About FounderFloor

FounderFloor is an early, self-hosted project run by one person. It is not an investment platform, a marketplace, or a source of advice of any kind. Conversations here are conversations — do your own diligence on anyone you meet, the same as at a physical expo.

Everyone here is real. Every stand on every floor was set up by an actual person, and every avatar walking around is a live visitor. There are no fake booths and no seeded “example” startups. The one exception is Pixel, the guide robot in the Tutorial Hall — clearly labeled as a bot, and it never leaves that room. If a floor looks empty, it’s because it is — claim a spot and change that.

What startups say about themselves is theirs. Pitches, one-liners, categories and goals are typed by the founder at the stand, unreviewed. Revenue ranks are labeled “verified” on the floor; in this build verification is simulated — founders type a number and the badge follows. Every rank badge carries that note. Live Stripe-based verification is the plan, not the present.

Accounts are optional and free. You can walk the floors, chat, and connect as a guest — your identity is protected by a secret held in your browser. An account (email + password) makes that identity portable: sign in anywhere and your booth, connections, streaks and badges come with you, and nobody can take your name.

If you make an account, the server stores your email address, display name, and a salted scrypt hash of your password — never the password itself. Sessions expire after 30 days of disuse.

Your email is used for exactly three things: a welcome note when the account is created, a password-reset link when you ask for one, and a heads-up if your account is signed in from a browser it hasn’t used before. No newsletters, no marketing, no sharing with anyone, and it is never shown to other visitors. Delivery runs through Resend, an email-sending service — that is the only third party that ever sees your address.

In your browser (localStorage): your display name, avatar, booth design, quests, badges, notes on connections, and — if you have an account — a session token. Clearing site data removes it from that device.

Progress sync: the same profile data (booth, badges, quests, streaks, membership tier) is also saved to the floor server under your identity, so signing in on another device brings it with you. It expires after 180 days of inactivity, and a deletion request removes it.

On the floor server: what other people need to see or that has to survive your absence — your stand (it comes off the floor when you leave, keeps its own page, and holds your spot for 7 days), guestbook entries, the activity ticker, connection requests and mutual connections, direct messages with your connections (latest 100 per thread), beta feedback, and abuse reports. Floor chat is relayed live to the people in the hall and not stored.

Not collected at all: no tracking pixels, no analytics scripts, no ad tech, no cookies beyond what the site itself needs to function.

Every spot on every floor is first come, first served. Claim a stand and it’s yours: your colors, your banner, your sign, your pitch. Close the tab and the stand comes off the floor: a floor shows who is in the hall at that moment, and nothing else. The spot stays reserved for you, so walking back in puts your stand back where it was. Stay away longer than 7 days — stands are kept longer around show weeks — and the spot opens up for the next founder.

One stand per founder, across every floor: claim a spot somewhere else and your stand moves rather than multiplying. Setting up a startup also lists it in the directory automatically, under whatever category you typed, and gives it a page of its own — that’s where people find you when they’re not walking: your pitch, your link, your guestbook, and a way to ask to connect, at any hour.

Walking the floors, talking, connecting, claiming a stand, and appearing in the directory are free, permanently. Paid memberships (Pro and Founder+) buy visibility — priority placement in the directory and co-founder board, member tags, gold banner trim — never access. If the payment buttons aren’t connected to live billing yet, the membership page says so honestly and nothing is charged.

Everything between your browser and the servers travels over HTTPS/TLS — the same encryption your bank uses. Passwords are hashed with scrypt (salted, memory-hard — designed so that even the server operator cannot read them, and cracking them at scale is economically absurd). Sign-in attempts are rate-limited, sessions are unguessable random tokens, guest identities are bound to a browser-held secret, and everything anyone types is sanitized before other people see it.

Honesty also requires this sentence: no system on earth is “unhackable,” and anyone who promises otherwise is selling something. What you can hold us to: we store the minimum, we hash what must be secret, we alert you when your account signs in somewhere new, and a password reset instantly locks out every other session. If you ever suspect your account is compromised, reset your password — that alone evicts an intruder.

Player chat threads have a Report option, and anything on the floor can be reported through the report page. Reports go straight to the operator (stored, and emailed) and are reviewed by hand. Mute is instant and local. The operator can remove stands, guestbook entries, and accounts that abuse the floor. Be the kind of person you’d want at the booth next to yours.

Questions, deletion requests, or something on the floor that shouldn’t be there: use the Report option in-game or the feedback box above — both reach the operator directly. Deletion requests are honored in full: everything above is either in your browser (yours to clear) or on one server (ours to delete on request).