... most important and challenging experiences you ll have as a founder is fundraising. I pitched VCs across London and San Francisco. Some spent 15 seconds on my deck. Some took the call just to diligence a competitor. One told me to ask for more money. Oh, and I found out your pitch is probably being recorded and run through AI. This is the high-impact version of all of those lessons to save you time, energy, and emotional damage. Please ... ... competing in smaller, more competitive pools, against companies with stronger metrics, stronger pedigrees, or stronger momentum. Investors use heuristics Ironically, investors use heuristics all the time to make fast decisions. What school did you go to? Stanford? Harvard? Carnegie Mellon

... This started out as a challenge to teach myself iOS development and I wanted to see if I could ship something meaningful in ~30 days. I built MelloPal , a tiny GPT-powered wellness app that helps you: - log meals with natural language - reflect gently on your eating patterns - get mood check-ins from an AI wellness coach What surprised me: even a simple app has a LOT more complexity than you d expect subscriptions, App Store review gotchas ... ... ended up learning: - prompt tuning with GPT/Claude - real-world solo dev tradeoffs (done vs