The project I’m most excited to discuss is Startup Founder, a platform I built to solve a problem I kept encountering: founders have great ideas, but there’s no low‑friction way to showcase them, get real reactions, and build momentum before raising any money or building a full product.
The core idea is simple. A founder submits a startup, name, short pitch, and category, and it appears in a public directory where anyone can browse, filter by category, and vote. Each startup gets its own detail page, each founder gets a profile page, and the system revolves around a loop of visibility and feedback: submit, get seen, get voted on, get noticed. I designed it as a cross between Product Hunt and a pitch competition, rather than a static list like Crunchbase, it’s active and social, with startups competing for attention in real time.
I built it on Next.js, which let me move quickly on both the frontend and routing. Dynamic pages handle each startup and each user, while a tag‑based filtering system embeds query parameters directly in the URL, allowing you to share a filtered view (e.g., all fintech pitches) that just works. Built‑in image optimization keeps avatars and thumbnails fast, because load speed directly affects whether people browse or bounce.
What’s genuinely interesting, and the part I’d like an interviewer to explore, is the incentive design. A voting mechanic sounds trivial, but it makes or breaks a directory like this. If the system is wrong, you end up with either a ghost town or a popularity contest where the loudest founder’s network wins regardless of idea quality. I spent real time deciding how the score should be displayed: visible but not the sole signal, so a newer pitch with a great description can still be discovered through category browsing rather than being buried under vote counts.
I also thought carefully about the profile layer. Every founder has an identity, avatar, submission history, because I wanted the platform to feel less like an anonymous idea dump and more like a place where reputations grow over time. This is the “connect with entrepreneurs” half of the pitch: it’s not just about the idea in isolation, but about who’s behind it, allowing people to follow founders whose taste or execution they trust.
If I’m honest about where it is right now, it’s early. The current dataset consists mainly of seed content I used to prove the categories, voting flow, and detail pages before opening it to real founder sign‑ups. This was a deliberate choice: I wanted the core loop, submit, browse, filter, vote, view details, to feel solid and fast before inviting real users and ideas. Launching an empty or half‑broken directory would quickly erode the first cohort’s trust.
Next steps include adding a competition structure, timed cohorts, perhaps weekly or monthly pitch rounds, to give users a reason to return and vote regularly. I also want to build out founder‑to‑founder features such as comments, direct messages, and collaboration requests, because the connection piece is currently implicit rather than explicit. These features would differentiate the platform from a simple list of startups.
That’s Startup Founder: a directory that aims to make pitching and discovering early‑stage ideas feel less like a cold database and more like a living community.
