21M Looking for a mentor

I’m 21M, and lately I’ve been feeling like I’m watching my life pass by without actually doing anything with it.

Days turn into weeks, weeks turn into months, and when I look back, I don’t have much to show for any of it. No real progress, no skill I’m proud of, no achievement that makes me feel like I’m moving somewhere. And honestly, I can’t even blame anyone else for it.

I’m from Pakistan, but I don’t want to use that as an excuse either. The truth is, I’ve been lazy, inconsistent, and terrible at holding myself accountable. I know what I want out of life. I want to be successful, financially independent, and eventually make enough money that I don’t have to constantly worry about it. But wanting those things means nothing if I keep spending my days doing nothing about them.

I’m currently in my 5th semester of CS after taking a gap year. Right now, I’m learning DaVinci Resolve and trying to get good at video editing. But I’m honestly open to learning whatever has a future and whatever someone experienced believes I can be good at.

What I’m looking for is a mentor. Someone who has already walked the road I’m trying to walk and can tell me what I should actually be doing instead of wasting another year figuring it out myself.

I’m willing to work for free. I’m willing to start at the bottom, do the boring work, and spend a year learning if that’s what it takes. I care more about getting real experience and becoming genuinely good at something than making money right away.

I’m not expecting someone to hand me success. I just want someone to give me a direction and a chance to prove that I can actually stick with something.

Because honestly, I’m tired of being disappointed in myself when I look in the mirror. I know life isn’t fair, and I’ve known that for a long time. But at some point, I have to stop acknowledging that and actually do something about where I am.

So if you’ve built something, run a business, developed a skill, or simply know what you’re doing and are willing to guide someone who is genuinely willing to work, I’d really appreciate hearing from you.

Isn't that kinda the point behind founding a startup to go all in? Invest everything you need to to get your company to succeed. To place your biggest bet on you and let it pay out. Is there anything I'm missing in terms of putting all your eggs in that one basket?

Started a new campaign yesterday, for my own company this time, not a client. Wanted to actually document day one honestly instead of waiting a month and posting a clean, impressive-looking result.

So here's day one, unfiltered.

Before building any list, I run a comparison across the verticals I'm considering, checking deal size, how reachable the decision maker actually is, and whether the problem I solve is something they already know they have. That research took longer than actually building the outreach sequence did.

Once I had a vertical, I pulled a raw pool of prospects and started filtering immediately. 106 of them got excluded before a single message was sent. Wrong company size, wrong role, or just not a real fit once I looked closer. That's a lot of people to cut on day one when the instinct as a founder is always to keep the number of prospects as high as possible.

Real numbers from yesterday: 254 connection requests sent, 36 accepted, 26 outreaches after filtering further, 7 replies, a 26% response rate, and 4 calls already on the calendar.

4 calls is a small number. I'm posting it anyway because I think most people only share startup progress once it's big enough to look impressive, and that leaves everyone else building in the dark about what day one actually looks like. It looks like this. Small, a lot of exclusion, and a start.

Anyone else documenting the actual early days instead of just the milestone posts? What did day one of your own outbound or sales motion look like?

When you’re building something alone, it’s easy to think the hardest part is coming up with the right idea.

I don't think it is.

The harder part is figuring out whether the idea is actually worth building, what people really want, and how quickly you can change direction when your assumptions turn out to be wrong. So my work has gradually started looking more like: Find opportunity → Research → Understand the problem → Create something → Get feedback → Adjust → Repeat.

If I wanted to explore a new product direction, I'd spend hours reading industry reports, looking at competitors, browsing Reddit discussions, checking reviews, collecting screenshots, and trying to make sense of everything. Then I'd have to analyze all of it, figure out a positioning, write landing page copy, ads, social posts, maybe a video, finally launch something and wait for feedback.

By the time I'd completed one cycle, I was already exhausted - and sometimes the conclusion was simply, "people don't actually care about this." So I'm using AI Agent workflows to shorten that loop.

I break the process into several different roles:

- Research Agent: Give it a product direction and have it investigate the surrounding market on industry trends, competitors, customer discussions, common complaints, emerging use cases, and potential gaps

- Analysis Agent: Feed the research and actual user feedback back into the process. Instead of reading 200 comments individually and trying to remember the patterns, AI can help cluster recurring complaints, compare different customer segments, identify changes over time, and surface questions worth investigating. That's particularly useful for positioning.

- Marketing Agent: Once the positioning changes, I can use the updated direction to generate different versions of ad angles, social posts, landing page copy, campaign concepts, and video scripts. Again, I don't treat the output as final. The point is to get several hypotheses into the market quickly.

And then there's the visual side. I've also trying with video generation+editing as part of the same loop. I can go from: marketing hypothesis → script → generated footage → edit → variations → test, and that makes it much cheaper to test different creative directions before investing heavily in one.

If another founder can research a market in a day instead of a week, analyze hundreds of customer conversations quickly, generate 20 marketing hypotheses instead of 2, and test multiple creative directions before I even finish one campaign...

then they're not necessarily better at execution.

They simply have a much faster learning loop. And that might become a pretty meaningful competitive advantage for small teams.

A friend of mine runs a small dev agency and wants to test out an offer: doing free code, infra, and cost audits for early-stage startups. The only catch is they want to turn the process into a YouTube video for their channel (gets about 30k–50k views per video).

Honest check: would you ever take them up on that? What would make it worth it for you, or is having your tech stack aired on YouTube an immediate dealbreaker no matter what?

Three years ago, I was a pretty successful entrepreneur. People were fighting to get an appointment with me so I could fix their life problems even old ladies were asking astrologers when the best day was to reach out to me.

I was a tough, capable guy, pretty damn capable.

I solved the unsolvable until I completely burned out from carrying everyone else's problems and the overwhelming weight of the responsibility they dumped on me.

The kicker is that I built all of that entirely from scratch, out of absolute zero, at a very young age. A true shadow power.

Naturally, your ego blows up. You start thinking you’re the smartest and most powerful person on earth, and then reality slaps you straight in the face.

I decided to pivot from construction to software to change entire systems. Things took off like crazy at first, people were literally throwing money at me that I didn't even want to take. I carried everything on my own back as long as I could, and when I finally ran out of gas, I accepted one relatively large investment.

I was someone people saw up among the stars. But then came certain "old players" people whose titles and names I won't even mention because I'm still afraid of them. They tried to take over my business. I refused to let them. Two weeks later, they put an end to my project and my entire career with a few orchestrated news headlines and a couple of sudden regulatory reforms in the exact sector I was planning to automate.

That was the beginning of a living hell that’s still going on. I fled my hometown which was probably one of my smarter moves, and likely the reason I’m still alive today.

Then came total isolation and a period where I practically ceased to exist. I woke up every single night dreaming about the people who ruined me, and those who betrayed me. It all boiled down to this: everyone hated me, but it worked as long as they feared me...

Since then, I’ve tried to rebuild three times, and I fell three times with no safety net. I’m an orphan with no parents or family. The few "friends" I had left after the first fall dissolved after three years of trudging through the mud. They forgot me, wrote me off... whatever. I don't even have enough of them left to count on one hand. And there isn't much left of me either, except that physically I'm still strong as a horse, even though I turned to alcohol in the meantime. Given how I live, I look surprisingly good.

The point is, lacking funds, I had to figure things out on my own. I self educated and built the complex systems I had envisioned myself. I couldn't forget it, I couldn't drop it. I honestly felt like checking into a clinic not because of the alcohol or drugs, but because of this obsession with programming that I just can't quit. A damn vision that won't leave me alone.

I finished the system not just one. I built a multi-tenant system designed to serve multiple industries/domains, not just a single one and it’s perfect, exactly how I imagined it, maybe even better.

And now I’ve hit the most painful wall: people don't understand what I've built. They resist it. It's like trying to push a cyclist into a space shuttle. Meanwhile, my nerves are thinner than tissue paper after surviving all this hell.

I’m in a state of deep shame, with no face to show up anywhere, no face to ask for funding, no time to wait for it anyway, and no energy left to explain the benefits of the systems I’ve created.

I went from a period where I had no finished system just an idea and people were throwing money at me and blindly believing every word I said, to a period three years later where I have a fully finished, flawless system that meets my highest perfectionism, but nobody takes me seriously anymore. Everything flipped upside down.

I have no money left, my reputation has been turned inside out, I have no car, no apartment as of tomorrow, I am literally on the street.

Where do I go from here? How? Should I bypass the mental hospital or check myself in? I have nowhere left to go.

Stalemate or at least that's how I see it.

Just making sure I'm not crazy. I get 1-2 family office unsolicited DM on LinkedIn. My startup is in the DigitalHealth space, but that's a pretty crowded field right now.

I'll click through to profiles but even the ones who seem organized leave me skittish. If they're fully legit, am I about to waste time on calls only to have them demand 20% equity for a $19 in cash plus a ham sandwich.

We definitely need $$ but we're still too early for any serious investor, not sure why I'd bother even taking the calls. Time better spent getting more traction even if my savings are rapidly draining.

Been running my SaaS for 8 months and I think I’ve found a stupidly expensive blind spot.

I’m collecting USD from customers in the US and UK while I’m based in India. Every month, Stripe takes its cut, my local bank takes another cut on the conversion, and then whatever’s left sits for 5 to 7 days before I can actually use it.
I did the math last week and I’m losing roughly 9% between fees and the exchange rate spread on revenue I already worked pretty hard to earn.
The obvious fix seems to be having an actual multi-currency business account with a real IBAN, so the USD/GBP can sit there until I decide when to convert instead of getting converted automatically at whatever rate the bank gives me that day.
I’ve looked at a few options. Paddle for the tax side, Lemon Squeezy if I wanted something simpler, and Unlimit also came up because they offer EMI accounts aimed at cross-border businesses. I haven’t actually opened an account with any of them yet, though.
And this is where I keep getting stuck.
Instead of doing the one boring thing that could literally save me money every month, I’ll add a feature nobody asked for, tweak some tiny part of the product, or spend a Saturday “researching competitors” for something I’m not even building yet.
This has been going on since March.
Has anyone else actually managed to break this kind of procrastination loop? Did you just force yourself to deal with the boring operational stuff, or did you eventually decide the fees were simply the cost of staying focused on the product?

I work at a late-stage pre IPO company in the AI space (not one of the big guys, we operate more in neocloud space) and have a transactions role. I am highly cash compensated (in a good year can make bonus >$1m) but in exchange for that, have pretty much no equity (not an exaggeration). It’s a decently solid company but has tons of bloat and real issues - but good culture, good role, etc. I could be comfortable plugging along there for awhile so long as the company stays afloat (fairly questionable) and the AI space doesn’t absolutely implode.

I was approached by a well-funded Series A company to do a similar role. They are meeting my base and offering me meaningful equity. In short, if this company follow trajectory of other AI company’s - and, again, market doesn’t absolutely collapse - it could be life changing for me. Obviously significant risk, but we are at a unique moment in time on this spinning rock!

My theory is: if I am doing a similar job anyways, and doing a good job of it - should I take the “surer thing” and be happy with my strong cash comp, but never have upside, or should I bet on myself and a company that is VERY early and take the gamble? Founding team is good, investor team is very strong. First hires are highly qualified individuals in the space.

How would you view this opportunity? What could you ask within reason to get more comfortable? Thoughts on entering this space now at an early stage?

I work at a late-stage pre IPO company in the AI space (not one of the big guys, we operate more in neocloud space) and have a transactions role. I am highly cash compensated (in a good year can make bonus >$1m) but in exchange for that, have pretty much no equity (not an exaggeration). It’s a decently solid company but has tons of bloat and real issues - but good culture, good role, etc. I could be comfortable plugging along there for awhile so long as the company stays afloat (fairly questionable) and the AI space doesn’t absolutely implode.

I was approached by a well-funded Series A company to do a similar role. They are meeting my base and offering me meaningful equity. In short, if this company follow trajectory of other AI companies - and, again, market doesn’t absolutely collapse - it could be life changing for me. Obviously significant risk, but we are at a unique moment in time on this spinning rock!

My theory is: if I am doing a similar job anyways, and doing a good job of it - should I take the “surer thing” and be happy with my strong cash comp, but never have upside, or should I bet on myself and a company that is VERY early and take the gamble? Founding team is good, investor team is very strong. First hires are highly qualified individuals in the space.

How would you view this opportunity? What could you ask within reason to get more comfortable? Thoughts on entering this space now at an early stage?

Launching a startup of sorts. No plans to raise money. I was thinking of incorporating in Wyoming for the privacy.

Home state is California. People say that's where I should be incorporating if I don't need Delaware but there's the possibility of moving out of CA.

The only reason I can see to incorporate in Delaware for me is to be able to do it through Stripe Atlas for the fancy dashboard and some random credits.

Is there something I should know before I choose Wyoming or Delaware?

Launching a startup of sorts. No plans to raise money. I was thinking of incorporating in Wyoming for the privacy.

Home state is California. People say that's where I should be incorporating if I don't need Delaware but there's the possibility of moving out of CA.

The only reason I can see to incorporate in Delaware for me is to be able to do it through Stripe Atlas for the fancy dashboard and some random credits.

Is there something I should know before I choose Wyoming or Delaware?

I'm in a tricky situation where I was offered the role of founding engineer in a well-funded startup. The MVP is a vibe-coded mess made by a non-tech founder, which is not yet deployed and was used as a demo.

I want to do a complete rewrite in order to build a maintainable and scalable product. I'm expected to work full-time and manage everything technical regarding the project, including and not limited to:

-Backend implementation:

• Design & architecture, performance and maintenance.
• Every technical decision.

-Frontend:

• One admin, one client facing application.
• Maintenance and debugging of the existing vibe coded mess -

-Infrastructure:

• CI/CD pipelines,
• Docker
• Deployments
• Databases
• Scaling
• Monitoring,
• Prevention of downtime
• Production incidents
• Security-related technical issues
• Server / infrastructure problems

Obviously an extremely demanding role with huge work loads. The difficulty of the decision comes to the fact that my current position is threatened due to financial difficulties for the company. This means that I might be out in a very difficult job market with little room for negotiation and benefits.

The offer comes with the benefit of a standard job contract with guaranteed salary which will be a slight raise from my current position, as well as 2% equity. The product is interesting and has good chances to succeed, however field is something out of my interests domain.
Apart from the no-risk opportunity, I love writing code and can pull this off. I've already been in a similar position, albeit with more manpower behind it.

Am I crazy I'm considering it? Given I'll be building the whole thing by myself (or if I manage to convince founder and bring another dev from my network to ease up things), is it naive & greedy to negotiate a better equity and co-founder title? Should I just focus on building something myself?

i'm not looking to promote myself off this post; I'm genuinely asking for advice on outreach

i'm an freshman at a top school in the US. over the summer i've become very interested in a specific niche of startup (agentic market research for asset management/hedge funds). i have decent experience, but i'm mostly just looking to learn from a coffee chat, with the internship being a later ask based on the quality of the call.

i'm cold emailing founders with an ask to chat but not getting responses. mostly targetting series A founders. i know that many of them are not actively hiring interns, so curious as to how founders view these types of networking emails and how to improve.

We're a 2-person SaaS (55/45 split, both with day jobs at the time); he owns frontend and finance (ex-banker), I own backend and product, and that division worked fine until we landed paying US and Gulf customers who needed a real multi-currency business account, not just a checkout link. He was supposed to set it up, but six weeks in it was eight pings and a 12-day payout hold that left us unable to cover hosting, I did it myself-comparing Stripe, Paddle, and Lemon Squeezy before landing on Unlimit for SWIFT/SEPA support, live in about 4 days. Now he's resurfaced wanting full say on "account decisions" despite never touching the setup, which has damaged our working relationship. I'm not sure how to even frame that conversation with him.

I'm building a boring startup(not in the AI/tech space), hence finding talent or people motivated to work is rare. Finding both is even harder.

I'm stuck between two candidates

A: sharp young 2nd year uni student, sees this just as an internship/life experience, not likely to stay, but creative and can direct her own work
B: 4 year working experience, one of those corporate people that got let go as companies reduced footprint in my local market, super committed, but not that sharp, needs me to breakdown problems and give a lot of directions

I feel like this is a common dilemma for founders, curious how you guys approach it

Hi Founders, I have been trying to make a medical device startup. One of the key obstacles I am facing is getting connected with clinical experts that work in medicine such as physicians, nurses, hospital techs, etc. The reason is to get feedback on my device concept and maybe network with potential customers for later down the road.

Wondering how MedTech Founders connect with clinicians? Or how Founders connect with potential customers in general?

Hello everyone I’m a final year medical student and I’ve recently become very interested in the intersection between medicine, biomechanics and biomedical engineering!
I originally became interested in orthopedics because I loved the clinical side, but over time I realized that what fascinates me even more is the mechanics behind medicine. Which led me to an idea I’m currently exploring, a medical simulation business focused on developing more realistic and interactive models for medical and surgical education.
The idea would be to go beyond simply reproducing anatomy and explore ways of incorporating some of the physical and mechanical aspects that make practising a procedure more meaningful.
The longer term vision could potentially involve a company/centre that clinics or other healthcare institutions could use for training. However, I’m intentionally keeping the more specific product and technical details private for now.
I’m very early. I don’t have a company, funding, a finished product, or an established team. I have the medical background, the general concept, and a few people with complementary technical skills that I’m starting to talk to.
What I’m struggling with is figuring out what I should actually do from here.
For people who have built startups, especially in medtech, medical devices, hardware or B2B healthcare:
If you were in my position, what would your next steps be?
How you validate whether there is actually a market for this?
What would you actually ask potential customers?
Would you build a basic prototype first, or validate demand before investing in development?
How do you go from “I have an idea” to having something concrete enough to show potential customers?
At what point would you start looking for a technical co-founder, funding, or investors?
What would the first few months realistically look like?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who have experience building hardware, medtech, medical-device or B2B healthcare businesses, because I have absolutely no previous experience building a company.
I’m genuinely looking for criticism rather than encouragement. If there are obvious problems with this idea or things I’m overlooking, I’d much rather hear about them now than after investing years and money into it
Thank you so much for reading me, I’ll be waiting for your answers!

I ended up with roughly $100k in Lambda.ai cloud credits and I'm trying to figure out the highest-leverage way to actually use them, or make money out of it.

I'm interested in hearing people ideas and thoughts.

If you had access to ~$100k of GPU compute, what would you do/build?

Or, even better: what problem do you currently have where you'd happily pay for the output, but GPU cost makes it uneconomical today?

I'm running a relatively new business related to video creation and social media automation. Most of my traffic and signups currently come from my own growth on social media. Whenever one of my videos goes viral, I see a significant increase in traffic and signups.

The problem is that a large portion of this traffic consists of low-intent users. A lot of people sign up simply because they saw a viral video and got curious, but they don't necessarily have a strong intention to pay for the product. Because of that, my overall conversion rate isn't great.

At the same time, I've noticed that many of the people who do end up paying discovered the product through my social media content. I think seeing my content and growth over time gives them some level of trust and validation before they decide to sign up and pay.

That makes me wonder whether targeted ads could actually help me reach people with stronger intent, or whether they would convert worse because they haven't had that same exposure to my content and personal brand.

I have almost zero experience with paid advertising, and my budget is still relatively tight, so I'm trying to figure out what makes the most sense at this stage. Should I spend time learning and running small ad experiments myself, or would it be better to hire an experienced freelancer to help me test things properly?

I'm not looking to throw a huge budget into ads. My main goal is simply to validate whether paid acquisition can work for my business and whether I can acquire customers profitably before trying to scale anything.

For founders who have been in a similar situation, especially those who were already getting customers through organic content or a personal brand, how did you approach paid acquisition? Did targeted ads work for you, or did you find that the trust built through organic content was too important to replicate with ads?

Would genuinely appreciate hearing what others have experienced.

I’m working on a niche consumer iOS app and I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between capturing existing demand and actually creating awareness.

My problem is that the people who could potentially benefit from the product probably aren’t opening the App Store and searching for the category it belongs to.

For example, if someone already knows they want a calorie tracker, password manager, or budgeting app, there’s existing search intent you can capture through ASO, ads, comparisons, etc.

But what do you do when the user doesn’t even realize that the type of product you’ve built is something they might want?

That makes things like App Store keywords feel limited because there isn’t much category awareness to begin with.

For anyone who has dealt with this with a consumer product:

How did you create awareness before there was meaningful search intent?

Did you focus on marketing the underlying problem instead of the product category?

Did short-form content, creators/affiliates, paid social, communities, PR, or something else work best?

And how did you know whether you were successfully creating demand versus just getting impressions from people who would never convert?

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who launched products in categories that weren’t already obvious to consumers.

I'm a self-taught full-stack developer. I can build almost anything on the technical side: web platforms, sales funnels, automation systems, CRMs, internal tools, you name it. That part comes naturally to me and I actually enjoy it.

My background actually goes beyond software. I also work with industrial automation, PLCs, and microcontrollers, and I'm comfortable with more complex engineering problems too. So it's not just programming, I can support technical needs across a wider range of fields than most people expect from a developer.

What I struggle with, and honestly dislike, is sales. Cold outreach, prospecting, closing calls, none of that plays to my strengths, and I know it's holding my projects back.

I keep thinking the ideal setup is a technical founder paired with someone who genuinely loves selling, splitting the work based on what each person is good at. But I haven't figured out the best way to find that kind of partner, or how to structure the split fairly (equity, commission, hybrid) so it works long term for both sides.

I'm looking for people who actually want to sell and build a team, not just a one-off collaboration.

For those of you who came from a technical background, how did you find your sales counterpart? Did it come from your network, a specific platform, or somewhere unexpected? And how did you structure the deal so it felt fair to both of you?

I'm an ex CEO. I am semi retired now but I'd like to partner with someone and start working on something new. I specialize in rudimentary, problem solving type inventions and optimized business start ups. I have been called a visionary. I have some elite skills but I am not great at the day to day grind and dealing with petty tasks. 

I have over a dozen invention concepts and business start up ideas that I have saved over the years, that I am now ready to get going but I know I work best with a partner.

I am looking for someone bright and motivated. Hopefully you are logical and good at math. These are the people I work best with. Some of my ideas will need some type of financial investment but some don't...I am open to both. 

I can give you a little info on my ideas so you can see what might inspire you best. Here is a categorical list of some of my ideas to tease you a bit. You will need to sign an NDA in order to hear the details.

I have 2 sports based ideas, 2 political ideas, a crypto idea, 2 restaurant ideas, a retail idea, 2 art based ideas, 2 YouTube ideas and more. All these ideas are in an advanced stage, meaning I have worked out all  major details and run them through friends, family and A.I. to insure I am not being delusional about the potential. I use a lot of math to help vet my concepts and they are all great IMO or they wouldn't make the list.

If you are interested in discussing this, please send me a message with some details about you, your situation and what you bring to the table. I am also looking for straight up investors so let me know if this is something you want more info about. I am located in London, On, Canada and closer is better but I will not exclude any if we can figure out a way to make it work.

Pick an industry (eg:FinTech, HealthTech, PropertyTech) → deeply understand its problems → talk to people inside it → build something relevant → become visible to companies in that industry → use that knowledge in cold outreach and interviews.

What do you think of this approach for getting a developer job?

How would you rate this approach, and what do you think are its strengths, weaknesses, or potential problems?

Also, if you were going to follow this approach, how would you:

• Deeply research a particular industry?
• Meet and talk to knowledgeable people working in that industry?
• Find real problems that people repeatedly face?
• Understand which problems are actually worth exploring or building around?

I'm open to all perspectives. If you think this approach is flawed or there are better ways to approach getting a developer job, I'd be interested in hearing those as well.