Real problems people complain about online, pulled every morning and scored out of 100. Build, validate, or skip. How scoring works
Companies struggle to track and secure sensitive data scattered across cloud tools, not knowing what data exists where or who can access it. This creates compliance risks and security vulnerabilities.
YC Graveyard11y agoToolBusiness
Restaurants want to replace paper menus with interactive digital experiences but existing solutions are expensive and complex.
YC Graveyard13y agoToolBusiness
Security teams are overwhelmed by alerts from threat detection systems, with most being false positives. They need expert analysis to separate real threats from noise.
YC Graveyard11y agoToolBusiness
Office workers need convenient access to snacks and supplies without the hassle of maintaining physical vending machines or petty cash.
YC Graveyard12y agoToolBusiness
Physical businesses need an easy way to collect real-time customer feedback without complex survey tools or high response barriers.
YC Graveyard13y agoToolBusiness
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
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
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
Product managers struggle with creating visual roadmaps that are easy to update and share with stakeholders across the organization.
YC Graveyard15y agoToolBusiness
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 use dozens of different SaaS tools but lack a single view of their data and operations across platforms.
YC Graveyard15y agoToolBusiness
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?
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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?
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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.
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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.
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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?
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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?
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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.
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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.
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness
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:** *
Reddit6mo agoToolBusiness