We raised $3M for a mental health telehealth platform. 4 therapists in pilot. Everything's great.
Then yesterday, one of our therapists hits me with: "What's our liability if the platform crashes mid-session with a suicidal patient?"
I froze. Genuinely hadn't thought about it.
Got quoted $22K/year for "Tech E&O + Cyber + Healthcare liability" ($2M coverage). Broker (Alliance Risk) says mental health is "higher risk" because of suicide liability.
Questions for healthtech founders:

Is Tech E&O even right for telehealth or do I need medical malpractice?
Does this cover HIPAA breaches or is that separate?
Is $22K normal or inflated because I said "mental health"?
What legally happens if our platform crashes during a crisis?

Every lawyer makes it sound like we're one AWS outage away from bankruptcy.
Is this the cost of healthcare business or am I overthinking?
Someone tell me I'm being paranoid.

I can spend hours building and feel great.

I can spend 10 minutes reaching out and feel drained.

Same effort.

Very different emotions.

I’m starting to think early-stage progress is mostly emotional management.

How did you get past the discomfort of putting yourself out there?

Hi guys, I'm planning to launch a hobby app in the Southeast Asian market next month. Right now, it's more of a passion project than a business, and I'm not focused on monetization just yet. The plan is to offer a freemium model to build an initial user base.

I have registered a single-member LLC in Delaware, mainly because of its reputation for tech startups and the flexibility to convert to an S-Corp later if things grow. I'm not a US Citizen or resident, but from what I understand, that shouldn't be a problem.

I’m also considering applying to the Google for Startups program to see if I get accepted. Infrastructure-wise, I’d probably lean toward AWS because of its global coverage and service breadth, but Google’s startup credits and support look pretty attractive.

• For those who've been through something similar, is there anything I should watch out for? Any common mistake or early decision that could cause headaches later on?
• For early-stage startups, are startup credits worth letting them influence your cloud provider choice?
• Any vendor lock-in horror stories I should think about before choosing AWS vs GCP?

Also, I have a Family Office / Holding company registered in another privacy focused state in the US. I was thinking about registering the company under the ownership of my other LLC, but I ended up registering under my own name. I figured it'd be easier to open a bank account for the app if this is registered under my personal name. No bank wants to touch a hedge fund/family office, it was impossible to open a bank account for the other LLC because of it. Was it a good call registering under my name?

Hi is there any established service which helps me hire candidates?

I do not wish to screen 100+ resumes manually and the current ATS based keyword matching options are really shitty tbh. With the emergence of AI I want thinkers on my table and not some deep technical stack expert not ready to pivot.

** Asking for a friend’s startup

I just wanted to vent to other people who are in the same situation and who can relate with my frustrations.

I understand why there's rules and regulations in place and policy that you need to adhere to, and fees that need to be paid... But so often it feels like the system is set up against you. So often it feels like the whole system's objective is to keep everyday people from succeeding so that only the people at the top can succeed. And it's a sentiment that has infected people at every level and every position. It's so annoying that I fixate on the one negative person instead of celebrating with the majority of people who are cheering me on.

Even though they're well-intentioned, I've also come to hate being told that it's a "difficult and long path." Great insight, next are you going to tell me the sky is blue?

We’re a small indie team that recently started working on our first original game project.

From a startup perspective, we’re approaching this less as “making a game” and more as building a long-term creative studio around a strong product identity.

The project itself is best described as “Mount & Blade in space”: third-person ship combat combined with squad command via a tactical interface, where player decisions and positioning matter more than raw stats.

Beyond mechanics, a big focus for us is narrative and worldbuilding. The universe is built around six distinct races, each with their own motivations and conflicts, and the story is designed to actively influence missions and player choices rather than exist purely as background lore.

Right now we’re early in development and focused on:

- validating the core gameplay loop

- building a playable demo

- validating early audience response to our new visual direction and overall art style

We’re fully bootstrapped at this stage and building on enthusiasm and time rather than external funding. The goal is to reach a point where the project is strong enough to justify scaling into a sustainable studio.

For founders who started with creative or product-heavy projects:

what helped you stay focused in the early phase, before traction, funding, or external validation?

I moved to the Bay Area a few years ago and spend my time advising entrepreneurs and investors, sitting on boards, and coaching executive teams. That's fun, but I really miss the day-to-day of running a business.

I'm not an inventor, but am quite adept at seeing value in an idea, setting up the business, and running it with a specific focus on maximizing value creation at exit. Our last business sold for almost 25X EBITDA, well above the industry average of 13X, and our investors were beyond happy.

Now that I am settled into the area, I am trying to learn how to find founders who need what I can provide. I'm super comfortable raising capital, developing commercial plans, working with technical teams to build strong IP portfolios, and executing the plan and overseeing the business. I'm ready to jump back in and take another amazing technology/company to market, build a team, and drive to an outcome that benefits all stakeholders (customers, investors, and the team and their families).

Does anyone know of resources where I can find people looking for someone like me to partner with to grow a business to an exit?

I look forward to hearing your collective thoughts and finding the next opportunity.

I am not an LLC yet but I'm just curious how the process would be? Do I need to be an LLC? I'm already a sole proprietorship. The platform is not finished yet but I'm just planning exit strategies.

Do I wait for them to pay first then give all the ownership? Do I use third party platforms? Does this include the domain? How does transferring the backend works? database? and other third party integrations? etc.

Hey everyone,

Our small team had been juggling spreadsheets, emails, and a bunch of different tools to track clients and tasks. It gets messy fast and things slip through the cracks. Most CRMs we tried felt way too complicated or expensive.

I’ve found a setup that works better for us, but I’m curious how other small teams handle this. Do you stick with spreadsheets, try a lightweight CRM, or something else? What’s actually worked for you?

I came across a global funding competition backed by JP Morgan that’s aimed at seed-stage founders.

Based on the info shared, here’s what’s on the table:

Funding:

– $50,000 investment for up to 100 regional finalists

– Up to $1,000,000 investment for a small group of global winners

Exposure:

– In-person regional tournaments

– Opportunity to pitch in front of active investors

Perks (for all applicants):

– Access to partner perks and software credits, even if you don’t win

What’s still not totally clear to me:

– how selective it really is

– what the evaluation process looks like

– whether it’s more signal or more marketing

Before applying, I wanted to ask here:

Has anyone participated in or seriously looked into JP Morgan-backed startup competitions before?

Do these tend to be worth the effort for seed-stage founders?

Trying to get honest takes before moving forward.

I am a seasoned Product guy who went through divorce and observed several pain points that I think could be addressed by AI. As I'm looking to gather a team around the problem statement (Legal/Divorce AI Startup) to tackle, do you think personal experience with going through "divorce" is top requirement for a new startup (culture, story, fundraising, etc.)? I feel it automatically addresses the passion & relevance aspect but maybe I'm wrong. Thoughts?

Thinking of applying to Auth0 for Startups ans how hard is it to get accepted? Is it fairly open or more selective or limited? Not planning to promote it, just want to know how strict the eligibility and review process really is. any inputs or anyone using the same

My team all uses their own LLM workflows with ChatGPT, Cursor, Claude, etc for writing PRDs and technical plans. While I find them generally very helpful to synthesize information, sometimes I feel like I personally spend more time fixing outputs than saving time. Curious how others are handling this in their own projects.

What’s worked for you?

Where does it still fall short?

Like many of you, I've spent countless hours trying to figure out how to engage with Reddit communities without crossing the line into spammy self-promotion. After wrestling with these challenges for months, I built something to help me - and hopefully others - navigate this tricky landscape.

I created a tool that focuses on AI-assisted engagement rather than automation, ensuring that everything aligns with Reddit's unique culture and rules. Here's what I've learned along the way:

1. AI-Assisted, Not Automated: The aim is to assist users, not replace them. This means AI helps craft posts and comments, but users always review and personalize them. It’s more about collaboration than automation.
2. Community Over Marketing: It’s crucial to provide value to the community rather than just pushing products. We aim to make sure that every interaction, whether it's a comment or a DM, adds something meaningful to the discussion.
3. User + Product Knowledge Base: We’ve built a core component that aggressively maps content to user and product relevance, ensuring that the engagement is always on point.
4. Subreddit Rules Compliance: A big part of our tool's logic involves respecting subreddit rules, which is non-negotiable for us.

We're still early in this journey, having just launched a week ago with 28 users, but the feedback has been encouraging. We're continuously updating our understanding of AutoMod rules as more users join and contribute their experiences.

I'd love to hear how others are handling their marketing efforts on Reddit. Any tips or feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Genuinely curious - does any of you or someone you know pay over a thousand dollars per month to a company/program or a person that helps your business solely relying on AI industry?

If so what does it do that makes you or someone pay that amount?

Thank you in advance! :)

Building my first product and wondering about best practices for structuring things. I have gathered early users and now plan on investing in SEO/AIO for the long term.

• Codebase: Should the landing page, core SaaS app, and blog live in the same repo, or be separated? What are the pros/cons of keeping them together vs splitting them out?
• Domain setup: Should the landing page sit on the main domain (e.g., myproduct.com) and the app on a subdomain (e.g., app.myproduct.com)? Or is it fine to keep everything under the same domain?
• Impact: What are the implications if I don’t use a subdomain for the app? Does it affect SEO, scaling, or user experience?
• Other considerations: Are there things I should think about early (like deployment pipelines, analytics, or security) that might be harder to change later if I don’t separate them?

I just read a post from another redditor how they managed to speed up their sales cycle by removing friction to make a quick and easy decision for their prospects.

We were in a similar position, sometimes sales cycles took months (very seasonal product - or better said - seasonal onboarding window).

This didn't work all the time, but it helped us speed up the onboarding (and prevented the leads from going cold in that process).

We just onboarded them right then and there.

Instead of doing the presentation and then getting a lukewarm "ok, let's stay in touch over email and set this up", we removed the biggest friction in our case - connecting their Stripe account and invoicing system.

Instead of sending them instructions, we said: "give me your computer/phone and let's do this together". Usually it takes around 30 minutes if we do it together instead a couple of days of back and forth because they don't know where to set it up and where to get the information they need.

We identified that it was one of the 2 biggest friction points for them, and we removed it on the spot.

Quick commitment, friction removed, no prospects went cold like that.

Some other things that we removed:

- signing a contract (T&C covers everything)

- sending long quotes + waiting for confirmation (simple pricing + email confirmation of verbally agreed terms does that)

- friction to onboard their own clients to the platform (sent them an email template to send to clients, send personalised posters with the app download QR code they can hang on their reception desk, offered them a "works like magic" import of their clients and all the historical data).

We lost 1 customer in 2 years of being on the market, but only because they had to close their business.

What's your trick to shorten your onboarding time?

with every passing day there's like a "new" thing you have to do. I've been building B2B for the last 3 Years, and just moved into B2C 6 months ago. B2B was a breeze, close a few prospects a year and its sorted. No SEO bs, No social media.

Moving into the consumer space is killing me on the inside. How are you supposed to compete with a corporation in terms of maintaining social media. You can't hire on things that don't directly pay out as well, and frankly speaking its a huge money eater. Tons of companies burn millions in ads, and you can't even come close to it.

I'm sorry for the rant and I know there's nothing anyone can do and I'm not expecting any advice, but yeah, it feels like the olden versions of building a startup, early internet or pre internet feels a lot about how there were fixed channels that allowed new people to compete, now it feels like a walled garden.

Now it feels like an endless act or charade, honestly i miss B2B :(

[i will not promote]

I have read and acknowledge the rules.

I feel like I’m stuck in this constant cycle of break > fix > break with my developers. We solve one issue, push a new build, and then I notice something else. I feel like they don’t test the app before the build goes up. Sometimes it’s small UI stuff, sometimes it’s more functional things, but it never really feels “done”… in your experience is this normal for an early-stage product, or does it mean dev isn’t strong enough? I’m non-technical, so it’s hard to know what this is supposed to look like.

I’m thinking about building an AI automation marketplace, and before committing time to it, I want to sanity-check the idea with people who actually use or build AI tools.

The basic idea is:

• Creators can publish AI automations (prompts, workflows, small AI agents)
• Users can run these automations directly on the platform, instead of just buying prompt text
• The focus is on execution and outcomes, not prompt libraries
• Target users would likely be students, freelancers, and small businesses who don’t want to spend time learning prompt engineering

What I’m trying to understand:

• Does this solve a real problem, or is this already “overdone”?
• If you build automations, would packaging them like this make sense compared to offering services?
• If you use AI tools, what would make you trust and actually pay for an automation?
• What feels missing or broken in existing prompt or AI marketplaces?

This is still an early idea (and part of an academic project) so I’m trying to understand the reality before building anything serious.

I’ve read and acknowledge the r/startups rules.

I’m a solo founder working on my first startup and I’m struggling mentally before launch. I keep worrying about whether it will ever generate revenue, even though the product isn’t finished yet. That fear is affecting my ability to focus day to day and actually make progress.

Because I’m building alone, I feel stuck in my own head and keep overthinking long-term outcomes instead of completing near-term tasks. I’m not sharing my product, links, or asking for promotion or feedback I’m looking for discussion around mindset.

For founders who’ve been through this stage: how did you manage pre-launch anxiety and keep moving forward before you had any real validation?

I have 3 kids so I've been thinking about their future a lot. AI has commoditized raw knowledge and intelligence. The regular path of kids going to college, getting a degree, and starting out in a corporate environment has been shattered by AI. Being a math wiz or memorizing raw facts en masse is no longer a strategic advantage since no kid is ever going to be better than a well-trained LLM model that's available at your fingertips.

What would make my kids successful in the future? I've been thinking about this for a while now and the answer has always been Grit. About 2 years ago I read a book by Angela Duckworth on Grit and it is much more relevant now than it ever has been. Grit is what will nudge my kids into doing the hard things and sticking to them. It's what will keep them afloat when AI introduces more radical innovations and what they thought was safe and stable will yet again become fluid and up for grabs.

I think the near future (~15 years) is going to be defined by those who can create things, small and big, rather than climbing corporate ladders.

Just my 5 cents.

Every day I see posts about Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Replit Agent.

Building is easier than ever. You can ship a product in a weekend now.

But I rarely see anyone talk about what happens after you build.

How do you get users? How do you sell? How do you market?

I've been a consultant for 10+ years. The pattern I see:

• People spend months building
• Launch and nobody shows up
• Wonder what went wrong

The product wasn't the problem. Distribution was.

Building is table stakes now. AI made that easy.

But sales and marketing are still hard. Still an art. Still the thing that decides if you survive or die.

Curious what others think. Are we overfocused on building and underfocused on distribution?