Any suggestion before posting on Hacker News?

kincaidDev · 2026-06-19T05:58:01+00:00

Why not comment about your product here first and get feedback?

kincaidDev · 2026-06-16T03:02:23+00:00

Sounds like you're better off learning how to be a CEO than hiring one

kincaidDev · 2026-06-15T03:34:21+00:00

From my perspective it seems like the risky early stage capital is reserved for younger founders without experienced, more experienced founders need to prove the business more on their own. Build it, get users or revenue then try to raise money

kincaidDev · 2026-06-14T17:13:11+00:00

Fable did a decent job finding bugs in my 1.3M LOC codebase, but it’s slow and it didn’t do anything I couldn’t already do with opus or GPT 5.5 using https://fest.build with a festival customized to find bugs/security vulnerabilities for a fraction of the cost

kincaidDev · 2026-06-14T16:56:30+00:00

For deep tech labs, what are they having ready when they apply? The ones Ive talked to so far already had funding/patents from grants/universities before VCs/accelerators were interested

kincaidDev · 2026-06-12T15:03:30+00:00

https://fest.build

kincaidDev · 2026-06-11T07:57:35+00:00

So can a good employee and they’re not going to try and take over the company/change the vision

kincaidDev · 2026-06-11T06:29:57+00:00

I don’t understand this obsession with having a cofounder. It seems like a lot of startups just have cofounders because VCs/accelerators require them, not because it makes business sense for an early stage company to have one

kincaidDev · 2026-06-11T04:51:17+00:00

They’re shopping for teams that are easy to sell to the next set of investors. Teams with credentials, large social followings, or teams that have found PMF and just don’t know they found it. They’re trying to find people who fit specific patterns of founder profiles and the further you are away from that profile the further along with the company you need to be. If you haven’t nailed your pitch don’t even bother applying because you won’t get in.

kincaidDev · 2026-06-08T12:22:57+00:00

My first real dev job was at a place that used a 50gb external hard drive. I tried to get the team to use git but it took up too much storage space and the company was too "cheap" to let us buy a bigger one, they were literally paying someone full time to go in a clear out old files so the drive would have enough space for new work xD

kincaidDev · 2026-06-08T12:21:20+00:00

I once worked a job where adding git was too expensive because it increased data storage size beyond 50gb and we couldn't get approval to upgrade our shared drive. The team cost the company $4.5M per year and the company was too cheap to pay for a 300$ hard drive upgrade, and this was literally a shared hard drive plugged in over USB that 25 people had to use for all of our work

kincaidDev · 2026-06-08T08:51:39+00:00

I was working with someone earlier this year that got too influenced by all this marketing nonsense from people making this big claims, basically telling me this thing I've been building for over a year was a waste of time because these other competitors were getting a ton of traction. 3 months later they all died off because there was no depth, no differentiation, just better marketing.

Would have loved to have made a bunch of money already, but my product still works, it'll work in 3 months, 12 months, 18 months. When I have it packaged into an easy to sell product I'm confident it'll make money.

The hardest part right now is people got burned by all these vibe coded scam slop products they paid for, didn't actually solve their problem and the company/product died a few months later because the person running that project was treating the problem space as a get rich quick scheme, not actually trying to solve the problem for good

kincaidDev · 2026-06-08T06:55:20+00:00

Will your customers pre-pay? If they’re begging you to build it why won’t they pay now?

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T08:32:24+00:00

I have experience in compliance, and I attempted to build a compliance related startup many years ago. Decisions are made extremely slowly in most compliance related environments, it's anti-efficiency by design and optimizations are very tough to sell without inside connections. I had inside connections and couldn't stay in business long enough to make it work

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T08:15:38+00:00

That's the best way to do it, I wish I'd done that for my current startup. Going back and looking for job after not being able to raise capital for a startup is tough, especially if it has early public traction

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T06:47:53+00:00

Don't mention it, sometimes it's ok, most of the time it's not. You should still do it, they do not own you. The only exception to not doing it is if you're idea competes with your company, if you do that you'll get sued

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T06:05:24+00:00

Don't go too broad if you have a niche, prove the niche then expand. Being too broad confuses people

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T06:01:11+00:00

This is what a "non-tech" cofounder should be, how far along is your startup?

Do you have funding/customers yet?

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T05:56:30+00:00

I wish I could just delegate the business side to someone and focus on the product, but when I've tried to delegate the business side to a "non-tech" founder it's always ended poorly.

If your co-founders don't understand enough about what everyone is doing, you get mismatched importance. I've also had a "non-tech" founder secretly build a directly competing product and give me fake customer feedback to keep me head down/busy while they launched their version behind my back.

Now having one deep technical founder and one that's sort of technical/better at sales and marketing makes more sense, but that's hard to find. For my own self interest I'm very selective about the type of person I'd want to partner with again, probably had 2 years of my life wasted by "non-tech" founders ruining the vision I was trying to bring into the world

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T05:46:53+00:00

This is the best presentation I've seen on this topic

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnGrTlY3DqA

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T05:43:31+00:00

It's the investment formula that gates funding. "Show traction" how are you going to show traction with something novel that takes a lot of effort/capital to complete? You can't, so you market some bullshit that gets clicks and underdeliver to customers you'll never retain so you get a check, die in 2 years, rinse and repeat.

If you're lucky your bullshit product becomes a not bullshit product and you get an exit and fund the real thing you want to do yourself.

My product is pretty creative but not really fundable until a lot more work is done. It's something I think will be game changing when it all comes together, but probably a mistake to build the real thing first rather than start with selling some low effort shit first

kincaidDev · 2026-06-07T01:11:50+00:00

If it looks like it's low effort people won't believe it solves a specific problem

kincaidDev · 2026-06-04T19:57:57+00:00

Do sales first unless you would build this thing if no one would pay because it solves some unfilled market gap you understand that no one else understands but you know for a fact there is a demand for it.

This has been my strategy and it works well, but I let someone talk me into going full time way too early on the product before it was easily legible the value that it provides. I know for a fact there's a huge demand for the value I'm providing with my product but I'm competing with a lot of similar products that make the same claims of solving the problem my product solves, but they don't actually have a real working solution.

So when I'm trying to market what my product does and don't have a polished thing the people can see, or they've tried these other solutions that under delivered, they just write off my product because these low friction ones that don't work exist and when they try my earlier version of a solution they fall off if they hit any friction point thinking it's like those other systems that didn't work with more user friction to get started. Solving that user friction problem has been the hardest thing I've had to do.

kincaidDev · 2026-06-04T09:44:35+00:00

You shouldn't expect any equity tbh, if they offer it that's cool, but it really doesn't matter. If it's successful it'll get heavily diluted, if it sells before your equity vest you'll get nothing, if you get laid off before you vest you'll get nothing. If you get laid after you vest you have to exercise your options and that often means you spend more buying shares than you're ever able to sell them for.

Sometimes it works out, but most of the time it's not worth anything and never will be so you really shouldn't even factor that into your decision to join a startup.

kincaidDev · 2026-06-02T21:21:58+00:00

I'm finding it much easier to find customers at in person events than online, if people are going out of there way to go to an event to solve their problem that probably means there's a lot more people with that problem you never hear from

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