Around a year ago, I decided to build a healthy snack brand.

At the time, I had this very romantic idea of what entrepreneurship looked like.

Come up with an idea.

Find a manufacturer.

Build a website.

Run ads.

Sell products.

I genuinely thought that was the journey.

Fast forward to today...

I've learnt more about food manufacturing, ingredients, nutrition testing, FSSAI regulations, packaging materials, moisture barriers, shelf life, freight costs, barcode registrations, GST, payment gateways and shipping than I ever imagined.

Every time I think I'm at the finish line, another finish line appears.

First it was developing recipes.

Then sourcing ingredients.

Then making them taste good.

Then making them shelf stable.

Then packaging.

Then nutrition testing.

Then waiting for reports.

Then redesigning things because one small detail wasn't compliant.

And now...

I'm lying awake wondering if anyone will even buy them.

The funny thing is...

None of these were the problems I expected.

The biggest challenge isn't making the product.

It's believing enough people will care about it.

I'd love to hear from founders who've already launched.

What was the one thing you completely underestimated?

Hey everyone,

We run a small creative agency where we produce ads for D2C brands, handling everything from ideation and scripting to creator management, production, and editing.

We're now trying to move beyond service work and build content IPs while setting up a proper studio production workflow.

Would love to connect with people who've done this before. Looking for advice on what to learn, mistakes to avoid, and how to approach brands for IPs. If there's an opportunity to collaborate, even better.

Just here to learn from people who've already been through this. Thanks!

Hello everyone, we are trying to develop an intelligent investment platform for passive instruments listed in Indian exchanges, if anyone from Mumbai , working in the capital market or Fintech domain please reach out for idea validation/support. Thanks in advance.

I have been studying how AI is changing software creation.

Something interesting stood out:

Building an MVP seems easier than ever.

But after getting users, founders still face problems around:

International payments

Tax compliance

Billing systems

Different customer markets

I was looking into companies solving this space and found Dodo Payments, which focuses on helping AI/SaaS builders handle global payments.

I am curious from founders here:

At what stage did payments become a real problem for you?

Was it:

Before launch?

After your first international customers?

Only after scaling?

Would love to hear real experiences.

Salve sono un ragazzo italiano che ha delle idee e vuole entrare nel mondo startup, in India come siete messi?

Rules 48 & 49 of India's Social Security Central Rules 2026 now require every gig platform to report worker exits to e-Shram in real time. Zomato, Swiggy, Rapido, Uber, Zepto all complied by June 21.

The problem: e-Shram records THAT a worker exited. Not WHY.

So a worker banned from Zomato for fraud joins Swiggy the same day. Clean record. No platform knows.

The fix is one field — exit_reason: voluntary / performance / fraud.

This transforms e-Shram into India's first cross-platform gig fraud prevention infrastructure. Exactly what CIBIL did for credit data.

I'm building Veravue — the fraud intelligence layer for this regulatory moment. veravue.dev

Would love to hear from anyone building in the gig economy space or who has faced the cold start problem for consortium models in India.