... shift of the last few years: AI dramatically reduced the cost and speed of building products. Because of this, the signals investors optimize for have changed as well. In the article, I openly talk about what we see inside Unicorns Club after watching hundreds of founders try to raise funding. I even share some of the traction thresholds and benchmarks investors inside our community increasingly expect to see. You can read the article here: https://medium.com/@producthunt/... But I think ... ... founder adapts hypotheses, whether they evolve from conversation to conversation, whether they can learn faster than others. Do they have what Peter Thiel called determinate optimism ? Do they have what Paul Graham described as being relentlessly resourceful ? At Unicorns

... What are the alternatives to Stripe? Paddle got rejected Reason: hybrid model. At Unicorns

... Last year in Unicorns Journal we published an interview with Sergey Bakaev , where we unpacked first-time fundraising strategy expectations vs

... everyone. I m Fran. I spent the last few years at two unicorn startups where I saw firsthand how over-complicated (and overpriced) HR tools can get. It felt like we were paying for 100 features and only using 5. Now that I m bootstrapping, I m building the HR tool I actually want to use: Powered by AI to automate the boring stuff, with a flat price and zero hidden fees. No "Book a Demo" buttons, no buzzwords just ...

... Last Christmas, I thought so. I built a simple Letters to Santa app - write a letter, get an AI reply. ~200 people used it. Then my niece asked Santa for a "purple flying unicorn." She got a text reply. She smiled. But something was missing. That's when I realized: AI generation isn't magic. Presence is. A text reply can't hold space. It doesn't listen. It doesn't surprise you. So I scrapped everything and started over ... ... Santa writes back and leaves you a voice message Day 2: Talk to Santa Real-time voice calls with Santa, right from the North Pole Day 3: Find Your Wish A search engine that understands "I want a purple unicorn

... strategy. Platforms like Fundable has no personalized matching, no curated dealflow, no learning loop, no shared context between investor and founder. It s simply SaaS for hope . The uncomfortable truth After working directly with funds and angel investors inside Unicorns Club , here s what became clear: Serious investors don t browse catalogs. Some of the investors who receive curated dealflow from us never even created a profile . They don t search. What founders need is not a directory. They need ... ... because it was strategic, but because reality forced it. Matching happens on two levels The surface layer: industry, stage, geography. The bottom layer: investor behavior, patterns of interest, quiet criteria that are never listed publicly. Every intro request in Unicorns

... just published one of the most honest and practical founder interviews we've ever featured in Unicorns Journal . It s the story of how Sergey Bakaev , co-founder of LovOn , raised $850K after hearing more than 100 rejections with no network and no previous fundraising experience. A brutally honest, step-by-step breakdown of what pre-seed fundraising actually looks like behind the scenes the pressure, the tactics, the mistakes, and the breakthroughs. Top takeaways: Fundraising = communication density 1 warm ... ... sharing fundraising battles, co-founder search, early traction wins, or lessons from near-failures we d love to hear from you. Email us at editor@unicorns.club and we ll be happy to create a deep, meaningful interview with you for Unicorns

... Animation Builder is available for all registered users of Unicorns Club, completely FREE! It s built to help you celebrate your small (and big) wins It s like Animastats (the gold standard let s be honest), but: free instant and made to require zero design effort. You create the vibe. We ll make it pop. Try it now on Unicorns

... startup mecca. Comment from Nika(@busmark_w_nika): @1001binary  Ireland can be a good point. I totally overlooked that Meta is there. Comment from John W.(@john_wern): Stockholm, Sweden, probably is the top location for breeding unicorns at least it has been for a long time, so the culture is there. Many investment firms have made it a hub for pumping a lot of capital into specifically tech and software, and at practically all universities there these firms ... ... mecca each country offering something slightly different for founders. Comment from Sangita kumari Sk(@deleted-8894550): Estonia is emerging as Europe s startup mecca, thanks to its digital-first government, low taxes, and thriving tech scene. With the highest unicorns

... many founders who validate openly on here, so it d be great to swap thoughts! Comment from Julia Yu(@juliayugo): @jonayed_tanjim  how do you think about the market size and the growth story here? Inside Unicorns Club we see a lot of tools that developers love, but YC and most venture investors usually look for something slightly different: a clear path from useful tool large, fast-growing market with expansion potential. Right now Vartiq feels like a tool ... ... bigger arc of the story is. Comment from Julia Yu(@juliayugo): @axel_brunet  interesting! do you have a co-founder? do you have a clinical background, medical degree, or experience inside healthcare systems? In our data at Unicorns

... thesis of a 1-person Unicorn has been going around since the emergence of LLMs and Agents . While I certainly see how an engineer can now do the work of 10, maybe 20 engineers, I'm still not able to see the path to a $1B company. Being a founder of a venture backed startup, I can see how we can grow Mozart AI to $100m+ with < 10 employees. But given the way VC backed companies move ... ... Acquisition of Base44 by Wix seems to sort of validate the argument, but $80m is quite far away from $1B! What are your thoughts? Comment from Manu Goel(@manu_goel2): Agree with you! I don't see 1-person unicorns

... gamified how startups grow, pitch, and raise Each startup on Unicorns Club now gets a live Unicorn

... learn experience ? So I built it. No funding. No team. No pitch deck. Just me, 3 hours , and a simple goal: make listening to books feel like music streaming. Click. Play. Done. This wasn t about building the next unicorn. It was about finally getting an idea out of my head and into people s hands. And the moment it went live . something shifted. I ll get to that in a sec. But first, let me show you what ... ... platform Google Colab to make up for where Odoo falls short Canva for design (yes, Canva ) And a brain that wanted to build instead of scroll That s it. No fancy frontend framework. No cloud-native, serverless, containerized unicorn

... crazy idea we refused to give up on And now Product Hunt just put us in the same league as billion-dollar startups. This is surreal. A dream. That moment of HOLY SH*T, did we actually do this? Unicorns Club a tiny team of just six people, backed by a single angel investor, no VC money just won a Golden Kitty Award. And not just any award, but the one that placed us alongside OpenAI, Google, Figma, Mercury, Notion ... ... just an idea. No big budgets, no seasoned startup team. Just a handful of people who believed the startup world needed a better way to connect founders and investors. To everyone who voted, supported, signed up, and believed in Unicorns

... Community & Social category at the Golden Kitty Awards is filled with amazing startups, just like Unicorns Club, all dedicated to solving challenges for founders and innovators worldwide. Socap ai Socap ai uses AI to help founders grow their networks and fundraise smarter. By leveraging social capital and automating key processes, they re redefining how founders connect with investors and partners. Follow Socap s co-founders on X: @ednevsky, @solonitsyn, @dmitry_star Roundtable Roundtable is building a LinkedIn for investors. With ... ... Hazim_Mohamad_ next play next play is your go-to platform for discovering what s next in the startup ecosystem, from under-the-radar opportunities to fresh collaborations. Follow next play s co-founder on X: @benln Unicorns

... Thank you, Product Hunt, for nominating Unicorns Club for the Golden Kitty Awards in the Community & Social category! When we launched the first version of Unicorns