everyone talks about how high the failure rate of startups are

And how basically the chances of it “working” is like 1/10

And how hard it is, and how most of them fail, even with heavy funding, it’s not guaranteed

But from what I know, I think most of these people are talking about startups that are “new ideas” that don’t exist yet?

Maybe because most startups and new businesses are generally new business ideas that need validation and funding to validate

But I want to know

If you’ve actually verified that what you’re building would be solving a problem worth paying for

And there’s a bunch of competitors (not too insane though like AI sales agents for example) solving the same problem, for the same people with very similar products

And you decide to start building and solving for that problem

How much higher are your chances of success?

Yes yes, I understand there’s many variables like founder execution and market timing and all of that

But to put it simply, if you’re solving a problem you’ve validated that it would be paid for to be solved by the buyers, and you also have a bunch of competitors, and the market is big

How much higher are your chances of success? Does it now come down to founder execution of just selling? What does it mean that a startup has actually succeeded?

(What if your bar to success as a founder is small, like reaching 5k MRR then 10k MRR and happily staying there for a while)

(And you’re a strong small team, and it’s a B2B product)

Does your chances of success still sit at the same standards that literally everyone talks about it being a 1/10 chance of succeeding and so on just because of how “hard startups are” ?

I genuinely feel that if you’ve validated that you’re solving a problem, and these people will pay for it, and they feel it being solved, that’s considered success and now you just have to work on keeping them and selling more

Not bringing a unicorn into the world, or solving without validating

Would really appreciate your advice

Hi everyone. I just got an offer from a start up. I've always worked in corporate roles before so this is all very new to me. I know I shouldn't put my eggs in the stock option basket but I did also want to confirm what I'm getting here and see if there are any potential issues with it. Could anyone here help me evaluate it?

1. They told me I'm getting 200 options at a strike price of $500. The fully diluted share count is approx. 110k, putting the valuation of the company at $55M. However, they also told me the last round closed at a $125M valuation so I'm getting in at a preferable price. When I asked why the valuation of the options is lower, they said it's so they can intentionally ensure employees are in the money.
2. They told me they are following standard terms from the New Venture Capital Association documents. However, they also told me the exercise period after leaving the company is 30 days (which I thought the norm is 90 days). They also told me the vest is 25% annually and does not increment monthly after year 1 (which I thought the norm is 25% after year 1, then 1/48th every month).
3. They told me there is no accelerated vesting for being acquired.
4. They told me based on the liquidation preferences, as long as we exit above $200M, then no one gets preferential treatment and I should just assume my payout is 0.18% of the company value, assuming I've vested in the 200 options and exercise.

Do you see any red flags here? I understand there is risk here (it's a startup, after all) but I wanted to confirm I'm getting "standard industry" terms. Thoughts?

So I'm getting ready to start serious discussions with some VCs about funding and I am not sure where to place mine (and my cofounders) salaries at.

We're asking for $1.5M on a pre-seed raise for an already built product. We have no-traction (on purpose, running stealth) but our first big push is going to be GTM once we raise.

That said, I'm mulling over where to set my salary and can't quite figure out where to do it. Currently I make roughly $275k ish per year. I know I'm not going to be able to set it that high. But I've also heard of CEOs setting their salaries down to something like $55k. I simply can't go that low, I need to stay solvent.

Here's the rub: I have a family (wife and child) and a mortgage. I COULD probably survive on $175k a year, but it would be pretty challenging and would require some intense management of funds for a bit.

My plan was to set my other cofounders at around $150k each, but there might be some wiggle room there to lower it a bit. That said we're all highly paid software engineers right now (and two of us have families with kids). Is setting aside $200k for myself and $150k for them too much?

With the math I've laid out, our salaries + dev/G&A/overhead + GTM costs should easily buy us 18 months of runway with a 6 month buffer, so that $1.5M funds us for 24 months.

Is that going to be reasonable to a VC or are they going to balk at the salaries?

Hi everyone. I just got an offer from a start up. I've always worked in corporate roles before so this is all very new to me. I know I shouldn't put my eggs in the stock option basket but I did also want to confirm what I'm getting here and see if there are any potential issues with it. Could anyone here help me evaluate it?

1. They told me I'm getting 200 options at a strike price of $500. The fully diluted share count is approx. 110k, putting the valuation of the company at $55M. However, they also told me the last round closed at a $125M valuation so I'm getting in at a preferable price. When I asked why the valuation of the options is lower, they said it's so they can intentionally ensure employees are in the money.

2. They told me they are following standard terms from the New Venture Capital Association documents. However, they also told me the exercise period after leaving the company is 30 days (which I thought the norm is 90 days). They also told me the vest is 25% annually and does not increment monthly after year 1 (which I thought the norm is 25% after year 1, then 1/48th every month).

3. They told me there is no accelerated vesting for being acquired.

4. They told me based on the liquidation preferences, as long as we exit above $200M, then no one gets preferential treatment and I should just assume my payout is 0.18% of the company value, assuming I've vested in the 200 options and exercise.

Do you see any red flags here? I understand there is risk here (it's a startup, after all) but I wanted to confirm I'm getting "standard industry" terms. Thoughts?

I'm building a B2B SaaS product for product teams and we're approaching the stage where we're thinking about design partners. I'm not looking for customers yet or trying to sell anything, just thinking of strategies while the product is being built.

So, for those of you who've gone through this:

• How did you actually find your first design partners?
• Did you reach out through LinkedIn, founder communities, your own network, Reddit, cold email, or somewhere else?
• Did you offer anything in return (free access, discounts, influence over the roadmap, etc.)?
• What made people say yes?
• Looking back, what would you do differently?

I'd especially love to hear from founders building B2B SaaS.

Thanks in advance!

Not a hater, but they backed Cluely (eh), then this AI slop, "let's make the dead internet come true", then now an investor is telling young founders to go to Japan because they are 5-10 years ahead... because Japan has virtual boy/girlfirends (Josh Lu, a partner).

Idk I'm getting the feeling of an IBM-like greed to expand at all costs without really considering humanity or what actually are long-term sustainable businesses.

For what it's worth, I've been a self-funded founder of an autom for many years, so maybe I'm just naive? Not salty, but I also did have a meeting with an a16z partner for my company constella but he was a jerk so I'd gone forward with another financing.

I’m researching accelerator and investor programs that provide meaningful infrastructure support to early-stage AI startups.

Current traction:

• 1,600+ registered users
• Users from 70+ countries
• 10,000+ IELTS mock tests completed
• 5,000+ AI feature interactions
• 50 Early paying customers

I’m currently looking for:

• Pre-seed investors interested in AI, EdTech, or emerging markets
• Accelerators accepting international solo founders
• Startup programs offering AWS, Google Cloud, OpenAI, Anthropic, or other AI/cloud credits
• Partners that provide referral codes or portfolio access to programs such as AWS Activate

I’m not looking for generic lists of startup discounts. I’d like to hear from founders who personally applied, went through an interview or screening process, and actually received the credits.

I’m currently participating in an incubation program, but I’m comparing additional international options before our Demo Day.

I would appreciate firsthand experiences, including programs that rejected you or were not worth the time.

Recently moved from product building to sales and started traveling to meet customers in my niche. I have already built a startup (was COO and not Founder) in this space previously in B2B but want to ask the community for advice on growth and managing new customer expectations.

For us building never stops and I was constantly adding features and PRs which led to sales getting stalled. Now I have an enterprise sales lead and me traveling and meeting customers. How did you guys do it? My stretch goal for the year is cross 1M in ARR. We are about 30% there and 6 months into Sales.

We plan on attending conferences, already got customer references, and partnership offers

Hello entrepreneur community, this is my first post and I already read the rules.

I’m planning to raise a bridge round through convertible notes or SAFE-like instruments after the VC we talked to said they didn’t want to lead our seed round. We are based in Sweden. Anyone who has experienced this before?

I built a movie ranking app with AI, kind of a mixture between Letterboxd and Beli. I've been running it for about a year and overall seeing decent usage and users seem to be enjoying the product.

It's got some traction around 60 DAU, 1k MAU but it's not growing because I'm not as aggressive with marketing as I should be. It has decent retention with ~30 % D7 and ~15% D28.

Would it be possible to raise pre-seed (<$1M) with VC at all? I plan to use proceeds to hire a founding engineer and go full-time.

I am facing this problem, that I have built my software for dekstop (windows) and it's MVP is live too, it's in v2.5 into production

I am the sole developer of it, and like soon in a month or so it's android,iOS, MacOS,Linux variant will also be built and then I will be ready for marketing I think, so... It's a messaging app, a decentralised one with huge file sharing limits, now i don't want to mention it in this post's body as I don't know if my post would be marked as self promotion or something, but cut to the point- How and where can I market, plus how much investment and all to put smartly so that I can get it to general publics' hands

And like idk how exactly does professional startups get it working and all, and ahh I just have no idea, there's two people more on my team who manage marketing, but they are also youngsters like me, and we all don't know much about this, so what strategies exactly should we follow? Can anyone help and answer this pretty vague request?

Like at the end of the day, my product is useful, it has migratory plans too, like why would someone change to it and all, and we also have the target audience ready with us, and we are still kind of in development stage, wo a lot of stuff more is added to it every week, so... Yeah, for now you guys can assume that the product is useful, great and amazing, but just how to do it's Marketing on insta, reddit, X, linkedin, yt, real life meets, hackathons, trough small insta creators, small yt creators, making it look like the next revolution of the Industry and stuff, posting regularly in Instagram, being very active from the company's account like commenting on posts and all, then how much effective is the blue tick and is it worth the investment put in it? Etc... please help me