🔗 https://supabase.com/state-of-startups?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Who’s Building Startups
Founders are overwhelmingly technical and under 40, with most building their first company.
Startups are mostly bootstrapped or at early stages of funding. They are small teams, and usually less than a year old.
Startups are building globally, but North America—especially San Francisco—remains overrepresented. Europe and Asia also feature prominently, with hubs like Toronto and NYC following close behind.
What Startups are Building
Under-30s gravitate toward AI-driven productivity, education, and social tools; areas where rapid iteration and novelty matter. Over-50s skew toward SaaS and consumer products, often bringing domain-specific experience into more established markets. Developer tools and infrastructure attract all age groups.
One in five startups joined an accelerator. Y Combinator is the most common choice, especially in North America. Elsewhere, participation was more evenly distributed. Pivoting remains the norm, and less than half of startups are monetizing today.
What’s in a Startup’s Tech Stack Tools
Supabase and Postgres dominate backend infrastructure. React and Node top frontend and backend respectively. Cursor, Claude, and VS Code lead AI-assisted development. Developer tools like GitHub, Stripe, and Postman round out the stack.
AI coding tools are indispensable for startups, and not just Cursor and Visual Studio Code. ‘Vibe coding’ tools like Loveable, Bolt.new, and v0 are also common.
How Startups are Integrating AI
Most startups are already integrating models like OpenAI or Claude, especially for semantic search, summarisation, and customer support. Half are building agents to automate real tasks, from onboarding flows to sales triage.
Where Startups Go to Learn
There is a healthy diaspora of important online communities. That said, many people just lurk; few actively contribute to the discussion.
Founders follow newsletters like TLDR and Lenny’s, and they listen to podcasts like The Diary of a CEO and Founders. Tool discovery happens quite often via YouTube or GitHub. Physical event participation remains low.
How Startups are Finding Customers
Founders earn their earliest customers through networks, communities, and inbound content. Paid acquisition rarely works early on, nor does performance marketing.
Sales is still founder-led at most startups. Dedicated sales hires usually don’t arrive until after 10+ employees. Many still use Google Sheets or nothing at all to track sales activity.
Biggest Challenges for Startups
The hardest problems are still the oldest ones: customer acquisition, product-market fit, and complexity. Startups cite AI-assisted coding and backend services as major time-savers, but many are still missing critical tools they want. Especially around onboarding, dashboards, and agents.
Most startup founders remain upbeat about the future, but that confidence isn’t shared equally. Engineers and marketers show more caution.