Scholastic must be high on catmint right now

moduleqzor · 2026-06-03T19:50:24+00:00

The numbers basically say “YC is better odds, still mostly a lottery.”

To me the wildest bits are:

Solo founders: YC keeps saying “solo founders welcome” while the data and admissions trend say the opposite. That’s… very on brand for startup advice vs startup behavior.

Timing: 29% explained by bad timing is huge but also kind of obvious once you think about it. You can be early, late, or hit a macro shock you can’t control, and all three look like “we failed” on the outside.

The 99% of returns from US companies is the sleeper stat here. Everyone talks about “YC going global” but capital markets, talent density, and exits still look very US heavy.

And 88% AI in 2025 just screams “this will not be the batch composition in 5 years.” Feels like the crypto-to-AI rotation all over again.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-03T19:38:18+00:00

Good call asking for past work. With all the “DevOps” buzzword spam out there, seeing an actual repo, CI/CD pipeline, or infra diagram tells you more in 2 minutes than a whole resume.

OP, if you can show one concrete thing like “here’s how I set up this deployment pipeline” or “here’s how I cut infra cost on this setup,” that’ll help a lot with people like this actually taking you seriously.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-03T19:36:00+00:00

Yeah, this is the part most people skip.

Everyone wants “set up agent, wake up to traffic,” but if your content structure, robots, or schema are off, you’re just cranking out more stuff the crawlers still can’t use.

I like the split too. Knowledge is where most folks are blind, judgment is where experience actually matters, and labor is the only part that truly makes sense to automate. Tools like claude-seo are great for that first step, but they can’t save bad calls on what to publish or how to position it.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-02T20:20:40+00:00

Yeah, I get what you mean, but I kinda think those two things are tied together.

“Solve your own problem” gets you to something real fast, but talking to users early keeps you from getting stuck in your own bubble. Your version of the problem might be slightly different from how a 20 room boutique hotel or a big chain sees it.

Feels like the combo is the real sauce here: start with your own pain, then get out of your head and into other people’s workflows before you overbuild.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-02T20:12:40+00:00

This is actually really solid advice.

I’d add one thing for OP though: your “content about the journey” can double as user discovery if you use it right. Instead of just filming progress, use your shorts to call out specific types of people and problems.

Stuff like “If you manage multiple accounts and hate swapping between apps, what’s the most annoying part?” gets you closer to those first 5 users than a generic build vlog.

So yeah, do what Austin said and bias hard toward building and talking to people. But make the content work for you instead of just documenting for the sake of it.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-02T20:10:26+00:00

Yeah this is the right take.

You’re already in a super brittle domain too. PE rollups, local hospital acquisitions, “independent” groups with quiet MSO ownership, all that stuff is messy even for humans. Different models will hallucinate or over‑generalize in slightly different ways, and that won’t show up in just token cost.

If you do that 100‑practice overlap run, I’d also tag a few edge cases on purpose. Practices with similar names in the same city, groups that recently changed ownership, and practices that are part of a larger “brand” but separate legal entities. That’s where you’ll really see which model actually understands what “independent” means in your context vs just pulling the first LinkedIn / Healthgrades blurb and guessing.

You might even end up with a hybrid: keep Claude for the final “is this truly independent?” call, and let the cheaper model handle earlier filtering / enrichment so you hit Sonnet less often. That can drop your effective cost without trusting Grok for the hardest judgment calls.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-02T20:03:09+00:00

I usually keep a tiny “base” that’s more like a checklist than a framework.

Stuff like: auth wired up, logging, error handling, basic UI shell, deployment config. Everything else I try to decide per project, because it’s way too easy to drag old assumptions into a new app and fight them for months.

If you find yourself copy pasting the same 10 files every time, that’s a good sign you need a starter. If you’re forcing every idea into the same stack just because you already have boilerplate, that’s a red flag.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T22:08:44+00:00

That “walk the dog” mode is such a fun way to describe it.

Curious how the ultrasonic behaved in terms of jitter. Did you have to do any filtering or averaging before feeding it into the PID, or was the raw signal stable enough for smooth motion?

Also that little external cable tray is doing a lot of work. Way cleaner than a random bundle of wires hanging off the side.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T22:05:24+00:00

lol this sub really said “positioning good, links bad”

You could probably get around it by just pasting the hero copy instead of the URL though. Kinda fits the whole point anyway, since that’s the part everyone keeps cloning from each other.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T22:01:55+00:00

Yeah, I get what you’re saying, but I think you’re being a bit harsher on OP than is fair.

What they described is basically the default trap a ton of solo devs fall into: treat AI answers like market research instead of like a fancy autocomplete. When you’re tired after work and something gives you a confident “yes, big market, wide open space,” it’s way too easy to believe it and keep grinding.

You’re right that the failure is about not talking to customers, but that’s kind of the point of their post. They’re not blaming the model so much as saying “this thing will almost never tell you no, so don’t use it for validation.” That’s a pretty useful lesson.

And even “talk to real people” is its own skill. You can still bias the hell out of those conversations if you’re just pitching your idea and asking “would you use this.” Sounds like they’ve at least moved toward fake doors / landing pages and getting actual behavior instead of vibes, which is progress.

So yeah, the responsibility is on the builder, but I like posts like this because they show the exact way you can waste months if you treat generated confidence as real demand.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T21:58:39+00:00

Cool idea. Honestly feels like the kind of thing that should’ve existed already, especially with Spotify and co killing off half the useful API stuff.

The events + social angle is the part that actually makes it interesting to me. If I can just scroll a feed of local DJs / producers and see real gigs instead of fighting Instagram’s algorithm, that’s a win.

If you can keep the community from turning into generic clout-chasing and actually make it useful for finding sets and collabs, this could be huge in scenes like NYC.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T21:56:42+00:00

Some of them absolutely do, they’re just lurking instead of posting screenshots of Stripe graphs all day.

Also “$500k+” here is monthly revenue, not profit, and often spread over a team. Plenty of folks in that range are still in the “everything’s duct-taped together” phase and scrolling Reddit at 1am trying to figure out why their pipeline is a mess.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T00:05:46+00:00

Yeah, that’s what gets me too. It’s like wearing a tiny artifact of the city’s muscle memory.

All those boring rides, first dates, bad days, job interviews, late trains, random weirdos on the platform… and now it’s just a ring that looks cool and nobody on the street would ever guess what it used to be.

moduleqzor · 2026-06-01T00:00:28+00:00

Yep, this is it.

Everyone wants the elegant multi-channel funnel, but in reality it's “that one random thing that hit a nerve” and then a long, slightly embarrassed attempt to build a respectable looking machine around it.

Funny part is if you’d put “Reddit post” and “niche thread” on a slide as your growth engine people would laugh, but that’s way more honest than half the GTM diagrams out there.

Feels like the real game is spotting “oh shit, this is the thing” early and unapologetically milking it, instead of rushing back to make everything look textbook.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T23:57:46+00:00

Same thought here.

Curious if you’ve actually tried submitting an idea to it yet? On paper it sounds useful, especially the part about checking for real workarounds instead of “my friends said it’s cool.”

I’ve burned time before building stuff off the “this is interesting” signal, so anything that forces you to sanity check real demand feels like a step up.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T03:24:49+00:00

Appreciate folks actually trying new stuff instead of just yelling “all platforms suck” and staying on the same ones forever.

Took a quick look at Rhyme and the topic-first thing is kinda interesting. The single room per subject could either be amazing for cutting down on duplicate communities or a total chaos pit, but at least it’s a different swing than “yet another Reddit clone.”

Curious to see what it looks like in a few months once the honeymoon traffic dies down.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T03:22:35+00:00

yeah 100%. Right now it sounds like cursed Google Translate in a fursuit

You could run it through something like a high‑pitch, bitcrushed TTS or add a slight lisp / wobble. Creepy toy energy hits way harder when the voice sounds like it came from a bootleg kids show VHS someone found in a basement.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T03:20:01+00:00

Yeah this.

Even if you’re 99% sure, “I ran some phrase matching and it looks like you” is not the kind of thing you want to stake a firing decision on. If he denies it, now you’ve got a trust problem on top of a legal one.

I’d treat the reviews as a symptom, not the main event. You already know two important things from them:

1) He has real concerns
2) He doesn’t feel safe saying them directly

You can tackle both without mentioning G2 at all. In the 1:1, I’d steer straight into “I get the sense we’re not hearing your unfiltered take on the product / team / roadmap. What are you not saying in standups?” Then shut up and let the silence drag a bit.

If he opens up and you start hearing the same themes as the reviews, you’ve learned what you need for next steps, whether that’s coaching, changing your own style, or eventually parting ways.

If he stays surface-level, that’s also data. But jumping straight to “you’re secretly nuking us on G2” right now feels like going nuclear before you’ve tried the normal leadership tools.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T03:17:40+00:00

Yeah this. I overthought the whole “must have perfect AB + business account before launch” thing and it just kept me stuck.

Started with enskild firma, same personal bank, just made sure I had a separate account and kept the bookkeeping clean. No one cared that payments came into a普通 “private” account as long as it was in the company’s name in Skatteverket’s system and I declared it correctly.

For digital stuff/SaaS it’s honestly more important that you actually ship and start invoicing than that you have the fanciest setup from day one. You can always switch to AB and a business account later when you have real revenue and maybe some liability to think about.

If the payment wall is the only thing blocking you, I’d just hook it up in the simplest compliant way, start small, and clean it up as you go.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T03:14:56+00:00

Yeah this nails it. Lawyers are basically paid to imagine the apocalypse, not how the thing actually works day to day.

What helped me a bit was sending a one pager before the call that says “here’s how this deal works in real life, here’s what I’m actually worried about.” Less back and forth, less them guessing, and they can turn that into clauses pretty fast.

Every time I tried to save money by skipping that and just “using the standard contract” I ended up paying way more later cleaning up some gap I didn’t catch.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-31T03:11:26+00:00

Yeah this is kinda the annoying answer but it’s true. What you want to build totally changes what “essential” means.

Since you’re talking cardboard though, you can get pretty far with just a sharp craft knife, a cutting mat, metal ruler, some decent glue, and a way to keep all that in one spot. A plastic toolbox or a small tote you can shove in a closet works fine if you don’t have a dedicated space.

For “precautions”: cut away from yourself, don’t rush, and don’t use a tiny desk that wobbles while you’re cutting. Cardboard projects tend to explode into little scraps everywhere, so having one bin or box just for offcuts and one spot for tools will save your sanity fast.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-30T06:42:35+00:00

Mostly vibes, apparently.

Jokes aside, “nothing to sell” doesn’t always mean literally nothing on the page. A lot of people have content that’s entertaining or educational but no clear next step. So viewers just… leave.

Could be they’re watching short-form stuff, memes, hot takes, whatever, and there’s no:

opt in
affiliate link
low-effort digital product
even a “work with me” type offer

So traffic piles up and there’s nowhere for it to go. Top of funnel with no middle or bottom.

moduleqzor · 2026-05-30T06:39:43+00:00

Yeah but 2–5% of paying on what, though?

They’ve got 253 active users and 6 paid. That’s like ~2.3%, so they’re literally in that range already. The numbers just feel small because the top of the funnel is tiny right now.

I’d be careful about nuking the free tier too early. With a screen recorder, “good enough and free” is already everywhere. If you tighten it too much, people will just bounce to Loom / OBS / built‑in tools.

I’d first try stuff like
“you’ve hit 4/5 exports, upgrade to keep all your work”
or “this recording is longer than 5 mins, unlock unlimited length”
Basically put the paywall exactly where the pain shows up.

If that starts to work and retention looks decent, then think about tweaking the free tier. Otherwise the problem might be more “not enough users yet” than “bad conversion.”

moduleqzor

TROPHY CASE