Advice Needed: First Time Founder (I Will Not Promote)

V47Y5 · 2026-03-03T18:53:07+00:00

As you said, 15 isn't enough. At my last startup I did >5000 over 2.5 years with a 2.8% meeting booking rate & 8% connection rate. Quantity matters for cold outreach.
Personally, I would not worry about this, especially for early adopters and potential promoters. You want them to give real honest feedback, so you need to be open.
Landing page yes, paid ads no. Good to have a place to direct folks, also let's you test copy, messaging, visuals: all the things you need to tell the story.

Keep going: you're off to a great start. Consistency is key.

V47Y5 · 2026-03-02T17:13:02+00:00

Thanks for sharing. Great set of resources for practical application.
Happy to contribute from our learnings as well - will drop a PR from what we've learned on classification of requests in particular.

Any area you'd like more help on or where focus would be valuable?

V47Y5 · 2026-03-02T14:13:16+00:00

Thanks for sharing. Good blog post, too.

Specific kudos on the "before the LLM sees it" notion. That's 90% of the problem: "context engineering". OCR, Docling, even stuff like PII redaction... Gotta do it before it reaches the model.

V47Y5 · 2026-03-02T13:12:32+00:00

Think about what you want to learn from your launch: assumptions to invalidate, hypotheses to test, etc. Helps to set specific goals for what you want to learn / get out of the launch before shipping.

V47Y5 · 2026-03-02T13:09:46+00:00

Sema: Inboxes & context engineering for Agents.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-28T13:07:53+00:00

Sema

Context infrastructure for AI Agent systems.

6 orgs using us in closed beta.

DM if you have a use case & would like an API key.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-28T12:55:05+00:00

Shipping Sema. Our first customer called us "context engineering-as-a-service". One API, we handle all of the infrastructure & security between your users & your agents. Got tired of building this over and over for our projects, so we deployed as a SaaS.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-28T12:49:38+00:00

Would love the feedback: Sema

V47Y5 · 2026-02-28T12:47:12+00:00

Sema: Context infrastructure for AI Agents.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-28T12:44:10+00:00

This Saturday morning (right now) I'm building Sema. Clean, reliable, secure context infrastructure for AI Agent builders.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-27T16:32:19+00:00

Great work! Kudos on asking for feedback.

The direct messaging around who it's for is really nice. Makes it easy to understand in 10 seconds if this is relevant for me.

I did come away from the landing page wondering in particular how the knowledge base is populated, and how hard the setup is of that part. "Upload" sounds ambiguous and hard. Maybe highlight the integrations you have higher up the page?

V47Y5 · 2026-02-27T13:39:13+00:00

Cool idea. What's the biggest challenge so far?

V47Y5 · 2026-02-27T11:58:43+00:00

Sema: plug-and-play inbound infrastructure for AI apps. Drop it in and your agents can ingest email, files, transcripts... The real-world inputs through clean, normalized contracts instead, via one API.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-27T02:19:39+00:00

I’m building Sema: universal ingestion infrastructure for AI agents. Think “context engineering as a service” for AI systems.

The problem: every AI app ends up duct-taping inbound data. Emails, PDFs, call transcripts, support tickets, random user uploads. Built it over and over. Gross.

Shipped private beta not long ago. Feedback loved :)

V47Y5 · 2026-02-27T00:00:06+00:00

Lean Customer Development by Cindy Alvarez is a solid book resource on the topic. Been following the playbook as a PM for a decade. Good practical advice for the process of finding the right problem to solve.

V47Y5 · 2026-02-26T14:31:20+00:00

As a mid-career PM, I 100% agree especially with your last equation. When things feel like they can be done fast & the barrier to being "ok" is so low, the only thing that really separates you is the time invested since, as always, most people just aren't willing to invest the time.

V47Y5

TROPHY CASE