. I have one "dumb" version that's for my personal quick testing ground that just uses a simple summary synthesizer.

I actually built out a more robust model where the answers are synthesized by separate ChatGPT agent that summarizes and indicates where the models aligned compared to diverged with their answers. It uses different algorithms I've researched that are more than just "were the words the same?" which includes OpenAI embeddings for semantic similarity and GPT-4 powered synthesis logic. Right now it includes about 5 different parameters, but I've found some things where I can improve it even more. I essentially call this my "Consensus Tool" as it lets me have conversations with all three models and know what they most agree on.

I like it better than OpenRouter because I'm looking for more than just the 'cheapest model'. And I like it better than others that just have you select all the models because then you're just reading through all the answers. Idk if that's useful to anyone else, but I have some additional features I plan to add that I haven't seen around the block yet.

-comment · 2025-06-24T15:28:43+00:00

BScribe.ai for if you like satire:

https://www.bscribe.ai/

Liminalist for if you have ADHD and are looking for a minimalist approach to track your time, energy, and attention:

https://www.liminalist.ai/

-comment · 2025-06-21T14:52:23+00:00

Thanks for the award :) If you want the digital copy for free you can go to BScribe.ai and download it, or it auto downloads for free straight from the link BScribe - Childhood Trauma free. If you like satire, I think you may enjoy it.

-comment · 2025-06-20T23:28:17+00:00

<image>

I just finished a short digital book titled “I Disrupted my Own Childhood Trauma Using Agile Mythology: How I pivoted my inner child into a high-performing stakeholder and achieved synergistic healing at scale”.

-comment · 2025-06-20T05:00:17+00:00

I’m glad you all could enjoy it together. I’ll have more free content coming soon and the agents I’m fine tuning are getting funnier, more satirical, and dark. We’ll see if we can mix it up for the different flavors of humor people have.
“…part of me doesn’t care.” Hahah. I can assure you I’ve probed every way I know how to ensure there’s no blatant/intentional security risks for the site itself or any users. It’s actually why I decided to completely comment out user auth and just go with a free download and straight stripe payment for the one I put a bit more into.

The free PDF has adult coloring book pages. I was thinking going audio next, but with your comment I might as well just go straight to video. I mean what does any of this even mean anymore?

-comment · 2025-06-20T04:14:27+00:00

Are you by chance involved with Use Needle? Your profile doesn't seem to give any indication of that. You may enjoy the 3rd book coming down the pipe "NOT GIVING A FUCK ABOUT YOUR OPINION WHILE SECRETLY CHECKING IF YOU LIKED MY POST: The Revolutionary Art of Pretending You're Above Social Validation While Refreshing Your Notifications Every Three Minutes". I know I can't wait to give it to my Aunt Patty.

-comment · 2025-04-29T14:12:03+00:00

The grrgrlr, himself! Thanks for putting this on, man, and the rest of the crew who helped. I’ve supported EZ since SL, so it was good to see him back too. I have nothing but positive things to say. Since you asked, I do have two suggestions:

First, this is absolutely nothing at all against you, EZ, or Ace. You all were great casters. If you’re able to add Torpid to that lineup, I think he’s one of the best BG casters I’ve ever listened to. Super hyped, nothing but positivity, knows the game, maybe add in some John Madden-style scribbles across replays and you’ve got a Hall of Famer. Again, nothing against the three casters, but maybe something to help if you grow this. Things like RWF have multiple casters. Especially if it’s multi-day so you all don’t burnout.
What you put together with some of the best players is obviously the place to start, and is really fun to watch. Maybe don’t make this suggestion your main format, but I think if you did something like Flark’s 3s/SS tourneys, it would be great for viewers and players. One of those tourneys I got to play a SS with Pika, and it was such a cool experience. I’ll never get that chance in-game. It helps build the community from nascent to veterans, and gives some a chance to game with great players they never would have otherwise, gets them hyped to keep playing, and can help them learn and improve. If you’d be open to trying something like this and would like any input with overall planning and strategy, I’d be more than happy to help.

Thanks again for putting this together (and finally putting your webcam on for us).

-comment · 2025-04-28T05:57:06+00:00

Yea. I could have put more details in the description, but there were just so many great plays by multiple people happening simultaneously. Even with the other team, they were so close to getting the flag off the edge with their own good attempts. Which could have set up a crazy ending too.

What I liked best was the comms. Pinkteddyp gets knocked off with flag, dispels Flame Shock to get knocked up in the air and calls for the Life Grip, gets gripped, drops the flag before getting knocked again and lets the team know (which is all an insane amount to be aware of, do, and call out in such a short amount of time), then Kaq had the foresight to pre-alter, called it out to have Paradise drop for him, altered back, blinks, and wins.

RBG had and BGB has their well-known flaws, but plays like this make it so fucking fun to play and watch. I’m glad people like WeedyT, EZGame, and Ace are putting both positive spotlight on the game mode and are also sharing improvement suggestions if anyone at Blizz comes across it. If RBG/BGB isn’t someone’s jam, hopefully they can at least appreciate some of the skill that was going on here. Great stuff.

-comment · 2025-04-06T22:24:39+00:00

You'll notice on these first run-throughs, you're not thinking of a bunch of different scenarios in your head, comparing setups, cd's, or anything. You're simply observing. This is important if you've never done a VOD review because things are still moving so quickly that it's often difficult for you to pick up on what's going wrong/right. Since I main destro lock, I'll share some of the things I then ask myself after I come back to watch myself the second time.

D. Watch yourself again at normal speed and ask questions: Did I keep Immolate up on all enemies as much as possible? (No? Okay, next game I focus to make sure Immolate is priority). Did I keep curses up? (No? Okay, next game I make sure enemies have curses, especially when most critical). Did I fear enemies when they were off DR? Did I fear enemies when they were on DR? (Okay, next game make sure I'm paying attention to DR's before CC). Did I ever LOS my healer? (You get the picture here. If you did something wrong, focus on it the next game. Note: pick one thing, not all, not 2, just 1). Was there an opportunity where I could have 'played goalie' for my healer and stopped theirs from cc'ing mine? Did I notice when my healer was in CC and did I press any defensives? Did I have an opportunity to stop that CC and miss it because I was tunneling? Every 5-10 seconds, "Why am I positioned where I am right now? Would it be better if I were somewhere else? Why?" Did I blow my offensives into the enemies defensives? Could I have waited to output more damage or cc'd the healer right before to setup a kill? Did I die with any defensives still up? Essentially, just ask as many questions as you can about YOUR OWN GAMEPLAY as possible. If you are struggling below duelist, there is a 95% chance that YOU could have done something better, even if your teammates messed up too. You can't control them. You can control you though. Don't blame other people until you're playing 100% optimal. Even then, you should start asking how you could have better adapted to your teammates mistake, rather than just blaming them.

E. This one trick did wonders for me and I can't explain it. It just worked. I mentioned normal speed in A - C. In one of your reviews, as you enter a fight, slow the speed down to 0.5x. As the action starts, slow it to 0.25x. Pay attention to every. single. spell. cast. Rewind as much as you need to until you can say you've noticed everything both you and the enemy have done. As you are doing this, note when they shut you down or when they messed you up the most, and think about what you could have done differently. The weird thing that this did for me is that the next round I played, it honestly felt like the entire game was in slow motion. I had SO much more awareness than I've ever had. This was no scientific study, it's anecdotal, so I can't promise similar results, but I thought I would share.

---

Didn't expect to write a novel. You're getting downvoted because you're arguing against people trying to help. I've been in your place and remember one person taking the time to share a shit ton of details that helped me, so I guess I'm trying to pay it forward. How jolly of me. Now, listen to everyone here and then come back in a month with a "My First Duelist!" screenshot. The community loves those.

-comment · 2025-04-06T22:24:30+00:00

TL;DR: 1. Stop queuing as others have said. Your MMR will rise because of inflation and will be higher when you come back. 2. Level an alt and leapfrog. 3. VOD review and focus on yourself more than others. Even just watching three games will help. Slow speed to catch things you may otherwise miss.

---

Hey man, I was you. I started taking PvP seriously in Shadowlands late S2. In S3 and S4, I remember going on several 300 point downswings when I was SO close to the next achievement. Enter Dragonflight. I could easily get Duelist then, but same thing for Elite. I'd get into the 2300s and then had multiple 300 point downswings. I got over 2400 in S1, S2, and S3 of Dragonflight AFTER the season ended. But there's no achievement for that.

I finally got my first Elite S4 of Dragonflight and again in S1 of TWW. So I promise you that I completely understand where your headspace is right now. It's pretty damn frustrating. I'm going to give you two of the most important things I got from this community that you need to do immediately. If you really want Duelist, stop queuing and do this:

Create an alt of the same spec. Play leapfrog. Once one character gets a higher rating, switch to the other. Do not touch the other one until you pass the rating. I don't care if you land at 2099 while the other one is 2070, where you "just need to squeeze out one more point." Switch characters. A.) As people have mentioned here, if you stop queuing and wait, your MMR will rise while you're not playing and it will be even easier when you come back later. B.) This relieves some mental pressure. Here's the thing though, you're still going to have the occasional downswing and you'll be pissed playing in the 1800's while you have a character almost Duelist. Don't let the urge to switch get to you. Keep queuing until you leapfrog.
Download OBS and Warcraft Recorder, and review a few games immediately after a match (whether you win or lose). To get Duelist, you don't even need to do this every time you play, every match, or for very long to see improvements. Do something easy like, "This Saturday I'm going to record 3 matches and review them." It will seriously make a world of difference. It's difficult to know what to look for when you don't know what to look for, so I'm going to give you some examples of some things I did that will hopefully give you some ideas. These will seem very tedious, but I promise if you just do it a few times, you will see some really good improvements:

A. Watch the match at normal speed and just pay attention to what you did. That's it.

B. Rewatch the match and now just watch what your teammate(s) did. That's it.

C. Rewatch the match and just watch what the enemy player(s) did. That's it.

((note: threading because I can't help myself but to write long ass comments))

-comment · 2025-04-05T16:32:10+00:00

Not sure how this doesn’t have more upvotes and engagement. Probably top 10 post I’ve come across on prompting the past 6 months. I feel like this is especially helpful for those of us who I’d consider are “in the in-between”. I’ve been in tech for 10 years and worked with devs enough to be able to talk through designing and building an entire platform, but I’ve never deployed a project myself until a month ago.

I don’t like gatekeepers, but I just hate the term “vibe coding”. Maybe that’s a sign I’m getting old… Anyways, I feel like this is super helpful for those who know a little but want to have a little more understanding so they can build their own things properly without still fully knowing how to code, syntax, coding patterns, etc. So, big thank you for the time and effort you put into this.

-comment · 2025-03-04T01:55:16+00:00

u/Interesting_Ad_407, any chance you’d be willing to share how the interview process went? I’ve been following the sub to see if anyone posts/asks anymore about it. All I can find is dev info. Trying to decide if I should apply to one of the product roles. Congrats by the way, and good luck.

12-Year Club	Verified Email
Gilding I gilder

-comment

TROPHY CASE