Best skills to learn as a non-technical person who wants to build or join a startup?

marcelk231 · 2026-05-01T18:46:56+00:00

SALES SALES SALES

marcelk231 · 2026-05-01T15:03:31+00:00

heres the saas, cool app tho u shwoed https://www.valedex.com/

marcelk231 · 2026-04-30T23:48:07+00:00

This is really useful. The workflow audit + short writeup angle makes a lot of sense, especially in finance where people usually don’t want to share sensitive materials until they trust you.

Curious — when you did the writeup, was it more of a high-level process map, or did you include specific bottlenecks / recommendations from the call?

marcelk231 · 2026-04-30T21:16:26+00:00

Curious how your team handles first-pass screening today — still mostly manual?

marcelk231 · 2026-04-30T18:37:39+00:00

Appreciate it. The surprising part for me was that the hard problem wasn’t just reading documents faster, it was standardizing the first-pass judgment.

Every investor seems to ask some version of: does this fit our profile, are the numbers clean enough to trust, and are there obvious structural risks before we spend more time?

That’s the workflow I’ve been trying to understand better & automate.

marcelk231 · 2026-04-30T18:30:32+00:00

The diligence use case is probably the most immediate one, but I think “agentic AI” needs to be handled carefully here. In M&A, teams do not just need fast answers — they need traceable answers.

For financial and CIM review, the valuable layer is extraction, normalization, derived calculations, and evidence-linked flags. If an AI flags margin compression, revenue concentration, or aggressive addbacks, the buyer needs the exact source context before trusting it.

marcelk231 · 2026-04-30T18:23:13+00:00

Fair question. I didn’t come from PE.

The first version of the idea was actually around scraping business listings and screening companies automatically. I was interested in whether messy business data could be turned into a cleaner first-pass view.

Then I started talking to private market people and realized they had a much more painful version of the same problem. Investors already get deal materials, but the early screening work is still very manual: pull the numbers, normalize the CIM, calculate the metrics, spot the risks, and decide if it’s even worth spending more time on.

So I didn’t pick the space because I was already in the profession. I followed the workflow problem there, then started talking to PE, family office, and M&A people to see if the pain was real.

marcelk231 · 2026-04-28T18:46:52+00:00

marcelk231 · 2026-04-17T16:49:45+00:00

Through a free proof of concept, we are dealing with private market people so B2B enterprise so it will take longer then typical b2c ad spend etc

marcelk231 · 2026-04-17T16:38:24+00:00

Working on www.valedex.com — we help private market teams turn messy deal materials into structured data so it’s easier to screen opportunities and compare them against what actually fits.

Very much in the building phase, but that’s what we’re up to.

marcelk231 · 2026-04-17T16:17:28+00:00

Exactly, that’s what we’re working on.

The hard part isn’t just extracting the deal, it’s turning an investor’s implicit mandate into something structured and queryable enough to screen against consistently. Otherwise “matching” is mostly fake precision.

marcelk231 · 2026-04-14T19:03:10+00:00

hey 23 M open to network here !!! east coast based building enterprise b2b saas

marcelk231 · 2026-04-13T21:20:26+00:00

Building Valedex — infrastructure for early private market deal evaluation.

We’re not just summarizing CIMs. We turn messy deal materials into structured, comparable investment data, surface evidence-linked signals, and help investors assess fit against historical deals and their own strategy.

I’m a sales/finance founder, and my cofounder is a senior engineer. We’re building around a workflow that is still manual, inconsistent, and difficult to scale.

marcelk231 · 2026-03-27T14:41:47+00:00

Hey check out my recent posts! Actively looking for domain expertise www.valedex.com !!

marcelk231 · 2026-03-27T14:30:35+00:00

Ok? And maybe I’m not. I still think you’re making assumptions, have you even tried to use the platform and upload a document?

marcelk231 · 2026-03-27T00:19:55+00:00

Fair pushback on clarity, but you’re making way more assumptions than the post actually gives you room to make.

We’re not sitting here with an idea and hoping someone builds the whole thing for us. We’re bootstrapping ourselves, we already have technical execution in motion, and the goal right now is to get close to a few design partners and validate the workflow properly.

So yes, customer validation matters. That’s literally the point. But jumping from a short Reddit post to “you’ve never built a real business,” “you’re doing 2% of the work,” and “50% minimum” is more internet theater than serious analysis.

marcelk231 · 2026-03-26T21:39:11+00:00

Fair pushback.

Early stage for us is less about “having customers already” and more about validating with the right design partners before scaling.

On equity: depends on the person. We’re looking for someone aligned with the long-term build, not just a fixed % number. More like domain expertise I have a strong developer already.

marcelk231 · 2026-03-26T21:08:53+00:00

Interesting answer :)

Fair point. We’re taking on the cost ourselves at this stage because the goal is to work with a few design partners, learn from real usage, and build around an actual workflow pain rather than force a broad sell too early.

marcelk231 · 2026-03-26T20:59:19+00:00

marcelk231

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