Just a thought looking around at what's happening lately.

99% of the SaaS launched right now are bullshit.

Everyone here builds AI-powered tools with agents that automate this and that, fancy dashboards, landing pages with purple gradients, and at the end nobody pays.

You know why? Because you're selling to freelancers and other SaaS founders who can rebuild your tool in 3 minutes with Claude. Or worse, to people who think a $9/month sub is too expensive.

You spend 6 months on a product to sell to people with no budget who churn at month 2.

Two pieces of advice if you actually want to build something that lasts.

Either go ultra vertical. Not kinda vertical. Really vertical. Pick a niche, understand every detail of their workflow, build something so deep technically that nobody can copy it in 3 months. But be ready, it's gonna take time. You'll iterate for 1-2 years and probably need funding because you won't be profitable fast.

Or build a "classic" SaaS but go sell it to random businesses who barely use the internet but have actual money. Mechanics, plumbers, dentists, rural accountants, industrial SMBs. These people have cash, they have problems, and they won't rebuild your tool with AI.

Stop selling to your own bubble of tech bros and freelance builders. They have the smallest budgets and they're the hardest to please.

Anyway, just a thought for those who recognize themselves.

Good luck.

Disclaimer: Not here to sell or promote anything i promise.

Just want to share my experience maybe it can be motivating for some people.

Some background info on myself:

I’ve been running Instagram theme pages for a living for the last nine years.

A theme page is an Instagram page based on a certain niche that curates content (reposts).

Because you’re curating content, it’s easier to post multiple times a day which makes it easier to grow pretty quickly.

For example ive grown pages 0-100k followers in a few days posting 20 viral videos a day. Ive even grown pages 0-1m followers in just a few months on multiple occasions, etc. And I’ve done this in almost any niche you can imagine. Tech, science, memes, pets, food, luxury, etc.

So how i made $320k:

In 2025 i owned 2 large pages:

A 2m follower science page

A 3m follower luxury page

The luxury page is one I’ve had for many many years and have slowly been growing it

The science page i started in march 2024 and grew it to 2m followers in just 12 months.

I also owned a few smaller pages (300-700k followers) but those made up for an insignificant amount of the money i made.

The three ways I made the most income was through advertisements, bonuses (instagram pays you for views), and selling a page.

Advertisements: $120,156

Bonuses: $110,569

Page sale: $90,000

Total: $320,725

Breakdown:

Advertisements: the idea of selling ads on pages maybe seems very vague but once you’re in the world, you quickly see how much opportunity there is for this. There’s a lot of brands and companies that are buying ads on pages with very big budgets.

Kalshi / Polymarket / ai companies / Stake were spending millions of dollars advertising on theme pages in 2025 and even 2026. I definitely profited a lot from them.

A 2m page depending on niche and audience (more usa followers = more valuable) can sell a post for about $500-$600.

Once you develop a relationship with an ad buyer, there’s a high chance they will come back to you pretty often so the money just keeps coming in.

I had many offers to promote onlyf\*ns models and they pay INSANE money because theyre so profitable ($2k-$5k a post) but your page literally tanks if you promote them so many people stay away from it, but I knew a couple people with big meme pages who were making like $20k to $40k a month off of them.

On the luxury page, I had a high end jewelry client who I signed a 12 month deal with where they paid me $4500 every month for 5 posts / 5 stories. They also sponsored almost any other luxury page over 300k followers.

Bonuses: so bonuses are a program Instagram rolls out to randomly selected pages where they pay you for the views you get on reels and carousels. It pays anywhere from $30-$100 per 1m views. I had it on one of my pages which was getting about 200 million views a month so thats how i made that money. Unfortunately, I lost the bonus feature at one point because I got a copyright strike on my account so that’s what eventually led me to deciding to sell the page.

Sell page: I sold that 2 million follower page for $90k. Over the last nine years I’ve sold multiple pages, have made maybe around $280k doing that. There’s a lot of people who just flip pages it’s lucrative if you know the right people.

Some final thoughts:

this is a really weird way to make money because you’re just on your phone for like 12 hours a day but it’s kind of fun. But I’m literally on my phone almost every waking second editing and posting content but I enjoy it so it doesn’t really feel like work sometimes

There are a lot of people making money doing this and there’s people making way more money than this.

Once you understand what type of content goes viral and you figure out how to grow that skill transfers to any other social media platform. I’ve done the exact same thing on Twitter / TikTok / Yt.

there’s a lot of other ways to monetize large pages as well (selling merch/products, real life perks)

Maybe this was a bit sporadic, but feel free to ask any questions. I will try to answer/clarify everything.**

Once again, I am not going to try to sell you anything or promote anything. Just genuinely want to help. if some parts of this sounded guruish I’m sorry

Thanks!

I saw a Shopify founder describe an absolutely unhinged setup recently. They connected Midjourney to a print-on-demand pipeline so trending memes from Twitter/X automatically became t-shirt mockups within minutes. The system scraped viral posts, generated parody shirt concepts, created mockups, and pushed products directly to the store before most brands even noticed the meme existed. The crazy part is they said most of the sales came from being early, not from having amazing designs. Basically weaponized internet speed.

So curious from the entrepreneurs here, what’s the most unhinged AI automation you've seen that somehow works?

Feels like AI changed the default speed of business overnight. A founder said recently AI completely changed how they handle churn. Instead of manually reading angry cancellation emails, they dump thousands of support tickets and refund requests into AI and ask it to surface hidden patterns humans missed. Apparently they discovered a huge percentage of churn came from one tiny onboarding confusion nobody internally noticed because support staff normalized it over time. That was pretty cool.

So entrepreneurs, what’s the biggest "before vs after AI" difference in your company?

I don't post much but I've been lurking here since before we even applied, so I figured it was time to give something back.

My co-founder and I went through YC S23 (if you really want my company name, you can probably find it in the YC directory by process of elimination). We'd been friends since first year university and have been for a decade since. I came from data science, he came from fintech. Our application revolved around being an all-in-one fintech forward practice management platform.

Three years later, we are a full featured all-in-one AI EMR, live in 150+ clinics with a team of 15. I wouldn't have believed any of that during batch. I was sleeping 4 hours a night, eating garbage, and cold-emailing/calling clinic owners who wanted nothing to do with us.

Here's what the three years actually looked like:

Year 1 was survival. We pivoted hard from what we applied with. The product we pitched at demo day is not the product we sell today. What stayed constant was defining the customer and the problem space. If you're deeply embedded with your users, the right product reveals itself, but you have to let go of the version you fell in love with from the beginning.

Year 2 was chaos that felt like progress. Fighting for new customers and when we closed them demands came in faster than we could support them. Every week something was on fire. We learned that the nature of stress doesn't go away - it just changes shape. Early on, the stress is "nothing works." Later, it's "everything works but it's all held together with duct tape and people are depending on us." Neither is easier.

Year 3 was the first time it felt real. Not easy, real. Customers renewing without us begging. Features shipping because users asked for them, not because we guessed. A team small enough that everyone has full context and nobody needs a meeting to make a decision. We've consistently out-shipped companies with 50x our headcount and I think that's the single biggest advantage of staying small for as long as possible.

A few things I wish I'd internalized sooner:

The batch is a blip. The relationships are forever. I still text S23 founders almost every week. When you're going through something that nobody in your normal life can relate to, having people who just get it is worth more than anything in the curriculum.

Small teams move at a speed that bigger companies literally cannot. Protect that. Every unnecessary hire, every premature process, every "alignment meeting" chips away at the thing that makes you dangerous. We're 15 people and I want to stay small as long as we possibly can.

Gratitude is the thing I underestimated most. Building something from nothing with your best friends, backed by people who believed in you before the numbers made sense, serving customers who rely on your product every single day. That's an insane privilege. I wish I'd slowed down to appreciate it more in year one instead of just grinding through it.

If you're in batch right now or thinking about applying, just do it.

The worst outcome is a few months building something that doesn't work, surrounded by some of the sharpest people you'll ever meet. The expected outcome is way better than that.

Happy to answer questions from anyone who's early stage. This community gave me a lot, I'm glad to return the favour.

My co-founder and I went through YC in 2023. We started as a team of 2, and now we're up to 15 people. I don't have all the answers as to how we got here, but I've got some honest reflections that I haven't seen anyone else post yet.

Nobody warns you that the stress of running a business transforms. I'll give you some examples; Year 1 stress is "nothing works and nobody wants this." Year 2 stress is "everything is on fire and people are depending on us." Year 3 stress is "things are working but one bad week could break something we spent 6 months building." Instead of waiting for the phase where it calms down. You just get better at functioning inside the chaos. If you're waiting for the calm part, stop waiting and build the tolerance instead.

Nobody warns you that your best customers will teach you more than any advisory. We pivoted hard from our original idea. The product we have today was basically designed after graduation, it's not our original concept (and that's a good thing). We'd show up, watch them work, and build immediately after. Every feature that came from a customer saying "can it do this?" over-performed. The pattern has held for 3 years straight.

Nobody warns you that hiring slow is easy to say, but brutally hard to be successful. When you're drowning and someone decent shows up, every instinct says "just hire them", but a mediocre hire on a team of 2-3 doesn't blend in. Keep every role essential for as long as possible. Every unnecessary hire chips away at the speed that makes you influential.

Nobody warns you that your biggest competitor is inertia, not another company. We spent our first year obsessing over feature comparisons with competitors. Total waste of time. The real competitor was our potential customers doing nothing, staying on their current system because switching felt too hard. The moment we started solving the switching problem instead of the feature gap, everything changed.

Nobody warns you that about the "loneliness" after the first year. Year 1 has momentum. Everything is new. People are excited for you. By year 2, nobody asks about your startup anymore. The novelty is gone. You're grinding and the results are incremental. Your friends have moved on with their lives. The founders from your batch who quit have normal jobs and weekends again. Year 2 is where most people silently give up, not because it's not working, but because it's just not exciting anymore. If you're in year 2 and it feels dull, that's normal. Push through it.

Nobody warns you that gratitude is a competitive advantage. This seems like a soft take, but I mean it operationally. When you genuinely appreciate your customers, your team, and the fact that you get to build something from nothing, it shows up in the product. Building a company with your best friends, backed by people who believed in you early, serving customers who rely on you every day, that's a true privilege. It always important to remind yourself of that.

If you're in early stages and any of this resonates, I've been in your shoes and so have many others. Embrace the learning process and the fact the journey will never be how you expect it, yet the outcome might.

NO AI WAS USED IN WRITING THIS I have been working on this post for over a year, it's all my own content, nothing from a model. I'll leave a screenshot showing the markdown files with dates in the comments.

Hello my name's Troy. I'm a serial founder who's been either a founder or founding employee at 9 startups with the total valuation of said startups north of $1bn. My current startup that I co-founded is currently at $5m in ARR and growing rapidly. I used to be a teacher and have been really itching to write and what I've learned over the last decade and a half of being in the startup space.

Mods, I'm happy to verify above if needed.

I browse this and other similar subreddits often and see a lot of similar questions pop up. The problem is the vast majority of the members in these communities are either trying to sell something or don't know what they're talking about (respectfully <3). My hope is to shine some light on some of the most common questions I see here and give some of you motivated folks some direction. Not trying to sell you anything, i dont want your money. I just hope it's useful.

1.1 | "What kind of business should I start?"

The people who ask a variation of this question will often get blasted in the comments despite it being honestly a very good question that the vast majority of people here get totally wrong. I'll be covering exactly how I identify, research, evaluate, and finally weigh prospective business opportunities. This isn't a foolproof method but rather a high level structure for you to go through and practice. Anyone trying to sell you on a specific business idea or plan is some internet guru who's only successful venture was selling courses. There's no magic bullet, just a series of things to think about and evaluate that should lead you to better, more validated, ideas and outcomes.

Here's the high level view process we're going to chat through:

1. Evaluate your skillset
2. Identifying opportunities
3. Researching your idea
4. Categorizing opportunities
5. Testing the market
6. Committing

Even if you believe you've already completed one of these steps please take the time to read through them as I'll also be weaving in important context / things to think about that can impact the later steps.

Be Clear About What You Want

Before you even start this process it's incredibly important you know what you want.

There's a ton of different paths you can take building a business from building a small little micro-sass that kicks off passive income after a few months of work to large scale decade long venture scale businesses. Both are super viable and both can make you a ton of money.

It's totally okay to be open to multiple paths but if you have particular constraints on your life and time it's important to keep those in mind as some business opportunities might align much better with where you're at and what you want.

The Two Types of Businesses - Pain vs Enjoyment

Note: i thought about calling this pain vs pleasure but though that was suspicious.

Every single business either solves a customers pain point or provides some form of enjoyment

Pain based businesses are solving some pain point for the customer. Here's some businesses that fall into this category and what pain point they're addressing:

• Hubspot - Pain of organizing and tracking sales team performance/data
• Doordash - Pain of having to go physically pick up your food
• Marketing Consultancy - Pain of having to directly manage marketing channels / ads
• Pool service company - Pain of having to do manual labor to upkeep pool

Enjoyment based businesses provide the customer with something that gives them some form of entertainment or enjoyment. Here's some businesses that fall into that category:

• Warner Brothers - Movies
• Riot Games - Video games
• Instagram - Social media
• Outback Steakhouse - Restaurant

Despite its simplicity, This distinction is very important because although it's very possible to build a great business of either type Pain businesses are significantly easier to build and often times better businesses.

There's a few reasons why you should probably build a business focused on solving a pain point.

1. Pain will drive people to pay.
   1. If a customer is experiencing pain, each time they experience that pain will drive them towards paying for your solution.
   2. The level and consistency of that pain is directly connected to how much they're willing to pay. More pain = more $$
   3. The chance of that pain returning will drive them to become a loyal customer.
2. Enjoyment businesses have to compete with all other enjoyment businesses
   1. If you're building a video game, that video game is competing for your customers entertainment time with not just other video games but also all movies, social media, physical activities, and more.
   2. The customer has such a plethora of choices that will require your product to be incredibly appealing to be successful
3. Enjoyment businesses require more work
   1. Because of the lack of pain and need to significantly stand out, building a business that provides enjoyment typically requires a deep level of passion, hard work, and intricate knowledge of the space.

Maybe you're thinking I'm wrong and that there's hundreds of thousands of businesses that do very well providing enjoyment to the customer. You'd be right to think that, there are tons of examples of great businesses built around a enjoyment based product that have generated a great return for their founders. You can build a great one if that's the path you decide to follow. I just want to make sure it's a very conscious decision and you understand that you will be deciding to go down a more difficult path (and building a great company of any kind is already very difficult).

1.2 | Evaluating Your Skillset

Any entrepreneur who's worth their salt when asked...

>What kind of business should I start?

will answer...

>I don't know.

This is because there are thousands of fantastic possible businesses that we could recommend, which business you specifically should pursue is directly coupled to your individual skillset. That's why our first step is to have a brutally honest self evaluation of the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Self Skillset Evaluation

Here's a quick exercise that you should go through. Lets list out all the skills you have that are relevant at this stage and bucket them like a self skill "tier list". Don't get too granular but try to be as accurate as possible. Knowing your weak / strong points will be incredibly valuable in far more than just picking what business to start.

Here's a quick template to use:

• Good
  • Skill A
  • Skill B
• Acceptable
  • Skill C
• Bad
  • Skill D

Good: These are skills you think someone would pay you to do, even if it's at a relatively junior level. Acceptable: These are skills that you can do and with practice could get to a place where you could do them professionally. Bad: You suck at this and/or have not done much of it.

And here's a list of skills that are important for founders that you should evaluate (feel free to add your own):

• Sales
• Graphic Design
• Product Design
• Content Creation / Creative
• Marketing (hard skills like using ad platforms, seo, etc)
• Public Speaking
• Technical Literacy (low code tools like zapier, site builders, etc)
• Programming
• Finance
• Operational Efficiency (creating processes, organizing information, etc)
• Leadership

Depending on where you're at in your career this list will change overtime so it's worth re-evaluating every so-often. For example, here's what my list looked like back when I founded my first company 15 years ago.

• Good
  • Programming
  • Technical Literacy
  • Public Speaking
  • Leadership
• Acceptable
  • Content Creation
  • Product Design
  • Graphic Design
• Bad
  • Sales
  • Marketing
  • Finance
  • Operational Efficiency

If I was to evaluate myself again today, this list would look drastically different.

The "Business Idea" Venn Diagram

I have a dope graphic for this but can't upload it so i'll put it in the comments (if allowed).

This "business idea" venn diagram holds the answer to "what kind of business should I start?". Your likelihood of success is directly tied to the percentage of key skills that a given business needs that you are already competent at. For example, let's chat through a few possible businesses that Troy from 15 years ago could have started and evaluate where they'd fall on this diagram...

SAAS for search engine optimization Key Skills:

• Sales
• Marketing (knowledge specifically)
• Product Design
• Programming

Although there's clearly a market for SEO tooling and SAAS is a fantastic model, old Troy (and frankly current Troy) should not be the person to build this company. Some of the most important skills were my weakest areas meaning I'd be fighting a huge uphill battle. If I found a co-founder who was a great sales person with good marketing knowledge we may be able to make something work.

Game Server Hosting Service Key Skills:

• Programming
• Technical Literacy
• Product Design

Now this seems much more aligned with the skillset I outlined above.

1.3 | Identifying Opportunity

There are hundreds of thousands of possible businesses you could start. Here's how I identify which ones are worth chasing.

We'll talk about the general process from a high level, then dive into a few examples.

Note: In this and upcoming sections I'm going to ask you to rate stuff on a scale from 1-5. Those exact values you set don't really matter. We're not going to be plugging them into some mathematical formula to output the best business for you. The reason for those ratings is to force you to think about/ask yourself specific questions which will then help make it clear what opportunities are worth chasing.

Chase The Pain

As we discussed in 1.1, pain businesses are generally the best to start. They're also generally the easiest to find opportunities within. If you have truly no ideas for a business. Start thinking about your life, day job, and the lives of those close to you. What are some points of pain or frustration that you and/or your loved ones experience consistently?

Those pain points will become our business opportunities.

Ideally, you want most of these to be pain points you yourself experience. Although you can certainly find opportunities through others they'll require a larger investment in research and you likely won't feel as convicted that what you're building solves the problem. If you're building something that you yourself would use than you start off with one data point that you have product market fit.

I have a permanent living document where I write any possible pain points for further evaluation. The goal should be exclusively to document each pain point. You don't want to start to get into possible solutions just yet as that may muddy the context for your future self. Your first goal should be to get a decent sized and fairly diverse set of pain points to look at. Then it's important to rate those pain points on a scale of 1-5 on just how much they suck to deal with as well as how often they occur.

The More Niche The Better

Something that may be counterintuitive about those pain-points is that you ideally want to try to target things that are more niche. A lot of entrepreneurs will incorrectly try to target opportunities that have massive reach. It's a logical conclusion to come to, after all, many of the worlds biggest and most valuable businesses have built products that appeal to the masses. However, going down this path especially early on is a surefire way to fail.

Here's why building a business around a niche pain point is so great:

1. The more niche you get the less likely you'll run into competitors that have true product-market fit.
2. It's easier to charge more when something is tailor built for an underserved group of people.
3. Getting direct feedback, especially early on, becomes significantly easier.
4. It's easier to leverage growth loops within niches.
5. Expanding your appeal outside a niche is easier than trying to adapt a product to multiple niches upfront.

I really do not believe there's such a thing as a opportunity that's too niche. It's true that there's a spectrum here, and some opportunities that are very niche may not be worth chasing. We'll get into how to evaluate these opportunities below but do not shy away from a potential opportunity just because you think it only applies to a relatively small group of people. If the pain there is significant, it very well may be worth pursuing.

Go through your prior list and add another "niche" rating to the pain points on a scale from 1-5 where 5 is very niche. Depending on how close you are to the problem you might not know this conclusively, give your best guess for now and in the next section we'll talk through doing further research before we fully evaluate.

After that you'll have a list that has enough context to move to the next section.

Working Through It

Let's work through the flow together, We'll use this list in all future session so you can see how we turn these pain points into business opportunities and then evaluate them to decide which one is the best to pursue. I'll start with identifying a few pain points.

• Scheduling specialist doctor appointments.
• Setting up browser residential proxies for scraping.
• Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.
• Getting better at climbing

Next lets rank the level & frequency of pain for each of those out of 5. Again, the exact numbers matter a lot less than the context that they reveal.

• Scheduling specialist doctor appointments.
  • Pain: 3 | Relatively time-consuming, can be very frustrating.
  • Frequency: 2 | Recurring problem but generally infrequent
• Setting up browser residential proxies for scraping.
  • Pain: 5 | Huge time sink, especially if you've never done it before.
  • Frequency: 1 | Infrequent, once you do it once next time it's a lot easier.
• Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.
  • Pain: 3 | Requires staying up late in off hours, language issues can cause missed reservations
  • Frequency: 3 | Recurring but tied to an individuals trip frequency
• Getting better at climbing
  • Pain: 2 | Plateauing in progress is frustrating
  • Frequency: 4 | Happens more and more as you improve

Finally, let's add a niche rating to each of them (higher == more niche).

• Scheduling specialist doctor appointments.
  • Niche: 1 | Pretty much everyone needs to schedule specialists at one point
• Setting up browser residential proxies for scraping.
  • Niche: 5 | Very niche, for developers looking to do a specific type of work.
• Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.
  • Niche: 3 | Distinct group but fairly sizable
• Getting better at climbing
  • Niche: 2 | Not everyone but a very large group of people climb.

This is a fantastic baseline for us to get started with. Next up we'll talk about researching these opportunities to understand the market size, current solutions, and possible differentiators.

1.4 | Researching Prospective Opportunities

This phase is where we can start really digging into our opportunities and start filtering out ones that don't meet what we're looking for. We'll go over what questions you're looking to answer and what those answers mean. As we do so I'll walk through an example using one of our identified opportunities from above.

The example we're going to be using is this opportunity:

>Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.

A Brief Warning on Over Researching

Research is incredibly important for deciding what business you want to start. However, it's incredibly easy to fall into a permanent research & planning phase without ever putting the rubber to the road. I know tons of people who want to become entrepreneurs and start their own business and the "research and planning" phase is where the vast majority of them get stuck and never push past. It's important to go into this phase with a clear intention to start building once some of your assumptions about a space are validated.

My recommendation would be to time box your research to 10 hours for any opportunity.

What is the Competition?

Your first question whenever you identify a possible opportunity is to look for other businesses in the space and see how they are addressing is. Many new entrepreneurs will take finding competition as a red flag for the space. However, it's quite the opposite.

You want to find competition.

If you're researching a space and find no other businesses solving that or a similar problem then you're very likely in a space that won't work. The reason for this is that it's pretty rare to have a truly new idea. Meaning someone else has probably also tried to build what you're thinking and failed because no one will pay for it, it's not possible, or some other reason. To be clear, the competition doesn't need to be exactly like what you're thinking of but you do want to find companies that solve the same underlying issue.

Sometimes you may actually stumble upon an opportunity that's truly new and will work. This is fairly rare but if you find yourself in this situation you could be on a gold mine where you get to sell into a vacuum without any direct competition. If you are unable to find any competition I'd recommend confirming that at least one of these are true before pressing forwards. If none of them are, it's very likely the space won't work.

• You're solving a problem based on a brand-new technology
  • If this is the case you should be able to find tangential products that have solved similar problems.
• You're in an extremely niche space
  • If this is the case, research similar products in related niches.

What you're looking for

What we're looking for when doing research is companies in the space that are solving the same pain point we've identified. The purpose of this is to give us some validation of the space as well as use our competitors products as learning resources. Many of the challenges you will face by starting a company are the same that your competitors have and using them as inspiration will help you skip those challenges and give you key insights on how you can stand out amongst them.

Here's the questions you want to find answers to when viewing competitors:

1. What's their pricing strategy?
   1. We want to understand what the market is currently paying for.
   2. We also want to know how they charge?
      1. When do they ask for payment? Is it subscription based or 1 time purchase?
2. What's their current size & how did they grow?
   1. number of employees is an easy to find gague of size
   2. do they have investor backing or are they bootstrapped?
3. How do they solve the pain point?
4. How are they framing their solution?
   1. what phrasing do they use on their landing page?
   2. what differentiators are they calling out?
   3. how open are they about price?
      1. this can give you an idea of how price sensitive a space is

Example walkthrough

>Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.

For our example, I was able to identify some low tech "travel agencies" that do the bookings by hand as well as a marketplace site for p2p selling of reservations. Here's what I learned...

What's their pricing strategy?

The agencies charge a flat fee dependent on the reservation and the difficulty to get it. For example, Something that's in high demand might be $100 while something that's easier to get might be $10. The marketplace company charges a ~25% fee to the seller of the reservation. So if they sell a $100 reservation the marketplace takes $25.

What's their current size & how did they grow?

The "agencies" i saw were small facebook groups with seemingly single business owners. The marketplace company has some public numbers around volume to attract sellers. They currently claim to have processed ~$12m in transactions over the last 12 months.

All players in the space are bootstrapped and grew organically.

How do they solve the pain point?

Provide either a "book for me" option or reservation "swapping" (this may not be an option depending on the establishments policies)

How are they framing their solution?

They're speaking straight towards the difficulty of acquiring specific reservations. Such as "Can't get a reservation at XYZ in new york?"

Where are the Customers?

The next thing we need to understand about our opportunities are where we can actually find customers. This is important for understanding how a difficult it is to get your solution out there as well as it being a key component for you evaluating an opportunity against your skill-set.

Here's what we need to answer:

1. Who are our customers?
   1. This should hopefully be largely answered by our niche evaluation
2. Where can we find them?
   1. where do they spend time both online & offline?
   2. If i asked you to find just 1 potential customer for the product online, how long would it take?

Those two questions give us important context to answer one of our first critical questions which is...

Example Walkthrough

>Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.

Who are our customers?

Leisure & business travelers

Where can we find them?

Google search (SEO) for reservations, travel social media influencers, travel platforms / forms / subreddits.

Marketing or Sales Company?

When you're building a business there's two ways to reliably reach customers. Those are Marketing and Sales.

Basically every startup is either a Marketing or a Sales company early on. It's very rare that a company needs significant investment in both early on. It's very likely that only one of these channels will be very effective for you early on.

Here's some indicators the opportunity needs a Marketing company:

• Easily target-able audience
• Lower cost product / low average deal size
• Simple self setup for the user
• No contracts necessary
• Likely selling to individuals

Here's some indicators the opportunity needs a Sales company:

• High cost product / high deal size
• Complex setup process
• Contract or volume commitments
• Likely selling to businesses

This should be our first big filter for our opportunities. If you find that the opportunity warrants a sales business but you expect the price for the product to be extremely low, then that is a huge indicator that it may be a bad business to pursue as you'd have a hard time making a functioning sales team if you can't afford to pay the sales team any commission.

Like everything, This isn't a perfect science. There's some totally viable businesses for example, that are marketing companies but have an expensive product. The goal of these questions are to make sure you're thinking about the right things.

Example Walkthrough

>Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.

Given what we've learned it's clear that this would be a marketing company.

• Low cost product
• Easily target-able audience
• Selling to individuals

How Big is the Market?

In 1.3 we spent some time giving our opportunities "Niche" scores. This is an important factor for determining how big your potential market size is for a given opportunity, but it's far from the entire puzzle. We're going to talk through how to evaluate the rough total addressable market size and then from there see how much revenue you could reasonably capture. To do that we'll use TAM, SAM, SOM.

TAM SAM SOM

Tamsamsom

First off lets talk about what TAM SAM SOM even means...

TAM: Total Addressable Market - Maximum possible market

SAM: Serviceable Addressable Market - Segment of market reachable

SOM: Serviceable Obtainable Market - Portion of market easily captured

We're not going to do a full evaluation. You can spend a lot of time on this really diving in and doing research to get an accurate TAM/SAM/SOM but that would not be worth the effort at this stage. We'll talk about doing a full evaluation more in the getting investment section.

For now, we're going to do a really simple version. Specifically focusing on the SAM & SOM. Now that you've done some research on the space we can estimate the rough opportunity size. To do so we need some of the numbers you sourced from prior research. Those being:

• Rough number of people in your space
• Rough number of people in need of your solution
  • This is different than total size of a space. Not everyone in a space will experience the same pain point.
  • If you cant find some data, feel free to make some assumptions.
• How much you think you can charge
  • If it's a physical good this should be your take after the cost of the good
• Frequency of purchases x year
  • Number of times someone would pay for your solution a year. If this is a subscription then the value is 12.

Now we can do some simple math to get our SAM & SOM. TAM = # of people in space * charge amount * charge frequency SAM = # of people in need * charge amount * charge frequency SOM = SAM * .1 (10% of SAM)

If you need to make any assumptions it's always best to anchor on the lower end. The number doesn't need to be super precise. It's just to give us a general size of the space.

Example Walkthrough

>Booking high demand restaurants / experiences in other countries prior to a trip.

# of people in space Here's how we'll estimate this market. Let's start with the TAM by getting the total count of international travelers globally. This fluctuates but it's usually around ~40m.

# of people in need Now we need to get an idea of how many of those travelers need to book high demand experiences. There's not a ton of data on this so I'll have to use some anecdotes from people I know. Out of my friends that have traveled recently ~10% have booked high demand experiences. This is a small and bias data set and I'd wager that the real number is very likely lower than that given my friends groups preferences. I'll adjust it slightly down and put it at 6%.

how much we can charge As for how much we can charge it's easy to find data on this using competitors. There's a decent range, but we'll anchor in the middle at $50 / order.

purchase frequency Although there may be repeat orders or multiple orders / trip, it's hard to know the exact frequency so we'll index low and set this to 1.

That gives us...

TAM - $2bn SAM - $120m SOM - $12m

One of the competitors I researched had some yearly volume numbers public and they do ~12m a year in volume so my rough estimates ended up pretty close to reality.

Now that you've researched your potential opportunities we're ready to make some decisions. In the next section we'll talk about how to compare these and pick winners.

1.5 | Categorizing Opportunities

Now that we've done a self evaluation, idea generation, and research we're ready to boil all of that down to an easy to consume list for you to see everything at a glance.

We're going to create a list of all of our opportunities and then have 3 additional columns for the following values:

• Timeline To Ship
• Opportunity Size
• Confidence

You can build this list wherever you want but something like Google Sheets works great.

Now list out each of your opportunities then we can begin assigning values. Here's what each of the values means:

Timeline To Ship

Possible values:

• < 1 Month
• 1 - 3 Months
• 3+ Months
• Ongoing

What this is asking is how long until you have some finished version of a lean version of a product that would capture the opportunity. It doesn't need to be perfect and the idea isn't to never work on it ever again. The main thing you're trying to gauge here is how easily can you stand something up.

These timelines are very driven by your own individual skillset. If you want to build a SAAS but have never written a line of code and have never used a low code tool before than this timeline is going to be a longer than it'd be for a tenured engineer for example.

NOTE: If a lot of our opportunities have a 3+ month timeline to ship... You're very likely not thinking lean enough. It is quite rare to actually need to develop something for that long before proving it out.

Opportunity Size

Possible values:

• Low (< 500k)
• Mid (< 1m)
• Large (< 10m)
• Venture

This should be driven by your SOM that you calculated in 1.4.

Anything that's larger than $10m in SOM we'll label as "Venture" opportunity size. That means we're starting to get into the space of opportunities that Venture Capital firms could be interested in investing in (tons of nuance here, we'll get into this in way more detail in later sections).

Confidence

Possible values:

• Low (< 10%)
• Fair (10% < 50%)
• Likely (50% < 80%)
• High (>80%)

This value should be driven by a combination of your research of the space and your own ability to execute on it (your skillset).

The percentages are meant to evaluate how likely you think you can make something that generates ANY money at all.

This is why opportunities that solve pain points you experience is such a great starting point. If you would buy the product you're thinking of making then your confidence score here should be high.

Choosing A Winner

So now that you've got your list it's time to pick what opportunity you'd like to pursue.

This is where you really come into play. I don't have a formula on what combination of traits makes an opportunity a winner. That's extremely dependent on you and what you want. Your goal now is to use the context you've gathered about these opportunities to make the best decision for you.

Although I don't have any silver bullet formula here's some things to think about...

As timeline to ship decreases, need for high confidence also decreases.

If you're able to crank out a lean version of a product very quickly you don't necessarily need to be extremely confident it'll work. If you can prove out the concept in just a few weeks, it can be totally worth the risk to try a lower confidence opportunity.

Bigger scale does not equal better space

There are a lot of reasons to not want to target massive spaces. You'll have more competition with more resources. Making it a lot harder to really stand out. Depending on your goals it might be better to build a business in a more niche space with a smaller opportunity size.

Not to say venture scale opportunities aren't worth chasing, they are of course. However, I'd recommend a very high confidence before diving in.

1.6 | Testing The Market

At this point you should have an idea of the opportunity you want to pursue. Now we'll build the leanest possible solution and then test the market. The goal of this is to get ten paying customers. Once you've done that you should feel very convicted that this is an opportunity worth chasing and you'll critically have a decent sized user group to talk to and learn about their needs / use cases for your product.

What you're trying to learn

I want to be very clear with what this is for and what indicators you want to really look for. I'll list them out plain and simple for you to easily reference then explain some more detailed thoughts.

1. Were my assumptions / research about the opportunity correct?
2. Can I get customers?
3. What do customers want?

Let's dive into each of these a little bit so i can paint some additional color on what you should look to answer.

>Were my assumptions / research about the opportunity correct?

In the prior sections we discussed different techniques to evaluate and research opportunities. It's important you're able to confirm as much of this as possible. This is extremely valuable not just because the information itself is useful for this specific opportunity but also because it'll give you confidence or insights on how to adjust your research and evaluation techniques for the future.

>Can I get customers?

The exact number is relatively arbitrary and dependent on what you're building. Ten is probably right for most opportunities. However, this is very up to the exact product you're building. Some products don't really have "paying" customers but rather generate revenue from advertisements or other means. The most important thing is to be intentional about what concerns you're trying to validate.

The purpose of this is to get people in your target market to pay for the solution you're providing. Your ability to find these customers and how difficult it is to get them bought in on what you're making are key indicators for if you should commit to a space. If you have to talk to one hundred people who are in your target market before anyone is even remotely interested... it's a good sign you are not in an opportunity you should chase or your current approach is very wrong.

>What do customers want?

In order to test the market you're going to have to make some initial assumptions of what kind of product or solution you should offer to address an opportunity. A good chunk assumptions will likely be very wrong. The feedback on what's good and bad about your ideas for your solution is critically important. You might find that the bulk of the problems you're trying to address are already solved quite well by an existing solution, and you'll need to drastically adjust your approach or drop the opportunity all together.

The leanest possible solution...

In order to test the product you'll need to have something to sell the customer. This should not be an "MVP" in the traditional sense. You instead want the simplest possible iteration of your proposed idea to address a opportunity.

It is insanely easy to over-engineer or over-build your first iteration. You're not building your dream product. You're not building an MVP. You might not even have to build anything at all... I know quite a few people that have gotten through this phase with a simple google form and some manual work. Anything that is not directly addressing the problem you're trying to solve you should not include.

The goal here is to confirm our assumptions and analysis of the opportunity space and our idea. Giving us the confidence to go all in and truly focus on chasing the opportunity.

Finding your first customers

By this point you should have a good idea of where to source and find your customers. The most reliable way to do this is to find them in person and have a conversation with them about what you're building.

Please lean into the phase that you're in. Far too many founders try to seem like they are more professional or established than they are. They'll spend a bunch of time making an attractive landing page, professional business cards, or even swag for their pre-launch product. On paper, it might seem like presenting yourself as a professional established company would help attract customers by building trust. To be clear though, this isn't actually the case and in the vast majority of the businesses I've built or been a part of building the first few sales done by the founders are often times some of the easiest. People love transparency and love aspiring entrepreneurs. You as a founder talking directly to a potential customer is not something that is possible at large companies. Lean in to where you're at. Approach potential customers with a humble eagerness to help and understand the problems they're facing. Generally, people will want to root for you / support you.

There's no one size fits all solution for finding your first customers so instead, here's some tools to add to your tool-belt for you to implement depending on what you're trying to build...

Advisor Shares

Giving out a small advisor share package to early customers is a great way to get them on board. Especially if your target end user is a fairly prestigious group such as lawyers, doctors, or executives. You don't want this to be a significant amount of equity. Typically, 0.1-0.5% total. I usually like to frame these in total # of shares. Bigger # = Better.

This also lets you cash in on something called the Ikea effect. People love something more when they feel like they were a part of making it. Giving key customers a very small ownership stake early on gives them a huge incentive to be a fantastic source of feedback, a long term customer, and makes them very likely to roll with the punches as you figure out the kinks.

Discounts

It's very important that you still charge for what you're offering. Giving away your offering for free can significantly impact the quality of the feedback you're receiving. There's a few different kinds of discounts that can be valuable at this phase. Here's a few to consider...

• Selling At Cost: Your goal at this phase isn't to make money. A lot of the time I like to sell the service "at cost" to the customers at this phase. That means you're just breaking even with the sale. In my companies early stages, this is what we did. We simply charged the fee we'd break even on with no additional costs.
• Godfather Offer: Putting together a extremely competitive price that you can then offer long term to a client is a good way to get them bought in for the long term.
• Free Trial: Giving things away for free is not ideal but depending on your space this can be an expectation from your customers. It's important you do collect payment information and a agreed upon date to begin charging. That allows you to still get that same investment as a full paying customer as they'll be evaluating if the product is worth the money you will charge at some future date.

Know when to fold

This is very likely the most time you've invested into any of your ideas up until this point. It can be very easy to get to this phase and try to force something to work. This is made worse by how common the bullshit "never give up" mindset is in the entrepreneur community.

So I'll say it.

PLEASE GIVE UP WHEN SHIT ISN'T WORKING

You are still so early on in this process. Do not get stuck trying to sell a product the market is not accepting. Be ready to rapidly drop your ideas and assumptions about the space or even to drop the space all together and look for a different opportunity to chase.

You should "never give up" on your dream of being an entrepreneur, but you should be incredibly ready to give up on specific opportunities when your ideas are not panning out.

1.7 | Committing

Congratulations! You've gotten through the phase where the vast majority of potential businesses die. Provided you got the validation you were seeking out when testing the market it's now time to do what very well may be the hardest thing for many entrepreneurs....

> You need to commit.

Once you find something that is showing you good signs you need to commit. As an entrepreneur myself, I know how hard it is to just work on one thing... case and point by me writing this shit right now instead of working on my startup. You probably have a bunch of other ideas you are excited about the potential of and are interested in exploring... But unfortunately, your limited resource is always time.

That's all folks :)

I’ve been studying recent YC batches trying to figure out what actually clears the bar. (I know PG says don’t pattern-match on demo day. I’m looking at the founders, not the ideas.)

One thing I can’t stop noticing: a lot of founders are 19–23, building in industries they’ve never worked in. Legal, fintech, healthcare, defense. Meanwhile the standard advice is “founder-market fit” i.e. you need unfair insight into the problem. So how does a college student have unfair insight into insurance underwriting?

Some guesses I’ve been kicking around:

- maybe founder market fit means something different for young founders - obsession and weird depth on a niche they’ve been nerding out on for years, even if never professionally.

- Maybe in an AI-native world, shipping a working prototype in a domain you don’t know is itself the proof.

- Or maybe I’m wrong about the pattern and survivorship bias is doing the work.

Would love to hear from anyone who got in young without industry chops - what did you actually say in the interview when they pushed on “why you”? And any partners/alumni who’ve watched this up close.

Applying S26, two rejections deep. Trying to actually learn something this time instead of just reapplying harder.

Don't post much but I've been lurking here forever and this sub helped me think bigger back when I was dead broke. So here's the full story.

It's 2019, I'm working a shitty sales job in real estate making about $40K a year. My now wife is babysitting a set of twins to help with bills and we just found out she's pregnant. Yay? We sat down and did the math one night. The math was ugly. We needed more money coming in but every business idea I looked at needed like $10K+ to start or some skill set I didn't have time to learn. Dropshipping, SMMA agencies, trading Crypto etc.. all of it felt out of reach. But there was one thing I actually knew how to do. I knew how to get residential cleaning clients. Here's the embarrassing part..I had already tried a cleaning business in 2017 with my brother, a maid service. It was terrible. Crews calling in, Clients saying stuff went missing. Everyone had different expectations. Every house was different. Different furniture, different level of dirty, different level of crazy lol. I was putting out fires every single day and barely making money. 6 months later my brother and I decided to shut it down. I told myself never again.

One night I couldn't sleep. I'm laying there basically trying to bribe the universe for some kind of opportunity to make more money and this one memory kept coming back to me. I couldn't shake it. When my brother and I had the maid service there was this one client. A realtor who also managed rental properties. One month this guy sent us about 20 houses to clean. All empty. Ready to be listed or moved into. No furniture to deal with. No clients breathing down our necks. Nobody accusing us of stealing their stuff. Just empty houses, clear scope, in and out. I remember laying there thinking man.. if every single job was like that I could handle hundreds of these a month.

That thought would not go away.

So the next day as it typically happened my wife and I were talking about money making ideas and ways to bring in more cash. I was hesitant to bring up the cleaning business because my wife saw first hand what happened with the one my brother and I had tried back in 17'. She watched that thing crash and burn so I knew she wasn't gonna be thrilled hearing me pitch another cleaning company. But I brought it up anyway with one HUGE condition.. we only clean empty homes. Move in, move out, post construction. Thats it. No maid service. No office cleanings. No "well maybe just this one time." We said no to everything else. That was the hardest part honestly. When you're broke and someone is waving money in your face for a job outside your lane.. everything in you says just take it. We didn't. And looking back that discipline is the single biggest reason we were able to scale. When you niche down this hard a few things happen. Every crew you hire learns one type of cleaning. The training stays simple. Quality stays consistent. You're not asking a deep clean specialist to figure out commercial cleanings. and the big one.. you don't need to be local. The home is empty. Nobody is there. You dispatch a crew, they send photos when they get there and when its done, client gets invoiced. I've literally never been to most of the markets we service and I have never had to step in a house we were hired to clean.

Where we are now, we've done over $4M in revenue since we started and are netting $25k-$30K per month. We're in 6 markets across 3 states with 20+ crews, all 1099 subs, and 3 virtual assistants running the day to day. My wife and I have never cleaned a single house. We run everything from our place in the Texas Hill Country, we homeschool our kids, and some months we travel for weeks and the business doesn't even notice we're gone. What I'd tell someone starting this from scratch is to pick one type of cleaning/service and say no to everything else! Specialization is what makes this thing scalable. Your first clients come from taking action and letting strangers know about your services. This may look like facebook posts in community groups, direct calls to realtors, emailing builders etc.. Not sexy, but it works. Don't hire employees!! find subcontractor crews who already have their own supplies and equipment and most importantly they already have cleaning experience. Keeps your overhead close to zero. Get a VA earlier than you think you need one, best $500/month I've ever spent starting out. And don't try to be everywhere at once. Get one market dialed in first, prove it works, then copy paste into the next city. One more thing, this business is not glamorous. Nobody at a dinner party is gonna be impressed when you say you run a cleaning company. But when your wife doesn't have to work, your kids see you every single day, and your bills are paid months in advance.. that beats impressing strangers. I hope this post helps someone focus, niche down and analyze what you are already good at. Use your current knowledge to service a gap in the market/industry and stop saying yes to everything.

I’ve been building online businesses since I was 18. I’m 21 now. Across that time I keep watching the same thing happen in this sub and others: someone posts excited about starting a dropshipping store / SaaS / Etsy shop / agency, gets sold a $997-$2,000 course, and disappears six months later.
The information that would have saved them isn’t hidden. It’s just scattered across BLS reports, MIT studies, platform earnings disclosures, and academic papers. Nobody puts it in one place because there’s no money in telling people the truth — there’s money in selling them the dream.
Spent the last few months pulling it together. Sharing what I found, model by model. Keeping each one short. Happy to go deeper on any of them in comments.

Dropshipping
• Startup cost: $200–$2,000
• Time to first sale: 2–8 weeks
• ~75% of new dropshippers quit within 6 months
• Median monthly profit (year 1, those still active): ~$400
• The math: average margin 15%, ad costs eat 12%, you net 3%. On a $30 sale, that’s 90 cents.
Print-on-Demand
• Startup cost: $0–$100
• Top 10% of POD sellers make $1,000+/mo. Median seller makes under $100/mo.
• Winners pick a tiny niche audience and serve them deeply. Generic “trendy designs” stores rarely break $50/mo.
Solo SaaS
• Median time to $10K MRR: 18–30 months (gurus sell “90 days”)
• Median solo SaaS MRR after 12 months: under $500
• Most don’t fail dramatically — they just never grow. Survivorship bias is brutal here. You only see the winners on Twitter.
Freelancing
• Startup cost: $0
• Time to fill schedule: 6–9 months for most
• Year 1 income: usually under $30K
• Year 3 income: often six figures if you raised your rates — most don’t
• Most freelancers fail by underpricing themselves into burnout, not by lack of work.
YouTube (monetized)
• Median time to monetization eligibility: ~22 months
• Channels that ever hit YPP: under 10% of those who try
• Median monthly ad revenue once monetized: $200–$800
• Ad revenue is the worst monetization on YouTube. The ones who make real money do it through products, sponsorships, or sending traffic to a business they own.
Agency
• Startup cost: $0–$5K
• Time to consistent $10K/mo: 12–24 months for most
• ~60% close within 5 years
• Client acquisition is the entire game. Skill at the actual service barely matters compared to skill at sales.
Affiliate marketing
• Startup cost: $50–$1,000
• Time to first commission: 3–9 months
• Median monthly income year 1: under $200
• SEO-based affiliate sites take 12–18 months to rank. AI-content sites are getting deindexed at scale by Google. The window has narrowed since 2023.
Course business
• Course businesses work if you have an audience first. Without one, it’s a 1–2 year audience-building project before the course makes anything.
• Almost everyone selling “how to launch a course” is selling to people without audiences. That’s the actual scam.
Newsletter business
• Time to first $1K/mo (sponsorships): 12–24 months at consistent posting
• Under 5% of newsletters monetize meaningfully
• The math only works if you grow to 10K+ engaged subs, which takes 2+ years for most.

A few patterns across all of them:
1. Time-to-revenue is universally underestimated. Almost every guru-promised timeline is 3–10x faster than reality.
2. Median income is disclosed nowhere. Survivorship bias is the entire industry. You hear from the 5% who won, never from the 95% who quit.
3. “Passive income” is mostly a lie. None of these are passive. The ones marketed as passive (POD, dropshipping, affiliate) require more hours per week than most jobs in the first 12 months.
4. The fastest path to revenue is freelancing. The slowest is anything content-dependent without an existing audience. If you need money this year, sell a service. Don’t build an asset.
5. The course industry’s real product is hope. A $997 course’s actual value is the 3 weeks of motivation it gives you. Most courses get refunded or abandoned.
I’m not saying don’t try any of these. I’m saying know the actual numbers before you commit a dollar. The people who succeed tend to be the ones who showed up with realistic expectations and survived the boring part — not the ones who bought into the dream hardest.
Happy to go deeper on any model in comments. Ask me anything.

For context, I work at a startup in Singapore. My boss is one of those “guru” supposed legends and is meant to be a expert in UX, design, sales and marketing.

When I joined, I was told that we were weeks away from launching. They had already raised funding so it all sounded pretty solid.

It has now been over 9 months and we still have not launched.

The product is just an appointment scheduling SaaS. It is meant to be simple. Create a booking page, let customers pick a service, choose a time and confirm etc.

But my boss keeps adding features. Every time we get close, something new gets thrown in. Now it has turned into this strange mix of HR tool, appointment system and bookkeeping platform. It is getting harder and harder to even understand what the product is meant to be and who we are meant to sell to.

At some point I just got fed up and demotivated. I would leave, but the job market is not great right now, so instead of quitting I decided to just build what we should have launched months ago.

I mocked up some flows in Figma, used Claude AI to help generate most of the code, Supabase for the backend, and Resend for emails. In total, it costs me roughly $50 monthy to run the entire platform.

I then went ahead and started to get AI to generated blog posts, spent nothing on marketing, and left it alone.

To my surprise, people started signing up and now I actually have paying monthly subscribers.

Which is mad, because this started as petty revenge and now it is slowly turning into something real.

Anyway, that is my ramble.

I was digging into a piece on the biggest challenges for web startups (from Lemon.io), and it got me thinking about how much of the "traditional" web dev struggle is about to be automated away by AI Agents.

We used to spend months on API integrations, complex database schemas, and state management. But in the current landscape, the "startup challenge" isn't about writing the code—it's about orchestration.

If an agent can autonomously handle a user request, fetch data from three different APIs, and update a DB without a human-written controller, the "Startups vs. Web Dev" debate changes entirely.

The new hurdles I'm seeing:

1. The "Black Box" Debugging: How do you scale a startup when your core logic is handled by an agent that might hallucinate a workflow once every 1,000 requests?
2. Latency vs. Logic: Traditional web dev is fast. Agentic workflows are slow. At what point does the "intelligence" of an agent-driven startup become a UX liability?
3. The Seniority Shift: Does a startup even need a "Full Stack" dev anymore, or do they need an Agent Architect who understands prompt chaining and vector memory more than CSS?

To the builders here: Are you still building traditional CRUD apps for your startups, or have you moved entirely to an agent-led architecture?

What’s the biggest "stability" hurdle you've hit when trying to replace a standard backend with an autonomous agent?