I'm the founder of TryHackMe, the biggest online cyber edtech platform. Its scaled to over 4 million users, with 1.5M joining in the last year alone - all without paid ads!

We’ve built out 4 growth squads, run 100+ experiments, and made plenty of mistakes. I wanted to share 10 growth lessons that stood out:

1. Quality > Quantity
Focus on “gold users” who love your product, not just boosting signups. Vanity metrics will trick you.

2. Not every engineer fits a growth squad
Growth work is fast, hacky, and iterative. The wrong engineer can slow everything down.

3. You can run experiments without engineers
Validate with tools like Typeform, HotJar, or Figma before touching code.

4. Make data self-serve
Don’t bottleneck on data teams. PMs should know how to dig into product analytics on their own.

5. Share lessons (even failed ones)
If only the growth squad learns from an experiment, you’ve missed a big opportunity. Share widely.

6. Let the whole company pitch growth ideas
Support, content, and sales teams all talk to users — their insights are gold.

7. Time box everything
Ask “what does a 2-day version of this look like?” Speed matters way more than you think.

8. There’s no such thing as a failed experiment
Learning what doesn’t work is still valuable. Neutral results are worse than negative ones.

9. Balance quick wins with big bets
Small optimizations are great, but you need riskier bets to unlock big step-change growth.

10. Whole squad needs to be bought in
Not just the PM. Engineers and designers should understand the goal, join user interviews, and care about the result.

Happy to discuss any of the points above!

I will not promote

I’m currently working as a front-end developer for a medtech startup that specializes in building, designing, and optimizing websites (including SEO) for medical doctors. The founder is a practicing doctor, and we have a strong working relationship. However, as a young team, we’re still navigating the challenges of early-stage growth. Since the founder balances this venture alongside his medical career, his focus has primarily been on generating leads, while I’ve been responsible for building and maintaining the platform. It’s been nearly two years since we launched, but growth has plateaued — we typically acquire about one client per month, with three being a rare high point. Has anyone experienced this stagnation? And what is the best method to improve scalability? Anyone have experience with this?

We’ve reached 100+ subscribers in just three months, growing 100% month-over-month. Our current MRR is $1,300.

While the numbers are still small, I’m curious—at what point is growth considered “real” in terms of +20% or +30% MoM? Right now, growing 30% from $1,300 is relatively easy, but I’d love to hear from others who’ve scaled further: when does that kind of growth start to truly validate a business? (I will not promote)

I'd love to find something like a Discord community where founders can share updates and ask questions to other founders

I've tried following founders who share updates with #BuildInPublic on social media but sometimes it's hard to follow as there's other posts which come up on my feed instead

I'd love to be able to find a supportive community which celebrates the wins of each other

I will not promote

My co-founder started working with me 3.5 months after I incorporated and after I had raised about 75% of our target SAFE angel round (<400k). And no revenue or contracts signed in that time, just sales development and some small product development all done by me.

I want to issue him his shares but not sure if I need a 409A or whether I can just issue them to him at the same nominal price I paid (.00001).

409a would be a big cost right now so is it necessary? This must be a rather common scenario so I’m wondering what others have done.

I will not promote

I lost my role some time back, with a (pre) seed stage startup. I actually think it's a blessing in disguise because it sets me free to explore many other opportunities out there. That said, I just want to take a moment to share my experience so that others will not have to experience the frustration I had.

1. Values - The founder has no values. She has no qualms doing "under the table" deals (that are illegal in some countries and unethical in many countries) just to achieve growth; she does not cringe when she has to cut corners and disadvantage others so that her company can benefit. This brings me to my next point.

2. Hiring practices - The founder lacks total empathy for her staff. She is constantly looking to fire her team. A total ingrate who is always looking at the slightest mistake to let her team go, in spite of what they have done for her. In a startup of that stage, you will oftentimes have to experiment with multiple ideas and there is always a chance you will fail. Hence, if you notice that the company has a high attrition rate (and people are saying stuff about the founder), sit up, pay attention and maintain your distance. The founder may be stubborn as a mule - and her unwillingness to listen to others will break the company.

3. Education - A well-educated founder is so important. Now I am not referring to a drop out like Mark Zuckerberg, but education does make a whole lot of difference between a decent founder and one who isn't. Look at the schools they attended (or not). I never knew I would say this but having worked with a few founders who didn't make it to college, I saw how much easier it was to work with a well-educated founder, who has the ability to think critically, logically and reasonably.

4. Funding - A seed stage startup may not have the finances but if the company has no money to even provide a laptop, and basic medical benefits, walk away. I had to use my own equipment for work and it is really frustrating and concerning that I have my work stuff on my personal laptop. Plus, the lack of medical benefits is horrible - I need to pay for all of my own medical needs, when this should have been a basic benefit for employees. For those of you interviewing with such companies, ask questions about monetization. Check on the financial situation of the company. The founder may lie to you but if you don't think the company has a good way to make money, walk away from it. Else you will find yourself worrying about every single cent (I kid you not) that the company spends - the scrutiny is awful AF. And when you don't have the budget to invest, and no PMF, it is mostly a one way street to hell and doom.

5. Product market fit - Check the user retention and engagement metrics. Look up social media platforms to see what other users are saying about the product. Check to see if the company has an app, and if so, what the reviews are. You will find a lot of info that are tell tale signs of how good / bad the company really is.

I see a lot of people wanting to join a startup but pls, join a rocketship and not a sinking ship. You will want to be on the up and up and not constantly trying to swim against a powerful vortex that is sucking you into the bottom of the ocean. As an employee, there is zero incentive but every disincentive to stay away. You will run out of energy and perish. The sacrifice ain't worth it.

Hope this post helps others who are in the midst of deciding whether to take an offer from a (pre) seed stage startup.

Meanwhile it's back to figuring out what I want to do next for myself. Wish me luck!

(I will not promote)

(I will not promote)
context -
I am the solo founder of a startup that has researchers as customers. I launched a very basic version back in Jan, got feedback and launched another much better (at par with competition if not better) version last week.

I'd like to know how you guys consistently added new customers in the early days? I've read the generic advice like post on socials, cold outreach, SEO, etc but seems like a lot to do and I am all over the place.

The day I posted about this new version I added around 15-20 customers and have been adding 1-4 customers every day since.

I have around 3k connections on Linkedin, 0 followers on X. Things I've done -
1. Post on Linkedin and Reddit
2. Reply to comments about competitors and relevant topics on Reddit and X
3. Reach out to researchers on Linkedin
4. Started writing blogs (I have 1 published)

I'm not sure if I'm doing things right or what I should change in my approach. Any tools I should be using to streamline this? Any particular channel I should be focusing on more than the others?

Building a Prompt Management App

It includes
- prompt management dashboard
- smart search
- sharing prompts
- joining communities (research, programming)
- discover top prompts + refine w/ AI chatbot

Do you think it is good idea?

Open for feedback!
I will not promote

Hey founders/operators — I’m currently working with a startup client who's building a market research tool for the dropshipping/ecom space (think: Shopify store database, live Meta ads tracking, product/store discovery, competitor analysis, etc.).

I started off managing UGC outreach (reaching out to TikTok creators), but now he wants me to expand into B2B outreach — meaning reaching out to mentors, dropshipping educators, agencies, communities, and business users who would actually adopt the tool as part of their workflow.

The issue is:

🚩 We ran into unrealistic expectations during the UGC phase (thinking we'd onboard dozens of creators per week).

🧠 Now that we're shifting to B2B, the founder asked me to propose a new package + rate — but he admittedly has no benchmark for what “success” looks like in this kind of outreach.

So I figured I’d ask here:

What’s normal in early-stage B2B outreach? What’s a realistic close or conversion rate for cold outreach to mentors, educators, or small businesses?

How many warm leads / demos / signups can one person typically deliver per month?

What do you pay (or expect to pay) for someone handling this — including lead generation, copywriting, and follow-ups?

Do you hire hourly or go retainer-based?

I’m based in the Philippines. Previously doing UGC outreach for $6/hr at 30hrs/week — but this new scope is more strategic (handling lead targeting, outreach strategy, CRM, messaging, etc.). I want to price fairly, but also help set realistic expectations for what a solo outreach person can do in the B2B space.

Would love to hear how other early-stage startups are approaching this!

I like startups, I don't like soloing. I tried, I just know that tech is fundamental, but unfortunately not enough for any business to become viable. I was wondering if any of you know a proper place where tech and non tech people could find each other to join forces and build together.

I (M18) need some advice for pursuing entrepreneurship. I can't see myself grinding out 80 hour weeks for a cranky boss and would much rather spend this time building something of value. I want to do something with sustainability (think a carbon credit start-up) as I feel that after technology, sustainability is the way ahead.

The problem: I have no clue were to begin. How do I get my concepts right about the sector? How do I even conduct market research for such kind of idea? Basically, I have no idea how to go from "a vaguely interesting idea" to actually creating something and all the steps involved in between.

If any current or future entrepreneurs can guide me, that'll be great:))

The story: I am building a membership blog with monthly subscriptions for access to premium articles (free and paid). I have validated the idea online, and people have followed me on social media and asked me when it will be live (i have only been on social for a month). I am torn between building something fast that works, or thinking more long-term and doing it slower.

The solution: Two options: Hand/Vibe-coding or Wordpress. I have a degree as a programmer and i know the basics of web app development. With the help of AI, such as cursor for example, i can build the front-end pretty easilly in React. Use next.js probably. Connect it to Supabase and some CRM. Then i would learn how to connect payments. Create table for users and a field that changes if they are subscribed or not. I have no idea how to do any of that by the way, and the language of React and Next.js i would need to learn, i know vanilla JS basics. Wordpress cuts all of this down and makes me a website twice as fast without any headache.

The problem: I am from Serbia, therefore Stripe or PayPal are out of question, making it infinitely harder to choose simple solutions. My country is 15 years behind as always so payment processors from here are recommending Wordpress for fast and easy setup. Other option is Paddle or LemonSqueezy if i opt for hand-coding. I am a startup, and therefore there is the infamous "do things that dont scale", but i can't help but wonder if Wordpress is the wrong choice, especially because i will want to build a mobile app in the future, which if i learn how to code a React website and do everything that goes along with building a membership blog, i can easily transfer that to a mobile app in React Native and much of the code will be reusable. The biggest problem is connecting payment processor (making it work for reccuring payment/subscriptions, gating content based on that subscription), which i do not know how to do, but i guess you have to start somewhere...

I am leaning towards wordpress, then learning a little bit of react on the side, just enough so i can then pay a freelancer to build me a mobile app. Then i would pay him for a few hours to go through what exactly his code is, what it does... so i can understand it.

What would you do?

(i will not promote)

Hi all, I’m Georgios. I recently launched a Kickstarter for a project I’ve been thinking about for a long time called SportsPal.

It’s a mobile app that helps people connect and play sports together. You choose your sport, skill level, and availability, and the app connects you with others nearby who want the same. Football, basketball, tennis, padel, running — anything.

The idea came from personal experience after moving to new cities and struggling to find people to play with. Even though the courts were there, I never knew where or how to join in. SportsPal is meant to fix that.

Currently working on the MVP and using Kickstarter to get it off the ground.

And yes — I will not promote 😅

So like the title says, I'm curious about traction. I've had more and more people look at my landing page since I've started posting on socail media, making posts, commenting on posts, which is nice but I'm not releasing my MVP till next month. I want to wait till user sign up before I start sending cold emails to prove that it's working, but is there a number or percentage that looks good to potential investors?

Raising a small piece from angels on our seed and I have an investor (Investor A) that gave an enthusiastic commitment for $150k, but hasn't signed or sent the check. Had my attorney edit, and the docusign was sent 10 days ago.

But I have another (Investor B) that is ready to give his commitment, but I want to be respectful of investor A that gave the commitment first. He'll add value and I want to work with him.

At the same time, I've experienced investors backing out last minute in the past and if he's out, but not telling me, I don't want to lose investor B.

Am I being too soft by respectfully holding his allocation? Do most investors really respect the handshake protocol?

(I will not promote)

I will not promote

Hello r/startups, i was working on an farm management/data aggregation tool. Now I want to connect with small-medium scale farmers for idea validation whilst I finish up my landing page. But this seems so tricky and elusive to do, a lot of times there aren't any responses. Tried collaborating with a couple agriculture prof in my uni but resulted in nothing. So I wanted to ask you guys: what are your go to strategies/tips for finding potential customers and idea validation. Looking forward to hearing from you guys.

I will not promote any product or service - just genuinely curious how it’s worked for others.

I recently ran a tiny test:

Reached out to 12 micro-influencers on Instagram (5k–15k followers)

Sent them free samples of my product (low-cost, handmade stuff)

Got 3 to post

And… crickets.

Barely any clicks, no sales, and one person even ghosted after receiving the sample.

I’m not bitter - just confused.

Is this a volume game? Did I pick the wrong people? Or maybe my product isn’t “shareable” enough?

Would love to hear if anyone's had actual success with this.

What worked? What flopped?

And how do you even measure ROI in this space?

Not looking for agency pitches or anything like that - again, I will not promote.

Just want to learn from anyone who’s been in the trenches.

Let me know if you’ve got a story - good or bad. I’m all ears.

I recently got laid off after working at a big company as a data scientist for ~7 months as a new grad.

I was contacted by a company that is essentially doing a spinoff startup. Small company but they have clients and can self fund for the time being. They want to build a product that they can sell in a few years and supports their other work also. I know it would be a good learning experience especially for some LLM experience.

However right now they only have a 2 person team (CTO and developer). They have some POC code but that’s about it.

I honestly am having trouble navigating the situation and whether I should take the opportunity as the job market is bad and could get a great learning opportunity out of it, or if I need some more reputable experience at a big company for another few years first.

Any advice would be great!

I’m trying to find the newest and hottest startups around the world. Does anyone know a good source for this? It feels like sites as producthunt are not really the right place. The focus is on SaaS products as I’m a software developer and looking for a new startup idea. Does anyone know good resources?

I'm thinking of going - does anyone know if it's well attended, and secondly will anyone be there lmk /. dm and let's connect

Also, if not this one what startup conferences are worth attending 2025?

*i will not promote so i'm not dropping the website nor do i work for these people

I’ve been building an AI SaaS platform that powers AI agents on business websites (I will not promote). These agents talk to real visitors, answer questions, and capture leads. We’ve had hundreds of conversations happen across our clients’ sites, and I finally decided it was time to dig into the data.

Normally, this would take me weeks (or months) manually reviewing transcripts, organizing trends, creating reports, and trying to make it presentable. But this time, I tried something different: I uploaded 200+ text files (chat transcripts) into ChatGPT, gave it a clear prompt, and asked it to help me create an executive-level analytics report.

And… wow.

It gave me:

• A full summary of trends and user behavior
• Lead capture conversion stats with percentages
• Insights into customer intent, trust signals, and business impact
• Clean, modern charts to visualize the data
• A polished, professional report I sent to my clients, team, and can send to potential VCs
• Even a prompt to generate a beautiful hero image for the report cover

I didn’t write a single formula or open a spreadsheet. The turnaround time? About an hour. What used to legitimately take me weeks is now… just done in a blink of an eye. I'm just floored.

This is hands-down one of the most transformative, efficient, and frankly jaw-dropping productivity tools I’ve used. If you're building a product or running a business, and you're not leveraging AI like this—you're leaving power on the table. Keep in mind I started using GPT in 2022, so I'm pretty well versed in using it. But I never did anything like this before, and to me, this is more powerful than anything else I've ever done using it.

Here's the prompt I used:

I have hundreds of conversations between website visitors and AI agents we’ve deployed for clients. I want to generate a professional data and trends report based on these conversations. Here's what I need:

1. Summarize the types of conversations happening (questions, inquiries, intent signals, etc.)
2. Identify lead capture performance (how many emails, phone numbers, etc.)
3. Extract trends in user behavior, customer readiness, and objections
4. Generate statistics and percentages for business impact
5. Make it all look like a polished executive report
6. Create charts to visualize the data in a sleek, modern style using a purple-themed palette
7. Exclude test accounts or internal agents
8. Provide a Slack-ready summary message I can use to update my team that we now have this report
9. Write out an image prompt in text for a hero message I can use at the top of the report

Then I uploaded a merged text document with all the conversations and told it to exclude certain names (like internal test accounts). ChatGPT did the rest. If you'd like to see the report, just DM me and I'll send you the link.

I still can’t believe I pulled this off in under an hour. Honestly, it might’ve only taken me 30 minutes. Either way, it felt liberating. Knowing that something which used to take me weeks of manual effort was now done with a few uploads and smart prompts, it just made me feel unstoppable. This is what productivity feels like when AI actually works with you as a tool. I wish more people realized this.

Hi guys,

Been a while since I posted here and I will not promote of course.

This is a somewhat more philosophical question/update about my b2b saas lead-gen startup which has been going strong about 2 months now - since then I have scored near enough 20 customers and have found mechanisms to secure between 2-3 clients every week - now while I'm pleased with this - especially, considering my early adopters decided to continue using the service and not 'churn' after the first month - I feel as if every customer is almost divinely sent at this stage - do other founders go through this emotion? I say this because I've learnt that I'll go through a couple quiet periods where I feel like 'it's over' and then suddenly an email will come flying with someone interested in booking a meeting or buying my service - is this the journey most start-ups go through? I do wonder as well - if there will ever come a time where the uptake is more parabolic - we can only dream of course!

I feel certain ideas can’t be validated until MVP. Facebook is one such.

How else you think one could have done a product market fit or sales before MVP for a social network app like “Facebook”?

“I will not promote”

“I will not promote”

“I will not promote”

Hi - I will not promote

I really don't like Loom and have been testing and trying a bunch of difference recording tools, but l'd like to hear your suggestions. The following is a must:

• Analytics (Views etc) • Custom domain • Custom branding • instant shareable links

The rest such as autozoom, option to edit the video to be on a background etc is a nice to have.

l've tried: neetorecord - Lags horribly cap.so - app crashes all the time, never got to use komododecks - Quite nice so far Screenstudio - no analytics :( - otherwise super nice

Let me hear your suggestions.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been building a project I’ve had in my head for a while: a mobile-first Discord community that helps people make real money using their phones.

It’s called MobileMoneyCrew, and it’s still in the early stages — but the vision is big.

Here’s what I’ve built so far: • A Discord hub with channels focused on referral apps, side hustles, daily bonuses, and mobile-friendly tools • A branded experience with a custom bot, channel guides, and pinned money-making missions • A fast-start section for helping new members hit their first $100+ • Foundations for a beginner-friendly course (“Phone Profits Starter Pack”) • Plans to include a vault of affiliate systems, and income challenges

My goal is to help people escape paycheck-to-paycheck living by using the phone they’re already glued to — and turn screen time into income.

Right now I’m focused on: • Laying out valuable content that doesn’t overwhelm new members • Attracting the right users — people who are motivated, not just curious • Creating referral-based income systems that benefit both the community and me as the builder • Testing ideas for future monetization: challenges, templates, affiliate collabs, and paid upgrades

Still super early — no crazy traction yet, no viral moments — just building brick by brick.

Would love tips on: • Community-first growth strategies (without ads) • Must-have features in a money-focused Discord • Creative ways to keep people engaged and taking action • Any red flags I might not be seeing as a solo builder

Appreciate any thoughts — especially from others building community-based startups.