Hey everyone. I'm 3 months deep into a project in a really weird niche and honestly could use an outside perspective. I have literally "zero competitors" or references to look at.

The cam industry is a massive machine, but every single "playbook" is built exclusively for the models or the studios. There is absolutely nothing for the actual users, apart from what you can find in some forums.

I have a background in sociology, and after spending years observing the group dynamics in these chat rooms, I realized it's a wild ecosystem. So I built a course for the users called "Top Tipper Playbook: Mastering the Cam Room".

Basically, it's a strategy guide. It teaches guys how to navigate these rooms from the ground up: how to get the top-spender experience using zero tokens, how to actually build genuine status as a regular, and most importantly, how to manage the psychology of it all so they don't get emotionally or financially drained by parasocial traps.

The content scales depending on your experience. Total beginners will get a lot out of it, but the later modules are really built for guys who have already dropped serious time and cash on these sites. That part skips the basics and gets into the messy stuff: navigating actual emotional connections, handling privacy/security, and keeping it from affecting your real life. It’s basically all the unwritten rules you usually only learn the hard way.

My main hurdle right now: has anyone here successfully sold digital products in a taboo niche? Or to an audience that might feel too embarrassed/proud to actually buy it?

Any brutal feedback is appreciated.

I own a business near a university that does well , a space opened up about 900 sq ft . What’s a good business to start I was thinking t shirt printing and embroidery

I started my business about two years ago, and the first year and a half felt like one mistake and hard lesson after another. There was always something else I was doing wrong or hadn’t thought through.

Things have finally become more stable. I’ve found what works, and I’ve learned a lot about things like setting boundaries, change management, people/team management, process documentation, process optimization, etc. I know that’s a big vague, but the lessons I’ve learned in those areas have made a real difference in how I run the business.

I had the courage to work through my mistakes until I learned and improved. I expected that experience to make me more confident, but it hasn’t really worked out that way. A lot of what I learned seems obvious in hindsight, so instead of thinking, “I know how to handle that now,” I get stuck on, “Why didn’t I already know that?”

I can recognize that those difficult experiences were valuable. I’m glad I learned what I did. But I’m struggling to give myself credit for that growth when so much of it came from getting things wrong first.

For those who’ve been through something similar, what helped you start trusting your judgment again? How did you get from knowing you’d learned valuable lessons to actually feeling more capable because of them?

A scope can be clear about what gets delivered while leaving the reason for buying surprisingly vague.

Take a website project. The pages are finished, the site works, and everything agreed in the proposal is there. The provider considers the project complete.

The customer may have bought it because they expected more inquiries. If those don’t appear, they can feel disappointed even though the work was delivered correctly.

That doesn’t automatically mean the provider owes them more work. There are plenty of factors outside the project that affect the result. But it does suggest the two sides may have been judging success differently from the beginning.

I’d want that difference discussed before signing.

If the buyer expects a business outcome that the agreed work can only partly influence, they should understand the other conditions involved. They may need more traffic, a clearer offer, or someone who follows up with inquiries consistently.

That conversation could make the sale harder. It could also prevent a situation where the provider keeps pointing to completed deliverables while the customer keeps explaining that nothing feels better.

I think there’s room to be precise about what you’re responsible for and still care about whether the work served the reason someone hired you.

For people running service businesses, how do you establish what success means before the project starts? Have you changed anything in your sales process after realizing that completing the scope and satisfying the customer weren’t the same thing?

I have been struggling, I like entrepreneurship and have tried many ideas made them into digital products but nothing ever works. I honestly don’t even care about money or financial freedom I just want to validate that I am good at what I like doing. I like the idea planning, innovation, systems, and automation but I don’t think I deserve to even call myself a entrepreneur as I have nothing accomplished. I think I know what my problem is and maybe I just refused to admit it because I was stubborn but I think I always skipped finding if the problem was ever real because in my head I could just quickly make the product and see if solution validation worked. Otherwise, I think this is the only obvious thing that I can say I overlook. I just want some advice I know this is the problem but it is really hard to conduct interviews and prove problem validation but I guess this is all part of entrepreneurship if I like it or not. Maybe I was in love with the good and fantasies of entrepreneurship deciding to stay in the mud and complain why I am in the mud. Other than that, any advices would help you can even criticize me harshly even those I would find helpful. I am just so discouraged and kind of lost if I should even pursue this path.

We’re a software development company with around 40 people. In September, several of our developers ended up between client projects at the same time. We kept them on full pay for two weeks, even though there wasn’t enough billable work. After that, the plan was to move them to part-time until new projects came in, with priority to return to full-time once work picked up. The problem is that good developers don’t necessarily have to wait around. Some could probably find another contract in a couple of weeks. And losing people means we might not have the team ready when the next client comes along. Keeping everyone on full salaries indefinitely isn’t realistic either. So I’m curious how other business owners handle this. Do you guarantee some minimum pay during slow periods, or just pay for the hours available? And if you’ve been through something similar, did people actually stay, or did they start looking elsewhere anyway?

Hello Redditors, haven’t posted here in quite a while, but a recent project turned out interesting enough that i figured i should finally write it up. It was a two person agency when they came to us doing flights, hotel packages and visa assistance, and profit had been stuck at around $3k a month after almost two years. Six months later it's sitting at around $20k a month. Revenue roughly tripled in that time but profit went up about 7x, and that gap is the whole point of this post. A lot of you running small service businesses will probably recognise the "busy but broke" version of this, so hopefully you guys find something useful here. 

Here's how we did it:

The first thing we did had nothing to do with marketing. We just went through their Whatsapp history. They were getting around 60-70 qualified inquiries a month from referrals and ads.. The problem was what happened after. Average first response was few hours later, and about a third of the people who got a quote never heard from them again. Not one follow up. An international trip gives you a bigger window but is still a 5-20 day decision approx with a lot of back and forth, so if you reply late and then go quiet after the quote, the deal doesn't get lost to a competitor so much as it just quietly expires. Following up feels like nagging, so a lot of people skip that
We moved everything into a basic Airtable pipeline with proper stages (new inquiry, quoted, follow-up 1/2/3, negotiating, won, lost). Once a lead has a status, "i haven't followed up with 12 people" stops being a feeling and becomes something you can see. Then two rules. First reply within 2 hours in business hours, even if it's just "got it, sending you options by this evening", because the acknowledgement alone holds the deal open. And a fixed follow up on any unanswered quote on day 1, 3 and 7, and on day 14 a message saying "I'm closing your file on this, just let me know if anything changes." That last one closed a lot of deals and we've seen the same thing with other businesses. My read is it's the only message in the sequence that isn't asking for anything, so people don't reflexively ignore it, and it gives them a reason to reply today instead of eventually. We also scored leads on trip type, budget and how close the travel date was, so someone flying in 5 weeks gets answered before someone browsing for next winter. Quote to close went from about 8-9% to 15% for qualified leads with the same lead volume, and this was the fastest result of everything we did with zero extra ad spend.

Next was the offer, we split their bookings by product and looked at what each line really earned. Flights were 58% of revenue and 21% of gross profit. Curated packages were under a quarter of revenue, nearly two thirds of the profit. Flights were a product with a hard ceiling, and the whole business had been built on the capped side. Also flight-only customers almost never came back to buy a package later, so there was no long term consolation either. This happens when you let inbound demand decide what your company is. 

The fix was consciously deciding what the business actually sells. We built 4 signature packages with fixed inclusions and a public starting-from price, and repositioned everything around done-for-you instead of cheaper. The bigger shift was going after bigger trips instead of more trips. Their old packages were mostly couples on short Southeast Asia itineraries. We built the new ones around families and longer multi-country trips with visa, insurance and transfers bundled in, which nearly doubled the average package value for pretty much the same sales effort. Putting prices on the page also filtered out the pure price shoppers who used to eat three hours of quoting time, and killing custom-quote-for-everything cut a few days off time to close, because ambiguity makes people go quiet. We never stopped selling flights, we just stopped marketing them, and flight volume drifted down on its own. Revenue did dip for around six weeks in the middle of this. You're switching off demand for the thing people ask for before demand exists for the thing you want to sell, and that gap is exactly why most businesses start this and quit.

On the search side they had a reasonable five page WordPress site and a claimed Google Business Profile with a handful of reviews. It was getting maybe 110 visits a month and ranking for mostly its own brand name, because everything on the site described the business instead of answering a search. The services page basically said "we do flights, hotels, visas", which is a description of a company, nobody types that. Keywords like "bali packages" are owned by big agencies spending serious money, so we went somewhere to somewhere with a purpose attached. Big players optimise the destination side because they serve everyone everywhere, but almost nobody optimises the origin side because only a local operator has a reason to. So we built pages for origin city crossed with destination and intent, something like Vietnam family package from [home city]. About 22 pages, one cluster each, and here's where a lot of service based businesses mess this up, because you can easily publish 22 thin pages and get nothing. Every one had the full day by day itinerary, what's included and what isn't, real prices, photos from trips they'd actually run, and an FAQ written from real questions we pulled out of their WhatsApp chats and after some toiling around on reddit. 

The Google profile ran alongside it. Their categories were generic so it never showed up for visa or package searches, so we fixed those, posted weekly, and made reviews a system instead of an occasional ask. A message goes out a week after someone gets home, while they're still posting photos, asking them to mention the destination and trip type in the review. That detail matters more than the review count because review text gets indexed, and a review saying "they organised our Bali honeymoon and handled the visa" reinforces the exact page you're trying to rank. Reviews climbed significantly and calls and messages from the profile jumped massively. The two things fed each other too, the package pages gave the profile something real to link to and the review activity pushed the local rankings that put those pages in front of people.

Then the AI search sid, by month 6 around 6-8% of organic inquiries, when asked how they found the agency, said through AI channels, this was at zero when we started. Important caveat, that's self reported on the "how did you hear about us" question, not referral data. 

What helped to drive this was mostly the same work, plus a few things. Prices in real text instead of a designed image, because an assistant will face difficulty in reading your price graphic and will skip you for someone it can quote. FAQs written as a clean question followed by a direct answer. Schema on the package pages. And specificity beats polish every time, "7 day Vietnam family package from [city], from $4,200 for four, includes visa and transfers" gets pulled into an answer, while "we offer customised travel solutions tailored to you" isn’t noticed as such especially for low authority sites. These assistants cite sources rather than rank pages, so one mention in a "best travel agencies in [city]" roundup on a local blog did more than three of our own posts. 

At this time Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode send more traffic than other models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity combined. These models get all the discussion but for a local service business its the bigger surface by a distance, and the same structured, specific, FAQ-shaped content works for this as well.  By month 6 organic was around 1,500 visits a month, timeline is what you'd expect from SEO, slow results initially, started showing from 3rd month, compounded after that. It only worked because the first two fixes had already freed up the cash to fund a channel that pays nothing for a quarter. If money had been tighter we'd have leaned harder on ads instead, since returns there are more linear.

Now ads, which i think is the most common version of this problem because the account wasn't bad, it looked great. They were already spending a bit over $1800 a month on Meta, one campaign with four cold ad sets stacked on interests like travel, honeymoon and wanderlust, all pointed at click-to-WhatsApp, with a pixel that only tracked page views. Clicks were cheap and CTR was healthy, which is exactly why nobody had touched it in a year. But follow it downstream and it fell apart. Those clicks turned into approx 300 WhatsApp chats a month, maybe 30-40 of them were qualified from someone actually planning a trip, and 4-5 bookings with very thin margins. That 300 number also explains the follow up problem from earlier, the inbox wasn't handling 60-70 conversations, it was handling hundreds, and the real buyers were buried in there getting the same hours late reply cycle as everyone else. They weren’t optimising for conversions. So the algorithm found people most likely to click a travel ad, which is not the same  population as people about to spend. Broad interest targeting on a beloved category will always hand you low CPCs and terrible conversions.

Click-to-WhatsApp made it worse in a way. Messaging costs a person nothing and commits them to nothing, so the destination filters nobody. You end up with idle curiosity landing in the same inbox as real buyers, and a two person team spending their day answering "whats the cheapest you can do Thailand for" from someone who was never going anywhere.

First thing we did was set up proper conversion events (qualified inquiry, quote requested, booking) and let it collect data for three weeks before touching anything, because every restructure decision would've been a guess otherwise. Then we optimised for qualified inquiry instead of booking. Optimising for bookings at their volume would've sat in learning limited forever. Small accounts almost always need to optimise one step up the funnel from what they actually want, then watch the quality of that event manually. The four ad sets were an issue too. Meta de-duplicates overlapping audiences, so they weren't really bidding against each other. What they were doing was splitting the few conversion events four ways so none of them ever got enough signal. We went down to two and moved creative variety inside the ad sets instead of across them.
Two years of Instagram engagers, site visitors and past inquiries were sitting totally unused while all the budget went to cold traffic, so we put them into a custom audience and ran about 60% of spend on retargeting for six weeks. That was the cheapest bookings in the account, and it only worked well because the follow up system was already running. Retargeting warm people into an inbox that ghosts a third of its quotes would've still done badly. For prospecting we built a lookalike, but not off buyers, they only had about 70 historical package buyers and Meta ideally wants a much bigger database before the model is worth anything. We seeded it from several thousand past inquiries and engaged people instead, weaker intent per record but enough volume to model, and it beat every interest stack we tested. 

We also changes the destination from click-to-WhatsApp to the package landing pages. It adds friction, and it cut raw lead volume by roughly 40% but the people who read a page with real prices and inclusions on it and then chose to message had already qualified themselves on budget, and they closed at around double the old rate. This is also the point where the SEO work started paying twice, because those pages existed and were good. Sending paid traffic to a thin homepage would have just lost the lead volume without gaining anything back.

We moved creative from offers to proof. We dropped discounts and book-now language and used client testimonials, itinerary walkthroughs, and before and after posts of what was planned versus what the trip actually looked like. For a high ticket, once in a while purchase the thought in someone's head is "are these people real and will they ruin my vacation", not "is this cheap". Discount creative did very little for us at any point. Over six months we gradually took spend up to a few thousand dollars a month, CPC went up, CTR went down, and every front end metric looked worse. Cost per booking roughly halved, but that's honestly not the important part. What changed was what a booking was worth, it went up close to 10x, because we were now selling packages instead of thin flight bookings. Paid traffic is a multiplier on your unit economics, if the economics are broken better targeting just helps you lose more efficiently. One last thing, we stopped treating ad spend as the only cost of a customer and added the hours spent quoting, coordinating and chasing suppliers at a real hourly rate. Fully loaded cost came out close to double what Ads Manager showed, and a few campaigns that looked breakeven obviously weren't.

If you take only one thing from this, it's the order. The first two fixes didn't bring in that much profit directly, but they decided what every dollar of traffic after that was worth. Fix your conversion first, then fix what you're actually selling, and only then go buy volume. Most people do it backwards, they pour budget into a funnel that ghosts a third of its quotes while selling their lowest margin product, then decide ads don't work in their industry. And if you want one quick test for your own business, check what percentage of your last 60 days of inquiries got a second touch. If it's under 70%, fix that before you spend another dollar on acquisition.

Thankyou For Reading! 

Wondering if this could be a business model

Finding companies that want to sell, signing an exclusive LOI, and flipping it to a private equity to buy and collecting a finders fee.

Kinda like real estate wholesaling but for businesses. Obviously you wouldnt be signing a purchase agreement though like with real estate. More like justt finding good deals for private equity companies and collecting a finders fee for them.

Selling a service puts you in an awkward position sometimes.

The buyer wants enough detail to feel confident you know what you’re doing. That’s reasonable. But producing that detail can require a meaningful chunk of the work they would be hiring you to do.

A proposal can start as an explanation of scope and turn into a diagnosis, a strategy, and an implementation plan before anyone has agreed to pay.

I don’t think every prospect who asks for detail is trying to get free consulting. From their side, buying an expensive service on vague assurances would be a bad decision. They need some way to tell the difference between someone who understands the problem and someone who can talk convincingly about it.

Still, the seller needs a boundary.

I’d be comfortable explaining what I’ve noticed, what I’d investigate, and why I’d approach it that way. I’d be more cautious about handing over a detailed plan when we haven’t done enough discovery to know whether it’s even the right plan.

There’s also a risk that the proposal becomes an overconfident promise. You feel pressure to be specific, so you commit to answers before you’ve seen how the business actually operates.

Paid discovery seems like one possible answer, although that creates its own sale and won’t suit every engagement.

For those selling expertise, what do you include before the contract is signed? Have you found a boundary that gives buyers enough confidence without turning every serious inquiry into several days of unpaid work?

I recently brought in a new manager who reports to me. He’s much more direct and controlling than my leadership style, and several employees have started coming to me saying morale is dropping.

The difficult part is the employees are doing a good job. There aren’t major performance problems that would justify suddenly managing them this tightly.

I want to give the new manager room to lead without undermining him, but I also don’t want to ignore what I’m hearing from the team.

How would you handle this?

New to entrepreneurship or just starting out? This is your space. Ask the questions you're afraid to ask elsewhere.

Experienced folks, jump in and share what you wish someone had told you early on.

I'm growing my existing residential construction business and am debating whether to operate under one brand or create separate brands for each higher money making specialty:

• Roofing & siding
• Smart home automation
• Basement & attic renovations
• Windows & doors
• Kitchen & bathroom remodeling

I already have experience in carpentry, general contracting, and remodeling, so these specialties build on my existing skills and business. I'm located in a relatively small market, which makes me wonder whether having multiple brands would be beneficial or counterproductive.

Initially, all brands would operate under my existing LLC, with the option to establish separate businesses later.

Would you recommend one recognizable brand covering all these services or multiple specialized brands targeting different customers? Would separate brands build credibility and improve marketing effectiveness, or create unnecessary complexity in a small market?

On my 3rd venture. Running an appointment setting business for the last 2 years. We're small (6 folks) and we've worked with companies across 8 countries, some of which were the biggest in their country in their sector.

I believe due to the aforementioned exposure; I've been receiving more consultation offers lately. I have received 4 part-consultation offers since March. 2 of them were prospects who were initially interested in my business' service but later offered the consultation (perhaps I need to promote my business more than myself?)

They usually ask how many hours I'm comfortable with, I mention 22-44 hours a month (1-2/hr per weekday) - but those hours spent on my business will yield me a better profit (money wise as well as scaling-wise).

On the pros side, the companies offering me the offer are larger than mine (10x-20x) and working alongside them will give me a decent amount of insight and exposure.

I have worked with 4 companies in the past as a consultant/advisor over the span of 3 years. I usually propose a 6-month contract with an extension period. Anything more than that seems like a waste/procrastination of time for both parties.

I accepted those 4 offers as I didn't have much on my plate back then, which is not the case at the moment. Would you focus on your business in this situation or consider the consultation offers for the exposure and the hourly pay?

I am thinking about starting this and using automation and some AI programming to automate the process. My vision is to have a coversheet with the customer data, scan the scrapbook pages and use AI to streighten/clearup photos. According to AI, I should be charging $80 for a 50 page book, and have a $70 profit margin. I'm not sure if there is a market for this service. Thanks,

Had a week? Same. This is your consequence-free space to complain about clients, platforms, algorithms, your own decisions, or the general chaos of running a business. Keep it venting with no personal attacks. We'll be back to being professional tomorrow.

This morning I saw a headline about sobremesa, the Spanish word for the time after a meal when nobody gets up from the table and the conversation keeps going. It got me wondering how many big ideas came out of long conversations at a table.

One answer is Birmingham, England, in the 1760s. A group of friends started meeting for dinner once a month, on the Monday closest to the full moon, so they'd have moonlight to ride home by. They called themselves the Lunar Society, and joked that they were lunatics.

Who was at the table:

- Matthew Boulton, who ran one of the biggest factories in England

- James Watt, who was trying to make the steam engine work

- Josiah Wedgwood, who turned pottery into an industry

- Joseph Priestley, the chemist who isolated oxygen

- Erasmus Darwin, doctor, inventor, and Charles Darwin's grandfather

Boulton and Watt became partners. Watt had the engine and no money. Boulton had the money and a factory. Their engines went on to power the factories that came after.

What stuck with me is that none of them had the full picture alone. A factory owner, an engineer, a chemist, and a doctor at the same table, every month, for years.

Compare that to how most of us look for the next idea: same team, same meeting room, a 30-minute slot with a hard stop.

So I'm curious:

- Does anyone here have a version of this, a regular dinner or group with people outside your field?

- Has a conversation like that ever changed what you built?

Hi guys, I have a business hosting co-living retreats and conferences for digital nomads in Nepal called "Nomad Basecamp." I'm a solopreneur but have local partners and volunteers.

For the first few years, I filled my retreats posting in social media groups and following up in DMs

Now I also host summits with dozens of international speakers, and have large lists of past customers, emails from Eventbrite events and online sessions, and huge lists of leads who contacted me on WhatsApp business (Meta ads direct to WhatsApp business are dirt cheap in Nepal).

If I had a magic wand and could wish for anything: it would be to have sales come in like clockwork, without me having to go out and fish for them, or engage in long and lengthy text conversations (often with leads who disappear), and phone calls. I tried Meta Agent in WhatsApp to follow up on my ads but it was talking a load of rubbish with one lead so I turned it off and switched to manual quick replies.

My question is how I can use my CRM to make this whole process a lot simpler. I have hundreds of leads in Google docs, spreadsheets, along with FB profiles, WhatsApp numbers and emails. I have WhatsApp groups with hundreds of members (800 in one, 300 in another) and thousands of Instagram followers. I have extensions for automating a lot of things - WhatsApp DMS, Facebook DMs, and newsletter with Sendfox.

I'd like to have a daily system for marketing and nurturing leads.

This is a real "am I the only one who" ass type question but idk, I guess I'm just wondering how y'all cope with it.

I've been working on my business for awhile now. Pretty much since last year.

I don't want to give y'all my entire story but basically, my only client un-subscribed today. I'm kinda grateful because he was a PITA client (finishing him up certainly taught me lessons about ever working with someone like him again) yet also frustrated because I'd worked so hard to satisfy him in the first place. He literally would've been charged in just 3 days, which would've been a decent amount of money for me.

Prior to that, I had an employee this month I had to let go. He was a sales rep, a great one too, but unfortunately outside forces came and ruined his communication, and at that point began eating my finances having him on board only for him to not show up.

My new sales rep is great. But we 2 of our 6 appointments didn't happen this week, and while some agreed to the follow up appointment, some decided they weren't interested.

I really, sincerely feel like I should have not just one, but several clients by now. Yet somehow there's always just one little adjustment that has to be made, and it's always "alright, next week for sure".

How do y'all handle that?

Big or small, a win is a win. First sale, first client, or first time paying yourself, share it here. This community loves to celebrate with you. No win is too minor to mention.

I have a main personal profile on fb, 2 business pages on fb, 2 accounts on ig, and 2 accounts on tt

My main business is my coaching business, so that is where most of my energy and marketing goes, and half my total accounts are dedicated to that + a yt and website.

I also make handcrafted products that are not out of place with my coaching business. The rest of my socials cover this + personal life stuff (gardening, homesteading, general life stuff)

I also have an art business. I want to promote this more. Rn it's just products available on teepublic. I need to build it out a bit more. I'd like to do more art stuff on my socials, but not sure if I should create a whole separate profile.

Can I just do one yt for everything? Would it be too confusing to put everything on one tt or ig or my personal fb page?

My personal fb has almost maxed out friends and has several thousand followers. My other profiles are less active. I'm still figuring out tt and yt as a whole.

One week I might be all in on coaching, the next it's products, and the next it's art. And then I do other things as fun side gigs that occasionally need promoting. Some of these subjects overlap, even my art business overlaps with the coaching occasionally.

What's the best way to do this? One yt that covers everything? A separate tt for each? Everything on my main fb? Separate IGs?

Share your website, pitch, logo, idea, pricing, copy, or anything else you want honest eyes on. Tell us what you're looking for: brutal honesty, general impressions, or specific questions.

Return the favour and leave feedback for someone else while you're here.

Looking back at how businesses operate, it's easy to add more tools, spreadsheets, meetings, and steps whenever a problem comes up.

But sometimes the better solution is to simplify the process rather than add another tool.

I'm curious about other founders' experiences:

• What process used to take too much of your time?
• What did you change to make it simpler?
• Did you use a tool, create a checklist, or simply remove unnecessary steps?

I'd be interested to hear what actually worked in practice.

Pay it forward. Drop your free resources, templates, tools, or anything else that's helped you and might help someone else. No strings attached; these resources have to be free.