From an idea to first £298 in revenue - it took us exactly 171 days. Or 5 months and 18 days. (0 'vibe coding' or copying - real product) Here's how it happened: Prologue: After travelling around Asia early this year, I had to get back to work, and I suddenly felt 'dread' having to come back to LinkedIn (after using it for years - successfully) and didn't want to use other social media either. I just wanted to talk to other business owners. Without all the other BS. 1) July - the validation. I talked to over a 100 founders. Many seemed to be pissed off about social media burn-out too and all AI slop and spam. So I got to work on the concept. I asked: "what if we could skip the long profiles, 'phd in marketing', commenting, DMing, connecting to 25 people a day, sales navigator, AI trash... And just connect to other founders with 1 click and get straight to conversation?" A platform anyone can use - without need to pay for 'personal branding course' or spend months 'figuring it out' or paying £200/m to make it somewhat usable. 2) August - idea for Founderstree is born, made a demo, started looking for a co-founder (I can't code). 3) Mid August/September - we started working on the concept and started coding. Meanwhile, I've worked on marketing & made a landing page with a waitlist. *We planned initial MVP launch for October 4) Sept/October - 300+ people signed up to waitlist, but it turned out tech is hard. Co-founder says it will take 3-4 more months to complete. 5) We stripped down 90% of it, and decided to go for bare minimum. 6) End of October - decided to launch super lean MVP, ASAP. Also pivotted to UK Only as we got a big waitlist spam from countries that definitely weren't in ICP. 7) November 1st, MVP Launch - 60 closed beta testers (real users) were invited and signed up for beta. 8) November 2nd - EVERYTHING BROKE. Platform became almost unusable :D. 9) November 3rd - everyone left because everything was broke. 10) All November spent fixing. Decided to give all users who wanted it 100% discount code for life, because it was the right thing to do. 11) 1st of December - relaunched again! (in a much better state, with major fixes and improvements) Chasing up old users re discounts codes + more feedback + re old trial accounts 12) December 19th - 100+ accounts made, and 2 weeks after re-launch some users are happy and got referrals and warm intros, so were happy to pay for the original deal. PS. Currently decide to leave platform for free, until our proper open launch again by end of Jan with much more improved UX and features based on user feedback. We haven't cracked the code yet. Messaging keeps getting refined. We've not found true PMF yet. We're adding a lot of small tweaks to help retention. And we're fighting 'cold-start' daily, truth is, platform won't work well until we hit 800+ (semi active) users, so we're not even 10% there yet. Money and funds are running out too. And I am not even sure on the exact monetisation model we'll implement next month. I don't even know which features to prioritise - trying to get feedback over Christmas is tough. But I know this... We're not stopping here. 2026 will be the year when business networking landscape changes :) ASK ME ANYTHING (made a ton of f*ck ups on the way).

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