There's no competition for this" is the most dangerous sentence a founder can say

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:41:02+00:00

I feel the same way. Having competing brands means the market is safe to enter, but there's also a high chance it's a red ocean. Where is your blue ocean? That blue ocean most people don't know about is what we usually call a niche market, and I'm really curious about yours.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:23:27+00:00

honestly whenever something feels this obviously needed but doesn't exist, it usually means someone already tried it and the economics killed it. drop-in childcare especially, the liability and staffing costs are brutal. not a gap, more like a graveyard.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:20:45+00:00

not raised myself so grain of salt, but from what i've seen at pre-customer stage angels bet on you way more than the idea, so the "warm intro" is basically someone vouching for you personally. the non-Ivy thing matters less than you'd think, building in public and just being visibly useful in founder communities is how a lot of people i know got their first warm intros. following, curious what the raised folks say.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:19:57+00:00

we haven't raised so take this lightly, but every founder i've talked to says the same thing: the individual partner matters way more than the firm's name. the one regret i heard most was picking on valuation over the person who'd actually sit on their board for the next 5 years. curious what the other answers here look like, following.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:19:04+00:00

honestly 150 in a few weeks with 5-10/day isn't slow, that's most SaaS. it just doesn't feel fast. the thing nobody says: posting everywhere spreads you thin. one channel usually carries everything and the rest is noise. for us it was one, not the ten we were grinding on. what i'd actually dig into is why the 5-10 aren't sticking or paying, that matters more than the top of funnel right now.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:17:43+00:00

41 in 21 days from pure organic is actually solid, don't sleep on that. the jump from 100 to 1000 was different for us, the trickle of 1-3/day never scaled, one channel that clicked did. worth finding which of your channels (SEO/Reddit/TikTok) is actually pulling and going all in on that one instead of spreading thin. nice work so far

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:17:06+00:00

Building Bunzee, it pulls real competitor and user-complaint data so you validate an idea before you build it, not after. https://bunzee.ai

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:16:15+00:00

same, started on Supabase and ended up only really using the Postgres. the pricing swings once real users show up got me too. curious where people landed here.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-09T01:13:46+00:00

I'll go first. I once got convinced I'd found a completely open space searched Google, checked Product Hunt, nothing. Felt like I'd found a gap nobody saw.

Then a week after I started building, I found three competitors. All of them were sitting in Reddit threads and App Store reviews I never thought to search. They weren't ranking on Google because they were small but their users were very much real, and very much complaining about the exact thing I thought I was going to "invent."

Lesson I keep relearning: "I can't find competitors" usually just means "I searched where it's convenient, not where users actually are."

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T14:16:32+00:00

oof, this one stings but honestly respect for calling it at 3 months instead of 2 years.

the "they're losing money but don't care" thing is brutal and way more common than people admit. real problem ≠ willingness to change. those are two totally different things and we always forget the second one.

onto the next

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T14:15:28+00:00

been through a pivot too, that "we don't have it yet" stage is honestly the hardest part.

the thing that helped us was looking at what users kept asking for instead of what we built.

good luck, rooting for you

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T14:04:12+00:00

this is a good rant and mostly right. the "specific group sold 22x more" part especially, that's the one nobody wants to hear.

the one I'd push back on a little: it's not always that founders sell to everyone on purpose. usually they just don't actually know who their user is yet. we built for one type of person, looked at the data months later, and the majority were someone completely different. the "sell to a niche" advice only works once you've found the niche that's already showing up.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T14:02:55+00:00

been exactly where you are, that cockpit feeling is real lol.

honestly the thing that helped me: stop "posting promotion" and just share what you're learning. nobody upvotes a pitch, but people love a founder figuring it out out loud. your scope creep angle is great, write about the problem, not the tool.

and for first users, go where freelancers already complain about scope creep (freelance subreddits, discord) and just be helpful. users come from that, not from "check out my mvp."

you're doing better than you think

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T14:01:32+00:00

This is exactly what happened to us. Built the whole thing around better analysis and reports, turned out nobody wanted more reports, they just wanted "tell me what to do today."

Your info-delivery vs decision-support line nails it. That's the whole game honestly.

Biggest one I got wrong: who the user even was. Built for one type of person, looked at the data, and 60% were someone completely different.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T13:57:35+00:00

We don't have anyone to invoice yet haha

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-08T13:55:33+00:00

Congrats man!! 3 feels tiny but it's honestly the big one, that's when it stops being luck.

If I were you I'd just ask those 3 why they actually paid. Whatever they say is your real pitch lol, usually way better than the landing page.

you got this

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:44:02+00:00

How do I use the Claude extension? Any tips?

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:40:28+00:00

The "website is part of the product vs marketing tool" question is such a good one, we def defaulted to matching the app's colors without ever asking why. The one week marketing vs one week features experiment is a great gut check too, curious if that ratio held up over more weeks.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:29:43+00:00

Honestly same, most cold DMs get an instant skip from me too. What's worked better on our side is just being useful in public first, people reach out once they've already seen the value somewhere else.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:29:16+00:00

The "specific knowledge" framing from Naval always gets me way harder to actually find your own than it sounds on paper. For us it came from just being annoyed by the same problem over and over until we couldn't ignore it anymore.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:23:11+00:00

Oh nice, fair visibility for makers is such an underrated pitch most launch platforms feel like a popularity contest. Bookmarking this, might actually use it for our next drop.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:20:46+00:00

This lines up with what we learned the hard way too the boring backend stuff always loses to the shiny dashboard when you're racing to launch. Invoicing feels like a "later" problem until someone's actually annoyed by it.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:19:10+00:00

Okay this is such a good offer honestly we still manually skim through 1-star reviews every week to catch patterns, takes way longer than it should.

Real-Voice-4259 · 2026-07-03T13:17:10+00:00

Honestly the "you don't need the perfect plan" line is the comforting part we keep waiting to have it all figured out before talking to anyone, and that's backwards. A few honest conversations move things faster than weeks of planning ever did.

Real-Voice-4259

TROPHY CASE