u/ReporterCalm6238

Dear friends,

I'd like to ask the crazy startup people working in GovTech like me, what GTM channels work for you?

In our case, we found that conferences work really nicely. We also apply to RFPs/RFQs that are relevant for us. Other than that we are experiment with good 'ol cold email outreach with non-existent results.

I'm wondering if there is something else that we can try. We'll maybe try cold calling but don't have much hope with that one. Any suggestions/ideas?

I'd appreciate to receive comments from people having first-hand experience in GovTech since that's a world on its own and the rules of B2B/B2C hardly apply.

Ich wohne in der Nähe der Mariahilfer Straße, und während meiner 20 minütigen Abendspaziergänge treffe ich mindestens fünf Personen, die Dosen und Flaschen aus Mülleimern sammeln. Was mich überrascht, ist, dass viele von ihnen wie ganz normal gekleidete Menschen wirken, überhaupt nicht obdachlos. Ist das ein Hinweis darauf, dass viele Menschen in Wien finanziell zu kämpfen haben und keine besseren Möglichkeiten haben? Oder kann man damit einfach viel Geld verdienen?

I’m an advocate for founders working full-time on their startup. That’s mainly because I’ve never met a founder who managed to build a successful startup generating at least six figures in revenue while working another job.

I’m ready to change my mind: are you a founder who built a successful startup while working another job? Was it full-time or part-time? At what point did you leave your job to focus full-time on the startup? Do you recommend other founders to do the same, assuming they are in the same financial situation you were back then?

If you’re not one yourself but know someone who did this, feel free to share.

I just started experimenting with Hermes locally. Currently using DeepSeek V4 flash (via OpenRouter). I would like to automate certain tasks that require using my Edge browser. I ask Hermes to use agent-browser CLI by Vercel but I'm not satisfied with the results. Navigation is extremely slow and makes so much mistake. Probably V4 flash is also not smart enough for this. Any ideas on how to have efficient browser use?

I'm currently using playwright MCP and it works fairly well, but maybe there is a more efficient and fast tool for scraping. I'm talking about headed browser scraping, not headless. For headless I think playwright is unbeatable.

They proudly said in the rejection email that they received 35,000 applications for only 35 available spots. That's a 0.1% admission rate.

Harvard admission rate is 4.18% for class 2029. Stanford is around 3.6%. MIT 4.6%.

NASA astronaut candidates in 2025 had a similar selection rate to this accelerator: 0.1%

My co-founder and I are indeed thinking to apply to NASA at this point, and you guys? How are you coping?

Sure bone smashing, drugs abuse, gen Z vocabulary are all easy targets for having a good laugh. But can we go a bit deeper than that? Can we try to actually understand the philosophy behind the looksmaxxing movement?

Social media put us on a global stage, live 24/7, where everybody is competing for attention. You can either be part of the audience or an active participant, but you can't avoid being in it simply because everybody else is in it, and we depend on interpersonal relationships.

In this global stage, those who win, win it all: money, sex, power, clout. That's why billionaires spend so much money buying and building their own social media. Through that they can influence billions.

Now, who wins normally in this social media circus? I'll tell you who, and I dare you to prove me wrong: the good-looking influencers, the clownesque content creators, the entrepreneurs making apocalyptic predictions about the future, the extravagant politicians posting memes. The ones who entertain, either because of their over-the-top behaviour or their aspect, win.

The young generations that were raised through social media know this very well. They are not stupid, they are able to read the room and see who is getting rewarded by society and who doesn't. It was enlightening to me when Andrew Callaghan asks Clavicular about dating somebody off camera and he answers "what's the ROI of that?". Social media have profoundly redefined the economic and social incentives. A live stream camera in front of a sexy face will yield 100x more dating/romance opportunities (+ the other benefits we discussed) to a young dude than the traditional offline dating. And let's be real, to a 20 yo man there is nothing more desirable than having a lot of sexual partners.

Now, here it is where I disagree with the looksmaxxing community. Their answer to this clown society can be summarized in "let's embrace it". The world wants us to be sexy clowns? Let's be sexy clown to the fullest. I think this is the wrong answer. This is not a pathway to happiness. Despite all the rewards the Clavicular of this world get, I don't think they are happy people. And certainly their audiences are not made of happy people. There is a better way. We need to turn against this perversed incentive system created by social media. That's the root of the evil. We should question it, boycott it, destroy it. It's gonna be hard? Yes! But we need to acknowledge that social media are making us miserable and, at the end of the day, the goal of life is happymaxxing.

Sorry for the grammar and syntax errors, I didn't want to write this with AI.