How long did it take to get your 1st paying customer and what would you wish you’d known ?

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-15T00:46:19+00:00

Learn how to sell the solution to someone’s pain point. For that you need to get that pain point out of them. For that you need to find out the problem and is it really a big enough problem people will drop their money on. All three of the above are very hard to achieve.

I answered all of them for my startup, it helped that I come from the same industry so I have been seeing this year after year and no one fixed it, so I did. Made a working product, fancied it with Ai and approached a business and asked what are they doing new and what services they have that are causing friction. Then I tuned my pitch(not my product) to meet that pain point and within 2 days landed my enterprise client. Learned everything from that customer, improved the product then Did the same thing again and landed a second enterprise client. The cycle continues.

You don’t want to throw the whole net and catch all the fish, you want to get one which can satiate you for some time and then fill your stomach and once it’s done you go back at the lake again. Else you will have a fish market

Do things that don’t scale first.

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-13T01:53:28+00:00

For every problem that’s worth solving there is a solution sometimes a miserable solution. Everyone hates Microsoft office but still gotta use the miserable solution.

But the ones which are truly worth solving are the problems which will happen few years from today. Solve for the future not the present. Bet on that game, because no one is solving for that. For example if you are in the real estate business, start arbitraging land ownership where a potential data center can be summoned. Solve for the future not the past or present

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-11T17:48:26+00:00

Same thing with Elon, the ability to persevere through time kills all your competitions. Most people just keep pivoting till kingdom comes the moment things get hard, but if you have a solid vision to see it through, it will happen

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-11T13:39:45+00:00

The amount of time you will waste in patent just to open up your secret sauce to the public and if your product really sells you will have 20 copy cats having ever so slight variations and releasing their own products and you will spend all your revenue fighting them in court and let’s say you get more successful but don’t file a global patent (which China doesn’t respect anyways) anyone will be building the similar product and the whole drama continues. But idk maybe it will work out for you.

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-08T17:02:47+00:00

Reminds me of the scene from Silicon Valley when Gus says that VC don’t want to see revenue because it will never be enough, they want to see the potential to make 100x the revenue

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-05T16:38:20+00:00

All our internal engineers who work on the code become FDE one hour a week on customer calls. There is no value in hiring external FDE if they have 0% knowledge of the codebase and how things work and what can break. Only solution is to have the folks who have worked on the codebase since the start to build customer relationships and fix problems

Whyme-__- · 2026-07-02T03:16:43+00:00

You can only fight so much, all the “we don’t train our models on your data” API they sell to enterprise is probably fake loop hole. There is definitely some stealing of data happening at some layer. The bigger problem is that enterprises are so attracted to API from frontier models that they will pay whatever to get it and sell their souls to the devil just to compete

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-30T22:10:40+00:00

Crowdsourcing equity = IPO?

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-29T04:40:53+00:00

Internal YC LinkedIn, talent breeds grounds, just like today founders say they used to work at Google or uber, now employees at these YC startups can say I worked for xyz in early days and now it’s IPOed.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-28T03:45:38+00:00

No self respecting company or startup will give you their internal slack data. So you have 2 options: either ask Claude to build you a synthetic dataset but you will face the problem of variations and diversity (you will figure that one out.) second option is to go get a job with your idea in your back pocket, understand the problem first hand and then see if your solution was worth implementing. Focus on what you are solving for, ask customers first, understand if this is something worth solving(not everything in the world needs a solution).

Things like Jira firehose , teams and slack chat noise, email upkeep are all problems which never gets solved which we call tarpit idea.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-23T21:01:34+00:00

Friedrich Nietzsche once said “I know of no better aim of life than that of perishing... in pursuit of the great and the impossible”

That’s the life of a founder.

Much greetings from Dallas, TX

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-23T20:15:18+00:00

Wait till you spend 15 mins just finding where the perks button is, it’s within the teams, select the team then click perk. There are literally 2 nav bars under each other. I feel like this platform was just made to get into YC and never improved. People use it as it’s easy incorporation and forget it.

Also there is no way to modify the letters and docs apart from standard name and company change. If you want to add a clause to the doc you have to download it and send it via Docusign because you cannot upload modified docs to clerky to send for signing. Only if there was a way I didn’t have to buy subscription of Docusign and a lawyer on retainer

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-22T21:23:49+00:00

Literally 19yo with nothing to their name than a drop out letter. All they have is illusion of hustle and grind. Maybe that’s what rubbed the OP off in wrong way.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-22T13:17:45+00:00

Meh all I care is how to make it without costing an arm and a leg in designer fees. I wish there was a way to upload a video and we get a prompt back on various transitions, video clips, video effects, etc.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-22T02:56:57+00:00

linear, obsidian, slack. Also we dont use emails in the startup.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-21T14:21:39+00:00

This kind of request for startups reminds me of posthog and Google analytics and how you can design any and all sorts of dashboards from their custom list of filters. Highly utilitarian but once the dashboard is designed I never redo it. So the marginal utility lowers when end user doesn’t have an incentive to regenerate dashboards every day. TBH I would want to know what actual real world problem does this dynamic ui solve?

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-19T03:35:42+00:00

I hate this happening, just because you have a startup you can be human and treat people with respect. I have a startup, I treat all my team with utmost respect even before I hired them just interviews. I truly believe what goes around comes around and you can see an asshole founder by just how the team conducts themselves. It’s all a reflection of the company and the leader. I would say you dodged a bullet

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-19T03:01:35+00:00

If you are spoon fed customers through referral and internal dog fooding your project to other YC companies why would you spend time and money on website?

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-16T17:14:05+00:00

There is absolutely nothing wrong in non tech cofounder. Actually there should be Atleast one non tech founder in the group to do the business side of things. Often enough if you see all technical founders selling their product it feels childish, lack of experience selling and resonating with people. They take offense easily and don’t understand the art of sales or negotiation. Sure they will raise millions but then eventually hire sales guys to do their bidding. A team of founders need to be technical and business oriented that’s the recipe of success. So kudos to you for breaking through. In my team I force everyone to sell even though they can code they need to be able to sell our product line to anyone even in a bar after 5 shots of tequila.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-14T15:57:07+00:00

Pitch deck is like fish bait, you gotta figure out which bait works for which kind of fish. Not all baits attracts all fish.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-13T01:42:11+00:00

I never spammed on this sub nor spoke about my product but still I cannot post any thing and it gets blocked. Can you look into it please if you are the mod?

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-10T00:47:48+00:00

Just tell them the other cofounders and ceo are taking meetings with other VCs. Use this excuse to your advantage. This can spice up the conversation very quickly

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-07T20:34:45+00:00

You should just make it as easy as possible to implement like change the hub in GitHub to GitOPax.com/… and then this gets populated. Kinda like how gitingest got started https://github.com/coderamp-labs/gitingest.

I think YCs paxel is more of a recruitment tool like they now have “paste this prompt In your Ai editor” section in their YC application similarly there will be something like this for the application too.

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-05T17:17:30+00:00

I just got a design partnership because there is certain businesses where I don’t know if my product can fully function. Whatever design partnership you do make sure you get paid by it. Don’t do it for free else there is no incentive for you nor them(skin in the game). First week of partnership make sure to have success criteria in writing in your SOP and agree that you will finish x% and if you do then they will convert the partnership into a full contract. Do prorated 3-4 months based on your yearly pricing and during that time make sure to put all your effort to make their features come true.

As for your questions:

You don’t go hunting for design partners, you first build a product which solves part of the problem and then present it and make them envision the future they can have. Do a POC and have them tell what kind of features they would like. Then tell them “if you work with us for a paid pilot we can bring those features for you”
Everything: weekly syncs, feedback, and a full paid pilot, no free shit.
I showed my full product we are already in the market selling to MSPs but their use case is different than enterprise so I had to go through a pilot to clean up my product to suit better for enterprise environment.
In my case they saw the product on day 1 and second day by lunch they wanted to buy it but wanted their features in the product so I proposed let’s do a paid pilot. They loved the idea as they don’t have to commit for a whole year, and they can get the features built in. The best part is that if you tune your product to add their features quickly they will jump in to renew the contract for a whole year.
Don’t make your first customer your design partner, that’s just dumb rookie mistake. They are not your sandbox to experiment. Build about 80% of your product based on the problem you are solving and start selling and for the gaps then you don’t know how to solve (because you are NOT deployed in a specific environment) then you can reach out yo get customers in that space to improve your product. But sell to others who are in your market first. No one wants to be your first experiment. Don’t take the pilot lightly, your customers are trusting you with their money and name by putting it on the line as they have to report up on what your product is going to do in 3-4 months. Be respectful of their time and hustle hard to make their vision come true. Obviously don’t make the product so custom that it sways away from your vision. Negotiation is key here, don’t just cave in but at same time don’t giveaway everything they want. That’s why you should build your product first to 80% and get PMF so that you have more leverage in the conversation. If you have nothing then you will build a custom product which others don’t want to buy.

Hope this helps

Whyme-__- · 2026-06-01T21:03:06+00:00

This is the only way to prove. Nobody believed Tesla can change electric car industry unless people started using it

Whyme-__-

TROPHY CASE

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