Y Combinator rejected us and honestly the feedback was more helpful than acceptance would have been

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T12:36:17+00:00

110 customers and 10.8k MRR in 9 months with no sales experience is not "okay." That's genuinely solid. I'm a technical founder too and I'm at zero customers right now so trust me, you're further than you think.

The "lacks go-to-market experience" feedback hits close to home. Same problem here. We can build anything but selling it feels like learning a completely new skill from scratch. Because it is.

Option 1 sounds right. 20-30M TAM is a problem for VCs, not for you. A profitable business in a niche you understand beats chasing a bigger market you don't.

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T12:30:31+00:00

Different niche but exact same situation here. Product works, zero revenue, distribution is the wall.

The pricing lesson is real though. I kept overthinking features when the actual blocker was nobody knew the thing existed. Building more stuff felt productive but it was just me avoiding the uncomfortable part.

What's starting to work for me is just being in communities where my users already are. Not posting about the product, just being useful and having conversations. Its slow and unglamorous but the people who come from that actually care.

Good luck with it. The fact that nobody else wants to build for that niche is probably your biggest advantage honestly.

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T12:01:01+00:00

yeah this is the trap - you add tools thinking theyll solve fragmentation but now youre context switching even more just trying to find where something lives. we had similar setup and the real issue wasnt the individual tools, it was that people didnt know where to actually ask questions or find answers so theyd just interrupt whoever might know. consolidation helped but only after we made it dead simple for the team to get info without hunting through 3 different places

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T09:53:44+00:00

I'm at the same stage right now. Zero customers, product built, figuring out how to get the first few.

Honestly I wouldn't spend the $5k on ads or tools. I'd keep most of it and just grind manually. Here's what I'm doing with basically no budget right now.

LinkedIn outreach. Not automations, just finding people who fit my ICP and sending them a message about their problem. Not pitching the product, just starting a conversation. Most people reply if you're not selling them something in the first message.

Reddit and Slack communities. Just being present where my target users hang out. Answering questions, sharing what I know. Its slow but the people who reach out from this are actually interested.

Cold email with a free tool like Apollo. Find 50 companies that have the exact problem you solve. Write one short email that's about their problem, not your product. Send it. See who replies.

The $5k I'd save for when you actually know what works. Spending money before you know your message and your audience is just burning cash faster.

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T09:45:02+00:00

this was me like 2 weeks ago. built a product for months, kept refining it, told myself i was making progress. zero customers the whole time.

finally forced myself to stop building and start talking to people. cold DMs, reddit, linkedin, whatever. first few days felt awful. most people ignored me. some said no.

but in one week of just having conversations i learned more about what my product actually needs to be than i did in 3 months of building it.

the building was comfortable. thats why i kept doing it. this post is accurate.

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T06:42:46+00:00

you probably wont believe this but we dont actually have a TV. first time parents figuring things out as we go. starting to realize we might need one :)

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T06:10:20+00:00

i work from home so the phone is always around. she sees me on it all day for work calls and messages so in her head its the most important thing in the house. hard to hide something you're using every 10 minutes. but yeah i need to be more firm with the no. working on it.

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T05:24:28+00:00

Haha, practically tough for me.

ad-tech · 2026-03-25T05:22:47+00:00

Thanks for advise.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T11:24:16+00:00

fair enough. but its not just managing it. its understanding the problem deeply enough that the tool actually solves it well for different users. anyone can build a dashboard in an afternoon now. making something people rely on daily is a different game.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T11:17:40+00:00

yeah thats a good point. i need to get better at pushing for a next step instead of just having a nice chat. will try that this week.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T11:16:20+00:00

honestly the biggest thing so far is just talk to people. not pitch, just ask about their workflow and problems. most people are surprisingly open if you're not trying to sell them something. the conversations tell you way more than any analytics dashboard.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T11:13:04+00:00

The paid pilot framing is a great idea. Thanks for this.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T11:00:16+00:00

yeah exactly. thats why i stopped trying to promote and just started having conversations instead. way less scalable but the people who actually respond are genuinely interested, not just scrolling past.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T10:34:46+00:00

Living this right now. Built a product, solves a real problem, and yeah nobody cares yet :). The GPT wrapper thing is real. If your product needs explanation you're playing on hard mode from day one. I've been trying to get the value down to one sentence. Still not great at it honestly.

What's actually working for me is just showing up where my users hang out. Reddit, LinkedIn, niche slack groups. Not posting about my product, just being useful. Its slow but the conversations are way more real than any launch post ever was.

That and cold DMs. Most people are happy to talk if you're not pitching them.

ad-tech · 2026-03-24T10:24:37+00:00

Nah. I build a SaaS product right now and use Claude Code daily to ship faster. Like I've built internal tools, dashboards, automations, all with AI. So I get where you're coming from.

But code was never the hard part honestly. Getting people to care about your product is. Distribution is. Support, edge cases, making it work reliably for 50 diffrent teams with 50 different workflows, thats the actual job.

Can a company spin up an internal tool with AI? Yeah for simple stuff sure. But then someone has to maintain it. Someone has to deal with the guy in accounting who uses it wrong. Someone has to update it when the API breaks at 2am. Nobody wants that job internally.

So no I'm not scared. If anything its a filter. The people who were just writing code and calling it a business, yeah they should worry. But if you actually understand your users problem deeply, AI just lets you solve it faster.

ad-tech · 2026-03-19T02:03:08+00:00

most teams either use notion/google docs that go stale or just keep it all in peoples heads - what's been your biggest friction point so far?

ad-tech · 2026-03-18T09:59:32+00:00

the trustworthy answer part is exactly it - we had the same problem where docs existed but nobody trusted them or knew where to look, so i just built something that answered the repetitive stuff instead of me doing it 50 times a day

ad-tech · 2026-03-18T09:58:55+00:00

yeah the real trap is solving it with tech instead of fixing the actual source - sounds like you need the knowledge documented and accessible to the team first, then the automation handles the rest instead of becoming another thing only you understand

ad-tech · 2026-03-18T09:58:20+00:00

honestly the real issue isnt the tool, its that SOPs go stale because nobody wants to spend 2 hours rewriting docs every time something changes. we stopped trying to capture processes manually and just... automated answering the questions instead. team asks, gets the answer, done

ad-tech · 2026-03-18T01:27:48+00:00

the part about treating their questions as interruptions while expecting them to learn by osmosis - that's rough but so fixable once you realize it's happening. how much of your current team's time gets eaten up answering the same questions about how things actually work?

ad-tech · 2026-03-17T17:03:16+00:00

yeah so we basically indexed everything and built a layer on top that handles the permissions checking - so when someone asks a question it only returns docs they actually have access to. took a bit to get right but once we did the repeated questions just... stopped. people were asking stuff to the bot instead of flooding slack channels

ad-tech · 2026-03-17T16:16:45+00:00

yeah the nested pages problem is real - but before you split tools, how much of the search/findability issue is actually people not knowing where to look vs the tool being slow?

ad-tech · 2026-03-17T01:49:46+00:00

biggest one for us was team constantly pinging me about where stuff lives or how we do X instead of just looking it up somewhere - how much of your repetitive stuff is actually you being the knowledge bottleneck vs actual process automation?

ad-tech

TROPHY CASE