I ll start.

I m building Round Funded, a fundraising platform for founders raising their first rounds.

We help founders find active, vetted investors, get matched based on their stage, and manage investor outreach without spending weeks digging through random databases.

From what I am seeing across communities, here is what the tool stack looks like right now.

The Core Stack

Email & Capture: Mailchimp for launch updates and email sequences . Carrd for quick, clean launch-specific landing pages . Pre-launch tools like LaunchBuddy and Prefundia to build a waitlist and gather early feedback before you even hit the Product Hunt button .

Social & Scheduling: Buffer or Hootsuite to keep a consistent presence across X, LinkedIn, and Threads without it taking over your entire day . Canva for generating graphics that do not look like you threw them together in five minutes .

Vokal got #2 product of the day and #7 of the week, and we now have 100+ signups from startups and teams. In general, people seem excited to try it out to up-level their teams to agent native.

Now I m trying to figure out the next step: how do we scale this beyond manual founder-led work?

I ve been writing posts, sharing content, and doing outreach manually, but it s starting to feel like a constant drain and a bottleneck. I ve been looking into tools like HubSpot, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo, and Clay.

For people who have used any of these: what has your experience been? Which ones are actually worth it at an early stage?

As usual, Y Combinator came up with segments that are worth investing:

1. Cursor for Product Managers
2. AI-Native Hedge Funds
3. AI-Native Agencies
4. Stablecoin Financial Services
5. AI for Government
6. Modern Metal Mills
7. AI Guidance for Physical Work 8. Large Spatial Models 9. Infra for Government Fraud Hunters 10. Make LLMs Easy to Train

We got 272 founders to sign up for Causo after launch.

Nice number. Felt good for about 12 seconds.

Then we looked at the funnel properly and got humbled pretty fast.

253 created a company profile.
92 completed onboarding.
90 got matched with investors.
38 actually launched outreach.
18 became paying customers.

Shameless self-promo, but we just shipped a massive update to Causo and I am genuinely proud of this one.

We spent the last few months rebuilding our VC dataset from the ground up. We now cover:

• 1,000+ venture funds

• 17,000+ investors and investment professionals

• Fund size, cheque size, stages, sectors and geographies

• Investment theses, portfolios, recent investments and latest fundraises

• Individual investor backgrounds, focus areas, career histories and past investments

• Verified emails where available

• Sources for the underlying research

• Non-investment staff separated from the people who actually make investment decisions

But the goal was never to build another giant directory or give founders a CSV and wish them luck.

How are you covering the monthly costs of building your B2C or B2B startup? The virtual office, phone service, domain hosting, Supabase or Firebase, and other recurring expenses add up. How do you fund these odds and ends, and what cost-saving hacks help you get the most bang for your proverbial buck before revenue starts coming in?

I have two startups, so the overhead can be overwhelming. Still, I decided long ago that it was in my best financial interest to focus primarily on my startup needs and find free workarounds for my wants. For example, Canva is a low-cost design service, but I opted for a free Affinity account for most of my immediate needs. It requires more manual labor and a bit of design skill, but I m saving $15-$20/month. It s minimal, but I would rather spend that $20/month on Resend for my email needs than on design extras.
How are you managing?

I spent 8 years as a VC. Invested in 47 companies, read thousands of decks, sat through hundreds of pitches.

And the whole time, from my side of the table, I kept noticing the same thing. The founders struggling to raise usually didn't have worse ideas. They were the ones who couldn't get in front of the right investors, or were emailing the wrong ones with the wrong message.

Most businesses and startups rely on VCs.

I would briefly write it as follows:

Two weeks ago, @byalexai discussed whether VCs are losing their appeal in the AI era. A few months ago, I personally noticed a lot of hate toward VCs and praise for bootstrapping on X.

It felt like VCs were being demonised: selective investors who take a big slice once a good opportunity appears, and then founders are expected to deliver top results while entrepreneurial freedom fades. That s how it was often framed.

YC published a list of themes they want to invest in:

1. Full-stack AI Companies

2. More Design Founders

3. Voice AI

4. AI for Scientific Advancement

5. AI Personal Assistant

6. Healthcare AI

7. AI Personal Tutor for Everyone

8. Software Tools To Make Robots

9. The Future of Education

10. AI Residential Security

11. Internal Agent Builder

12. AI Research Labs

13. AI Voice Assistants for Email

14. AI for Personal Finance

Of course there are many projects and startups that launched on Product Hunt in each of these categories.

Hey PH community

I m building a startup and reaching the point where I need to better understand the early-stage funding landscape especially around pre-seed and first checks.

There s a lot of theory online, but I d love to hear your real stories and practical tips:

How did you raise your first funding?

Supabase recently surveyed over 2,000 startup founders and builders to uncover what's powering modern startups: tech stacks, GTM, and approach to AI.

See full report here

I am trying to gather tools directly developed for the Product Hunt platform that could possibly help you with the launch.
This is what I have gathered so far.

• Advanced PH Scrapper extracting data of launches into the charts

• Hunted Space calendar & stats for upvotes, comments, upvote speed

• Launchgrid something like a database of launches from PH & HN

• Launchpedia  kits (PH resources)

• Product Hunt favourites  extension for bookmarking

• Product Hunt trending overview of successful launches (ranking)

• Product Wars  upvotes, comments, speed stats

If you know more, feel free to share.

I am trying to gather tools directly developed for the Product Hunt platform that could possibly help you with the launch.
This is what I have gathered so far.

• Advanced PH Scrapper extracting data of launches into the charts

• Hunted Space calendar & stats for upvotes, comments, upvote speed

• Launchgrid something like a database of launches from PH & HN

• Launchpedia  kits (PH resources)

• Product Hunt favourites  extension for bookmarking

• Product Hunt trending overview of successful launches (ranking)

• Product Wars  upvotes, comments, speed stats

If you know more, feel free to share.

We just hit:

600+ people on the Meet-Ting waitlist

275+ invites sent

50+ meetings booked

Hey Product Hunt community!

I'm diving into the world of bootstrapping and want to build something amazing without spending a dime. I know many of you have been there starting from scratch, hustling with free tools, and leveraging creativity to grow.

Let s share our best tips, hacks, and stories! What free tools, platforms, or strategies have you used to launch or scale a project on a $0 budget? From no-cost marketing tactics to open-source software or scrappy growth hacks, spill the beans!