The ideas in startup ecosystem
Your startup will not fail because your code is bad. It will fail because nobody knows you exist. I have spent the last few months talking to founders at different stages. Some are shipping their MVP. Others are still in the planning phase. A few have been live for six months or more.
The ideas are genuinely impressive. I have seen products that solve real problems in ways I had not considered. Clean architectures. Thoughtful user experiences. Proper testing coverage. But when I ask how many users they have, the number is always lower than it should be. Not slightly lower. Devastatingly lower.
One founder had built a developer tool that I would personally use. It had been live for four months. They had 31 active users. I have met a lot of people working on their startup idea already or planning to get started soon, and honestly, some of the ideas blew me away. Really unique things. But one thing I realised is that users is always an issue.
The pattern is consistent: brilliant builders who can solve complex technical problems but cannot answer a simple question: where will your first hundred users come from?
This is not a motivation post about hustling harder.
This is about a structural blind spot in how technical founders approach building startups.
We optimise for code quality and feature completeness whilst distribution gets treated as something we will figure out later. Later never comes.
I kept running into the same wall myself whilst building. So I built something to fix it.
At Entreel we help founders navigate the startup world by guiding them from their idea to revenue.
We plan to do this in four steps:
The legal setup, partnering with solicitors to aid the founders with any government laws and funding.
The build and validate this is where other founders can interact with one another and give each other advice lets say on their landing page to make it much better before they release it to the public.
Next is the growth phase. We created our own unique marketing agent that does all the marketing work for you, so that way the founders can focus on building.
Lastly we have revenue. This is where we plan to partner with accountants so they can maintain their revenue stream.
I post about what I am learning building Entreel in public, the wins, the mistakes, and what the data actually shows. If that sounds useful, find me on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/istiaqabdullah/