Launched this week

Pond

Launched this week

Fundraising, GTM, and bounties for startups

423 followers

Fundraising, GTM, and bounties for startups

423 followers

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Pond is the market infrastructure for the new startup economy. Verified founders raise capital, acquire customers, and access 20,000+ contributors in one place. · Markets: Stripe-verified metrics + Vault-protected funding. One startup raised $150K in 3 minutes. · Bounties: 10,000+ submissions, $36K+ distributed. Ethereum Foundation, GPTZero, PhotoBase. · AI Growth Agent: CRM, pipeline, and GTM on autopilot. 400+ startups · 154 countries · Archetype & Coinbase Ventures.

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Launch tags:Marketing•Artificial Intelligence•Fundraising

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Pond

Maker

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Hey 👋 I'm Dylan, founder of Pond. The idea came from a simple observation: AI has made building startups 10x faster, while the pace of startup commercialization—fundraising, go-to-market, and execution—has barely changed. So we built Pond: a platform where founders can raise their first round from anywhere in the world, and a community of 10,000+ people ready to help solve startup challenges through a bounty-based network. The moment that validated everything: a startup on Pond raised $150K in just 3 minutes, and we now have 100+ startups on the waitlist. Not because of a great pitch deck. Because their MRR and user growth spoke for themselves. Notable investors have started using Pond to discover startups and source deals personally, including a former Accel investor. (Accel has backed companies such as Facebook, Anthropic, Spotify, and many others.) Pond helps startups around the world launch their first fundraising round in as little as 5 minutes and get backed by investors globally. Founders can raise multiple rounds on Pond or go on to raise from traditional VCs in the future. Think of Pond as an online accelerator for your business—built to help founders turn traction into capital. Pond supports founders throughout the fundraising process and helps them scale afterward. We’re backed by multiple Tier 1 investors, including Archetype, Coinbase Ventures, and 30+ angel investors. Our backers include founders of unicorn companies, the co-founder of one of the world’s leading digital asset infrastructure providers, a co-author of the foundational GPT paper, and other leading founders, operators, and investors. Happy to answer anything about how Pond works, what we’ve learned from supporting 400+ startups and investors on the platform, or why we believe the startup economy is the next major platform wave after Amazon and TikTok. AMA 🙏

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6d ago

@thinksdylan congrats on the launch! will you guys be operating in the US?

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@aronlium Yes, we want to support global startups!

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1d ago

The description is a bit confusing) Am I understanding correctly that your platform can provide users for testing?

I have a travel AI, and right now we're trying to run a blind comparison test of our responses against other models. We can prepare the response dataset ourselves, but finding test participants across different countries is still an unsolved problem. Is that something you can help with?

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@natalia_iankovych Yes — this is exactly the kind of use case Pond Bounties can help with. You can create a bounty to recruit test participants across different countries, define the testing criteria, share the response comparison task, and collect structured feedback from real users. For a travel AI, this could be especially useful because travel expectations vary a lot by region, language, and user behavior. Would love for you to try Pond Bounties, and feel free to reach out if you need any help setting it up.

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1d ago

Mailwarm

How does the verification work for founders, I want to know what gets checked and how often is it refreshed?

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@thamibenjelloun Great question.

For founders, verification starts with real business traction. Today, we focus on signals like revenue, MRR, user growth, and connected data sources such as Stripe or GA where available.

The goal is to help investors look beyond pitch decks and evaluate startups based on actual performance. We’re also working toward making these metrics refresh regularly so founder profiles stay up to date as the company grows.

Feel free to check out Pond and send over any feedback.

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1d ago

Nice concept. Do the bounties help close enterprise deals or are they more about early traction?

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@dhiraj_patel5 Great question. Today, bounties are mostly focused on early traction: user feedback, product testing, community growth, lead generation, and campaign execution. But I think your ideas are great, we'd love for you to explore Pond and tell us what kind of bounty workflow you’d want.

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@dhiraj_patel5 We’ve recently supported bounties that helped companies close deals more efficiently and create a stronger sense of urgency among prospective customers.

For example, one startup posted a bounty with us and delegated the community to conduct competitive analysis and research on their target accounts. The goal was to identify whether those prospects were already using services similar to the startup’s offering.

The startup also asked community members to share their findings publicly on social media. For instance, if the community discovered that a prospect’s competitors were already using a particular service, they would post about it and tag the prospect. A typical post might say:

“Based on our recent research, we found that [Company A] is using this service, and it has helped them improve key metrics by X%.”

The startup then used these research findings to strengthen its sales outreach. Their sales team could approach prospects with a message like:

“Someone recently highlighted that your competitor is using a solution similar to ours, and reports suggest it has improved their efficiency by X%. Our platform delivers even better results. Would you be interested in exploring how we can help you outperform your competitors in this area?”

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1d ago

Build Check

Great combo Dylan! Got it the fundraising side, but what about GTM? Do you help to get first early adopters??

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@german_merlo1 Yes — GTM is a big part of Pond. Beyond fundraising, we help founders get early adopters through growth campaigns, contributor-led distribution, product feedback, and bounty-based tasks. Would love for you to try Pond and share what kind of GTM support would be most useful for you.

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1d ago

jared.so

Nice work shipping this! What made you decide to build this now?

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@borrellbr Thank you! The timing felt right because AI has made it much faster to build products, but fundraising, GTM, and execution are still fragmented and slow. Would love for you to check out Pond and share your feedback.

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1d ago

Do you provide templates or frameworks to get there?

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@sasha_mcclendon Yes — we provide guided workflows and practical frameworks to help founders get started faster. For example, founders can use Pond to structure fundraising rounds, define bounty tasks, collect feedback, run GTM campaigns, and present traction more clearly to investors. The goal is to make the path from traction to capital and growth much more actionable, not just give founders another blank workspace. Would love for you to try Pond and share what kind of framework would be most useful for your startup.

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1d ago

@thinksdylan yes please

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1d ago

Pond

Maker

@sasha_mcclendon Just reached out to you from my linkedin. You can check your message!

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1d ago

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