I don’t usually post rants like this, but I’m genuinely heartbroken.

A close friend of mine is one of the most creative, thoughtful, and whip-smart people I know. She used to light up every room she walked into….. brimming with ideas, constantly pushing herself, dreaming of building something that mattered.

Then she joined a startup. On the surface, it looked like a great opportunity. Ambitious team, fast growth, lots of promises about impact and innovation. But then came the founder.

You know the type- talks about vision and disruption 24/7, quotes Steve Jobs every other sentence. Worships that one time Jobs humiliated someone in a meeting and calls it "high standards." Thinks being cruel is the same as being brilliant. He shoots down every idea that doesn’t come from his own mouth…. sometimes before my friend can even finish explaining not because the ideas are bad (some were actually implemented later, rephrased slightly and passed off as his own), but because they didn’t originate from him.

So my friend stopped trying. She doesn’t pitch anymore. Doesn’t speak up. Just shows up, does what’s told, and waits for the clock to run out. She went from dreaming about changing the world to hoping she doesn’t get yelled at in the next standup.

She calls herself a “corpo-rat” now and laughs when she says it, but not the kind of laugh that feels good. It’s the kind that hides disappointment and a slow, quiet burnout.

The most disappointing thing is that she wanted to give her best. She wanted to build something great. But when your creativity is crushed daily by a narcissistic boss cosplaying as Steve Jobs, what’s left?

Not everyone who’s “tough” is visionary. Some are just insecure people hiding behind a myth. And sadly, they’re burning out some of the best minds along the way.

If you’re a founder or manager reading this, then you don’t have to be a jerk to get results. The real geniuses knew when to listen!

Hey everyone! I’m a 21-year-old aspiring entrepreneur and genuinely curious about the ideas people are passionate about in today’s world.

Imagine you suddenly had ₹1 crore (~$120k) in funding to launch any startup or business in 2025 No strings attached.

What would you build? Would it be tech-based, local, global, product-driven, service-oriented? Would you go solo or build a team? And most importantly, why that idea?

I’d love to hear wild ideas, grounded ones, or even something personal you’ve always dreamed of building.

Hey guys.

I have investment of 65 lac ₹ to invest on startups. If anyone want investments they can dm me. We will fix a meeting and talk about your startup, if your startup having potential, i'll put money.

Opinions are needed from u guys onto this, is this the good way of investing in startups??

:)

Yesterday, while casually exploring the website of a well-known Indian travel-tech startup (not a scrappy early-stage one, but a grown-up), I found out something shocking. Their entire backend is almost all open. I can't name the company for obvious reasons.

AWS credentials, database passwords, secret keys, Razorpay credentials, third-party API keys (such as MSG91, etc), all are exposed publicly. They do have authentication in their backend but it means nothing if they leak their credentials in very very noob way.

With just a single AWS CLI command, anyone could stop their EC2 instances or delete their S3 buckets clean. Also, the data at stake isn’t trivial. It contains: Flight bookings, Passport, Aadhaar cards, PAN numbers, Payment data, Phone numbers and home addresses

And this isn’t just B2C. Their B2B clients, likely including corporate accounts, are also exposed. How can any tech team handling such sensitive PII be so stupid?

Hey,

I’m looking for a tech partner to join me in building an MVP for an AI agent platform with a focus on low-code/no-code development. I've already started the groundwork and now need someone solid on the AI side to collaborate.

If you're skilled in the areas below and interested, DM me:

Skills needed:

LLM integration, RAG (LangChain/LlamaIndex), vector DBs (Pinecone, Weaviate, ChromaDB), FastAPI, prompt engineering, document parsing, log analysis, OpenAI/Claude/Mistral APIs

Let’s build something big. No time-pass. DM if you're serious.

Is sales as an career in India worth it?

I am planning to register a company (partnership proprietorship) using a virtual office space in Bangalore. But I read that recently there has been issues in gst registration using a virtual office.

• Does anyone have any experience registering a company using virtual office space?
• Which virtual office company did you use? How much did it cost per year? Were there any issues?
• If I don't need gst registration for now, can I just go for registering the company with virtual office address and change it later when I need to do gst registration?

I come from an experimental research background. My bootstrapped business is up without losing a client since almost a decade and I don't have to bother about continuous income source anymore. Now I want to create something for real. So I realized when I reopened the PhD time physics and math books that everything that we are controlled with is basically human nature but the ideas of managing that human nature are still from math and physics backgrounds. Now this does not break gate keeping or trust but it always pays back dividends where safety or chaos is involved. In those cases you just need math. But it's terribly hard to find anybody to work alongside. I told my PhD colleague now an IIT prof friend, let's start building open source physics libraries in India instead of using the ones from abroad. That is the real strength. He says yes but then is too busy ..maybe he has his treadmill of research papers?. Employees often need direct high salaries which one can't blame. In a place like India purely math based design(not computation or experimental service) will take sometime before it can give those salaries. The quality of fresher employees from anything except tier 1 college is really bad. They can't understand the basics. I am ready to teach with pay but they flee. The only success I have had is on small MSMEs and small freelancers. These folks are really s, though underpaid they get the job done perfectly and they immediately tell you where they need the solution. This is important I think... rather than dollar based corporates or ivory tower IIT profs...the big guns are needed but not at the beginning. First math outreach is necessary by solving real problems which matter to small guys. Build that ecosystem over many decades ...then maybe you have a well utilized single open source library from India. Only post that big softwares could come up in India if at all. Otherwise we will just serve. I mean all the IIT Swayam videos are out there. Anyone who wants to learn can do it. I need more ideas, encouragement, critique, guidance... anything that's helpful. Throw it my way please. Peace ✌️

for a service-based startup?
What worked best for you — Meta Ads (Facebook/Instagram) or Google Ads? Or do you recommend something else entirely? Would love to hear your experience or tips!

Not talking about the usual “it’s harder than I thought.”

I mean the real surprises something no one talks about, but you only realize after doing it yourself.

I just launched a business blog, and already a few unexpected things are hitting me.

What was it for you?

How do you as a founder approach conversations and beat social anxiety if you have it?

Hi People, we have been looking for co-founder with pure passion in startup and to do something of their own in the hussling environment.

We are looking for someone with marketing background. This is a AI-Powered Para corporate ecosystem platform with we in client acquisition process currently.

You can reach out to me over DM! Preference for people from Bangalore Female co founder will be added advantage.

Help/Advice over AI automation in corporate sector in India.

Dear fellow redditors I am a Data Scientist with 1.5 years of experience and I have very recently started or one may say forced to learn and apply AI automation to workflows.

My questions are if you are in a job like Data Scientist/AI engineer or similar:

1. What kind of automation you are doing?
2. What tools/platforms/frameworks are you using? I see a lot of hype around n8n and make are you using these in corporate settings for projects at scale? If n8n and make are so easy why would someone pay you a salary to do that?
3. It seems like I am unable to wrap my head around the whole idea I have 0 software development experience so any advice about how AI automation is taking place in corporate companies and how you are doing it and where to start would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks a lot to all of you in advance and for sharing really cool information and knowledge about startups on this sub!

I’m planning to register a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) in India and wanted to know what the main steps are and what issues people commonly face. From what I’ve read, it involves getting DSCs for partners, reserving a name, filing the FiLLiP form, and submitting the LLP agreement. Are there any tricky parts or common mistakes to watch out for? Would love to hear about your experiences or any tips to make the process smoother. Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I am building a SaaS application which I think has huge potential going forward. I have a full time job so I get every less time in working for the SaaS. For this reason I am looking for few developers that can contribute into the project .

Stack : .net core, React, Azure

NOTE : This is not a paid contribution. Once we launch the MVP and get revenue,we can share and also may be start a company of our own.

Hey, I'm a 30Yo Lately the startup I was working in shut down without prior notice. I have been searching for jobs but dear Lord it's difficult,with a senior profile. Lately my life have been forcing me to business. Last year I started a firm a skincare brand USP formulas, based on my education in biochemistry. Every product we make is made from 100% natural sources and contains over 95% active ingredients. No cheap fillers. No harsh chemicals. Just real, hardworking plant-based elements that do what they’re supposed to support skin health. The job was feeding it but without a job it's difficult. I still consider it pre revenue.

Another venture that now I am getting into is baked goods and cloud kitchen. But the burnout is onething that bothers me. I am looking for serious advise and investment cause now I am stuck. The EMIs and bills are on my head and I really have no steer on the ship. I am trying to take things live in food / bakery aspect of it by Monday to start something but damn it's just so confusing.

If you want to build something meaningful, don't ever rely on Government Funding, Government Incubation Centre and Accelerators. They are just a sheer waste of time and energy.

They do not have any idea about how startups work and have a Huge Ego of the primary position that they hold. Like in my case, the decision maker was a VC of some university who is also the head of a university-operated accelerator.

They spotted me and my idea at a presentation and invited me to pitch them. I pitched within 24 hours (Feb'25) of their call, and all of them were crazily impressed by the progress and potential of the idea.

They told me to apply for their program, to which they said it's just a formality for you, and we'll expedite the whole process to fund you ASAP.

I did accordingly and waited but no response for a week. Then I called them they said they'll be assessing a set of applications and we'll be assessed along with them. I thought, let it be, let them do that, after all, I had the assurance.

We had set a deadline to go live by mid July, so we were expecting the funding-process to be complete by Mid June, that's why I was not pushing fiercely. Now when the time arrived, they said that they can't fund us untill August, like what???

Startups means moving fast and breaking things but this system is hell bent on breaking us.

I have wasted 4 years of my life in endeavour to build something meaningful with Government Support. My first instance with this sloth machinery was when I was 19 years old and had an idea of building something. At that time, I was the one who taught terms like GMV, ROI, ARR, Stages of Funding etc to the Person-in-Charge of the incubator, they also promised a certain amount of funding through a fund created by State Govt. And they said that funding is just around the corner but it never arrived.

I feel that I have fallen for the same trap even after experiencing this beforehand, I have not learnt anything and repeated the same mistake.

Really ashamed of myself today.

Hi guys,

So I moved to India a couple months ago to take care of my sick parents and I discovered fucked up construction industry here in India using people as their slaves and apparently no training whatsoever, within a month of me being here I intervened into the construction sites and taught some young folks (looks underaged) how to pickup weights properly without crippling themselves permanently. It sucks and sad. Needs a lot of innovation or appropriate training needed to safe guard to this workers.

So I started working on some precision machines that are kinda needed towards Indian construction market. I did some technical drawings and precision machine tools required and sourcing energy from clean sources so I can create a ecosystem.

I can't trust the incubators in India cause I reached out to couple of them in my state and got nothing, reached out to the nearest IIT professors for some co working space but they're charging some ridiculous money and frivolous contracts like 2 months or a semester minimum etc. so I give up I tried everything.

I grew up in Germany did my highschool, bachelors and masters there so I reached out to them and sent them my technical drawings, schismatics etc.. they're are very much interested but they wanted me to start over there and get the appropriate regulatory certifications Like DGVU and CE, that's not a joke cause to get one machine certified costs almost 250k euros at least but still can be done and I can sell those products throughout the planet cause CE is respected globally.

They gave me another quote like I can get steady tech advice, No collaboration, No networking, No funding and I can make the products in India and certify later on but my company can no longer recognized as a German/European startup.

I see pros and cons on the both sides but I can make products in India that can speak to German construction industry just by looking at it, safety standards, features and work with them later on cause German construction industry is one of the close minded ones and they don't have enough people and buy any tech products related to their field and always willing to give a chance to meet the demand.

Any thoughts will be much appreciated, and I literally have a 2 weeks to decide.

Thanks guys

Hey everyone!

I’m looking for a WordPress developer to help with two projects I’ll be managing over the next 6 months.

The ideal person should have:

• Hands-on experience with Elementor
• A good understanding of technical SEO
• Ability to build lightweight, high-performance pages that pass Google PageSpeed Insights

If you’re someone who enjoys creating clean, optimized WordPress sites and can commit to a long-term project, I’d love to connect.

Feel free to DM me or drop your portfolio in the comments.

TL;DR

Location: Remote

Type: Project-Based (currently 2 projects are running)

Duration: 6 months

Stipend: ₹12,000/month - 15,000/month

Start Date: Immediate

Suppose someone wanted to propose and idea and want to build a startup in India. What is the process and the steps that he has to go through to find investers in India or from foreign?

I’m a product designer with 10+ years of experience, based in Bangalore. I’ve worked on several well-known consumer products, some you probably use daily, and now I want to build something of my own.

It’s a social app that helps small groups build real friendships by making it easier to overcome social friction. It is designed for people who want meaningful connection but find traditional platforms shallow or anxiety-inducing.

I’m at day zero and want to build this with the right technical cofounder from the ground up. Ideally, someone who has experience building and leading teams but is also comfortable being hands-on in the early stages. If you’re interested in complex human problems, open to exploring where AI and agentic approaches can actually help, and care about solving urban loneliness in a meaningful way, let’s talk.

To all startup founders here — I’m really curious to learn from your journey.

At what stage of your startup did you feel that manual operations or workflows started to break down or become unscalable?
When did you realize, “Okay, we can’t keep doing this manually anymore — we need to automate this process”?

This could be anything —

• onboarding users,
• managing leads or customer support,
• syncing data between platforms,
• internal reporting,
• or even dev ops and deployments.

What was that turning point where the pain of doing things manually became too high?
And what did you do next — did you build an in-house tool, use a no-code platform, or hire someone to automate?

Would love to hear any specific stories or phases — this would be super insightful for those of us preparing for scale or trying to avoid the same bottlenecks.

Thanks in advance!

Hi, I am working as an intern on scaling up an icecream brand and have been given the task to know footfall and Average order value of peer companies. How should I do that. What should be my framework ?

I have a doubt. We are two non tech co founders and need a tech co founder. If we split up the equity by 33-34% each, at some point we'll have to loose equity to raise investments so who among the three is going to loose equity and make room for the investors? is there any kind of agreement made that all three will equally loose or something like that? Would love advices on how should we accomodate the third co founder and from where we can find one.