New entrepreneurs often struggle to gain traction and secure funding for their startups. This problem is exacerbated by several factors including the saturation of content marketing, lack of a strong personal brand or resume, and the challenges of sales and consistent productivity.
This issue affects aspiring entrepreneurs who may have innovative ideas but lack the necessary resources or network to bring their visions to life. It can lead to failed startups, wasted potential, and discouragement among new founders.
Pain Points
- Saturation of content marketing makes it hard to stand out.
- Having a safety net can reduce the urgency and drive needed to succeed.
- Lack of a strong personal brand or resume makes securing funding difficult.
- Sales and convincing people to invest time or money is challenging.
- Periods of inactivity can lead to stagnation and lack of progress.
As I get close to just my first full year of building startups, I wanted to share a few hot takes/advice/random game about entrepreneurship. 1. I know we all can’t stand the fake hype and staged founder aesthetics, but the concept works - It has become such a mess because content marketing delivers insane results for certain people that actually put the time in. Now it’s saturated. Everyone uses LinkedIn like social media, cuts corners, uses AI to write everything, and posts twice a day hoping to go viral. 2. Burn the boats. Go all in - This is something I personally struggle with. Between getting into an awesome program a top 3 school and landing a cool internship this summer I have set myself up for a nice, comfortable corporate life. While my drive and passion to truly achieve something great is still there, having a safety net sometimes takes away from the “I can’t fail” mentality that is so essential in the early stages of building something. 3. Being an already accomplished person makes starting a company 100x easier - Seems obvious, but when I first entered the startup space I thought ideas raised money. They don’t. Stanford grads, 18 year olds who interned at OpenAI, and founders with a real product and traction raise money. If you don’t have the résumé, more often than not you will need to build something successful before getting any help. 4. Selling is harder than coding - This might be biased since I have a technical background and am kind of an awkward dude, but convincing people to give you their time, let alone their money, is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. 5. The worst times in entrepreneurship are when you have nothing to do - I personally love the chaos because it means customers and progress. When you suddenly have time to build a feature nobody asked for, that is usually when you’re in trouble. So make the empty promise and work through the weekend to deliver. 6. Work with someone else - Get yourself an awesome co-founder. Someone who forces you to post on LinkedIn, cold call, work until 10pm, and do all the hard things required to build a truly successful business. Again only really been in the game for around a year so this is pretty basic stuff but curious to hear others options on these topics
A resume writing tool designed to help users create compelling resumes.
Hey everyone. Been building this for about a year now and figured I'd share some stuff I learned along the way. **What it is:** A search engine that scores 6,000+ public companies across 11 ethical dimensions. The twist is we don't use corporate self-reported ESG data. We pull from court filings, investigative journalism, and NGO reports, other public data. Every score links back to the actual source so you can read it yourself. **The hardest part was the data:** You cannot just scrape the web anymore. Half the sources we need are behind CAPTCHAs, JavaScript walls, or aggressive bot detection. Court filing databases are especially painful because each jurisdiction has different access patterns and some actively block automated access. We ended up using third party scraping tools which aren't cheap, but the alternative was maintaining our own headless browser fleet which is its own full time job. If you're building anything that relies on web data, budget 3x more time and money for data collection than you think. **AI Tasks need to be broken Down:** We use AI agents to find evidence and score companies. The obvious problem is hallucination. An LLM will confidently assign a score based on vibes if you let it. What helped was separating the "find evidence" step from the "score evidence" step completely. Different agents, different prompts. The scoring agent never searches the web, it only works with what the research agent already found. We also run an adversarial network to audit the scores until it reaches consensus. **SEO was broken until I fixed rendering:** I had company score pages rendering client-side and Google was indexing empty shells. Moved to server-side rendering and suddenly Google started picking up individual pages. If you're building anything where discoverability matters, do your rendering homework early. Don't bolt it on later like I did. Starting to see real search traffic growth now which feels good after months of nothing. **Where I'm stuck:** The product works. The data is solid. But now I need to figure out distribution and that's a completely different skill set from building the thing. I'm looking at financial advisors who need cited evidence when clients ask about portfolio ethics, and investigative journalists who could use the database as a research starting point. Has anyone here sold into finance or research-heavy industries? How did you land your first few paying customers? Cold email? LinkedIn? Content? Partnerships? What actually worked vs what felt productive but wasn't? The product is live at [MASHINIi](https://www.mashinii.com). You can search any company or upload a CSV of your holdings and get an ethics breakdown. Would love feedback on the score pages especially. Roast it if you want, I'd rather hear it now
Well, I recently launched my product on ProductHunt but it wasn't as I had hoped for. Honestly, Product Hunt isn't as great as it used to be. I even got a hunter with 10k followers for my launch, but I got lukewarm traction. Looks like one has gotta do a lot of gimmicks on PH to be noticed. Anyway, fast forward to a week after the launch, I got my first paid customer for StoryCV. First step is to validate my product idea, whether someone is actually going to pay for the problem I am solving. Second step is to then scale it. I am very tempted to just keep working on SEO and other marketing tasks, but I also gotta make sure this product is good enough for people to pay. This first payment is really very special. I will always remember this user fondly, who trusted us with his money. [First internet dollar for StoryCV resume writer](https://preview.redd.it/562elpk6g0jg1.png?width=1270&format=png&auto=webp&s=77c190a25c8dd1b33f343ec3573d152267320a12)