Why we are starting Founders DNA with high-school and college aspirers

TL;DR

The wedge mistake

When we shipped the alpha, the pitch read more or less the same to every user — "a verifiable behavioural profile of a founder, before you fund them." The implied user was a serious founder, somewhere between pre-product and Series A, who would run the simulator to build a credential they could show to investors.

This was a coherent positioning. It was also the wrong wedge.

The mistake was confusing who the credential is most valuable for with who the daily product loop works for. The credential is most valuable for late-alpha founders who are about to raise. The daily product loop works for almost no one in that group, because they are too busy actually running the company to come back to a founder-coach app every day.

A wedge that does not produce daily usage produces stale profiles. A stale profile is worse than no profile, because it tells the viewer "this founder used to be on it" — which is a strictly negative signal.

We needed a wedge user with three properties: (a) genuine reason to come back daily, (b) actions that produce clean digital signal, (c) a long enough time horizon that the credential becomes valuable to them before it has to become valuable to a viewer.

The user that fits all three is the high-school or early-college aspirer.

Three reasons the wedge is right

1. Highest density of "want to build, nothing to lose"

The 16-to-22 segment in India is the largest cohort with simultaneous (a) free time, (b) cultural pull toward building something, (c) high tolerance for working on things before they monetise. Every metric we care about — daily session length, willingness to log a manual proof, willingness to connect a LinkedIn account — peaks in this segment relative to any other.

Compare to a 32-year-old founder running a real company. They have less time, more downside on every hour, and a strong instinct to spend any spare cycle on the actual business rather than on a credential platform. They are the eventual user, not the wedge user.

2. Cleanest fit for the activity-graph metaphor

Aspirers run virtual ventures — side projects, school clubs, content brands, course experiments, indie SaaS attempts. These ventures throw off the right kind of digital signal:

• A lot of public-facing artifacts — LinkedIn posts, Notion pages, Google Forms, GitHub commits, X threads — the things the integration scaffold was built for.
• A lot of micro-decisions — what to build first, who to talk to, how to position — without yet having the kind of high-stakes commercial commitments (employees, vendor contracts) that need PII redaction at every step.
• A natural fit with the simulator — they have not yet faced supply-chain shocks or regulatory crises, so the sim is doing real work as a substitute for experience they have not had.

A 35-year-old running a real D2C brand has a different shape. The integrations carry more PII, the decisions are higher-stakes, the simulator is less novel because they have already lived versions of every event we throw at them. They are a great user for Phase 2; they would be the wrong user to optimise the Phase 1 product against.

3. Most authentic reason to use a daily coach

The narrative loop "I am building toward something" is a more durable daily loop than "I am validating a credential." Aspirers come back because the product is helping them figure out what they are actually trying to do — through tasks, sim events, and the heatmap that fills as they put in the work. The credential is a side effect they discover later.

Late-stage founders, conversely, have already chosen what they are building. The credential is the only thing the product offers them. That is a thin daily loop.

We optimise for the daily loop, not for the demo loop.

What aspirers actually look like in the product

Concretely, an aspirer in the Q3 beta might:

• Pick one or two virtual ventures — "a study-buddy app for JEE prep" and "a print-on-demand brand for college merch" — and the system generates a 90-day plan per venture.
• Connect LinkedIn (so their public posts paint green squares) and Notion (so their planning pages count as commits) on day one. GitHub goes on once they actually start building. Stripe and Razorpay do not get connected until they are transacting.
• Get a daily nudge — sometimes a real-world task ("interview five potential users this week"), sometimes a sim event ("a competitor just launched at 50% your price — what do you do?"), sometimes both, sometimes a rest day. The cadence engine decides.
• Send the Telegram bot proofs as text, photo, or link — a screenshot of a customer DM, a link to a landing page they just shipped, a voice note (Phase 2) summarising a customer call.
• Watch the heatmap fill, the dual radar take shape, and the venture's About sidebar populate with public links, integrations connected, and recent commits.

The Phase 1 task bank is deliberately skewed toward this user — customer discovery, public posts, micro-builds, learning, reflection. It is not pretending to teach them how to handle a Series A board meeting.

Why investors and accelerators come second

Investors and accelerators are the right users for the credential. They are not the right users for the product loop. They do not run businesses; they evaluate founders. Their daily action does not produce founder events.

What they need is a browse surface — a way to filter anon profiles by Capital Discipline, Crisis Response, or Consistency, request identity unlock from founders whose dual radars match their thesis, and pull a profile in five minutes instead of five meetings. That is real value, and we will build it. It just sits on top of a founder side that has to exist first.

We are also explicitly not optimising the Phase 1 UX for them. The Phase 1 view of a founder profile shows a lot of granular activity — every commit, every reflection, every sim decision — which is great if you are the founder living that life and overwhelming if you are an investor scanning fifty profiles a week. The investor view in Phase 2 will collapse all of that into a cleaner, decision-grade summary. Two surfaces, same data underneath.

What we are giving up

This wedge means we are saying no to a few things in the short term:

• We are not targeting late-stage founders for Phase 1. They are welcome, but the product is not optimised around them.
• We are not shipping the investor portal in Phase 1. It is a Phase 3 build, after the founder side has produced a meaningful number of profiles.
• We are not doing university campus licenses, accelerator cohort licenses, or B2B contracts during Phase 1. Those become natural Phase 2 plays once the freemium side has demonstrated retention.
• We are not shipping multi-founder simulations, leaderboards, or mentor mode in Phase 1. They are tempting features for the wedge user too, but the daily action coach is the core promise — everything else is a Phase 2 add.

These are real trade-offs. The argument for them is that trying to serve all four users at once is how you serve none of them.

A note on positioning vs wedge

The mistake we made earlier — and that I think a lot of products make — is conflating positioning and wedge.

Positioning is the long-arc story: "the verifiable behavioural profile of a founder." That story stays. It is what we tell investors, what we tell pilot partners, what we tell the press. It is the strategic identity of the company.

Wedge is the specific user we are building Phase 1 around: "the high-school or college aspirer running a virtual venture." That can change as we learn; the positioning does not.

For most of the alpha we let the positioning eat the wedge — we tried to make the product work for everyone the positioning implied at once. The result was a product that was fine for everyone and great for nobody. Pulling those two apart was probably the most important decision in the last six months of the project.

If you are an aspirer reading this and want to be one of the first profiles in the beta, we want to hear from you. The first cohort is being shaped right now.

— Karthik