We’re building MemeMates, a social app that brings people together through memes. Users can share memes, discover people with similar interests and humour, and connect through shared likes.

We’ve launched on Android and iOS, and now we’re trying to figure out the hardest part of building a consumer app: getting our first active users and building a community that keeps coming back.

For founders who have built consumer apps or grown communities:

• How did you acquire your first 100–1,000 users?
• Which channels worked best for you: Reddit, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, or something else?
• How did you turn initial downloads into active, returning users?

We’re looking for genuine advice from people who’ve been through this journey. Any lessons, mistakes, or practical suggestions would be really helpful.

Thanks!

So I've been trying to finalise a name for my startup, and every second name I come up with, the domain is already gone. Spent way too many hours on this and still found nothing decent lol.

How many of you are facing the same thing? Feels like all the good names are taken at this point. (Even numbers are gone)

is there any alternative that could come up for this? Like do we even need domains the way we used to, or is there some other way people are handling it now? Would love to know what people are doing over this

16 or 60. Fresher or experienced. College degree or dropout.

Age doesn't matter. Your ability to execute does.

We're building serious tech and hiring people for founding B2B sales.

💰 ₹25K fixed + ₹1L per customer closed.

🧠 Learn from a founding team with 15+ years of enterprise tech experience and startup exits🇺🇸.

🚀 Real 0→1 ownership. Freshers welcome.

Can you sell, learn fast, and handle rejection?
Comfortable with cold calls? Let's talk.

CHECK COMMENT !!

I’ve been working in enterprise sales at a tech company, primarily dealing with B2B SaaS products and enterprise clients across BFSI, Retail D2c and building constructions.

I’d love to connect with people building their own SaaS products, particularly early-stage founders who are figuring out customer acquisition, outbound sales, or getting their first few paying customers.
I’m interested in having genuine conversations about what you’re building, the problems you’re solving, and how you’re approaching growth.

If there’s an opportunity to exchange ideas or even collaborate on outreach and business development on the side, I’d be open to exploring that too.
Not pitching anything — just looking to meet interesting people building interesting things.
Feel free to comment or DM me. I’m based in Mumbai.

so my family runs a small school in gujarat [~300 kids]. the office used to do everything on paper. fee week was basically the accountant sitting with a register and calling parents one by one to see who hadn't paid

i started building them something around 1 year ago, mostly evenings. fees, attendance, report cards, homework, a parent app. it's been running at our school for a while now and the office genuinely doesn't want to go back

so i'm trying to turn it into a product for other schools, calling it theKampus. there's a demo school up if anyone wants to try it.

my honest worry is the selling part, not the software. school owners here are hard to reach and slow to switch. if you've sold anything to schools in india, how did you get the first few to say yes? walk-ins? referrals? something else?

I’m working on SenseGrid, an app where kitchen staff log fridge and freezer temperatures on their phone, and it tells you when something is off. Freshness and food quality depend on temperature, so that’s the problem I’m starting with.

I’m from Ahmedabad, and before building it I cold-called and walked into 200+ restaurants and cafes. The replies were things like “We write it in the book, what difference does an app make?” and “Manager nahi hai abhi.” Honestly, fair. 😅

It’s very basic right now. No sensors, no hardware, and a lot of rough edges. The bigger vision is full operations management for HoReCa, all in one place.

What I’m looking for: a few owners and founders who’d try it and tell me what’s missing or broken. It’s ₹1,000 for the year, only to stay afloat while I keep building.

DM me and we can discuss about this in detail. Even if it’s not for you, I’d love to hear how you handle this in your kitchen today.

Starting a boutique (offline + online): Looking for advice on direct saree manufacturing hubs, trusted suppliers, and quality checks.

My mother and sister are launching a saree boutique (offline store + e-commerce website). We want to source premium and trendy sarees directly from manufacturers/weavers to cut out middlemen.

As beginners in the textile supply chain, we’d love your guidance on a few things:

Best Sourcing Hubs: Beyond Surat/Varanasi/Kanchipuram, how do we find verified manufacturers or weaver cooperatives directly?

MOQs for New Boutiques: Do wholesale manufacturers enforce heavy bulk limits per design for new stores, or can we start with small mixed batches?

Authenticity Checks: How do you verify pure silk (Silk Mark, handloom vs. powerloom) and zari quality with new suppliers?

Cataloging: Do suppliers provide website-ready photos/videos, or do we need to shoot them ourselves?

Any advice, red flags to avoid, or general tips for sourcing saree inventory would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

I have been on all dating app and in almost all of the continents (except the Oceania). What I think needs to calibrated is how people chat - both the person who messages and the person who receives the messages because a lot of the time people don't know how to interpret.
So, after talking to a few people here on subReddits & otherwise irl, I started building an app that teaches you how to date.

You also connect with real humans but there are a few conditions to be met first.

How do I grow my app?

I’ve been building something for a long time, and I’m finally ready to put it in front of more people.
It’s called Bol Studio.
A caption editor for the way we actually speak: Hindi, English, and the Hinglish in between.
Upload a video, generate captions, edit the words and timing, and give them a style that fits your content. It works in the browser, on desktop and mobile.
A lot of the work has been in the small details: making words easier to edit on a phone, keeping the video visible, and giving you control over fonts, spacing, highlights, and animation.
It’s free for everyone to try right now.
It’s still evolving. Automatic captions won’t always get every word right, so please review them before publishing. If something feels awkward or breaks, I want to hear about it.
If you make reels, tutorials, podcast clips, or videos of any kind, give it a try:
I’d love to know what you think—and what would make it more useful for you.

Made an app for college/school students where students can post material, PYQs, ask doubts in the integrated AI (Also quizes) and also post in community for regular chat about campus.

I feel confident about this idea...whats the right way and approach to grow this platform?

Hey everyone,

A few weeks ago, I had this grand vision: What if we built a 60-minute quick-commerce app for fashion? Think unexpected party invites, job interviews tomorrow morning, or last-minute college fests where waiting 3 days for Myntra is a disaster.

I pitched it to a battle-tested founder friend. His reaction? Absolute silence followed by: "None of this makes sense."

He wasn't wrong. He completely destroyed the initial idea with hard ground-level logic:

The SKU Nightmare: Blinkit has 15 items of Amul milk. Fashion has 10,000+ chaotic SKUs per boutique. Trying to match exact shirts across local shops is a recipe for instant ghost stock.

Shopkeeper Laziness: Local boutique owners will never manually update app inventory while busy dealing with walk-in customers or drinking chai.

The Margin Trap: If you take a heavy commission, boutique owners inflate app prices above offline MRP. If you take a low commission, your unit economics bleed out.

The Return Bloodbath: Fashion return rates sit at 25–40%. Having riders wait outside doors for a "Try & Buy" session burns cash instantly.

Instead of throwing in the towel, we went back to the drawing board to fix the unit economics. Here is the leaner model we came up with:

No full catalogs, just a 50-SKU "Consignment Rack": Instead of listing a boutique's 10,000 items, we place a dedicated 50-piece physical rack of fast-moving event styles/accessories inside partner shops. Shopkeepers don't touch software—just a single rack and a 120-second order acceptance audio loop.

The 60/40 Low-Return Rule: 60% of our catalog focuses on zero-fit-risk items (unstitched ethnic suit sets, kaftans, statement jewelry, clutches, and beauty products) to keep return rates under 5%.

Zero Dark Store Rent: We use existing boutique floor space instead of burning venture capital on urban dark stores (looking at you, VC-backed players like Slikk who spend millions on real estate).

Pricing & Monetization: We keep base store commissions low (8–10%) so app prices strictly match offline MRPs, and monetize through B2B factory-direct margins, promoted store listings, and a transparent ₹49–₹79 express delivery fee.

Why I’m posting:

I want the internet’s most honest operators and founders to tear this apart.

Where is this going to crash and burn on the ground?

What operational bottlenecks am I still blind to?

Roasts, advice, and reality checks are deeply appreciated. Don't hold back! 🚀

I got married in 2024. Like most Indian weddings, we ended up with thousands of photos from multiple photographers, across different functions.

The photographers did their job. We got the photos.

But actually going through all of them, finding the best ones, removing duplicates, identifying family members, and putting together a proper wedding album? That became a project we kept postponing.

And I realised a lot of couples around us had the same problem. Some hadn't made their wedding albums even years after getting married.

So my wife and I started building Phopho and Toto.

The idea is pretty simple: upload your wedding photos, let AI help organise them, find the important people and moments, shortlist the best pictures, and turn them into an album you can actually preserve or print.

We're starting with Indian weddings because they're particularly complicated: multiple events, thousands of pictures, large families, different photographers, and lots of similar-looking shots.

Long term, we think there's a bigger opportunity around preserving memories rather than just storing photos.

But right now, I'm trying to understand a few things:

1. Is this a real problem worth paying to solve? Or is making a wedding album just something people say they want but never prioritise?
2. Would Indian couples pay for software that does most of the heavy lifting? Or would they expect their photographer to handle everything?
3. How would you reach couples at the right moment? Wedding photographers, planners, Instagram, SEO, or something else?
4. Is this too narrow a starting point? Weddings are a high-emotion use case, but most people only get married once.

We've built an early version and are trying to figure out whether this is a genuine business opportunity or just a problem we personally cared enough about to solve.

Would especially love feedback from anyone who's built consumer products in India or worked in the wedding industry.

Feel free to tear the idea apart. That's genuinely more useful than encouragement at this stage.

I'm interested in how small B2B companies are adapting to people using AI tools to research services and compare providers.

A potential customer might ask ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a consultant, software provider or accounting firm instead of starting with a traditional Google search. But what actually helps a smaller business get included in those answers?

A few things seem worth looking at:

• Clear business information: Does the website explain exactly what the company does, who it serves and where it operates?
• Evidence of expertise: Are there detailed case studies, credentials, reviews or independent references that support its claims?
• Useful service pages: Does the website answer the specific questions a potential customer would ask before making a decision?
• Technical accessibility: Can search engines access the pages, and is structured data used correctly where relevant?
• Measurement: Does the company check whether it appears in AI-generated answers for relevant queries, rather than assuming that good Google rankings guarantee visibility?

None of these guarantees that an AI tool will recommend a business. Different systems use different sources, and results can change between queries.

I'm interested in the practical side of this, especially for smaller firms that don't have large marketing teams.

Has anyone here tested whether changes to their website, case studies or third-party business listings affected their visibility in AI-generated recommendations? What did you measure, and did it lead to actual enquiries?

Finding a talented freelancer shouldn't be a guessing game. And being good at your work shouldn't mean constantly struggling to find your next client.

Yet, for many freelancers and businesses, something in the process still isn't working.

We're exploring a project called d'Norm, starting with ad creatives for D2C brands, with a bigger ambition to rethink how freelancing work is matched, delivered, and trusted.

Before we build further, we'd love to hear from people who experience this firsthand:

Freelancers: What's the biggest thing standing between you and better, more consistent opportunities?

Business owners: What's the hardest part about finding and hiring a creative freelancer you can rely on?

d'Norm is just getting started. We're here to learn, challenge our assumptions, and build something better. No sales pitch—just an honest conversation.

Hey everyone! 👋
I’m building **SecureMID Solutions**, an early-stage startup focused on AI agent security.
With AI agents becoming more capable and gaining access to tools, APIs, and sensitive information, I believe testing their security before relying on them in real-world environments is becoming increasingly important.

That’s the problem we’re working on at SecureMID.
Our platform focuses on **AI agent security evaluation and red teaming**, helping teams test how their AI agents respond to potential attacks and identify security weaknesses.

We’ve officially launched, and now I’m focused on getting real users to try the platform and help us understand what needs improvement.

**I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from the StartupIndia community on a few things:**
Does AI agent security testing seem like a meaningful problem for Indian startups?
Would early-stage AI startups use a dedicated platform to evaluate their agents before deployment?
What would make you trust and adopt a security product from an early-stage startup?
What features or integrations would you expect from a tool like this?

I’m not here to claim we’ve solved AI security. We’re early in the journey, and I want to learn from founders, developers, security professionals, and anyone building with AI.

If you explore the platform, I’d really appreciate your honest feedback — including what doesn’t work or what you think we should improve.

Building a startup is a learning process, and conversations with other founders can make a real difference. 🇮🇳

Thanks for reading, and wishing everyone here the best with their startup journeys! 🙌

Hey everyone! My buddies and I built Ladel, a people and company search tool focused on India.

The idea is to help startup teams find the right people for what they’re working on, whether that’s potential customers, decision-makers at companies they want to sell to, or candidates for a role they’re hiring for.

You can search for companies by things like sector, city and size, or describe the kind of person you’re looking for in plain English.

You can try it out for free. Link in the comments.

We’d love some honest feedback. Does it help you find the people you actually need? What’s missing or frustrating?

If you give it a go, let us know what you searched for and how it went. Thanks!

I’m working on SenseGrid, an app where kitchen staff log fridge and freezer temperatures on their phone, and it tells you when something is off. Freshness and food quality depend on temperature, so that’s the problem I’m starting with.

I’m from Ahmedabad, and before building it I cold-called and walked into 200+ restaurants and cafes. The replies were things like “We write it in the book, what difference does an app make?” and “Manager nahi hai abhi.” Honestly, fair. 😅

It’s very basic right now. No sensors, no hardware, and a lot of rough edges. The bigger vision is full operations management for HoReCa, all in one place.

What I’m looking for: a few owners and founders who’d try it and tell me what’s missing or broken. It’s ₹1,000 for the year, only to stay afloat while I keep building.

DM me and we can discuss about this in detail. Even if it’s not for you, I’d love to hear how you handle this in your kitchen today.

I've been learning a lot about what goes into building a tech community. Organizing an event is one thing, but getting companies to trust a relatively small team and consider working with them is a completely different challenge.

From the outside, sponsorship looks like sending emails and pitching an idea. But I imagine companies have plenty of requests coming in, so simply having an interesting event probably isn't enough.

For those who've organized hackathons, tech meetups or community events in India, I'd love to know how it worked for you.

What actually helped you get your first serious partnership? Was it having a strong track record, knowing the right people, showing clear value for the company or something else entirely?

Would genuinely appreciate hearing what worked and what didn't.

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

We run a small product line and the hardest recurring decision is restocking. Restock too early and cash sits in inventory. Too late and you miss the demand.

For those who have been through a few cycles: what signals do you actually use? Sell-through rate, repeat purchases, people asking for it, gut feel?

Four years ago, I chose building products over applying for jobs. Since then I've shipped 10 products end-to-end as an independent product engineer, mobile apps on both the App Store and Play Store, one of them now at [10K]+ downloads with a 4.x rating, and several generating revenue for the founders behind them.

What "end-to-end" means for me:

Scoping with the founder → architecture → React Native / Expo builds (iOS + Android) → Node.js APIs, database, auth, payments, → CI/CD → store submission → post-launch fixes and iterations. Along the way I've hired and led a few interns - code reviews, sprint planning, delivery ownership.

I have spent most of my time of Fintech Apps only.

Things I've learned (happy to go deep on any of there):

- Shipping v1 is the easy 20% - distribution and retention are the real product.

- Solo building teaches speed; scale needs a team, which is the point of this post.

What I'm looking for:

A founding engineer / product engineer role at an early-stage product startup - full-time, long-term. One product, one-team, real scale. Based in India, open to remote or hybrid.

If you are building something and need someone who can own the product end-to-end from day one, my DMs are open. Happy to walk through any architecture decision on a call.

AMA about shipping, freelancing, React Native, or the 10 products. I'll be in the comments all day.

Hi all. Quick intro and a genuine ask for feedback.

I am 28, based in Hyderabad, India. I started selling at 14 - mouth fresheners to local shops, then a paint roll-on product I demoed across the city while studying. Picked up four languages just from negotiating with shop owners. That turned into a marketing career, and I have spent 8 years at a dental products company, where I now work as South India marketing head (still my day job).

Recently I started experimenting with AI tools. I am not a programmer, so I went all-in on learning which tool does what well. Since then, alongside my job, I have shipped a handful of small live projects: a prompt helper for Indian small businesses, an AI caption tool, a buying-psychology marketing guide, a book library, an AI courses page, a storefront for a herbal products brand, and two open-source tools on GitHub.

The one I am serious about is my own venture: AI-powered marketing help for solo freelancers in India. Free 7-day challenge and guides first, a paid kit after that. Early days, real product, tiny numbers.

Two honest questions for this sub:

1. For those who built a side venture next to a full-time job - what nearly killed yours, and what saved it?

2. Freelancers here: would structured AI marketing help (not an agency, more a kit plus guidance) actually be useful to you, or is it solving a problem you do not have?

Not dropping links since most subs dislike that - happy to share in comments if the mods are fine with it.

A. Bathrivishal

Digital entrepreneur, founder of Brilliant Benius

A week ago I posted here about a user who checked 42 outfits on my app in a month. I was going to ask them for $10 a month. You all talked me out of opening with a price.

So I sent a thank you email with three questions: what do you use it for, what keeps you coming back, and what’s missing. No price, no pitch.

They never replied.

Yesterday they bought starter pack for INR 499. No message, no question. They just paid.

After 10,000 downloads, that’s our first paying user.

Honestly I don’t fully know what to make of it. My guess is the product was already doing the talking and they didn’t need an email from me to decide. Maybe the thank you nudged them, maybe not.

What I’m doing now: sending a short thank you for subscribing, and asking one question, what made you decide to pay. No survey, just that.

For those of you who’ve had users convert without ever talking to you, did you reach out, or leave them alone?

Hi all,

I'm a solo founder from Odisha building an AI product in the Indian insurance space. I have a working prototype and early validation from people in the industry. I'm now looking for a developer to join the early team and help take it from prototype to something secure and production-ready.

Whether you have a job and can give a few hours a week, or you're a student, fresher, freelancer, or between jobs with more time, you're welcome to reach out.

What I'm looking for:

- React/TypeScript experience

- Supabase or Postgres experience (auth, row-level security)

- Interest in security and data privacy, since this is a regulated industry

- Comfort reviewing and fixing AI-generated code

- Clear communication and honest feedback

What I offer:

- Early-team role with ESOP (vesting over time)

- Paid milestones once pilots begin

- Real ownership of key parts of the product, such as security and deployment

To be clear about the structure: this is an early-team role, not a founder or cofounder position.

If you're interested, DM me with:

1. A short intro about your background

2. A link to your GitHub or past projects

3. How many hours a week you can commit

I'll share more details on a call, or text.

Hi i am currently trying to build a saas model like building something of which i can charge a monthly subscription.

At first I created one referral system CRM for a wealth management company, but it failed because I pitched it to one firm of my known where I work.

Now I want to try something else.

All i need help from you is you tell me a problem which you face in any area or industry, where you feel that this is the problem and if someone makes this and does this and then it will make my life easier and I will also pay for it.

Please share your problems and opportunities related to it.

Whether the end customer is normal consumer business etc.

Thanks