A logo, basic website and slogan (which you shouldn’t even waste time on) should be done in a couple days, at most. Wasting months on a logo and a slogan isn’t running a business or starting a company, it’s just hanging out with your friends.

What is it your app does? Maybe that can give us some context as to why your conversion rate is so low or why so many people stop when activating the stripe link?

I stand corrected. This is not BS and I retract my original comment.

If you have access to a thousand large companies and VC funding, why are you going to Reddit asking if the idea that’s been funded is a good idea? Surely you didn’t get a blank check to do whatever you want, and were funded for an existing idea with a business plan you presented, unless your dad is in charge of it or something.

Why don’t you ask one of the advisors your VC gave you? Why is your main goal to reach profitability as fast as possible, did your VC advise you to do that?

This story smells of BS to me.

Have you any experience in sales and marketing or is it just your skill set you believe you’re good at?

Unless you have specific industry expertise, or general experience with sales and marketing at a higher level, you’re basically looking for someone to do a lot of work for you just because you have the idea. An idea isn’t worth much, so it will be difficult to find a random person to develop your app for free if you aren’t already personally friends with them. Mental health apps are really a dike a dozen and notoriously hard to monetize as well.

I’m not trying to discourage you, just being realistic. If your idea is “talk to an AI that gives you mental health advice” in an app it’s been done.

Try Y-combinator founder matching to test the waters. You’ll get lots of opinions on your idea very quickly and find if there are technical people looking to work with you or not.

We don’t know what happened, so we can’t derive any lessons from this.

Was Sam Altman fired with or without cause? If he committed fraud or something and was removed because of that then there’s not much to learn besides don’t commit fraud. If he was fired for disagreeing with the board on a fundamental issue, the lesson is to understand your powers and ability in the company. He’s an employee and nothing more, so it’s not like he’s Zuckerberg where he can just do whatever he wants with majority control.

My guess is he saw things one way and the board saw things another way and he wasn’t willing to budge on an issue he believed was important.

What sort of “company” polishes your ideas and helps you get funding? Are you sure the testimonials are real or are they just on their websites? Do they have any other startups that have demonstrable success like being acquired?

It’s not surprising that another company is doing a similar thing as you, depending on the idea it might be quite obvious, or it might be that they started their own thing and the company you hired is a scam at best. Without more context it’s impossible to know.

It depends on what you’re doing for him and what he’s doing for the company.

If this is just an “idea” and he wants you to do all the upfront work with no compensation for only 10% run for the hills.

Spending the minimum amount of effort to find a cofounder will almost certainly get you a minimum quality cofounder.

Why not use a few minutes or even an hour writing something well written about yourself, your ideas, and what sort of person you’re hoping to connect with?

Remote founders almost never, ever work out. Finding someone across the world to be your CTO is almost never going to end up in you getting an MVP. As a non-technical founder you are going to have to work very hard to find a technical founder who will actually deliver, as it seems like you’re just trying to find someone to build an app for you. This can only be done successfully when you’re bringing something to the table like specific industry experience or a previous successful startup.

If your app is social media which it sounds like it is, I wouldn’t bet big on it. Social media ideas are perhaps the easiest to have and hardest to implement. Unless it’s something truly unique and innovative, you’ll end up with too few customers to make it work. 2 weeks for an MVP is also extremely short.

It sounds like you’re diverting a whole lot of blame to others instead of looking at what you’re doing. Saying things like “Imagine being female or a POC in the startup world?” suggests you’re really looking for any excuse to say this is hard and it’s not your fault. Perhaps you should limit where you’re looking for a cofounder or re-evaluate what you’re looking for in a cofounder.

Are you the actual producer or at least exclusive distributor of this product? If so, and if you can produce at least a few hundred of them up front, it’s incredibly easy for any American to get it on American Amazon business account set up. I set one up years ago to sell something as a side hustle but a more serious startup I was building took off and I just didn’t have the time. I’m not sure about setting one up internationally, but I’m sure it would be much more complicated.

Amazon even has a program where they will store and ship your items for a fee, which can streamline the process a whole lot depending on how confident you are they will sell. It costs money to store, but you only have to worry about shipping once to a central location, which is major if you’re based in Shenzhen like what your website suggests.

Depending on your margins you may want to try contacting YouTubers who make computer builds and offer them a free monitor if they promote it. A video with a 100,000 views featuring your monitor would have to be worth the few hundred dollars it costs to produce.

Any company that specializes in Amazon FBA will charge you big bucks to set it up though, which I wouldn’t recommend. If you’re based in China I would see if anyone in your firm went to school in the US, or perhaps still has someone they can trust to partner with.

Your best bet is to find an American or European firm who can put it on Amazon for you if you can’t yourself. Getting some Amazon reviews and some legitimacy from that, maybe even a sponsorship or two will go a long way in convincing larger chains to hold your product. Unfortunately that will require you to actually have the product designed and produced ahead of time, which is extremely expensive. If your product is innovative enough you might find an investor, but otherwise expect to from the cost yourself.

I’m sure Walmart gets a thousand requests to stock someone’s product per day, but they are only interested in brands that can provide consistent quality for a cheap price that they are sure will sell. Going in dry without that legitimacy gives you zero chance.

You might as well edit your own early on. Until you know if you enjoy it, or if you’re good at it or not you might as well not waste money if you don’t have to.

If you enjoy it and get even a little traction, maybe spending to increase the quality will be worth it.

This isn’t really entrepreneurship and is more just scamming businesses. You’re hoping to convince brands to pay you to post their content for an audience of bot followers who can’t buy their product. It’s the very definition of false pretenses.

No surprise that taking a drug that makes you unproductive makes you unproductive. Weed is a depressant like alcohol.

Sure, there are CEO’s who drink regularly and probably some who smoke often too, but while drunk or high, your ability to get anything productive done drops almost to zero. If you are using up all your free time doing so, you’ll have absolutely no chance to start something unique and interesting!

It’s not really a big deal if you unwind with some drinks on a Friday night with some friends, or smoke some weed a couple days a month to unwind, but doing so every day will make it impossible to succeed, to even what to succeed.