Update: The Deel Leaderboard will no longer be going ahead today for the Paris event.
We re teaming up with The Pitch by @Deel, a global startup competition where up to 100 winners will receive $50k in funding and up to 10 winners will receive $1M+.
After several years of founding and running a VC backed startup that got acquired by a fortune 100 I am looking to reconnect with the founder community!
With AI it's such a fun time to build now, but go-to-market is the new bottleneck. I'd love to connect with folks to share stories!
A few years ago, getting a VC check was the ultimate shortcut. The fastest way to scale. The signal that you'd "made it." But with AI is a little bit different.
Global VC funding declined 30% in Q1 2024. One of the lowest quarters since 2018. And bootstrapped startups are quietly catching up. Recent data shows bootstrapped businesses are growing as fast as VC-backed startups, while spending only about one-quarter as much on customer acquisition.
Last week Garry Tan (CEO of Y Combinator) shared his entire Claude Code setup on GitHub and called it "god mode."
He's sleeping 4 hours a night. Running 10 AI workers across 3 projects simultaneously. And openly saying he rebuilt a startup that once took $10M and 10 people. Alone, with agents.
I ve been building things on the internet since the late 90s. Started out the same way a lot of people probably did back then, tinkering with early websites, figuring out how things worked, breaking things, fixing them, and generally making software do things it wasn t originally designed to do.
I ve always been more of a problem solver than anything else. If something annoys me or feels inefficient, my instinct is usually to try and build a way around it.
For most of that time I was a developer, mainly web and backend, but over the last year AI has completely changed how I work.
If you re still sitting on your launch, this is the push.
YC made a special exception for this community: one or more companies that launch tomorrow will get a YC interview and potentially funding. A YC partner will review every eligible launch.
According to @RevenueCat 's State of Subscription Apps 2026 report, "hard paywalls convert 5x better than freemium, but with significantly wider variance."
Day 35 download-to-paid, freemium vs. hard paywall
Does access method impact download-to-paid conversion within 35 days?
I m the @Product Hunt CEO, I ve launched 7 times on PH, and helped countless friends prep their launches. The most common mistake I see is a confusing tagline. Launching on Product Hunt soon? Tell me your tagline and I ll fix it for you :)
