founder_mode

Community Guidelines

Last updated: 2 May 2026 · Effective: 2 May 2026

Founder Mode is a place for founders to share ideas, build projects, and help each other ship. These guidelines describe how we expect members to behave across the website, the iOS and macOS apps, and the Founder Mode Discord server. They sit alongside the Terms of Service — the Terms govern the legal relationship; these guidelines govern day-to-day behaviour.

1. Be a builder, not a bystander

  • Share what you are building, what is working, and what is not. Half-finished is fine; vague is not.
  • Give feedback the way you would want it: specific, actionable, and respectful. "This is slop" is not feedback; "the onboarding gates the value behind a quiz, consider X" is.
  • Celebrate other founders' wins. The community gets stronger when shipping is contagious.

2. Treat people well

  • No harassment, hate speech, threats, or targeted attacks on individuals or groups.
  • No content that sexualises minors. Ever. We report this to the relevant authorities.
  • No doxxing — do not share someone's real identity, location, employer, or contact details without their consent, even when their pseudonymous identity is public elsewhere.
  • Disagreement is welcome; bad faith is not. If you find yourself drafting a reply to "win," close the tab.

3. Keep content honest

  • Do not impersonate other founders, companies, employees of Founder Mode, or moderators.
  • Do not post content that is illegal where you are, where the recipient is, or where our servers are (the EU).
  • Do not post content you do not have the right to share — copyrighted material, confidential information that is not yours, leaked credentials.
  • If you use AI to generate content, that is fine; if you pass AI output off as a personal account of something that did not happen, that is not.

4. Don't abuse the system

  • No malware, phishing links, or social-engineering attempts against other members.
  • No security probing, rate-limit evasion, or attempts to break authentication. If you have found a vulnerability, email [email protected] — we are grateful, not litigious.
  • No automated scraping of other users' content at scale, including using AI tooling to mass- extract profiles, ventures, or DMs. The public API is the public API.
  • No multi-accounting to inflate ratings, votes, or visibility. One account per person.

5. Self-promotion and ventures

  • Posting about your own venture is the point of Founder Mode — do it.
  • What we do not want: drive-by promotion that ignores the surrounding conversation, repeat posts of the same launch across every channel, or affiliate / referral links pasted without disclosure.
  • If you are running a paid product, make pricing and what-the-product-actually-does easy to find. Hidden caveats erode trust faster than competitors do.

6. Direct messages

  • DMs are person-to-person. They are not a backdoor for cold sales pitches, recruiting blasts, or unsolicited investment advice.
  • Do not paste someone else's private DM into a public channel without their consent.
  • If you receive a DM that violates these guidelines, you can block the sender and report the message to [email protected].

7. AI features

  • AI summaries, legitimacy scores, and other automated outputs are tools — treat them as drafts, not verdicts. We do not ban accounts based purely on AI signals.
  • Do not deliberately game AI features (e.g. stuffing keywords to manipulate legitimacy scoring or summaries). It wastes everyone's time, including yours.
  • Do not use AI features to generate content that violates any other section of these guidelines. The model does not absolve you.

8. Discord server

  • Channel topics matter — post in the channel that fits, not the one with the most eyeballs.
  • The Founder Mode bot persists messages from the FM server (see the Privacy Policy). Treat anything you post in a public channel as on-the-record.
  • Voice chat etiquette: do not record voice conversations without consent from everyone in the channel.

9. Reporting and moderation

If you see something that violates these guidelines:

  • On the website or apps: use the report option on the post or message, or email [email protected].
  • On Discord: ping a moderator role in the relevant channel, or DM a moderator directly.

We may remove content, restrict features for an account, or suspend accounts that violate these guidelines or the Terms. For severe or repeated violations, we may permanently terminate accounts. We aim to explain enforcement decisions when we can; in cases involving active investigations or other users' safety, we may not be able to share details.

10. Appeals

If you believe an enforcement decision was wrong, reply to the email or in-product notice you received. We will look at the case again. We will not relitigate the same case more than once unless new information is provided.

11. Changes

These guidelines evolve as the community evolves. Material changes will be announced in-product or by email and the changelog at the bottom will reflect every revision.

12. Changelog

  • 2 May 2026 — initial published guidelines.