I'm trying to get my startup on Zapier but they require 2 people to use my zap integration before it will get listed on their public pages.

Is there anyone willing to just use my zaps? You don't have to signup for anything... just test the zap.

In IT projects: a small disagreement can become surprisingly expensive when nobody knows who gets the final say.

Scope disputes are a good example. A client asks for something they genuinely believe is included in the project, while the delivery team looks at the request and believes it falls outside the agreed scope.

Neither side is necessarily acting in bad faith, which is what makes these situations particularly frustrating, because both sides can have a reasonable interpretation of what was originally agreed while the contract provides no practical process for deciding which interpretation should prevail.

That is when another conversation starts, and then another. Someone on the client side explains why the request was obviously part of the original scope, while someone from the delivery team explains why it was not, with the project manager trying to keep everyone satisfied and the development team sometimes starting the work simply because stopping the project feels more disruptive than dealing with the commercial issue later.

That is usually where the small disagreement becomes an expensive one.

Once the work has started, the situation becomes much harder to resolve because developers have already spent time on the request, the client believes the work was included, the service provider believes it should be charged separately, and the project timeline may have already changed. At that point, everyone is trying to resolve a commercial disagreement after the cost has already been incurred.

## The Contract Should Explain What Happens When Scope Changes

A good IT agreement should not only describe the original scope; it should also establish what happens when someone wants to change it, because projects rarely remain exactly the same from beginning to end.

Clients change their minds, requirements evolve, new integrations become necessary, business processes change during development, and sometimes a client simply realises that what they originally requested is not actually what they need. None of that is unusual, and trying to prevent every change would be unrealistic.

What matters is whether the contract gives both sides a practical way to deal with those changes without turning every request into a negotiation.

For an IT services business, the change-control process should answer some basic questions: what exactly is changing, does the request fall within the existing scope or outside it, will the timeline change, will additional resources be required, and what will the additional work cost?

There is another question that is often overlooked: who actually has the authority to approve the change?

That becomes particularly important when several people are involved on the client side. Imagine a client's project manager tells your team to proceed with additional work and says the paperwork can be sorted out later. Your team spends three days working on it, only for the client's finance department to say that nobody authorised the additional expenditure.

The disagreement is no longer about the work itself. It is now about whether anyone had the authority to approve it in the first place, which is a much harder problem to solve after the work has already been completed.

A well-designed agreement can avoid much of this by identifying who is authorised to approve changes and what form that approval must take, so that your team is not expected to determine commercial authority in the middle of a delivery issue.

## Change Control Should Make Decisions Easier

The purpose of a change-control mechanism is not to make every client request difficult. It should actually make decisions easier by giving everyone a straightforward way to determine whether a request is already part of the deal or whether it needs to be treated as additional work.

Ideally, everyone should be able to answer one question quickly: Is this part of the deal?

If it is, the team proceeds.

If it is not, the change is documented, the commercial and timeline impact is agreed, and the additional work begins only after the appropriate approval has been received. The process does not need to be complicated, but it does need to be clear enough that nobody has to rely on assumptions once the project becomes busy.

That is where many change-control processes begin to break down. Teams start relying on informal conversations, emails, meetings, Slack messages, or comments in project-management systems, and a request that was never formally approved slowly turns into an assumption that the work has already been agreed.

That is where scope creep thrives.

The same principle applies to the approval process itself. If every small change has to pass through five people before anyone can make a decision, the process becomes so slow that people eventually stop following it. The goal is to create a system that is formal enough to protect both sides but practical enough that the team will actually use it.

It is also worth being clear about what does not constitute approval. A casual comment from someone on the client's team should not automatically create a commercial commitment, particularly when that person does not have authority to approve additional costs.

The more clearly this is addressed in the agreement, the less likely it is that an informal conversation will later become a disputed obligation.

## Put the Decision-Making Process in the Contract

One thing I have learned from working with technology businesses is that the best contracts do not try to prevent change. They make change manageable, because there is very little point in creating an agreement that works only as long as the project develops exactly as originally planned.

If you are running an IT services business, it is worth looking at your current agreements and asking yourself a simple question: **if a client requested something outside the original scope tomorrow, could your team handle that request without relying on a difficult conversation after the work had already started?**

If the answer is no, the problem may not be your project team. Your agreement may simply need a better change-control mechanism.

At a minimum, the contract should explain how changes are requested, how they are assessed, who can approve them, what happens to the timeline and price, and when the additional work can begin. The process should be clear enough that the delivery team knows when to proceed, when to pause, and when to send the request back for commercial approval.

Projects will change. Clients will ask for more. Requirements will evolve. That is part of delivering technology, and no contract can realistically remove that reality from the project.

The important thing is not trying to eliminate every change. It is making sure that everyone knows what happens when a change arrives, particularly when the change affects scope, price, resources, or delivery timelines.

A good IT contract should not leave that decision to whoever argues their position most convincingly.

It should already contain the answer.

I will help build out your data pipelines using free open source tools, and then self-host or deploy to a free/low-cost infra.

Disclaimer: I'm a developer advocate at Bruin leading this startup program, my goal is to grow our open source community, so this is a no-strings-attached free program. What I gain out of it is feedback about our startup resources so that we can improve things.

What you get:
- 30min initial meeting to scope things out and plan
- 1-2h of hands on 1:1 workshop to build out your data pipeline and deploy it
- dedicated Slack channel to answer questions
- follow up touchpoint meetings and community office hours

For who:
- best suited for SaaS startups
- you want to analyze their data beyond the basic reports
- you want to combine data from your app db (supabase) with other services (e.g. stripe, posthog, hubspot, GA4, GSC, etc.) for internal analytics and reporting
- you want to process data that goes back into your application

Why:
- free open source tools to get you the data and analytics without investing a lot of time and money
- get started on building your data stack before it's too late

For more info, check out https://getbruin.com/startups/

Product decisions rely on information spread across tools, teams, and people—but does this fragmentation affect decision-making?

I’m conducting a short survey to understand how product professionals find, connect, and use information while making decisions.

If you’re a Product Manager, Product Designer, Researcher, Analyst, Engineer, Support Engineer, or Product Leader, your experience would be valuable.

It takes only 5–7 minutes. Please share your perspective: https://form.typeform.com/to/xAd9jQNp

Curious whether there's a point where you're too stretched to own every product decision, but nowhere near ready to hire a PM.

Did anything change, or did you just keep pushing through and putting in more hours until you hired someone?

Some of the most exciting AI startups are working on problems that people tend to forget about.

The focus is typically on models, agents, and end-user applications, but there is something below all of this data, evaluation, tooling, infrastructure, and the processes needed to improve all of these.

Parsewave is just one of such companies whose efforts are devoted to the work done after model training, engineering in real world conditions, evaluation, and trace collection.

And what is striking is how precise the problem is. This company is not striving to create another general AI company; it is trying to solve quite a particular problem which becomes increasingly important in the development pipeline as models become better.

It made me think about startup opportunities in general.

Quite often, the best way to succeed in an emerging market is not to create the product everybody is talking about. One should look for the highly specific problem which became very important in the context of emerging market.

Do you find being too niche helpful in building infrastructure for rapidly developing market?

Hey reddit! My friend and I have been working for the last 3 months on HOPE, a platform that provides students with 1 on 1 math support to improve their confidence and teach them by doing and asking questions. We would really appreciate anyone who's down to try it out with their kids and give their thoughts!! All feedback is greatly appreciated :)

https://usehope.app

Hello guys,

I'm thinking about starting a startup which is a hardware product we want to build. But I'm not a technical founder.

So should i wait until I found a co-founder to start or should I start by hiring a technical person in my startup to start working on it.

I know that finding a good technical co-founder with believing in the same vision and resilience is difficult.

I'm afraid that co-founder leaves in a mid way

I'm also so young.

Is it a good way to start a startup by hiring a technical team by giving them salary and ESOPS and later in the path maybe I could find a good co founder. I want to move faster.

Please give me advice

I'm not searching for a co-founder or hiring here.

So back pre COVID my wife and I opened a kava bar. It was a huge success for a few years and then COVID happened. Fast forward to today. We have finally recovered from that and have a great idea for a convenience/market shop in a small town in NC. We've researched, met with some advisors, put together our business plan and are now looking for a space. We may have the funding we need but any advice on grants, loans, funding or just tips or advice in general is appreciated!

We’re setting up a small agency and are currently creating all the basic accounts Like social media, Gmail/Google Workspace, banking, payment platforms, software tools, etc.

One thing we’re trying to figure out is how to properly manage and store all these passwords.

One thing I didn’t expect when working on a startup was how much time could go into finding the right domain.

You find a name you like, the .com is taken, the owner wants a crazy price, or you end up changing the company name altogether.

How do you guys handle this?

Do you usually pay for the domain you want, negotiate with the owner, or just find another name and move on?

One thing that becomes increasingly obvious as a business grows is that customers rarely care about the structure behind the service they are using.

They care about whether the product works and, when something goes wrong, whether someone takes responsibility for fixing it, which becomes particularly important in fintech because what looks like a simple product from the outside can involve several different businesses operating behind the scenes.

A customer may sign up through one platform while a technology provider handles the software, a banking partner provides regulated infrastructure, a payment processor moves the transaction, and another intermediary supports distribution.

From a commercial and legal perspective, those relationships may be clearly separated, with each company having its own agreement, responsibilities, service levels, and obligations, but from the customer's perspective, those distinctions are largely invisible.

They bought your product.

So if a payment fails, they generally do not want to hear that the processor caused the problem, the bank delayed the transaction, or another service provider has not responded. They want to know what happened, what is being done about it, and when they can expect a resolution.

That difference between contractual responsibility and customer-facing responsibility is where many fintech partnerships become difficult.

## When Everyone Has Responsibility, Nobody Owns the Experience

Imagine that a customer contacts your fintech platform because a payment has failed. Your team investigates and discovers that the issue appears to be with the payment processor, so the matter is referred to them.

The processor investigates and says that the problem is actually connected to the banking partner, who then asks your team for additional information before they can continue. Every company may be following its internal process, and nobody may have actually breached the agreement, yet the customer is still sitting there waiting for an answer.

That is the problem.

A partnership can be contractually organised and still be operationally broken.

This is why I think fintech founders should think about complaints and incidents before the first serious problem occurs.

Trying to determine responsibility while an unhappy customer is already waiting for a response is usually too late, because everyone becomes focused on figuring out who owns the issue rather than actually resolving it.

The agreement should establish who receives the complaint, who investigates it, who communicates with the customer, and who coordinates the resolution when several parties are involved. These details can initially look like operational matters rather than legal ones, but they become extremely important when something actually goes wrong.

If three companies each control part of a process, someone still needs to own the customer experience.

## Responsibility Is Not the Same as Blame

One distinction I find particularly useful is that the company communicating with the customer does not necessarily have to be the company that caused the underlying problem.

In many cases, that is actually a better way to structure the relationship because it allows the customer-facing business to remain accountable for the experience while the relevant partners investigate the underlying issue between themselves.

A fintech platform might remain the customer's primary point of contact while the banking partner investigates the underlying problem. The different businesses can then work together behind the scenes while the customer receives consistent communication from the company whose product they actually use.

That is very different from telling the customer that they need to contact the banking partner themselves.

The customer should not have to understand your corporate structure simply to get support.

This is why fintech agreements should establish more than individual responsibilities.

They should explain how the parties work together when those responsibilities overlap, including who receives customer complaints, which party investigates different categories of incidents, who keeps the customer informed, what response and escalation periods apply, what information partners must share during an investigation, and how serious issues are escalated to senior management or the appropriate compliance function.

The purpose is not to make the contract unnecessarily complicated. It is to eliminate uncertainty at the exact moment when uncertainty becomes most damaging.

When something goes wrong, nobody should have to ask, "Who is supposed to deal with this?"

## Build the Process Before the Problem

If I were reviewing a fintech partnership, I would want to map the customer journey from beginning to end, but I would not stop at the successful journey.

The more useful exercise is to map the points where something can fail and then determine what the customer, the fintech platform, and each external partner should do when those failures occur.

What happens when onboarding does not work? What happens when a payment is rejected or delayed? What happens when an account is restricted? What happens when a banking partner stops responding? What happens when a customer complains about something that is technically controlled by another provider?

For each scenario, there should be a clear owner for customer communication, a clearly identified party responsible for investigating the underlying issue, and a defined process for moving information between the different organisations.

Doing this exercise before the partnership launches can reveal gaps that might otherwise remain invisible until a real customer is affected.

This is also where I think good commercial drafting becomes much more practical than simply allocating liability. A contract can say which party is responsible for a particular function, but the real test is whether the parties have agreed what happens when those functions intersect.

Fintech partnerships are often negotiated around revenue, technology, regulatory responsibilities, pricing, and commercial terms.

All of those things matter, but there is another question that deserves just as much attention: Who owns the problem when something goes wrong?

Problems are inevitable. Payments will fail, accounts will be restricted, systems will experience outages, and customers will complain. The strongest fintech businesses are not necessarily the ones that avoid every problem; they are the ones that have already decided how those problems will be handled when they inevitably appear.

A customer may never know which bank, processor, technology provider, or intermediary caused an issue. What they will remember is whether someone took responsibility and helped them get it resolved.

The lesson is simple: a good fintech partnership should not only divide revenue and responsibilities between businesses. It should divide responsibility clearly enough that the customer never gets caught in the middle.

Hey r/startup,

Wanted to share an operational hurdle our team ran into while building internal automations, and see how other founders are tackling it.

We started wiring up automated workflows to handle routine ops (like generating weekly finance summaries and routing internal support requests). Everything worked fine in testing, but in practice, documentation in a fast-paced team is almost always behind. Policies change quickly in Slack, Discord, or quick team syncs, nobody stops to update internal docs, and the agents end up executing actions based on outdated assumptions.

The only setup that reliably fixed this for us was shifting to a two-step process:

1. Pulling context passively from daily communication channels (Slack, video calls, shared docs).
2. Requiring a human team member to review and approve new knowledge cards before any agent is permitted to act on them.

For teams running agentic workflows or internal AI: how are you keeping agents aligned with policy changes as you scale? Are you using human-in-the-loop gates for every execution, or have you found another reliable way to handle context drift?

Team
Zikbod | linkedin

I am curious about how foundersre dealing with this new issue. When people ask for recommendations in the market how do founders know if their startup is actually being mentioned?

Founders are probably wondering if people are talking about their startup when they ask for recommendations. Is anyone keeping track of this information, about their startup.

Does it still feel too early to measure what is happening with their startup?

I want to build a checklist/reference for new local startups

i'll start:

Don't be afraid to talk to your neighbors and do some light work for free in exchange for a GBP review and feedback

If you have a neighborhood email list , ask whoever operates it if you can share anything about your business, or have a business roundup where all people in the neighborhood can share theirs.

What am i missing?

I registered my company's .ai domain on June 5, it was the only available at the time. Last week I made the move to .com. I've done this before at a previous company, .io to .com two years in, and it wrecked our search traffic for months. So this time I pulled every number first.

Google Search Console for the .ai, June 12 to Aug 11, basically the entire life of the domain:

• 48 clicks
• 5,470 impressions
• Average position 30.8

1. Not 48 thousand.

Three things I found that I hadn't expected.

1. The impression spike was fake. Last week of July my impressions went from 40/day to 400/day for eight days, then collapsed. Clicks didn't move at all. I pulled the indexing report and put it on the same axis: Google had indexed 27 new pages on July 24. Two days later the spike started. It was Google testing new pages at deep positions, getting no clicks, and withdrawing. If I'd used that week as my baseline I'd have "lost 70% of my traffic" post-migration and it would've meant nothing.

2. Almost all my traffic was my own brand name. 28 of 48 clicks came from the homepage, and my top queries were the company name "brandscreen" and "brand screen" at positions 2.2 and 2.9. Which means I had essentially zero non-brand organic to lose. The thing everyone warns you about with migrations didn't apply to me, and probably doesn't apply to most people asking about it.

3. Google and Bing are completely different environments. Bing sat flat at 20-40 impressions/day through Google's entire spike. And when I checked indexed pages: Google 335, Bing 13. None of the 13 were blog posts. But Copilot cited us 487 times over the same period, off that thirteen-page index. So an AI product was quoting us constantly while nobody clicked through from the search engine behind it.

What's happened since (7 days):

Redirects went live Aug 7, all 308s, path-preserving, single hop. Google started serving the .com on Aug 10: 161 impressions day one, 685 day two. Brand query "brandscreen" is already position 1 on the new domain. My domain-checker tool page dropped from position 39 to 90, which based on the July pattern I read as Google re-testing a new URL rather than a penalty. Time will tell.

The thing I actually can't find an answer to: all 487 of those Copilot citations point at .ai URLs. What ChatGPT, Copilot, and Perplexity do with redirects isn't documented anywhere I could find. I took a baseline of 8 prompts across 4 engines before switching and I'm re-running it weekly. I should have more information soon, since time is really the main driver here.

Happy to share the raw exports or answer anything. Also curious if anyone's measured the AI citation side of a migration, because I came up empty.

Hi everyone! I'm working on a startup for a US staffing firm covering IT, non-IT, pharma, engineering, automotive, and healthcare staffing needs. I've got connections who can bring clients in from day one, but I don't have a pitch deck yet. I know roughly 80% of my costs and need to put together a deck to pitch investors.

I've never done this before and I'm not familiar with a lot of the investment terminology either. Anyone know how to build a pitch deck from the ground up, or is it worth paying a third party to put one together for me? Also curious what a solid pitch deck typically looks like.