Lack of momentum kills startups. I've done YC 3 times and built Pre to productize the focus and accountability of batch office hours. Pre's AI agent knows exactly how you're really doing from your connected data. Set your North Star, commit to weekly goals that move the needle, and every week it sends a no-spin progress report to whoever you don't want to disappoint. No editing. No excuses.
Howzit 🤙🏼
I'm Darius (Bubs). 3x YC founder and have exited for 8 & 9 figures. And I built Pre because even experienced founders fall into the same startup traps.
My first startup I chased the wrong vanity metrics, and wasn't honest enough to kill things that were "kinda working" for NINE YEARS. We finally saw where there was real product market fit and pivoted... we were acquired 11mo later. Overnight success that took nearly a decade.
My last startup grew thru Series B with 120+ employees and then imploded... We were scaling a model that was fundamentally broken and should have been something we were laser focused on making right in the beginning.
So I built a system that makes it structurally impossible to bullshit yourself. You set a North Star metric. You commit to weekly goals that actually move the needle. Pre's AI advisor challenges your reasoning instead of just validating it. And every Friday it sends a no-edit truth report to whoever you've given permission to hold you accountable. Raw data. What you shipped. What you didn't.
This is the same honest and direct framework you get during a YC batch... Now it's something anyone can use. Try it free for 10 days.
Would love your feedback, especially from founders who have tried every system and keep ending up in the same spot. That's exactly who I built this for.
What's the best way you keep yourself totally honest about what's working and what isn't as a founder? 👇
How does the system get context with regards to where I am at in my startup journey? Are they solely based upon the "north star" I set or are there ways to get more personalized feedback once it understands the industry and product that I'm trying to sell?
As someone who just spent 3 hours debugging a deployment because our junior dev didn't understand the difference between staging and production variables, I can see why you'd want to abstract away the operator role entirely. The real question is: how do you handle the edge cases where someone needs to SSH into a box at 3am because the automated rollback failed, or when the "simple" deployment requires understanding the intricate dependencies between your Redis cluster and PostgreSQL replicas?
This is launch of the week for me. Love this product and plan for our team to use it.
Love seeing all the progress, Bubs! This is such a great idea and needed product. Good luck with the launch!
The no-edit Friday report sent to someone you don't want to disappoint is a clever forcing function — most accountability tools fail because founders can reframe their own narrative before sharing it. Does the AI advisor push back in real-time when you set weekly goals that are clearly too safe or disconnected from your North Star, or does it only surface that gap in the weekly report?
I've been watching this product since its early concept days and I'm super impressed with the newest version. It has always provided accountability for founders, but this latest version makes it so much easier to get going – and keep going. Great work!
