Looking for Founders Who Don't Know Where Their Customers Come From
A surprising number of businesses can tell you how many leads they got last month.
Far fewer can tell you:
• Which marketing channel produced their best customers
• Which leads actually became paying customers
• Which campaigns generated revenue
• Which follow-up sequence converted the most prospects
• Where customers are dropping off
Without that visibility, growth becomes guesswork.
I've worked with businesses that were spending money on channels they thought were working, only to discover their best customers were coming from somewhere else entirely.
Before spending more on marketing, I'd recommend answering one question:
Can you track a customer from first touch to final sale?
If not, that's often the first system worth fixing.
Founders, what's your biggest challenge right now when it comes to tracking leads, customers, or marketing performance?
I'm curious to hear how others are solving this problem.
I’m a full-stack engineer, and I recently built a system that takes completely chaotic, flat PDFs (dense technical manuals, textbooks, policy documents) and fully automates their conversion into structured, interactive web products.
It maps everything—complex math formulas, data tables, layout styles, and multi-choice quizzes—directly into a clean database. No manual copy-pasting. Because it converts everything to programmatic code, the final web app is completely searchable, SEO-crawlable, and can be rendered into any UI shape (like a sleek dashboard or internal wiki).
I’m trying to figure out where this problem hurts the most so I can target the right premium clients. Standard academies don't care enough about this level of tech, so I'm pivoting.
Where do you think the real money is for this?
B2B Field Manuals: Aviation, engineering, or machinery manuals that field techs need to search offline?
Legal/Compliance: Law firms drowning in dense 500-page regulatory PDFs?
High-Stakes Test Prep: Turning dry professional licensing materials (CFA, medical exams) into interactive subscription platforms?
I can offer this as a pay-per-book conversion service or build out the full custom pipeline for an organization.
I founded two cultural media companies in China. My goal is to collect dialect and slang data from different regions of China, package it into usable datasets, and sell it to overseas AI model companies. I am currently looking for an overseas startup partner.
That's really interesting. I have a background in Applied Linguistics so I really know how important and useful dialectal differances can bring.
The hard lesson that I learned is founder should not deduce who your customer should be. Instead, just go read what real people already say about the problem in public. Most founders can describe their feature set in detail but can't quote a single real sentence a user wrote about the pain. Once you've got 20-30 actual quotes from the wild, "who's my customer" tends to answer itself. Curious what your thoughts are?
This is an interesting problem because a lot of founders think they have an attribution problem.
Sometimes they do.
But sometimes they have a visibility problem where the customer journey is happening across multiple conversations, channels, and touchpoints that nobody is connecting together.
Curious what patterns you've seen most often when talking to founders?