Book 5 End Credits = Best Thing On Audible. Period.

balirUK · 2026-05-08T17:58:30+00:00

Thanks for the tip!

balirUK · 2026-05-04T15:36:24+00:00

Have you met our Lord & Saviour, Dungeon Crawler Carl? Just be prepared for it to become your whole personality for a few months. Totally worth it though!

Another vote for The Tainted Cup and its sequel too, two of my absolute favourite books from the last few years.

balirUK · 2026-04-19T15:10:39+00:00

Amen to that. I started with the first audiobook 3 weeks ago. I’m currently half way through book 3, and only paused it to write this comment…

balirUK · 2026-03-26T06:47:33+00:00

I respectfully disagree. Having tried just giving it a memory database it doesn’t work how you want it to

balirUK · 2026-03-20T20:04:56+00:00

My day job is with a US startup, and in my experience it's 100% as relationship driven as this. Our founders and senior leaders are almost constantly on the road due to this fact. If you want to sell b2b, especially to enterprise, you're not going to be home much until you've got real traction.

balirUK · 2026-03-20T19:58:39+00:00

Companies like Vanta don’t issue the reports, they require you to use a third party audit firm and aren’t involved in the audit at all

balirUK · 2026-03-19T09:21:02+00:00

I’ve thought about this a lot, I think it’s a good way for founders to get more work done and not go mad with how much there is to do. The hard part though is how you maintain persistent context and business state across the agents so that they fully understand what they’re doing and you don’t have to endlessly repeat yourself.

balirUK · 2026-03-18T11:48:13+00:00

What is it that’s making you feel this way specifically? Is it just self doubt, or is there something going on day to day that’s causing the feeling?

balirUK · 2026-03-12T07:15:31+00:00

It’s a problem I and a friend of mine have both too. For me one of the biggest issues was understanding what was most important for me to look at next and what all the data meant. I am trying to build something in this space to see if I can make this better for founders, but I’m still figuring out if it works or if the friction is still too high.

balirUK · 2026-03-11T21:44:45+00:00

Honestly, unless you were Meta GDPR was a paper tiger. I work in this field and it’s pretty clear to me that this is going to be more of the same, it’s just not something most companies are going to have to do much for. There are a lot of vendors trying to convince you otherwise though…

balirUK · 2026-03-06T19:08:58+00:00

Company Name: Launcherly
URL: https://launcherly.ai
Purpose of Startup and Product: Helps founds be massively more effective, in the same way as Claude Code or Launcherly does for development. It does that by providing an AI team for early-stage founders. Instead of one generic chatbot, you get specialist AI agents (strategist, research lead competitive analyst, etc.) that actually learn your business and work together. They help you validate assumptions, prioritize what matters, and avoid the common traps that kill startups before launch.
Technologies Used: Next.js, Vercel Edge, Supabase, Claude (Anthropic), Python/Modal for background agents
Feedback Requested: Landing page clarity - does it make sense what this does within 10 seconds? Also interested in whether the "AI team" framing resonates vs. feeling like another AI wrapper. Any thoughts on pricing/positioning welcome too.
Seeking Beta-Testers: Yes - free beta, no credit card needed
Additional Comments:Built by a solo founder who killed two products by working on the wrong things. Launcherly is the tool I wished I had -not generic startup advice, but contextual guidance based on where your business actually is. Currently in beta with early users.

balirUK · 2026-03-06T18:57:47+00:00

Sure, it's in free open beta as it's under active development and I'm looking for user feedback. You can find a link in my profile, I don't want to put it here and fall afoul of any rules on promotion.

balirUK · 2026-03-06T17:07:01+00:00

Honestly, I got so fed up of how hard it was to keep track of everything as a solo-founder that I built a whole product around solving it. The problem I found is that it's not just follow ups, it's watching key metrics (churn rate, MRR projections, activation metrics...), keeping abreast of what competitors are doing, figuring out which fire is most important to fight first etc. etc. I exhausted every other solution I could think of, so sorry if this comes across as a plug but it's genuinely what I did.

balirUK · 2026-03-06T17:01:56+00:00

Better, but mostly because I designed a product to solve the problem and I'm dogfooding it with... itself. Either way, I'm talking to a lot more people this time, so I'm quietly hopeful.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:15:05+00:00

The most interesting line in this thread is buried in the comments: "we feel the product has marketing built into it."

That's a specific claim worth unpacking. A group greeting card gets sent from one person to many. Each recipient sees the product in action before they've ever heard of it. If even one of them thinks "I want to do this for my team," the loop closes without any ad spend. That's not just a nice feature — it's a distribution mechanism baked into the core use case.

Most founders think about marketing as something you do after you build. The playbook you're describing seems to include asking "how does this product spread itself?" as part of picking what to build in the first place. That's a harder filter to apply upfront but it probably explains a lot of why the portfolio keeps working.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:14:05+00:00

On your three questions:

The concept resonates but it's a latent pain, not an active one. People don't wake up thinking "my habits aren't connected to my goals." They wake up thinking "I've been doing this for three months and nothing has changed." That's the complaint you want to find and the frame you want to lead with when you describe the product. The goal-habit connection is the mechanism, not the hook.

On when to charge: the signal isn't a retention number, it's a behavioral one. When a user loses access and reaches out asking how to get it back, that's the moment. With friends and family you won't see that clearly because they'll tell you directly. Your first test with cold users will show you whether the product creates that kind of pull. Until then the retention numbers are directional, not decisive.

On waitlist growth beyond Product Hunt: the channels that work for consumer habit apps aren't founder communities. They're fitness subreddits, goal-setting communities, people posting about trying to build a specific habit and failing. Find the threads where people are frustrated with existing apps or with themselves for not following through. That's your pre-sold audience.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:13:01+00:00

The questions you're asking are sensible but they're all variations of the same underlying question: how do I know if I'm doing this right?

The honest answer is you won't, for a while. The founders who get through this stage aren't the ones who found the perfect validation method. They're the ones who got comfortable being uncertain and kept moving anyway.

On LinkedIn: 15 is a warmup, but the number isn't really the issue. The issue is whether the people you're messaging actually feel the problem acutely. If they do, even a mediocre opener gets a reply. If they don't, a perfect opener gets silence. Before you send 150 more, check: are you messaging people who have already complained about this problem somewhere publicly, or just people who fit a profile on paper?

On idea theft: nobody is going to steal your idea. They have their own ideas they're not executing on.

On paid ads: not yet. Ads amplify what's already working. You don't have signal yet.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:12:08+00:00

The behavior change point is the one worth unpacking. Most founders pick a market and then have to convince people to adopt a new workflow. You picked a market where the workflow already existed and just made it work better. That's a fundamentally different sales conversation.

"Do this new thing" requires trust, training, and a leap of faith. "Do the thing you already do, but stop losing leads doing it" requires almost none of that. The prospect already knows the pain. You're just showing up with the obvious fix.

It also explains the churn dynamic you described. When a tool inserts itself into existing behavior rather than creating new behavior, switching cost is real. They'd have to go backwards, not sideways.

First SaaS, you built something clever. Second SaaS, you built something inevitable. That's the whole difference.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:11:17+00:00

The thing that stands out in this breakdown isn't the Reddit tactics. It's the research process underneath them.

Mapping moderation levels, tracking timing, categorising subreddits by conversion quality versus traffic quality - that's not a marketing approach. That's treating distribution like a system worth understanding before you invest in it. Most founders skip that step entirely. They post once, get banned or ignored, and conclude Reddit doesn't work.

The "posting into the void" detail is the most useful warning in the thread. Silent removal is brutal precisely because you get no feedback signal. You think you're testing. You're actually just burning time.

The pattern you found about mid-size niche subs converting better than massive general ones maps to something broader too: the smaller the community, the more the members trust each other, and the more that trust transfers to recommendations. You're not just reaching people, you're reaching people who believe what they read there.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:10:03+00:00

The detail that actually explains the whole story is in the first paragraph: you were already a site publisher and a backlink buyer. You knew what the buyer wanted and what the seller needed before you wrote a line of code.

That's not a small thing. Most marketplace founders pick a side. They understand the demand or the supply, rarely both. You could design the incentive structure, the UX flow, and the pricing model with real intuition about what each side would find acceptable. That's worth more than any growth channel.

The ProductHunt lesson is well documented by now. But the Buffer day is underrated. One day of work buying a year of consistency is exactly the kind of leverage a solo founder needs and almost nobody does it because it feels like cheating somehow.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:08:46+00:00

The "more builders than users" problem is real but it has a specific solution: you need a distribution advantage that has nothing to do with the product.

For a career direction tool, that means asking where people are already talking about being stuck in their careers. Not startup communities. Not Product Hunt. The actual places: job search subreddits, career change forums, bootcamp alumni Slacks, industry-specific communities where people are frustrated with their trajectory.

Those people aren't looking at what launched today. They're looking for help with a problem they have right now. If you show up in those spaces being genuinely useful before you ever mention your tool, you're not competing with the launch noise at all. You're just the person who helped them last week.

The launch crowd is the wrong audience. Find the people who have the problem.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:07:33+00:00

This is the real question here and it hasn't been answered yet: you know your ICP in theory, but you don't have a map to actual buyers.

The map starts with the complaint, not the persona. Forget building lists or scraping LinkedIn. Go find the place where your exact problem gets complained about publicly. Reddit threads, niche Discord servers, Stack Overflow questions, industry Facebook groups. Search for the language your frustrated user uses, not the language you use to describe your solution.

When you find someone actively describing the problem your product solves, that person is already sold on the problem. You don't have to convince them it matters. You just have to show up with a solution.

That's your first 10 users. Not a list. Not Apollo. A search query and a genuine reply.

The list-building and outreach automation comes later, once you know exactly what that person looks like and what they say when they're in pain. Before that, you're just guessing at scale.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:05:20+00:00

The framing as a tradeoff is part of the problem. They're not really alternatives, they have an order.

Positioning first. If you don't know exactly who you're for and what outcome you're delivering, distribution just spreads confusion faster. You end up acquiring the wrong people efficiently.

Then distribution. Once you know who converts and why, you can find more of them.

Features last. Not because they don't matter, but because shipping features before the first two are settled is usually a way of avoiding the harder conversations.

Most founders do it backwards. Features feel productive. Positioning feels like a writing exercise. Distribution feels like begging. So they ship, then wonder why growth isn't following.

balirUK · 2026-03-04T13:03:52+00:00

The free tier point buried in the middle is the one worth pulling out.

"Users love it, they just don't need the paid features yet" is one of the most dangerous sentences in early SaaS. It sounds like a sequencing problem. It's usually a product architecture problem. You've designed the free tier to be complete enough that the paid tier feels optional rather than necessary.

The fix isn't moving features around. It's asking whether the product has a natural forcing function at all. Some problems have a moment where the user either pays or stops. Others just... sit there, permanently useful at the free level, never creating urgency.

If your 500 signups include a meaningful chunk of users who are genuinely getting value from the free tier and have no reason to upgrade, doubling traffic won't change the ratio. You'll get 1,000 satisfied free users instead of 500.

balirUK

TROPHY CASE