r/Startup_Ideas

Built a yes/no voting site for startup ideas. Free to vote, $4.99/mo to post your idea and get real feedback.

Stuff that surprised me while building it:

• SQLite on a cheap VPS is completely fine for an early product. I was way overthinking the database situation.
• next-auth v5 has basically no real documentation. Had to figure out a lot by trial and error.
• Stripe was somehow the easiest part. Had it working in like 30 min.
• Email verification has way more moving pieces than it should for something so common.r

Would love brutal feedback — on the idea, the UX, the pricing, anything.

https://rate-my-startup.com/

I've already got multiple business partners, planning on using my massive local popularity to get a head start, got people I trust in finance like no other, any advice?

I’m looking for a few SaaS products to feature this week.

On average, a single dedicated video across our network brings:

• 10+ paid users
• plus a strong tail of free signups

If you’re currently doing cold outreach or just posting and hoping for traction, this puts your product directly in front of real demand.

I’m also a video clipper/editor, so we can turn your SaaS into short-form content that actually performs on TikTok.

Drop your link below — I’ll pick a few that are a strong fit.

If you prefer to move fast or keep things private, feel free to DM me.

over the last year i noticed something strange. there is more marketing advice available than ever.

more tools.

more ai workflows.

more “growth hacks.”

more content explaining content.

yet a lot of marketers and small business owners seem more confused, not less.

one week people say seo is dead. next week everyone says linkedin is the answer. then it becomes short form video.

then community building. then ai search optimization. then cold email again.

feels like people are jumping between tactics faster than they can test anything properly.

the funny part is that some of the best performing businesses i’ve seen lately are doing very simple things consistently:

- clear offer

- fast follow up

- useful content

- strong customer trust

- patience

meanwhile other brands are running 12 tools, automating everything, posting everywhere, and still struggling to convert traffic into customers.

curious what others here think.

has marketing genuinely become harder in 2026 or are people just overcomplicating it now?

Simple test: open ChatGPT and ask “best [your industry] tools/services.”
Are you in the answer?
Most businesses I’ve spoken to have never checked. They invest in SEO, content, ads but have zero visibility into whether AI is sending them customers or ignoring them completely.
Google has Search Console. There’s no equivalent for ChatGPT or Perplexity.
Is this a problem you’ve experienced? Would you pay for a tool that tracked this automatically?

Been running a small experiment with AI and product design lately and honestly… it’s kinda wild what’s possible now.

If you have a rough app, landing page, dashboard, SaaS idea, or side project that looks “prototype-ish”, I’d love to pick a few projects and spend one or maybe two days redesigning them into something that feels much more polished and production ready.

I can also share the code in a private GitHub repo so you can actually use and build on top of it.

This is mostly an experiment for now. I’m exploring how far AI can go when combined with design systems, frontend engineering, UX thinking, motion, and rapid iteration.

I’ll probably tweak the format as I learn what works and what doesn’t.

If you want, drop your project below or DM me. Curious to see what we can make.

Cloudflare has left its original mission. Instead of flying to Mars - its trying to find a void in space nobody wants to go to.

Clients need

• A fast, reliable CDN
• WAF
• Bot defences
• Click Fraud defences
• A network that does not block AI crawlers

Stop vibe coding SEO tools that check your page title length or pagespeed and the usual checklist of non-helpful non-SEO tasks that you think makes up SEO and build some useful tools!

I have shipped 6 startups. Most of them died because I built first and looked for demand later. Classic developer disease.

Before I touch the keyboard on startup #7, I want to actually pressure-test the idea before falling for the same mistake.

The concept: An agent that scans GitHub issues, Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, Indie Hackers, G2 and Capterra (comments included, because that is where the real pain leaks out). It surfaces problems that get mentioned repeatedly and scores each one from 1 to 10 based on how often it shows up, how emotionally charged the language is, and whether people are already paying for bad workarounds.

10 means "people are actively asking for someone to build this."

Once you ship something for a high-scoring problem, the same agent runs personalized outreach to the exact people who voiced that pain in the first place. So you get validated demand on the way in, and warm prospects on the way out.

Two things I genuinely want feedback on:

1. Is "pain scoring" too fuzzy to be useful, or would a 1 to 10 signal actually change how you decide what to build next?

2. What is the part of this that would make you NOT use it? I would rather find the deal-breaker now than after 6 months of building.

Not trying to pitch anything. I do not have a landing page, a waitlist, or even a name for it yet. Just trying to avoid making startup #7 the 7th graveyard project.

What would you find value from a tool like this?

There are thousands of builders shipping in public every day across X, Reddit, Instagram, everywhere.
But there’s no single place to watch all of it happen.
So I’m building one.

You land on the site and you see what people are building right now. Their real updates, their real progress, pulled from wherever they’re posting. X threads, Reddit posts, IG reels, doesn’t matter. It all lives here.

No likes. No views. No engagement theater. Just a save button. That’s how we figure out what’s actually interesting to people.

Want to get featured? Connect the social accounts where you build in public. That’s your entire signup flow.

Day one I’m pulling 2 to 5k builders manually and seeding the platform. Pure market validation. If people come back and save things, we build further. If they don’t, we learn something.

The vision longer term is a place where you can search trending startup narratives, track what’s being built in real time, and never miss an interesting founder story again.

But right now it’s just one thing.
A front page for builders building in public.

I am an athlete and a physiotherapist, 31. I have wanted to build my own business for about two years but I never had an idea I actually believed in. I am good with people, good in sports, good with my hands, but I am not technical and I have no business background.

I tried a lot of ways to find an idea. Some of them I read about here on Reddit. I tried asking people directly. I asked my patients, my friends, my family what annoys them, what problems they have at work, what apps they hate. I got a long messy list but nothing on it felt like something I wanted to spend two years building.

I tried the "go somewhere new and you will get inspired" idea. I was already going to travel a bit last year to Thailand, so I paid more attention while I was away, watched how things worked in other places, took notes. It was interesting but honestly I came back with zero ideas I would actually build. Travel did not do it for me.

I tried posting questions on Reddit asking what problems people face. Got some answers, but mostly generic ones I had already thought of.

The thing that actually moved me forward was talking to an LLM. Not for ideas directly, more like a conversation. I would explain my situation, my background, what I am bad at, what I do not want to do, and just go back and forth for a long time. One evening I asked it where I should even be looking, and it gave me a few websites that collect or generate startup ideas.

I tried all of them. Most were just blog-post lists of ideas, the same recycled ones, nothing personalised. One was different. It works like Tinder, you swipe through startup ideas, and after you do a short quiz it personalises everything to your background, your skills, your weaknesses, your budget.

The reason why this website (it is called MyIdeapolis) worked for me and the others did not is that it did not just throw ideas at me, it filtered for someone like me. A non-technical person with a healthcare background and interest in sports.

The ideas it showed after the quiz were things I could actually see myself doing, not "build an AI platform." It also has an AI assistant inside that answers questions about whatever idea you pick. I asked it a lot of basic things about how to even start, and it gave me real steps.

I am not going to pretend I have launched anything yet. I have an idea I believe in, a plan, and a clear next step, which two years of asking around and one trip abroad never gave me. For the first time it does not feel random.

Sharing this mostly for the other non-technical people here who keep getting told to "just find a problem." That advice never worked for me. What worked was being shown options that actually fit who I am, instead of trying to invent something from nothing.

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

my friend built something that solves a pretty specific problem. google maps caps you at 20-60 results per search which is useless if you're trying to build a comprehensive business list for a whole city or country.

the fix he came up with is a grid system that divides any region into cells and queries each one separately via google's official places api. dense areas auto split into smaller grids, sparse ones skip it to save quota. tested it on germany and got 52k+ businesses in one run.

data per business is solid. phone, website, ratings, hours, coordinates, business status. n8n workflow then filters and pushes everything to google sheets automatically.

the question is — is this a real startup or just a useful tool? who would actually pay for this and what's the right model:

- one time purchase (buy the tool outright)

- saas with monthly credits

- done for you (we run the jobs, sell the lists)

target buyers would be cold email agencies, local marketing agencies, anyone doing outbound at scale

what do you think — real opportunity or too niche?

Last project: ~6 months building a B2C application before checking if the pain was real. It wasn’t. Classic error: confuse “users have the problem” with “it hurts enough to pay.”

The new project is B2B, so this time I validate it before building. That means discovery conversations with ~10 people in a specific niche. The obvious channel is LinkedIn, and I’ve never really used it. I created the account today, zero connections, no profile.

For those of you who have made B2B discovery or cold reach on LinkedIn, a question:

How was your process to find and reach the right people? Search/filter a specific role, who you sent a message to first, how the profile had to look for a stranger to respond. The specific steps, if you are willing to explain them.

Trying not to repeat the last time error in a new way, burning weeks in the wrong settings instead of in conversations.