Ideas Lab

Team communication for live event coordination

Teams working live events (concerts, conferences, sports) need real-time coordination tools that work reliably in high-pressure, time-sensitive environments.

YC Graveyard13y agoToolBusiness

70FL score

Secure file transfer for large files

Businesses need to send large files securely without using consumer tools like Dropbox or email that have security and size limitations.

YC Graveyard14y agoToolBusiness

Businesses need customer support and FAQ systems that actually get used

Companies want to reduce support tickets by making it easy for customers to find answers, but traditional knowledge bases are hard to maintain and search.

YC Graveyard16y agoToolBusiness

Professional phone system for small businesses

Small businesses need affordable, feature-rich phone systems with voicemail, call routing, and business numbers. Many still struggle with professional phone presence.

YC Graveyard15y agoToolBusiness

59FL score

Product teams need better tools for creating and sharing roadmaps

Product managers struggle with creating visual roadmaps that are easy to update and share with stakeholders across the organization.

YC Graveyard15y agoToolBusiness

Small businesses struggle to find and book appropriate venues for events

SMBs need a streamlined way to discover, compare, and book venues for meetings, events, and corporate functions without endless phone calls and emails.

YC Graveyard15y agoToolBusiness

Small businesses need unified dashboards for their scattered SaaS tools

Businesses use dozens of different SaaS tools but lack a single view of their data and operations across platforms.

YC Graveyard15y agoToolBusiness

70FL score

What worked to get first 5 customers?

I am building a product that allows users to collect any type of media (images, video, audio, code, 3D models, AI chats, etc.), collaborate, and synthesize insights. The target users are product designers, design managers, creative directors, and user researchers. I have already built the product and it is beyond the MVP stage. My next step is to find the first 5 customers who are willing to try the product and give feedback. This is the part I am struggling with. What I have tried so far: 1. Reaching out to people with specific roles on LinkedIn 2. Reaching out to decision makers in small companies 3. Reaching out to people in my network (which is quite limited) How I approached them: 1. Asking if they actually experience the problem I am trying to solve 2. If I understand their workflow, explaining how the product could benefit them 3. Starting a conversation and asking them to describe the challenges they face in their workflow Most of my outreach has been through LinkedIn and email. Calls are not even in the picture yet and getting someone to actually try the tool has been even harder. For founders who have been through this stage - what worked for you when getting your first 5 customers?

Reddit7mo agoToolBusiness

Does anyone actually plan their finances monthly?

Almost every budgeting tool I’ve tried assumes people think about money in monthly budgets. Monthly income, monthly expenses, categories for everything. But the way I’ve always handled money never really worked like that. The real question in my head every time I got paid was always simpler: which bills does this paycheck need to cover, and what will be left after that? For years I handled it with a pretty ugly spreadsheet. I would block out pay periods and then drop bills into the week they were due so I could see which paycheck was really covering what. That way I could look ahead and see if things were going to be tight before the next check came in. It worked surprisingly well, but the spreadsheet itself became a pain. Months shift around, some months have more paychecks than others, bills move a little depending on the calendar, and I kept having to manually adjust things. At some point I realized the core problem wasn’t really budgeting. It was just timing. Money shows up on a schedule, bills show up on their own schedules, and the real question is whether those two timelines line up. The spreadsheet did the job, but maintaining it became enough of a chore that I eventually started building a small local app to automate a lot of that flow for myself. Now I’m curious how other people actually think about this. Do you mentally manage things month to month, or more paycheck to paycheck?

Reddit7mo agoToolBusiness

66FL score

Visa vs. Mastercard: What Every Fintech Founder Learns the Hard Way About the Payments Duopoly

Hey everyone, I've been building a payments platform focused on cross-border remittances for small businesses in emerging markets (mainly SEA and LATAM). While researching the landscape, I ended up digging through Visa and Mastercard’s latest numbers and it was a pretty humbling reminder of just how dominant these two networks are. Here’s a quick snapshot from their FY2023 reports: |Metric|Visa|Mastercard| |:-|:-|:-| |Revenue|$35.93B|$28.17B| |Net Profit|$19.74B|$12.87B| |Cards in Use|4.48B|3.16B| |Employees|34,100|35,300| |Accepted Countries|200+|210+| |Net Profit Margin|54.9%|45.7%| |Revenue per Employee|$1.05M|$799K| |Revenue per Card|$8.02|$8.92| A few things jumped out immediately: * **Visa dominates scale and efficiency.** Their margins are wild, over 50% profit margin on payment rails.. * **Mastercard squeezes more value per card**, likely through premium partnerships and data-driven services. * Together they control an almost unavoidable infrastructure layer of global commerce. For founders trying to build anything in payments or fintech, this creates some very real challenges. **2. The Network Effect is Brutal:** Between them, Visa and Mastercard have over 7.6 billion cards in circulation. Merchants expect them. Consumers trust them. So when a startup shows up with a new payment rail, even if it’s cheaper or faster, the response is usually: "Sounds interesting but will my customers actually use it?" We’ve spent months convincing pilot partners that a 1% fee improvement isn’t worth the perceived risk of leaving the standard networks. **2. Regulation Is a Moat in Itself:** Payment infrastructure is deeply regulated, and the rules change constantly. Whether it’s PSD2/PSD3 in Europe, RBI rules in India, or licensing in Brazil, the legal and compliance costs pile up quickly. One regulatory mistake can burn hundreds of thousands before you even launch. Meanwhile, the incumbents have entire teams dedicated to regulatory strategy and lobbying. **3.

Reddit7mo agoToolBusiness

60FL score

LinkedIn outreach is dead and my offer isn't sexy. What's the move?

I run a small B2B bookkeeping practice and cold outreach is just not converting anymore. Sent around 200 LinkedIn messages this quarter. Tried the "quick question" openers, tried leading with pain points, tried just being direct about what I do. Response rate is somewhere around 1-2%, and half of those go nowhere. Cold email is even worse. I'm basically writing into a void. The thing is, I'm not selling something with hype behind it. Bookkeeping isn't sexy. Nobody's excited to hear from me the way they might be for a new SaaS tool or a growth consultant promising 10x revenue. It's a necessary service that most small business owners already think they have "handled." Everyone's seen the same playbooks. The same Calendly links. The same "I help businesses like yours" openers. Even when someone replies, there's no urgency. So I'm trying something different. Pulled back from LinkedIn almost entirely and started showing up in places where business owners are already talking: local Facebook groups, niche forums, even a couple of industry Slack communities. Early days but the conversations feel less like cold outreach and more like just being around. Anyone else has found that boring-but-necessary services just need a completely different approach than what the outreach is.

Reddit7mo agoToolBusiness

How do you all source reliable video production for SaaS marketing when you are still small?

Small team in Denver running a SaaS that automates customer success workflows for mid sized B2B companies. Our current marketing videos are stitched together in iMovie and honestly look dated. They do not clearly show how we improve retention by about 30 percent. We want professional 60 to 90 second motion driven pieces explaining churn prediction and intervention dashboards in a simple way. Target market is US mountain states and western Canada. Budget around 10500. The biggest frustration has been unreliable freelancers who disappear mid project or ignore conversion goals. We need structured timelines and measurable outcomes before our next quarterly campaign. For early stage teams who upgraded production without burning cash, what worked and what would you avoid?

Reddit7mo agoToolBusiness

Are small businesses using ai agents for their businesses?

so many new products which helps with automations like email responses, content creation, lead gen etc. just curious and looking to integrate ai agents in my own workflow. how solo/small businesses owners using ai agents to automate their workflows?

Reddit7mo agoToolBusiness

I'm thinking of starting SaaS and already have an idea in mind

Hey everyone, I'm 18 years old and have always wanted to start a SaaS business, so right now I’m experimenting with an idea for a web tool I’m calling **Life Audit**, and I’d love to get some feedback from people who actually care about improving productivity and life decisions. The idea is simple: instead of just tracking tasks, habits, or goals, it **shows how your actions actually impact your life over time**. Some features I’m thinking about are: * Track every decision, habit, or project and **assign a personal impact score** * See **heatmaps and graphs** of where your time and energy are going * Weekly or monthly mini-reports highlighting your **biggest wins and time-wasters** * Gamified points and badges to motivate staying on track Basically, it’s like a dashboard for your life, showing you what’s actually making a difference, what’s wasted time, and helping you plan smarter. Before I start building it, I wanted to ask: * Would this actually help you? * What’s your biggest pain when trying to track productivity, habits, or life goals? * Any features you think would make it super useful? I’m really curious about your thoughts, and I want to make something people actually want to use, not just another habit tracker that already exists. Just wanted to make it more interesting as well. I appreciate reading this and giving some feedback.

Reddit8mo agoToolBusiness

54FL score

How we used social listening to find our first 100 paying customers.

The biggest mistake I see founders make (and one I've made myself) is the "Build and they will come" trap. You spend 6 months coding in a basement, launch on Product Hunt, get a few upvotes, and then... crickets. No one actually needs what you built. For my latest project, I decided to flip the script. I didn’t start with a landing page or an ad budget. I started by listening. I found my first 100 paying customers by treating Reddit and X as a giant, free focus group. Here is exactly how we did it: # 1. Finding the Unmet Demand Instead of guessing what people wanted, I looked for people who were literally begging for a solution. I started tracking "Pain Signals" across social media. * **The "Is there a tool..." signal:** Searching for people asking "Is there a tool that does X?" * **The "Workaround" signal:** Finding people sharing hacky, 5-step solutions to a problem that should be 1 step. * **The "Frustration" signal:** Monitoring when people were complaining about a specific missing feature in a competitor's product. # 2. The "Non-Salesy" Outreach When I found someone asking for a solution, I didn't pitch them. I asked them questions. * **Me:** *"Hey, I saw you're struggling with \[Problem\]. I'm actually building something to solve that right now. Can I ask, is \[Feature A\] or \[Feature B\] more important to you?"* * **The Result:** They didn't see me as a spammer; they saw me as the guy building *exactly* what they needed. By the time I had a Beta, I had 50 people ready to pay. # 3. Closing the First 100 Once we had the MVP, we didn't go to Google Ads. We went back to the same threads. We looked for every person who had expressed that specific pain in the last 60 days. Because we had listened to their feedback during the build, the conversion rate was insane. # The Numbers: * **Ad Spend:** $0. * **Time to 100 Customers:** 4 months. * **Conversion Rate on Outreach:** \~25% (Compare that to the 1-2% you get on cold traffic). * **Current Result:** *

Reddit8mo agoToolBusiness

78FL score

Your recommendations on the best LinkedIn automation tools in 2026

Hey guys, It’s that time of year again (last quarter to hit my agency targets and build my stack for 2026) where I try to get feedback on the latest tools on the market. So my goal is pretty simple: a tool that is 1. Working 2. Safe, that’s all! AND IMPORTANT without overcomplicating my life (I’m a small french Tech Agency, so I’m doing enough Tech within my day ) (currently using Dripify but starting to feel the product isn’t evolving that much and the UI/UX ...) Here’s what I’m looking for: * Ability to connect and sync multiple LinkedIn accounts * Open integrations for signals (API, Zapier, etc.) * Super safe for accounts (using my personal one not sure if it’s a best practise but I’m not doing high volume) * Automatically updating lead lists (no static CSV hell) * Built-in enrichment + advanced filtering to exclude non-ICP leads from campaigns * Less than $70 / mo (those tools are so expansive now!!!) If you’ve tested any tools lately, I’d love your recommendations and why you think they’re good.

Reddit8mo agoToolBusiness

i tracked 700+ complaint threads and found 5 phrases that almost perfectly predict whether someone will actually pay for software

this started as a side experiment and turned into probably the most useful thing i've ever done for validating ideas. i've been cataloguing complaints from reddit, hacker news, forums, anywhere people vent about tools they use or processes they hate. 700+ entries over the past 6 months. each one scored by pain level. at some point i noticed something. certain phrases kept showing up in the threads that eventually led to real products people paid for. other threads had tons of upvotes but zero commercial potential. the language was different. here are the 5 phrases that consistently predict willingness to pay. phrase 1: "i've been doing this manually for \[time period\]" this is the strongest one. when someone says they've been doing something manually for months or years, they've already built the workflow. they understand the value of having it automated. they don't need to be educated on why your tool exists. they've been waiting for it. i found 40+ threads with this exact phrasing and almost every one maps to a tool someone is already paying for. phrase 2: "is there a cheaper alternative to \[expensive tool\]" this tells you three things at once. the category is proven (someone already built it), the buyer exists (they're already paying), and the price point is wrong (there's a gap). you don't need to invent anything. just build the simpler, cheaper version. i tracked 30+ of these and the pattern is wild. the tools people want cheaper alternatives to are almost always enterprise software being awkwardly used by small businesses. phrase 3: "i can't believe there's no \[simple thing\]" disbelief is a strong signal. when someone is genuinely shocked that a solution doesn't exist, the problem is real and they're ready to pay. these threads also tend to get the most engagement because other people share the same disbelief. social proof built into the complaint. phrase 4: "this is overkill for what i need" i mentioned this before but it deserves its own entr

Reddit8mo agoToolBusiness

how to automate finding decision maker emails at real volume

The manual to automated handoff in outbound contact discovery is messier than most playbooks admit. Clay is great for enrichment workflows but it's only as good as the data sources feeding it, and the moment you're targeting anything outside SaaS or enterprise tech the waterfall starts returning empty columns. The other thing is that "automating" contact discovery usually still means building a workflow that requires a human to QA the output before sequences run, because the cost of bad data showing up in an active campaign is worse than the time you saved on sourcing, so what does the stack actually look like for teams doing this at volume without a full time data ops person?

Reddit8mo agoToolBusiness

69FL score

Our best B2B marketing strategy for 2026

to those of you struggling with marketing for your B2B offer, heres what’s been working for my clients in 2026 so far. Step one. make a simple landing page for a webinar. Just a thumbnail image, webinar title, and a working optin form. Ask for multiple data points like company name, job title, etc. Use some recaptcha solution to prevent spam submissions. After successful optin, just show a screen like “webinar ended, we’ll send a replay when available!” Step two. Make 15-50 variations of this with various webinar topics and titles. You never know what resonates most with people in your industry until you test, and you’ll waste countless hours & resources filming and producing webinars nobody will ever watch. So test titles first then thumbnails second. Even the wording of the webinar headline can result in either $16.00 or $2.50 per qualified optin. The worst and dumbest thing you can do is burn ad spend forcing people to watch something they have no interest in. Step three. Run paid ads to test which webinar topics/titles perform best. We run ads across Meta, LinkedIn, Google/YouTube, and Reddit. (Even TikTok for some industries). Algorithms can find your target audience even if it’s super niche. We’ve even done webinars targeted at “Owners of independent pharmacies” or “CTOs at tech companies with 300+ headcount” or “owner operators of remodeling companies on the east coast”. If your webinar title is relevant, and your ad copy is targeted, you reach the right people. Simple enough. Those people click, and then algorithms show to more people like that. Step four. Take your best performing webinar title & thumbnail and actually script and film the webinar. This is by far the biggest bottleneck for most people. They keep restarting and never actually film the thing. If it’s easier we’ve had a lot of success with ultra realistic AI voiceovers and the watch times can actually be higher. Aim to write a transcript that fills about 20-30 minutes. Then do a

Reddit8mo agoToolBusiness