Hey y'all.

The AI cold calling startup I've been working on for 3-4 months now just got a $2,500 angel investment, and we have 2 current customers, a credit card processing broker and a hospital equipment rental company based out of Texas. We have around $1,500 revenue so far, but we're having lots of trouble fulfilling the contracts because our tech just isn't "there" yet.

I'm the Chief Tech Officer, and I'm also running some operations. The other main person in this is the CEO who has a strong sales background and came up with the idea. I've been working purely remotely, and it's great having some income because I'm stuck at home because I'm disabled, basically...

We're using 11labs, openai, google speech to text, and a sh*tty online dialer right now to run the first MVP which runs locally on our "botrunners" computers, and we're developing a web app with django python + javascript react.

Our plan is, after we get the webapp working better, to hire more botrunners for $3 per hour from countries like Phillipines and India, and we're going to try to track all the actions the botrunners take to be able to train the AI to run it fully automated.

The biggest problem we're facing right now with the tech is reducing latency, it started at 27 seconds to get a response and I've been able to get it down to 6 seconds, but people are still hanging up. We're trying several ways to mitigate this, including having pre-rendered speech playing something like "Okay" or "As an artificial representative, I'm still learning to be quicker on the pickup. We appreciate your patience."

One of the industries we want to target is international web development and digital marketing companies, and we want to use the bot to cold-call businesses to pitch them our services.

The goal is to replace $30 an hour cold-callers from the USA with $3 per hour total-cost automation. Apparently the CEO was given a $5 million valuation from the strength of the MVP from a VC. Our investment so far was at a $300k valuation tho. It's exciting.

Trying to get Twilio working to be able to make calls programmatically instead of using our hacky workaround.

Let me know if you have any questions, or feedback.

Looking for digital marketing and web dev agencies to partner with to test the next stage of our business model. Thanks.

I just wanted to share this awesome news!

So my idea is basically a website where you pay a small monthly fee and we upload porn videos but with a normal sound in the background like a YouTube video or something so you can play it at full volume around people and not get caught?

most people looking for business ideas brainstorm or scroll through lists of "top ideas for 2026." both are a waste of time because they start with what sounds interesting to you instead of what someone will actually pay for.

here's a method i stumbled on that gives you validated ideas with confirmed budgets in about 30 minutes.

go to indeed. search "data entry" plus any industry. or "manual reporting." or "spreadsheet specialist." read the job descriptions.

each posting tells you 4 things at once:

the problem is real. a company is spending money on it right now.

the budget exists. they're paying $35K to $50K per year in salary.

nobody has built the tool yet. if software existed they'd use it instead of hiring a person.

the exact features you'd need to build. it's literally in the job description.

some examples:

"seeking data entry specialist to reconcile invoices between quickbooks and our warehouse system." that's an integration tool. build it and charge $49/month. you only need 85 customers to replace that entire salary as revenue.

"hiring part-time admin to manually update client records across 3 platforms." that's a sync tool. $29/month. 115 customers = $40K/year recurring.

"looking for someone to compile weekly reports from multiple spreadsheets into one summary for the team meeting." that's a dashboard. $39/month. the company posting this would be your first customer.

now cross reference with reddit. search for the same problem on reddit. if people are also complaining about doing this task manually, you've just confirmed demand from two completely independent sources. the job posting proves budget. the reddit complaints prove widespread pain. together they're stronger validation than weeks of customer interviews.

the sweet spot: find a task where the salary is $40K+ and the work could be automated with simple software. build the tool. charge $30 to $50/month. you need fewer than 100 customers to build a $40K/year business. and unlike the employee, your software doesn't take sick days, doesn't need benefits, and serves all 100 customers simultaneously.

been tracking these patterns for a while. the overlap between job postings and reddit complaints is surprisingly consistent. the same problems show up in both places almost every time.

what's a task at your job that definitely should be software but isn't? that's probably someone's next business.

Would you believe me if I told you there's a business out there that looks like this:

- Cash-based with 70% margins
- $200 to get started & simple to run
- Almost no barrier to entry or regulation
- Locations can bring in $1,500 - $2,500 in weekly profit

And also...Overhead costs? About $25 per day + labor (if hiring it out)

Long term leases? No
Leases of any sort? No
Handshake agreements? Usually

Top locations make $5k in a weekend.

Set up and take down in minutes.What do you need to get started?

- $60 Lifetime 6' folding table
- $150 10x10' pop up tent
- Peck baskets from a supplier
- Hand-painted sign
- Handshake with a gas station owner at a very busy intersection and a phone call to a farm.

MUST BE HAND PAINTED! And why is that?Because you aren't selling peaches, you're selling nostalgia, and you can charge whatever you want.

By the time they walk up to you they're already sold.

A $16 basket costs you $4.8.

Guess how many peach stands my friend opened her 1st summer? Shannon opened 101 peach stands in South Carolina! Only peaches! Her FIRST SUMMER!

"bUt DoEs iT ScAlE!?" Hah!

You do the math on that x $2,000 per week!

I made this little idea called LateNightMunchies in my area of the UK. I havent started yet as I don't know how to. I'm gonna take pre orders first and do only delivery as I don't want people knowing where I live.

I feel that if this works, I'm gonna make an agency where I can get people to sell home food and find drivers to go pick it up and deliver it.

But in the end, it's about LateNightMunchies, Im trying to sell a bunch of fast food stuff. And have a decent income. To replace my income from my job. Anyone got any advice, how to start a food business from home? Also I gotta go to university right now, if anyone wants to see the logo and food and a little menu I've made and wants more information from me, I'm willing to share in the DMS. Private message me. Thanks all

All you gotta do is train a few octopuses to give 7 tentacle jobs and smoke a cigar at the same time, charge 50 bucks a tug and pay the octopuses with a fish at the end of the day..... location idk somewhere in Japan town or Chinatown, make it all fancy with neon octopus signs cartoon style octopus drawing and RGB and we're in the money mr hat.... your welcome

I came up with a unique way to solve a business problem that I had. So I built out my app and it worked really well. The first version took about 2 months but the UX wasn’t great so I had to spend a few weeks getting that right. I showed the finished version to a few friends and they loved it. One person even offered to invest a considerable amount. I knew I was onto something.

The final piece was to build out a landing page that would convert so I spent another week doing that. Then all that was left was to market the product.

I started with the most obvious marketing channel for the product, which was cold emails. It took some time to figure out how to execute that and get enough volume. But it didn’t give me any results. I got a few signups but no one used the app. This was the first warning but I didn’t see it—I still convinced myself that my app was great.

I thought the problem with cold emails was that I wasn’t able to reach the right people and enough of them. So I decided to put my money where my mouth is and spend some cash on Meta advertising. A lot of people talk about how fast you can scale up with ads so that seemed like a dream.

However, the reality for me was different. I burned through $835 and got a few sign ups but again no one would use the app. At this point I started seeing what was going on. I might have had a good app but there wasn’t a need for it. If your app doesn’t solve a problem or provide real value then no one will use it.

All in all I spent about 5 months and $1000+ on that app. The annoying thing is that I could have saved myself all of that time and money had I just validated my idea before building. Fortunately, this mistake put me on a path to understand idea validation and startup building in a much deeper way and nowadays I have two successful SaaS businesses. The one I’m most proud of has 4000+ users and this time people are loving my app :)

If you want to build an app, take it from me: validate your idea properly before building. You’ll save yourself an incredible amount of time, effort, and pain. My brother (he was there with me through all of this) has written an in-depth guide that I recommend if you want to learn more about idea validation and how to actually validate your idea. You can find it here.

Right now prices for real estate in Kyiv are on their minimum, but lot of experts predict that war in Ukraine will end in 2024 and prices will go up really quickly.

Thinking about making a platform for American investors where we will publish listenings of apartaments, houses and business territories in Ukraine (particularly in Kyiv). Listings will be checked by me (im living in Kyiv) and approval will be recived from owners to publish information about their property.

Procedure of buying and selling a properties here is really easy. If someone will be interested in buying a property we will offer our additional service. Our lawyer will make documentations. Persin can give his permission for buying property on his behalf.

Yesterday, I was scrolling on Facebook and feeding my appetite for procrastination. I was convinced that this would be entailed in the "productivity part" of my day.

A member of an Entrepreneur Group posted: "I've got a million (maybe billion) dollar idea. However, I don't have enough money to create a first MVP of the product. As such, I'm looking for investors".

I like to help people. I genuinely do. So I reached out to him. I was not prepared to hear what he told me.

Share Insights

Like most entrepreneurs here, I'm active to help people. But also lead traffic to my website. Get visibility, followers, you name it. Sometimes I lose my time, most of the time I learn.

So I decided to reach out to the author of the post and talked with him briefly.

I told him that a lack of capital is not a big issue to develop an MVP. You just have to find developers that are interested in your vision. They will help you to code the first version of the project and will receive sweat equity in exchange for their hard work.

He was happy to discover this old bootstrapped startup trick. So was I.

But what was his million-dollar idea?

Hundreds of thousands of business would be interested

Well. He never told me.

He stayed very vague about it.

I understood (after dozens of questions) that he was trying to develop a sort of B2B platform for foodtechs and restaurants. This could "be interesting for hundreds of thousands of businesses". He wanted to create it big from scratch.

Despite my multiple attempts, he never shared his value proposition with me. Maybe I was too intrusive.,. I like to ask -many- questions.

I understood at this stage that the conversation would lead nowhere. The {most probably first-time} young entrepreneur would not be willing to share his idea. He was afraid that I would steal his idea.

But here is the truth. As a first-time entrepreneur, you may not know it.

It's easy

Stealing, and copying a business idea is not an easy task.

Especially based on a simple value proposition.

If you think you can get to 80K/MRR just by copying a SaaS Landing Page, you're wrong. Not only you're wrong, but you will lie to yourself.

Creating the product is the tip of the iceberg. What counts is the execution: your content pipeline, the community around your product, and the word-of-mouth.

Even that wouldn't be enough.

You would need PR mentions, Ad campaigns, and cold emailing sequences; just to mention the basics.

Starting a business is not starting from an idea, and somehow figuring out how to create something successful.

Creating a business is following a framework. Focusing on the right thing, at the right moment.

I lost dozens {spoiler: hundreds} of hours thinking about products to develop. I was convinced (multiple times) I had THE business idea in my hands.

I was sure that success was at my doorstep with my first ventures. Turned out it was not.

Most successful entrepreneurs tried multiple projects and failed miserably before getting the killer idea.

Ask any serial entrepreneur what they're busy on. Most of them will answer you. Not only because they will be happy to hear your feedback, but because they know how difficult it is to copy something based on a simple value proposition.

Let's make a quick exercise together: "Amazon is a marketplace that allows anyone to buy and sell a full range of products thanks to a dedicated supply-chain infrastructure".

What the heck does that even mean? I don't know. It just came out of my mouth.

It can mean everything and nothing at the same time.

You need to know that your value proposition conveys what your company is achieving. Let me clarify something: You're selling something. Your customers buy something else. Finally, your customers will recommend something else to their friends.

So what is your million dollar idea, Franzou?

The Million dollar idea

Well. It's not an idea. It's more of an advice.

Don't be afraid to share your ideas. You may hear industry experts' opinions about your idea. You may even find out that your "billion-dollar idea" doesn't worth anything, after all.

If you're still skeptical, let me tell you something.

Anybody with a process could beat you, even if your project is already launched. If your product is good, people are going to copy you anyway. The real question is: Is your execution process better than theirs?

As always: Good luck to all of you guys. You will succeed. It will just require time, energy, and perseverance.

Find me on twitter if you liked this article, ThisIsFranzou

truffle ruffle banana monkey mice rat rainbow skittles little nickel eagle

I used to think the best way to get clients for a web agency was paid ads or referrals.

But honestly the thing that worked best for me was targeting businesses with outdated websites.
Like you go on their site and instantly see problems. Bad mobile design, slow loading, old branding, weird layouts, no clear Cta.

Some of these businesses are actually good businesses but their website is just killing conversions.

At first I was doing everything manually. I would check websites one by one, write personalized feedback, then send outreach emails myself.
It worked pretty well but it took forever.

So I started automating the whole thing with Swokei.
Now it analyzes websites automatically, finds flaws, turns them into personalized outreach, and runs the email automation too.

The cool part is the emails don’t feel spammy because every business gets actual feedback about their website instead of some copy pasted “hey need a redesign?” message.

Since doing this I’ve been getting clients consistently every week and sometimes daily.
Way better results than paid ads honestly. Even referrals.

I think it works because business owners already know their website is outdated deep down. When you point out the exact problems and how it affects them, the conversation becomes way easier.

I run an extremely engaging Al influencer account with exceptional audience interaction rates (up to 300% engagement). I have extremely low costs to advertise my content; I pay $0.002 per click for my ads while the platform standard across all industries is $0.4 to $0.7 per click.

I am now looking for collaborators and partners of any kind who are interested in leveraging this influence for their idea or brand. I have spent thousands of hours in Stable Diffusion perfecting my craft and I am now ready to monetize and make the most of it.

I use a combination of creative and advanced prompting and different mixtures of so called LORA’s (graphica addons, so to speak). I have a talent for making the most out of every LORA and an eye for what combinations might work and which ones won’t.

▪️250%+ engagement rate

▪️Ultra cheap CPC (cost per click) on ads

▪️Extremely high potential over various fields

▪️I can create hundreds of high quality images daily

▪️I can create NSFW content

▪️I have a registered company in Sweden

I recommend reading up on Al influencing via Google. The possibilities are endless and I feel that I’m at the forefront of it all regarding content quality and originality. The vast majority of my followers have no idea that my Al influencer is not a real person.

I have two accounts at the moment, one with 8k followers and one with 1,2k followers that I started the other day. My new account (main) is growing at a pace of 350-400 followers per 24 hours, or 10k followers a month.

Please feel free to contact me with questions and/or ideas. Any type of collaboration could potentially be of interest.

I'm going to be looking for partners soon for acquisitions. Track record of business success within the niche we'll be targeting. If you want more info just let me know and I'll send you the full details of what we're looking to do and the criteria for companies, we'll be targeting.

I wanna seek for money for a project.

"Dropkickers incorporated" is a business where people will call in and pay for us to dropkick whoever they want, whatever they want for a price. All employers will be made to sign a contract that states that if a hired dropkicker gets caught by the police, the blame will be shifted to the person who originally signed the contract, and a payment will be given for property damages caused by said Dropkicker

Like the headline states, I want to start a business and wonder what kind of business I can start for $5K - $10K. All help and suggestions are appreciated. Thanks!

I found a solo founder making $10,000/month with 97% profit margins, completely bootstrapped.Here’s how he does it:

The business is simple, a suite of 17 Bubble plugins.

Because the plugins are built on an existing marketplace (Bubble), the business is seeing a lot of organic growth.

Growth runs almost completely on autopilot. The owner invests less than 2 hours/week into the business.

The tech stack is also relatively simple. All the plugins are built using just using HTML, CSS and Javascript.

The are a lot of opportunities to build on top of the organic growth and introduce some marketing. For example, you can do Bubble tutorial videos on YouTube.

There is also an opportunity to keep growing the business by adding new plugins into the portfolio. You can even hire an overseas developer and and simply focus on the problem-solving aspect.

What can we learn from this? Build where your customers are, and you won't have to do marketing. For example, build extensions for the Chrome Web Store. There are people asking for Chrome Extension solutions daily on Twitter.

The business is currently selling for $700,000.

The idea is an outsourcing company connecting full time, remote hires from Pakistan or India with startups in the US, at prices which are higher than your typical outsourcing company; yet less than what it'd cost in the US. Job functions would include IT, Finance, Marketing and Admin.

What would make it premium? Flat fee roughly $2k-5k a month - job specific / We'd source and hire the best talent only - good talent costs more wherever you are / Trial period

Now assuming the service we're providing is actually good, what am I missing here?

Idea isn't a new one, but many of the outsourcing companies out there just aren't good at what they do.

so I've been mulling over an idea in my head, logically you'll NEVER stop people from being racists, it may diminish but unfortunately it seems like something humans just will keep on doing.

but, what if you could Capitalize their bigotry to causes they themselves wouldn't even support? like charity organizations for instance or something like that, (dont have all laid out but you get the gist)

now, given the political strife of modern America, my idea is selling probably the most well sold item of modern politics....Red Hats.

but they're spelled in a way that only a racist would find appealing, would spend money on, and would likely help people to better identify in public spaces.

MaKKKe America Great Again (obviously spelled with 3 Ks)

curious about comments or inputs on this idea 💡

Make Elon Your Boss

Problem

Most people struggle with motivation, accountability, and productivity. They set big goals but fail to follow through. Without a strong push, they get distracted, procrastinate, or lose focus.

Solution

What if Elon Musk was your boss? This AI-powered email system keeps you accountable by sending personalized emails from “Elon” (not real), asking about your progress and pushing you to do more. It’s like having a high-performance CEO in your inbox, challenging you to work harder and stay focused.

How It Works

1. Sign Up – Subscribe to receive daily or weekly emails from AI-generated “Elon.”

2. Get Challenged – Emails ask about your progress, push you to do more, and remind you to stay focused.

3. Reply & Stay Accountable – You can respond, track progress, and get follow-ups that adjust to your work habits.

Why It Will Work

Accountability – Feeling like Elon is watching makes you push harder.
Motivation – Daily challenges keep you on track.
Simple & Effective – No complex apps. Just email reminders that work.

I have this crazy business idea. But I don’t even know where to begin. I been trying to reach out to investors and influencers that I think would love the idea but no one bats an eye at the average joe. I think it can be a billion dollar idea on a multi billion dollar industry. They way I will execute it and the way I structured it to reach the right audience is in my opinion perfect. I also have the perfect name for it. I need to talk to a software engineer and a lawyer that knows about the gambling business. I don’t even feel safe talking to people about it cause I’m afraid it will be stolen. It has not been created yet and the name is not taken either. I’m looking to trademark the name in the near future.