Ask HN: How is your startup doing? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is your startup doing?

41 pointspyrophane42 comments

Startup founders/employees, how's it going?

I know that VC funding has been harder to come by lately, and the "macroeconomic environment" may not be helping either.

I just want to know, for founders/employees at startups, how have things been going?

Has growth kept on track? Are you worried about your next round?

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I have a startup without VC funding. On track to make about $5 million profit this year.

Downturn has been great for me. Could hire some great folks for cheap and I am in a few industries where downturns help me.

VC is a scam in most cases apart from a select few like YC.

Congratulations! Which startup? How long have you been at it? How long did it take to reach revenue/profit ?

Reached $4 million profit last year. Took about 8 years to get there with many pivots and troubles.

Every week is a hustle. Growth is slow. We publish our growth numbers in our marketing blog on the 1st of each month. https://blog.neeto.com/p/neeto-marketing-updates-for-septemb...

We are optimizing for surviving till 2025 and hopefully beyond. We have not taken any VC funding but the consulting work supports the product development at neeto.com.

Above water, below radar.

https://menu.miami

Your "book a demo" link is broken pal

Great.

I've pivoted from an AI art site (https://inventai.xyz) to trying to build anything with AI (not yet launched). The dev progress is going great, but it seems funding is out of reach without a co-founder. I'm starting to look around for one though.

I don't feel like I gave the art site concept enough of a chance before pivoting, so perhaps I'll come back and improve it and meld the two concepts at some point.

We're about to close a round, and have the funding already in hand to continue our human trials. The one benefit of startups in med device is that you don't really follow the same macro cycles, since the timelines on these projects are so long and carefully orchestrated/budgeted. We hope to run a pivotal trial shortly after we can fully finance a series A

what kind of device? also building a medtech start-up in France, would love to discuss

It's an autonomous glucose control machine for hospitals! Commonly referred to as an artificial pancreas, but it just controls sugar, not the hundreds of other things the pancreas does

It's undoubtedly a challenging time for startups, with VC funding becoming more elusive and the broader economic landscape uncertain.

As a founder, staying agile and adaptable is key. Keeping growth on track might require creative strategies. It's also an opportunity to build resilience.

If you're navigating these challenges and exploring innovative tech solutions, you might find Rather Labs at https://www.ratherlabs.com valuable. They specialize in AI, GPT, and blockchain development and could offer insights to help steer your startup in the right direction during these turbulent times.

Oh man, glad you asked. Still trying to figure out all this business stuff for poss market, a marketplace for software I’m just about to launch https://poss.market

Basically it’s a place on which you can charge for using your software (and keep it free of charge for non-commercial usage if you want to)

I had some cofounder matching rounds to find business-oriented and people-oriented cofounder, but none of them worked in a long run for me (it might be on me ofc)

Startups are hard and respect to anyone who’s trying to make their way in the business

Best wishes to all founders here!

Cool! I was looking into monetizing my OSS idea just the other day and it seems much more complicated than it needs to be. Is your idea to build a marketplace and all the behind-the-scenes license / billing tools, or just the marketplace?

Thanks! It starts as a marketplace that provides you payments and invoicing infrastructure as well as a license, but I'm sure it might be further improved

I have a self-funded startup with the product currently in beta. It is a new kind of general-purpose data management system that handles all kinds of data (unstructured, highly structured, semi-structured). https://www.Didgets.com

Looking for people to try it out on their own data sets. Load in millions of files. Create DB tables with millions of rows and hundreds or thousands of columns and do analytics on them. Give us feedback on missing features.

I had a look at what you're doing but I'm trying to understand the business use case, could you give me a few practical examples?

Since it is a general-purpose data manager, it doesn't solve a very specific problem like most apps do. It is similar to file systems, databases, or NoSQL solutions. You can use their data manipulation and analysis features to perform a wide variety of business use cases.

The demo videos on https://youtube.com/@didgetsdemos will show you some of the things it will do and just how fast it will do them, even with large data sets.

Growth is slower than we'd like, for sure. But since we're firm believers in pg's maxim, "don't die", we've become cockroaches who can't be killed off.

do you expect faster growth in 2024?

I'm a solo founder bootstrapping https://www.browserhub.io/

It's definitely not easy to grow these days. But I'm still grateful that at least the needle is moving.

So far I only launched on Twitter (not a bunch of audience). And I hope I can launch on more sites like Product Hunt next month.

And yeah, I'm worried about the future. But the best thing I can do is to be present. I'll do what I can to grow the business.

Wish me luck :)

In our 5th year. Have had steady growth YoY.. Just picked up IBM as a new customer.

Although we just had the worst month to date -20% growth ( attributing to the new war .. as no other variables changed )

https://VisualSitemaps.com || https://VisualFlows.io

Bootstrapped founder (freelance with a startup side-hustle) here - seeing the startup side of my business continue to grow is motivating increasing investment over the next couple of quarters into the startup, so on the contrary, we are don’t presently have internal concerns.

Following this thread to learn about the experiences of others; always curious to see what is out there in the marketplace

Growth has dropped a lot from triple digits percent to mid double digits. We have years of VC cash at our current burn and we have about -200% EBITDA margins. Seems like we’ll need to cut a LOT of heads to find a path to breakeven if growth doesn’t pick back up in the next 6 months. We’re in the AI space.

Survived and thriving, managed to keep a clean cap table despite some very close calls.

Section 174 changes really, really suck.

I was just scratching my own itch with this project. Not sure if it'll become an actual startup. Monetization strategy isn't obvious, especially since its an adult site.

https://nsfwseek.com

We work on a GoLang productivity extension for Visual Studio Code (https://www.tooltitude.com/). We are growing, but not as fast as we wish we did.

Co-founded a startup this summer, growth slower than what we want for now (isn't it always the case?). Every users feedback and business angel calls is an energy-giver. Every VC call has been a drainer.

Almost ramen profitable with my my language learning app https://vokebeln.io

Did you make a typo? Not reachable here.

Try https://vokabeln.io/ instead.

Not the author, but yep, I think there is a typo here.

Should be https://vokabeln.io/ (vokabeln is German for “vocabulary”)

Yes, https://vokabeln.io/ is correct.

Growth has slowed over the last year. I am experimenting with a second product idea to see if there's potential there while the industry recovers.

Hustling strong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4pkMjpNJS8

You could have at least used a real person's voice

Couldn't even stand to listen to that voice for long enough to tell it wasn't human, it was so off-putting

Bootstrap,solo founder. Everyday is tough but I'm making it work. Had to pick up some side consulting work to make ends meet.

Slow but going.

https://apolloweather.com/

Things are going great, and they're only getting better! I'm doing alright, and got interviewed on the Joe Roganoid Experiments—major exposure for our world-saving project! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYGnYjWtOSo&t=303s

So, you created a deep fake interview? Why?

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