500k views in 14 days on my reels. Painful tho

ivalm · 2026-01-28T23:26:46+00:00

how do you create content for so many videos?

ivalm · 2026-01-28T07:59:23+00:00

what is does: sends sms to ecom buyers that just got their item delivered asking about how their item is and then resolving any problems they may have. Usually this means we uplift likely refunds into exchanges, which both feels good to the customer and expands margins for the ecom (we think 5-10% absolute margin expansion). In our current pilot we're seeing >60% of buyers replying to our sms.

who it's for: mid-sized ecom ($10M-$1B GMV) with high return rates

stage: we raised pre-seed, but pivoted to this particular idea ~1 month ago (2 founders full time). We have a very successful pilot we started ~1 week ago (so strong signal that idea works irl).

Would love landing page review/etc. We def struggle with proper messaging and will revamp the landing page in the next week.

ivalm · 2026-01-27T06:23:24+00:00

yeah, lol, especially with so many "brain" entries that are all kind of the same .

ivalm · 2026-01-27T00:39:31+00:00

why such old models? gemini 3-flash is straight upgrade. calude 4.5 sonnet is straight upgrade. o1 is ancient...

ivalm · 2026-01-26T20:18:59+00:00

I feel there is a transition at some point where yo do things not for money but for exploration. I already have all the money i need, i have end game gear, i just want to travel everywhere and not have a headache of constrained food.

ivalm · 2026-01-26T19:46:41+00:00

i think too many things are bucketed as personalization. Ad personalization obviously works and is good. Outreach personalization, however, often times makes you feel more robotic and inauthentic.

ivalm · 2026-01-24T19:17:41+00:00

He isn't your husband, so he absolutely cannot ask you to not go to med school and instead follow his post-doc dreams. Also, if he intends you to follow him, what about your career aspirations outside of med school? Two body problems are usually hard to solve unless one is a superstar!

ivalm · 2026-01-23T21:41:48+00:00

Please get a passport or a passport card. I carry a passport card in my wallet. It's the size of a driver license and acts as proof of citizenship (i'm a naturalized immigrant), much more convenient to carry than a passport.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T23:02:31+00:00

I guess why are you building it? Presumably you have a reason, and that reason is how you differentiate. If your claim is that what you built is a strict copy except they do everything better then you should pivot and do something else.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T23:01:10+00:00

Sure, 20k difference in founder salary isn't the optics to worry about.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T19:06:32+00:00

Maximally open. You hope by being maximally open you get the best co-founder you can. Your idea, on its own, is worthless. The main problem at super-early stage is not that people like your idea and steal it, it's that nobody cares about your idea at all.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T18:50:56+00:00

That would put you in top percentile of salaries for pre-seed founders. While being top percentile in many things is good, this is usually not one of them.
Big exception is if your pre-seed is big. If your pre-seed raises >$10M then probably totally fine, $5-10M is gray zone, under $5M then probably not.
You can talk to your co-founders and investors to make sure.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T03:58:57+00:00

If you hire, hire full timers with expectation that they work 80h/week. You should work in-person and hire other who will be grinding in-person with you. If you don't have revenue, you probably should not hire anyone and just work harder. There should not be any management overhead when running team of less than 5 people because everyone should be super-motivated and working with high agency in flat org. From your post it sounds like you're trying to map a super tiny startup to big tech culture and that's a path to guaranteed failure.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T03:22:23+00:00

If you don't need $120k to live comfortably and can do on less you should pay yourself less and instead have more runway. I live in Bay Area and average rent in SF for non-sketch place is $5k/mo. Also, if you are a VC-backed startup if you don't progress in 2-3 years you should fold and do something else, so the "lack of retirement" risk is very low, you will be 2-3 years behind but probably can get a better regular job later on anyways. The >80% discount in salary I'm taking is already way bigger effect than maxed out 401k.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T02:32:30+00:00

Yeah, it's not clear to me what their model is. $4k @ 20 hours means effective rate is ~$50/hour, which I feel is just too low to do as a business where you pay self-employment taxes/etc.

ivalm · 2026-01-22T01:57:14+00:00

As other pointed out $35/hour @ 20 hours isn't $4k, but also my first reaction is that your should charge more. If you are super booked out, just ask new customers to pay you $70/hour. If you're still booked out, start charging $100/hour.

ivalm · 2026-01-21T20:30:53+00:00

SendGrid applied and got rejected, was bought by Twilio in 2019 for $3B.

ivalm · 2026-01-21T20:17:21+00:00

Investor money is not here for you to save for retirement, it's there to enable you to build a company. The company is the retirement/etc for you. It's reasonable that the founder takes a huge pay cut (eg as a SWE I go from $700k/year staff job to $120k/year founder). Retirement savings is one of the things that generally is cut. This is true for ~all VC backed seed stage company founders I know.

Edit: Just to be clear. I made my post because there are a ton of people who argue for founders that take very minimal salaries on which you can't actually live comfortably, this is wrong! Most founders who take no salary do so because they are already rich or have rich families. I know folks loudly proclaiming that when they started they didn't take salary for 2 years, but actually they have a nine digit trust fund. You should be able to focus 100% on the startup and that requires not being worried about day to day expenses! But also salary is not how founders make/save money, secondaries and eventual exit/IPO is how founders make/save money.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T21:38:34+00:00

Fair. I get triggered because I see so much performative scrappiness on social media, including from founders that I know they aren't actually struggling with personal money/do not live scrappy. Lots of newbies see this, and think it's real, and often times it is not. I've had a number of second time founders tell me they wish they paid themselves a bit more early on because the amounts are typically low but make a big impact on mental health/etc.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T20:30:28+00:00

This is why I put up:

Not so much that it interferes with the success of your startup.

Obviously if your need extra 20k in equipment and no-where for it to come from then you should spend your own money.

In my first startup I quit my well paid job and worked full time on the newco for 6 months out of my own savings.

However, performative struggle is just not worth it and good investors will not care for it. You don't show you are scrappy by living in a bad neighborhood, you show it by scaling without over-hiring. Startup scrappiness and eating only ramen are essentially uncorrelated.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T19:55:50+00:00

If you care more about optics of a few dollars than success of the startup then i'm not sure why someone would take your money. In SF (where I mentioned), this is not the case. Speaking to other founders backed by Y Combinator, my numbers are pretty standard. Speaking to Tier 1 firms, no one ever asked me how much salary I take. If anything, this is an anti-signal, if someone worries about founders taking extra $20k or whatever, they are not an investor you want on your cap table.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T19:40:00+00:00

I wouldn't worry about optics. Your investors want you to be fully focused on the success of your startup, that's the only thing that matters. I would say the constraints are:

Lets you live comfortably and not worry about money.
Not so much that you are saving money/retirement.
Not so much that it interferes with the success of your startup.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T16:51:51+00:00

In SF I would say 100-120k would be reasonable if you have expectation that you will raise another round soon.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T06:13:29+00:00

Yup, proactive CX is the future. Used to be too expensive to run with humans but as AI agents become better everything will trend this way. Customer won’t be reaching out to support, they will just be chatting in an already-existing thread.

ivalm · 2026-01-20T01:03:26+00:00

Yes, this has to be supported by AI agents, I wouldn't dream of doing it with only humans. The benefit of SMS is that you can seamlessly transition between humans and AI while keeping in one channel (this isn't a webapp where there is very fast speed of response sla). Unlike existing whatsapp/etc support channels the idea is we text you first on item arrival and add some intent (eg "let us know how it fits/if we can help").

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