r/founder 18h ago

Should I just let my startup die?

45 Upvotes

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

For the last 6 months I've been building an AI startup on my own. No funding, no grants, no rich friends backing me. 

It's an AI platform that helps people prepare for interviews, improve their CVs, practice interview questions and hopefully make job hunting a little less painful.

After months of building, I finally launched the MVP last October.

Right now I've got about 300 people signed up. They're all using the free version. It isn't viral or anything, but knowing that real people are actually using something I built has kept me going.

The problem is... I'm broke.

I ran out of money around the time the MVP launched and I've just been trying to keep the platform alive ever since. My Hostinger server renews on July 29, and this time I honestly don't have the money to pay for it. If I can't renew it, the site goes offline.

I've thought about raising money, but I keep asking myself who would invest in a startup with only 300 free users and no revenue.

Some days I feel like I'm one breakthrough away. Other days I feel like I'm just refusing to accept that it's over.

Has anyone here been in this situation?

Did you keep going, pause it, pivot, or just walk away?

I'm honestly not looking for sympathy. I just want to hear from people who've been through this because right now I genuinely don't know what the right move is.


r/founder 9h ago

1 year building my app solo, today I got my first paying subscriber

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30 Upvotes

https://apps.apple.com/za/app/quassama/id6752957774

After a year of building this alone (Quassama, a personal finance app with a Darija AI assistant for Moroccan users), I just got my first active paying subscriber.

I know it's not much — it won't even cover the costs of running the app. But it means someone out there actually trusts what I built enough to pay for it. That hits different than any download number ever did.

A year of nights and weekends, countless rewrites, and a lot of moments wondering if anyone would ever care. Today one person did.

To anyone who tried Quassama, even just to poke around — thank you. It means more than you think

https://apps.apple.com/za/app/quassama/id6752957774


r/founder 10h ago

Ai virtual mouse

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19 Upvotes

Built a 30 FPS AI Virtual Mouse in Python (OpenCV/MediaPipe)! 🖐️💻

As an 11th grader, I mapped cursor tracking to the base knuckle instead of the tip to get 100% stable clicks (0% drift!). Also made a Three.js steering racer!

⭐ Code: https://github.com/vishalpatil133-cmd/Virtualmouse


r/founder 16h ago

What surprised me most about selling my company

13 Upvotes

I sold my company to private equity last year. It wasn't life-changing money — I'm not Elon-rich. But it was a successful exit nonetheless.

What surprised me most was the due diligence process.

The buyers joked that I should enjoy the brief excitement of signing the LOI because the next 6 weeks would be a headache. Apparently, this is the point where most founders scramble to pull together their numbers: P&Ls, CAC, margins, sales trends, churn rates... all of it.

I got it done in two days.

My numbers were always top of mind. I put all important metrics into a single spreadsheet and viewed that as the heartbeat of the business. I'm lazy. I don't like to go digging around in different sheets and platforms whenever a question arises. Putting everything into one sheet let me know in a single glance if we were growing or dying, and what was working and what wasn't.

It made me wonder how many deals fall apart just before the finish line because founders don't know their real numbers until someone asks for them.

Being on top of your numbers as a founder is critical, isn't it? Anyone else here dealt with (or heard of) a canceled acquisition during the due diligence process?


r/founder 18h ago

100+ signups. Two paying customers. $5k MRR. Fully bootstrapped.

10 Upvotes

Three founders. Full time jobs. Families. No investors.

Ten months ago, we started building QueryPanel. At least, that is what it does today.

Our first version could generate kind of good SQL and charts. Straightforward questions made it look impressive.

Then we tried harder questions and it started failing.

We had convinced ourselves that our system was better than the others. Real questions proved us wrong. That hurt. But it also forced us to stop polishing the demo and rethink the problem.

A database schema can tell a model where the data lives. It cannot explain how a business thinks.

So we rebuilt QueryPanel around four ways companies can teach the system: database annotations, their own business glossary, trusted SQL examples, and tenant specific context.

The real test came while implementing QueryPanel for a customer.

New questions kept coming. Each one exposed another gap. We kept developing the product around what happened in their actual environment, rather than the questions that made our demo look good.

Eventually, we watched QueryPanel answer the kind of complicated question that had broken our first version. It understood the business context, generated the right SQL, and produced a useful chart.

That was the moment it stopped feeling like a clever demo and started feeling like real infrastructure.

Building it was a separate challenge.

I usually worked for two hours in the morning, then another three or four after 9pm. I protected my weekends for my family. My cofounders covered more of the weekend work.

We were rarely in the same workspace. Keeping everyone in sync was painful, and there were hard moments between us.

Eventually, we realized that productivity was not only about shipping the next feature. We also needed to recognize that we were making progress.

Now we meet in person every month and celebrate the small wins. It sounds minor. It made a real difference.

Ten months later, QueryPanel has more than 100 signups and two paying customers generating $5k MRR.

That is not a massive customer base.

It is something better: proof that companies will pay us to solve this problem.

The product now pays its own bills. We can invest in better tooling, more development, and finally some serious marketing without constantly reaching into our own pockets.

We did not raise a round.

We did not quit our jobs.

We just kept building until the side hustle became a business.

Still bootstrapped. Still built around real lives. Just no longer unproven.


r/founder 13h ago

Best CEO events I have been to weren't really about business at all

4 Upvotes

I have been to a lot of conferences and networking events over the years and the pattern I keep noticing is that the most useful conversations almost never happen in the session or the structured networking blocks. They happen at dinner afterward or during whatever activity fills the gaps between the official programming, and the more the official programming gets out of the way the better the conversations tend to get.

Events I have gotten the most from have been ones where the experience itself was genuinely compelling enough that people were present for it rather than working the room. Changes the quality of every interaction because people are actually relaxed and talking like humans rather than performing their professional identity at each other.

Curious whether other founders have noticed the same thing or whether some people genuinely get more from the structured networking format than I do.


r/founder 22h ago

I launched this game just 3 days ago.

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4 Upvotes

r/founder 4h ago

2 weeks post-launch: 34 downloads, 6 purchases, 173 page views. Ideas to keep momentum going?

3 Upvotes

Launched ReelStack (watchlist tracker for streaming shows) two weeks ago. So far: 173 App Store page views, 34 downloads, 6 purchases, and 7/7 reviews at 5 stars.

Most of that traction came from a Product Hunt launch and a couple Reddit threads early on, and things have cooled off since. Feels like the product itself is landing fine (reviews are solid), I just need a second wave of real traffic.

Anyone been through this after an initial spike faded? What actually worked to get momentum going again?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reelstack/id6768630222


r/founder 14h ago

[Targeting YC S27] Looking for a founding team for Startup

2 Upvotes

Hey everyone, I'm Samarth, founder of Vritti. We are building the first AI-native, Agent-driven Workforce Lifecycle Intelligence for India, where HR is the first Vertical.

We’re building a complete DIY self-serving model, with a plug-and-play dynamic config approach. Our architecture dynamically adapts to any workforce - whether you are managing 15 deskless workers in a retail shop or 500 corporate employees in a hospital network. Organizations configure exactly what they need within minutes without needing to talk to a sales rep or consultant for implementation and setup.

YC just funded a similar thesis for the US market in previous batches. We are doing it for India, but with a much wider, config-driven scope built natively for complex Indian statutory compliance (PF, ESI, TDS) and DPDP-compliant from day one, by design and architecture.

We are preparing our application for Y Combinator S27 Batch, and I am looking for the core Founding Team to join us and help build and scale this over the next 6-12 months.

The Reality Check First: We are pre-revenue and bootstrapped. There are no salaries today. This is a pure sweat-equity play for ambitious founders who want to build a unicorn and are willing to bleed for it.

Why this is already a fundable company: I am not pitching an idea. The core platform is built, live, and deployed.

The Traction: We are actively powering operations across 4 distinct verticals right now: an educational institution, a school, an automotive venture, and a state-wide wine retail chain.

Our Tech Stack: Currently including Python(FastAPI), Next.Js, React Native (Bare), PostgreSQL (pgvector), Docker, and an Applied AI Engineering Stack; open to better ideas and approaches

Currently, the whole product is built & shipped solo. I'm a technical founder, includes the complete core foundational layer, architecture and design, Mobile Apps (Staff & Lens), Web Dashboard, Backend, with the first layer of agentic intelligence work in progress

The Founding Team I'm looking forward to connecting with:

  • Founding Mobile Engineer (React Native)
  • GTM / Growth Co-Founder
  • Founding Backend/Applied AI Engineer
  • Design / R&D / Full Stack

The Vibe: You have a chip on your shoulder. You don't wait for permission. You want to build a category-defining company for India, and you execute fast.

Next Steps: If you want to join a startup that actually has a live product, multi-vertical users, and a massive YC-aligned vision, Let's connect & discuss:

  1. Which role you are claiming (Mobile, Growth, or Backend/AI).
  2. The coolest/hardest thing you’ve ever built or sold.
  3. Why you're ready to grind for equity right now.
  4. Anything else?

Whether you're a Technical or Non-Technical Person, doesn't matter. Let's connect and discuss more. Let's build something big.


r/founder 20h ago

What takes up the most time every day when you're running a business through Facebook or Instagram?

3 Upvotes

I'm doing some research and would really appreciate your honest opinion.

If you could completely automate just ONE part of running your Facebook business, what would it be?

It could be anything—replying to comments, finding leads, managing ads, reporting, content creation, following up with customers, or something else entirely.

I'm not selling anything. I just want to understand what business owners struggle with the most every day.


r/founder 39m ago

Greg Isenberg: VC funding works for less than 1% of companies. Here's the actual math.

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Upvotes

Most people treat "not VC-backed" as a consolation prize. Greg Isenberg and Derek Andersen (Startup Grind) make the actual case for why that's backwards.

 

The real numbers: venture funding works for less than 1% of companies created. Of the companies VCs do back, only a small fraction ever return the capital — the model is built around that outcome, not despite it.

 

Derek gets specific about what that looks like from the inside: six engineers at $100K each against $300K in recurring revenue. $600K in cost, $300K coming in. He calls it a "golden anchor" — something that looked like success and nearly sank the company.

 

The reframe: if the model only works for a tiny fraction of builders, it was never supposed to be the default for most people building something real. A leaner team, sized to the actual problem, was always the more correct model — AI just made it more viable than ever to run that way.

 

Full episode is worth the watch if this lands. Link's in my bio if you want what's actually working right now.

 

Clip credit: Divot (Derek Andersen) & Greg Isenberg — full episode on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.


r/founder 44m ago

If you need a AI humanizer tool, you are writing with AI the wrong way.

Upvotes

TL;DR - Writing with prompts is a pain. It makes errors, hallucinates, and delivers mechanical content people can tell is AI slop. AI humanizes were created to treat your AI slop condition, but never deliver a cure.

The cure for AI slop is finally here. I built a tool that takes your best ideas to build a better brief. It runs through a complex multi agent writing system that humanizes from the input all the way through the draft creation and shows you the receipts. No more prompting. Side effects of prolonged use may include better writing, happy clients, more subscribers, and free up money spent on AI tools no longer needed.

There are nearly a million searches a month by people looking for AI humanizer tools to help take what they created with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to make it sound less like AI. By now people can spot AI writing tells quickly. Some of the signs were single paragraph sections with a heading above each explaining what it was trying to say.

Cringeworthy paragraphs starting with scene setting phrases like “in a world where…” or “in this modern era of…” Or the repetitive framing, overuse of lazy structures, and the annoying rhetorical reversal. You know it when you see the it’s not X, it’s Y framing.

AI killed the emdash for me, so I only use it ironically like a subtle middle finger to the machines.

It appears that many AI users are starting to recognize that a single prompt, however complex just can’t cut it. The chat box that tells you how wonderful you are and that every idea you have is amazing. AI chat bots makes stuff up, as if all those time it told you how smart you are were not a dead giveaway. It just wants to be your friend who’ll share mushrooms with you.

These are sociopathic AI systems that want to please you while feeding your junk that you’ll have to go back and keep fixing. The co-dependent cycle never ends, especially when you are paying for the subscription.

Even with the advanced intelligence of the frontier models, it felt like each time used ChatGPT to write another article I was starting from scratch. Even with creating projects with detailed instructions, it often conveniently remembered to forget or ignore the directions it was given.

As someone who’s published over 2,000 articles this year alone, I know the pain of AI assisted writing all too well.

I have been doing SEO for enterprise brands for 25 years. I spent the last 13 years doing online reputation management for high profile individuals and brands.

I’m not an eager college student who believes they deserve to have millions of dollars handed to them over and idea that’s not rooted in real experience. I never learned how to code. I never even went to college.

I’m a 5O year old Gen-Xer who’s been married for 22 years and has 5 kids. I spent years working for large companies before launching my own crisis comms and reputation management firm a few years ago.

Clients who are referred to me expect to pay a lot for my services.

Most of my time is spent fixing serious and complex problems for people who make headlines because of their wealth or brand exposure draws competitive attention.

I’m a fixer of sorts that is hired to make things disappear off the internet and/or help curate a search result so people only see how amazing that brand or person is. I find myself working for people who have a reputation to defend.

I also do political work and publish a substack with a decent subscriber base that exposes extremism and bad behavior. Some of the more shady political characters can be litigious and used lawfare and death threats to try and silence me. I defeated the SLAPP style lawsuits and stood my ground.

It was stressful and expensive.

It taught me to be vigilant and pristine in my writing, don’t pull punches, and ensure my content was legally bulletproof. Eventually my critics learned not to mess with me as my work attracted a larger statewide audience and caused the extremists to start losing elections.

Enough backstory, you get it. I work for living, write impactful content, and AI helped fill my skill gaps to amplify my output.

I started using ChatGPT in early 2023 and have tried every prompting trick I could find to try and help me write better quality content that included research, fact checking and was written for humans to read. It was not until earlier this year I discovered I needed to use a multi agent writing system, but none existed for what I needed.

I decided to push myself and dig into Claude to build something that might work for what I needed. The results were so much better than arguing with ChatGPT for hours and it apologizing for lazy mode slipping in the middle of a 4,500 word article.

You see, in order to get Claude or ChatGPT to produce a draft that doesn’t suck, you need different agents to help do the work. One single agent, the chat bot itself, struggles to do it all.

You need a variation of the following agents:

- a content planner to create an outline and give agents instructions to help each suck less in succession

- a research agent to find the sources and background information

- a fact checker to make sure the AI is not inventing facts

- a drafting agent to write the first draft (AI slop)

- a editor to make that draft suck less

- a humanizer agent to make it not suck so bad

- a red team / devils advocate agent to tell your other agents why they suck and fix it

Plus, a half dozen more agents for specialized writing tasks to screen for defamation risk, defensibility of claims, and enhanced quality. Ideas that stemmed from my earlier lawfare adventures.

After it runs through each you get a draft that is actually decent — even if one or two of these slip in.

It may not pass GPTzero, Pangram or any other anti-AI detector racing to beat each other in this crowded but profitable market, but it will look and sound more like a person wrote it.

The AI detectors have serious issues as they look for pattern detection. Unfortunately most humans are predictable and use patterns in their own non-AI writing. These tools will often flag what you swear you wrote by hand as AI, even if you never touched ChatGPT. (Don’t worry, I believe you.)

I wondered if what I had built could be improved to not just sound more human, but sound like you wrote it.

I thought about a real writing process, one where you take information you need to draft something, decide who will write it, what you want written, where will it be published, and who the audience is. I also wanted it to look at your previous writing to make sure it aligns with how you write (back to patterns, but ones you use without thinking about it).

And that’s the product I just finished building.

Yes, under the hood it’s very complex. It has a well researched and structured content type matrix that determines what agents need to be used based on the type of content you want to create.

It’s built around these question about the content you want to draft:

Does it need to be optimized for SEO/AEO?

Do you need real research and citations?

What is the output format and styling (press release, AP style, social media post, etc)?

How long do you want the article?

How high of quality do you need it?

Which AI model is best for the type of content you want to draft?

What writing voice do you want to use, yours or your client’s?

Instead of starting with a blank prompt box, I wanted something would help pull the idea out of your head by asking a few simple questions. It’s designed to feel intuitive.

You pick the basic details and say where the content will go. Then after clicking on your options you say plainly what you want: “an article about why AI slop sucks with ideas for making it not suck”…

You pick who is going to write it: a AI ghostwriter trained as a expert in a specialized field, a writer trained on your own writing or one trained on your client’s writing (with authorization).

Then it goes to work.

It starts to research, and asks a clarification question. It shows you the research it found and asks if this is what you were thinking, or to keep researching further with simple direction.

Once the research is approved with a single click, it then runs through 8-12 more steps internally, edits, fact checks, humanizes, and write the content in the voice you chose.

When it’s done processing, it delivers a fully written draft with incredible accuracy. And if you want to improve it further, there is a button to run an additional editor pass which tells you want can be done to strengthen the claims made and suggest further optimization for SEO/AEO/GEO to push the scores it displays higher.

Did I forget to mention it has a built in scoring system for human writing detection, SEO, AEO, legal risk, trust, and citations?

Basically it does it all, and I keep finding new ways to use and improve it.

It took me three months of planning and stress testing my plans before I fired up Claude code to help me engineer this beast.

I am proud of the result.

If you do need to make edits to the draft, it saves those in a file to instruct the writer for that project to help it improve the next draft you request.

If you give it the published URL or give it the RSS feed to watch, it will look at the published version, compare it to the approved draft and inform your ghostwriter where it sucked so it will do better next time.

The built in feedback loop is also used to track search rankings and AI visibility so it improves its optimization based on real world results.

I wanted to make sure it gets better each time you use it. That personalizes the tool so you’ll want to keep paying me the monthly subscription — Now you know why I told you I have a lot of kids to feed earlier.

If you stuck around this far, feel free to ask me anything about this process, my pending patent, what next in the process, and when I’m ever going to be able to spend time with my family again after becoming a AI zombie running on very little sleep.

The life of a solo AI SaaS founder ain’t easy, but I love every minute of it.


r/founder 1h ago

I built a tool for vibecoders. Everyone seems to hate it. What did I do wrong?

Upvotes

I recently built and released WhipDesk, a free and open-source remote access tool designed for vibe coders. It allows you to access and control your dev box directly from your phone's browser.

It’s probably the first product I’ve built that I actually use daily. I thought people in the dev/open-source community would love it, but I’m getting almost no traffic, and my posts keep getting removed or downvoted.

I sincerely have no idea what’s wrong with it or what red flags I'm throwing off. I use it all the time to control my two dev boxes (Windows and Mac) from my phone whenever I’m away from my keyboard.

If anyone here has a minute to check it out and roast it with honest, unfiltered feedback, I’d really appreciate it. Don't hold back - I don't need nice words, I need to know:

  • What makes you reject it or not want to try it?
  • Is page description clear and explains what it does?

I know that when you work on something for a long time, you lose sight of what it looks like to a first-time user. I think that's what happened here.

Repo: https://github.com/BinaryBananaLLC/WhipDesk

I’m deliberately not adding more description here because I want to hear your genuine first impression. Thanks in advance!


r/founder 3h ago

Prospect be like "let me enjoy this pain"

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2 Upvotes

Why does it seem many people would rather suffer than purchase a product that solves their pain point?


r/founder 5h ago

Attention is Cheap. Credibility Isn't.

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2 Upvotes

Tech founders are often frustrated with journalists and legacy outlets. They still, begrudgingly, need their help.


r/founder 8h ago

Founders: is customer discovery this hard for everyone, or am I doing something wrong?

2 Upvotes

Building my startup project, I've caught myself thinking a lot about how prone founders are to blind optimism. I genuinely believed two weeks would be enough to collect 1000+ survey responses during customer discovery. It's been over a month, and I've collected 13.

Honestly, I don't get why it's so hard for people to fill out a short survey? Whenever someone sent me a survey, I always filled it out gladly, even when I knew I probably wouldn't use the product because I understood how much any input, any opinion, matters to a founder.

Is this founder solidarity? Or is the world just... indifferent?


r/founder 14h ago

What's been the hardest part of building trust with your first customers?

2 Upvotes

I've been thinking about how different it is to build a business in a technical industry compared to a typical consumer brand.

Take a company like Zatural Research as an example. In a niche where customers expect high standards, it seems like trust is built through clear communication, transparency, consistency, and reliable documentation rather than marketing alone.

It made me wonder how other founders have approached the same challenge in their own businesses.

When you were getting started, what had the biggest impact on earning your first customers' trust?

I'd love to hear what worked for you, whether it was being more transparent, improving customer support, sharing your journey publicly, or something completely different. I think founders in every industry can learn from each other's experiences.


r/founder 15h ago

Getting users is a bottleneck. Let me make a free UGC video to help promote your app.

2 Upvotes

Building a product is hard. Reaching your first 100 users is often even harder. I'm making free UGC style promo videos for founders who are live and need clean content instead of low-effort AI slop. If you're interested, comment with what your project does in one or two sentences, who it's for, and a link to your website. If your project is a good fit, I'll reach out via DM to get a few details and create a UGC video you can use on TikTok, Insta, YouTube. I'm just looking to help founders while building my portfolio. Drop your startup below 👇


r/founder 16h ago

What's the biggest mistake you made as a founder?

2 Upvotes

r/founder 16h ago

We lost a weekend to our own crypto taxes. So we built a tool. Tear it apart.

2 Upvotes

https://reddit.com/link/1v3e55z/video/udgg74g5ureh1/player

A year ago I lost a full weekend and days to calculate own crypto taxes. Two spreadsheets, a CoinDCX export, and Form 26AS, all being forced to agree by hand.

We got one working ITR out of it and swore we'd never do that again.

So we built the thing we wished existed that weekend. It's called CryptoKar, and it's a crypto tax tool for Indian traders. No exchange API keys. You export your CSV, upload it, and it hands back the numbers.

Right now it handles CoinDCX, WazirX, and Bybit. Feed it a report and you get FIFO capital gains, Schedule VDA, TDS reconciliation, and a portfolio and transaction breakdown.

Here's what caught us off guard once we started. The tax rules were easy. 30% flat, 4% cess, no set-off, no carry-forward, you code that once and it's done. The exports were the nightmare, because every exchange labels its transactions differently, formats timestamps its own way, hides fees in whatever column it feels like, and ships a fresh set of edge cases that only surface once real trades hit them. Making that mess line up cleanly is most of what we've built.

It's still rough in places. And we'd rather hear that from people who actually trade than keep telling ourselves it's fine.

So if you file crypto taxes in India, we want to know a few things. What's the worst part of it for you? Was there something you expected a tool like this to do and it just didn't? What would it take for you to trust it with your actual numbers?

If you've got a CoinDCX, WazirX, or Bybit CSV lying around, run it through and tell us exactly where it breaks. https://cryptokar.com


r/founder 19h ago

You know all my pain points, now what do you do with them?

2 Upvotes

I think everyone here has someone or an AI model told you, find out the pain points, the problems of customers and offer a solution.

Sounds familiar, right? Plus we see a lot of posts on Reddit where in one form or another they try to find out this information.

From my point of view it is ok. But now I ask you, what do you do or do you know what to do with this information?

You know my problem, but do you really know how to offer me a solution that works? Here I think is the big problem for everyone,

Now I want you to ask yourself this question and answer honestly, do you really know how to solve my problem or do you follow the same template and have no idea. or what do you do when you have the same problem as me where you haven't been able to solve it but you are trying to sell me that you know the solution.

Let's have an honest discussion if possible.


r/founder 22h ago

what you prefer traditional crm or attio? how about clickreach?

2 Upvotes

Folks,
In the AI era the process of acquiring customer and outbound has changed..People send more emails then they were sending 10 years back..Do you think traditional CRMs are too complex for modern time? how about attio? have anyone tried clickreach.io


r/founder 40m ago

We've been heads down building Clientalio.com lately and wanted to share a small update.

Upvotes

Building in Public 🚀

We're currently working on:

  • AI-powered brand-aware templates.
  • Generate beautiful testimonial experiences from just a website URL.
  • Dynamic theme generation and customization.
  • Better Wall of Love pages and embeddable widgets.
  • Faster and more scalable template rendering behind the scenes.

One thing we've learned while building is that users don't want another generic template—they want something that feels like their brand.

That's the direction we're moving towards.

There's still a lot left to build, but it's exciting to see things slowly come together. Thanks to everyone who's shared feedback so far—it has genuinely helped shape what we're building.

Clientalio.com 🚀


r/founder 47m ago

MoneY

Upvotes

Verified u/valeriahernan network testing guide today. fast workflow, zero hassle, funds confirmed on balance. check his pinned post to give it a run.


r/founder 1h ago

How can a founder focus on his goal? See What a Deepseek's boss told us

Upvotes

Recently, DeepSeek, the most secretive AI company, began its first fundraising round, reaching a valuation of 350 billion yuan (approximately US$50 billion). These are the core remarks made by Liang Wenfeng at that meeting, leaked from non-public sources. There are a great many “nos” — an extreme degree of focus, an extreme degree of concentration. Perhaps this is the key reason for DeepSeek’s success.

Liang Wenfeng believes that as long as his team remains stable enough, they will definitely achieve AGI.

【Posted from Chinese media elsewhere】

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From the limited material we have gathered, the following high-frequency words appear: model, cost, AGI, time, open source, and so on.

Most of the time, Liang Wenfeng’s tone leaves room for uncertainty; his language is plain and unadorned. Only when speaking about a few issues he deeply cares about does a hint of sharpness emerge: “As long as we can maintain the stability of the team, I am certain we can achieve AGI. It’s that simple.”

Below are 52 statements we have collected. Some wording may differ slightly from the original while preserving the intended meaning.

DeepSeek Has Only One Main Line

  1. Now is not the time to maximize revenue through products. On the path to AGI, products are a step we must take, but we don’t need to spend too much thought and energy on B2C or B2B products. When you are at a high level of technology and work on relatively lower-level tech, it’s a dimensional strike. Products are by-products on the road to AGI.
  2. Many things are not on our main line, such as 3D and video generation; and world models, which don’t have much to do with the upper limits of intelligence either.
  3. Multimodality is very important for products, and very important for C-end users. But it is merely a component, not the main line nor intelligence itself.
  4. Of course there are ways to solve hallucinations in large models, but it’s a long-term problem. Internally, we categorize hallucinations as a product issue; we will address it, but it is not a priority.
  5. At this stage, the most important thing is still the Coding Agent. Given the situation in China, the most sensible approach is to go all out on a general-purpose Agent; other Agents for finance, healthcare, etc. have lower priority.
  6. If the AI era gives rise to many trillion-dollar companies, it would be great if DeepSeek were one of them.

First Achieve Continuous Learning, Then AI Self-Iteration, the Endpoint Is Embodied Intelligence

  1. AI does not lack taste and intuition right now; what it lacks is the ability for continuous learning.
  2. Humans can learn continuously, but to do the same thing, you have to give AI all the context. That is nearly impossible, so AI cannot replace employees. Therefore, the next-generation model must have the capacity for continuous learning to truly be called a next-generation model.
  3. We hope the next-generation model can assist our own development. Simply put, the first goal of the models we build is not for everyone else to use them well, but for us to use them well. This is the fastest way to achieve AGI.
  4. Currently, no one in the world has found a good method, because “learning” is made up of many things.
  5. DeepSeek’s long-term vision is AGI. If we compare the path to achieving it to climbing stairs, last year's step was CoT (Chain-of-Thought), this year's step is Agent. The problem to solve after Agent is continuous learning.
  6. After achieving continuous learning, we may arrive at a gradual singularity: the model can accomplish everything humans can do, including developing more advanced AI models itself. That is, AI can accelerate AI research. Only after this step is embodied intelligence.
  7. The endpoint of intelligence may well be embodiment. Because for a normal person, the need is not a computer, but human labor.

Still Far from a Full Pivot to Commercialization

  1. We only earn a reasonable profit; our pricing is not aimed at maximizing profit.
  2. For one of our models, we initially worried about excessive demand and set a relatively high price. Later we cut it to a quarter, and many in the company’s chat group cheered. Because this is the purpose of our painstaking work on the model: to let everyone use it abundantly.
  3. Low cost is a result; our model architecture has always been moving toward lower costs. We also want the cost to be affordable, especially against the backdrop of scarce computing power. There is another reason: the lower the cost, the bigger the model we can afford. When computing power is limited, high computational efficiency allows us to train larger models. Large companies can solve this by adding resources; we prioritize cost efficiency.
  4. From the outside, it may look like we’ve chosen a very difficult model. But in fact, we’re doing it very effortlessly. Price cuts are certainly not good news for our competitors; they are definitely not cheering. I don’t find selling API access all that attractive. I just need a few people to maintain the API; we don’t even have customer service or sales, and users come on their own.
  5. We have always been commercializing, we just don’t make commercialization the goal. The point at which DeepSeek completely pivots to commercialization should be very far away.
  6. I don’t even need to think about taking a position in it then. As long as the business opportunity is that huge, there will definitely be a way. DeepSeek is a product of the times, a reflection of reality, not the result of imitation.

Open Source Is the Sweet Spot for a Company of Our Scale

  1. Restraint is a strategy: give up some things in exchange for more of other things. Open source is about sharing benefits: internally, it gives employees a sense of achievement and the company cohesion; it also benefits society — peers and ordinary people will be happy. I have no doubt that AGI will have enormous commercial value. On that basis, my priority is not to grab a larger share, but to increase the probability of success.
  2. To succeed commercially with AI, open source is beneficial. This sounds a bit counterintuitive. Historically, a software company might have a market of a few billion dollars a year — if it goes open source, that’s gone. But AI is so huge that it could eventually account for ten percent of human society’s GDP. If we try to monopolize that benefit, we will certainly be cast aside by history. That is an objective law, a historical perspective.
  3. The open-source models we release are the same as the ones we deploy ourselves. We won’t open-source a slightly inferior model while keeping a better one for our own deployment.
  4. I’m not worried about others deploying our model to compete with us. Not every company has the will and the ability to reach that goal. If a startup is too small, it lacks the resources to do this; large companies find it hard to organize. This is a sweet spot for a company of our scale.
  5. Open source has no impact on our business model, provided that you “only earn a certain amount of profit.” If you want to earn a hundred times the profit, open source will indeed affect you.
  6. We don’t want to become rivals with any internet giant or small company. Under that premise, we are very willing to assist and help anyone, even including Alibaba, Zhipu, and Moonshot AI to do better.

The Gap Between China and the U.S. Is Not in Talent

  1. In the future, we want to rewrite the narrative of China-U.S. AI: using a fraction of the computing power to narrow the gap even further, down to six months, three months.
  2. The China-U.S. AI gap is mainly in resources. We believe in scaling — the larger the scale, the better the results will be. We train such a large model not because I think this size is enough, but because this is all the resources we have.
  3. There is almost no gap in talent — it’s essentially the same pool of people. There is no shortage of talent in China. Talent shortages are temporary; historically, there has never been a long-term shortage of a certain type of person.

Model Factory Competition — Cost Comes First

  1. Anthropic surpassing OpenAI right now is not a long-term trend, it’s just a phase. In the future, OpenAI and Google will most likely rise alternately.
  2. There are too many companies in China building models, all doing the same thing, and resources are quite scattered. Eventually it will converge, but it takes time. If everyone only takes a reasonable profit, you don’t need that many people making large models: perhaps two large companies and two small ones would be enough.
  3. I absolutely do not believe that large model companies can capture the majority of the profits (in the AI industry).
  4. The ultimate gap in large model competition will manifest in three aspects: cost, time, and user experience. Cost comes first — at what cost can you provide the same quality of service. Second is time; a difference of a few months matters. User experience creates some stickiness and barriers, but it’s not fundamental.

No Intention of Becoming the Next Super App

  1. We don’t want to become the next super app. The next ByteDance? The next Tencent? We have absolutely no such idea.
  2. We don’t fight for this because there are watermelons further ahead; what’s in front may all be sesame seeds. Of course, these sesame seeds might be relatively big, but I don’t think they are significant.
  3. Last year everyone was fighting for chatbots and C-end traffic; this year it’s fighting for B2B revenue. But we don’t think that’s important. What the company truly cares about internally is the roadmap to AGI and how to achieve the next technical breakthrough. It’s strange: the things you want most you don’t get, while the things you care less about come easily.
  4. Going viral during last year’s Spring Festival was not in our script.

Maintaining Team Stability Is the Core

  1. There is only one thing we cannot compromise on: we must maintain the stability of the team. This is also a very big risk we face. Of course, this risk has been largely mitigated with this round of financing.
  2. We do many things to maintain team stability. We don’t want to become rivals with any internet giant or small company; we want to empower and help them. We don’t want to make enemies. That way, our own environment will be better too.
  3. Some people think our organization is top-down, some think it’s bottom-up; I think both are correct. Top-down is about “doing the official work,” and we generally hope that “official work” does not take up more than half of an employee’s time. They have the other half of their time bottom-up, unstructured, where they can research whatever they want, explore on their own, and pursue whatever they think is important — there are no prerequisites.
  4. We generally don’t work much overtime. The first reason is that research requires a relatively relaxed environment. The second reason is that we are extremely focused. Many of our products are not fully polished, but we haven’t gone back to fix them either — that’s part of the culture of restraint.
  5. The organization is dynamic, not static. In the future, as the company grows, there may be some adjustments. But it will not completely turn into a traditional hierarchy, though there may be some necessary structures. But the vision-driven approach will not change.

With Goodwill Toward the World

  1. When we started this company, our original intention was not to make a lot of money or to go public in the capital markets. The first few dozen people never thought that way. If they had, they wouldn’t have joined. We embarked on this endeavor with enormous goodwill toward the world, believing it would be useful to humanity.
  2. “We need to achieve such-and-such KPI” is not our way; we are a vision-driven organization. This has both advantages and disadvantages. In the future, we will find ways to play to our strengths and mitigate our weaknesses, but this is our defining characteristic.
  3. The vision isn’t even written down; it lies in the way we do things and in our attitude toward the world. Perhaps everyone in the company has a slightly different understanding of the vision, but we are aligned in the broad direction.
  4. About twenty years ago, the person I admired most in management was Jack Welch (the former CEO of GE). Looking back now, most of what he said may no longer be correct, but he got one thing right: the most important thing for a company is vision. Vision is not a slogan on the wall, not what you say, but what you do.

Restraint Makes Us More Likely to Achieve AGI

  1. AGI offers the greatest return. As for other things, if we have the energy, we will do them; if we don’t, we won’t. Restraint is part of our vision.
  2. AI is such a huge endeavor, and the stakes are enormous. As long as we can succeed, even a tiny fraction of the benefit will be immense. And the more restrained you are, the more likely you are to succeed at this.
  3. I think this aligns with intuition — at least with my intuition. Apart from our vision, we don’t have many other advantages.
  4. When we founded the company two years ago, we didn’t have much money, didn’t have many GPUs, didn’t have much name recognition, and didn’t have much influence — we were just a group of very ordinary people. The narrative I like is “a group of ordinary people doing extraordinary things,” not “a group of geniuses doing extraordinary things.”
  5. Open source is also part of restraint. In pricing, we certainly do not start from the premise of maximizing company revenue or profit. In the short term, higher prices bring more revenue; but in the long term, it’s really hard to say. For me, restraint is a strategy.
  6. Open source and low pricing give employees a strong sense of achievement, create organizational cohesion, benefit society, and make other peers and ordinary people happy. So this restraint, from a long-term perspective, can increase our probability of achieving AGI.
  7. If your vision is to take more, you’ve already lost; you are likely to face even greater difficulties. That’s just how the world is.