Talk Startups & Side Projects With Builders

A Sounding Board Without An Agenda

Friends tend to be encouraging and investors tend to be busy. A stranger who has built something, or is trying to, can give a blunt first reaction to an idea, ask the questions you've been avoiding or simply share what the early months were like.

What Founders Talk About

Useful threads for early-stage builders:

• How they tested whether anyone wanted the product
• Finding first customers before writing much code
• Side project versus quitting a job to go full-time
• Bootstrapping versus raising money
• The mistake they'd avoid if they started again

Share The Problem, Not The Secret Sauce

Describing the problem you're solving and who it's for is fine, and usually more useful than describing features. Keep unreleased details, customer data, code and financials to yourself. Ideas are rarely stolen, but confidential information can still cause problems.

Building Somewhere That Is Not A Hub

Access to funding, payment infrastructure, hiring pools and whether local customers will pay differ enormously outside the well-known ecosystems. Founders building in smaller markets have a completely different set of problems, and describing them to somebody who assumes the standard playbook is often the most useful conversation either person has that week.

The Failure That Taught Something

Most people in this topic have shut something down. Those stories are specific, unglamorous and far more instructive than success narratives, and anonymity is what makes them tellable. Asking what somebody stopped doing gets the detail that a public post-mortem would sand off.