Nick Shilov

I’m begging you, never quit as a founder. It’s 0 for longer than you’ll ever expect. No momentum. Soul-crushing doubts. Nobody seems to care. Even when it looks like it’s working, it’s not. You keep trying new things. You don’t lose hope. Then it snaps to 100. You find the one thing that resonates. You wake up with more customers than you can handle. Everything is breaking. Momentum builds even when you stop pushing. You didn’t get lucky. You just didn’t leave.

I'm 30. I built an AI startup called GojiberryAI to $3.5M ARR. Got accepted into YC. If I had to start from 0, here's exactly what I'd do: 1. Sell it before I build it. No code. Just a simple slide deck (mine was 6 ugly slides) explaining the problem, the solution, the outcome, and the price. I made my first $10k that way, before writing a single line. 2. Pick a painfully specific customer. Not "B2B SaaS." Something like "founders at 20-person SaaS companies about to hire their first SDR." So specific that the right person reads it and thinks "that's me." 3. Start outbound on day one, but only to people showing intent. Not scraped lists. People engaging with competitors, changing roles, raising money, or publicly posting about the exact problem I solve. That's the gap between a 1-2% reply rate and 25-40%. 4. Lead with value, never a calendar link. Send a blueprint, not "got 15 minutes?" Let the resource do the selling, and the trial becomes the obvious next step instead of a pitch. 5. Pick ONE channel and go deep. For us it was outbound first, then Reddit (10M+ organic views), then LinkedIn lead magnets. I wouldn't touch a second channel until the first one was clearly working. 6. Talk to customers every single day. The product doesn't matter until you understand the problem better than they do. Spend 90% of every early call listening, not demoing. 7. Only build once people are actually paying. Then keep it dead simple and price it to sell itself. We landed on $99/mo with a free trial, so the funnel runs without me dragging anyone onto a call. 8. Do this relentlessly for about 12 months. That’s roughly how long $0 to $3.5M took us. Bootstrapped. No outside funding. Most founders don’t lose because they can’t build. They lose because they build too early, sell too late, and quit the channel before it compounds.