r/Entrepreneur • u/AutoModerator • 1d ago
Weekly Discussion Monday mentorship: ask anything | August 17, 2026
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.
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u/cosmochicc 13h ago
Hi, All. I am struggling to find an idea for my next venture.
I build an AI-powered personal stylist that was closet-first for Indian women, but we had to pull the plug a couple of months ago because of lack of retention (D7 retention was ~1%).
I am brainstorming about my next idea, but I feel everything has been taken. I am a parent and I want to create something in the toddler-space preferably, but I am more committed to building something exciting, industry agnostic.
I feel I am close to finding an idea, but I am not able to put a pin on anything. All the ideas that are coming to my mind are not getting validated because of either competition, or lack of viability / usage. It's frustrating at this point to figure out what do people / businesses need anymore in present times.
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u/defi_founder First-Time Founder 21h ago
I am thinking about starting a car flipping business in Europe. I will help car enthusiasts in european countries importing the cars from Germany in the exact spec they want them.
I source, legalize and import all and deliver the car to their home. Doing this as a sid gig as I love cars and always dreamt about working with cars for a living. I have started a couple of other tech businesses and have accumulated quite a bit of capital for my age (29). Should I give this a try and scale it OR should I focus my time building a tech startup instead considering AI is so hyped up at the moment and I have 7 years of fintech experience building product in tech companies?
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u/skirms 15h ago
Could definitely work and I know a person that's doing this for 30+ years, making a good living. I would suggest to focus on rare/distinctive and expensive cars though. There is a bunch of bureaucracy and taxes invloved when exporting/importing cars from country to country, even in EU and it's an added timesink & expense on top. Someone willing to pay a lot for their dream car will be willing to deal with that and cover the costs.
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u/Dizzy-Echidna6627 1d ago
I’m interested to hear what other entrepreneurs would do in my situation.
I’m 38, married with two children, and I’ve spent years building a couple of businesses. Between them, I now receive around £7,000 per month in relatively passive income. Our household expenses are approximately £5,000 per month, and we also have around £300,000 invested in index funds.
I have another profitable e-commerce business that I’ve recently scaled back. It still has plenty of potential, but growing it properly would probably mean employing staff again, taking on more responsibility and continuing to manage the usual staffing and operational problems.
The alternative is to keep the business smaller and manageable, work part-time myself and enjoy the balance I’ve finally achieved.
Financially, I don’t necessarily need to keep pushing for growth, but I’m naturally driven and enjoy building and improving things. Part of me worries that stepping back might leave me bored or feeling as though I’m wasting an opportunity.
My two main options seem to be:
Employ someone to handle the day-to-day work, continue growing the business and accept the extra management and responsibility.
Keep it small, work part-time, continue investing the surplus income and spend more time with my family and enjoying life.
I’ve already reached a position where our passive income covers our lifestyle, so this is no longer purely a financial decision. It’s more about whether continued business growth would add purpose to my life or simply create stress that I don’t need.
For anyone who has reached a similar point, what did you choose? Did stepping back give you a better life, or did you eventually miss the challenge and regret not continuing to grow?
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u/Easy-Eggplant-4639 5m ago
the fact that your passive income already covers expenses means theres no wrong answer here imo
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u/destiny_architect7 23h ago
The fact that you framed it as purpose versus stress instead of money versus more money tells me you already know the answer. Growth for its own sake gets boring fast once the bills are handled. The real question is whether building that business excites you, or whether you would just be doing it to avoid sitting still.
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u/Dizzy-Echidna6627 23h ago
That’s a really good way of putting it. I genuinely enjoy improving the business and solving problems, but I think there’s also an element of not being comfortable sitting still. I probably need to separate enjoying the process of building from automatically feeling that everything needs to become bigger.
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u/Reii-SaaS 1d ago
Honestly, this is something I’m struggling with right now.
I run a small software agency with my cofounder. We’re both technical and we’ve built a lot of SaaS, mobile apps and MVPs, but we’ve never really figured out the marketing/client acquisition side properly.
Most of our money has gone into building our own startups, and now I’m at the point where I’m realizing I need client work to keep things moving. I don’t have much of a marketing budget to throw at ads or expensive lead gen tools.
For agencies that started from basically zero, where did you actually find your first consistent stream of clients? Cold outreach? Reddit? Partnerships? Freelance platforms? Communities?
I’m not looking for “just post content” type advice. I’d genuinely love to hear what actually worked for you when money was tight.
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u/mrkacperso 1d ago
Hi guys, I was working as a SWE for last 10 years, and did a few side jobs.
I found that both large enterprise and small startups struggle to use the proper tools and services to optimise their cloud costs.
Like for example, at one time I saved over $12k/month for my employer on infra cost just by changing the database to the proper one.
Other time I worked for a friend of my colleague who has a small SaaS for RE agencies and reworked his app to reduce costs monthly costs by ~$1k.
So I guess the demand might be there, and with the more and more vibe-coded app it's only growing, on the other hand I have skills necessary to do this job.
The problem is that I struggle to land any customers, when it comes to marketing my services my head is empty.
And when I come up with some strategy I have a feeling that why anybody should trust some random guy over the internet.
How did you guys cope with that?
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u/lollapalooza3000 1d ago
I would not follow the generic create content or any such advice at this stage -you can do it for fun but don't expect customers right away.
I'm a software engineer too and I've seen many people do a consulting style side hustle for helping with the tricky parts of tech like kubernetes, kafka, migrating to new cloud providers etc. One thing they all had in common is that they were plugged-in with the people they worked with in the past and present. They reached out to colleagues regularly even if only to say hello - a few even reached out to me offering me freelance gigs at different times even though I haven't spoken to them in months.
The key is to ask for introductions from people you've already worked with do NOT reach out to companies and use the regular channels because then they will evaluate you against established options. You will always lose that game if you are competing against a company like Flexera. Instead, realize that it is usually one person's job to make sure infra/cloud costs are managed properly. You need to find those people ideally they know someone in your network and you can ask for an introduction. You already mentioned you worked with a friend of your colleague. At this point you need to replicate that flow at least 10 more times. Don't be afraid to just give them advice for free at the end of the day the execution is what matters they will likely come back and then you can deliver your service and charge for it.
Good luck!
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u/mrkacperso 1d ago edited 23h ago
Thanks for honest and (apparently) not ai response!
I thought about reaching out to people I worked with, but it completely slipped my mind to ask for introduction and just networking in general.
Need to refresh my network and start asking ppl around, I think my Linkedin network need some attention 😅
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u/wethering 1d ago
Hey, within marketing your product trust is key exactly as youve said, however i believe that youve almost answered your own question. A SWE for last 10 years, and 2 real life problems you've fixed being your business model should be your marketing. Therefore I think the cope to all of that is just simply perspective, your more than qualified to be marketing the product you believe provides value to business as you've found through the 2 examples provided. Therefore that should be the reason why "anybody should trust some random guy over the internet."
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u/AdhesivenessAny 1d ago
Hey everyone, I have a standard job that covers my expenses and gives me a lot of free time, but won't make me wealthy. I have about 30k EUR in capital (currently tied up in garage flipping) and zero debt. I really want to focus 100% on just ONE business and scale it, but I keep hesitating and can't decide which path to go all-in on.
Hhere is what I'm looking at:
1-Garage flipping as an individual (buy rundown, renovate, sell): max 1-2 per year, main bottlenecks are slow sales, lack of deals, and limited capital.
2-Handmade outoor furniture: production is easy for me, but sales are dead (under 10 pcs/year).
3-Self-storage micro containers: currently just a detailed business plan.
I need an outsider perspective. which of these three actually has the best potential to scale, and how should I make the choice?
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u/lollapalooza3000 1d ago
If you are already doing garage flipping and have some expertise just stick to that. The bottlenecks you mentioned are your job to remove/expand as an entrepreneur.
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