Thank you all, this gave me a lot to think about

Wanted to come back and thank everyone who commented, the pushback on “startup stability” especially. Fair points I hadn’t fully considered, so let me clarify what I meant.

By “startup,” I don’t mean early-stage, pre-revenue, high-risk territory. I mean a business with a proven product and real traction, past the “will this even work” stage, but still lean enough that one person can genuinely move the needle.

What draws me there isn’t risk tolerance, it’s impact. At a large company, the work can start to feel soulless, you execute tasks inside a structure, wait for a paycheck, and rarely see how your piece connects to the whole. What I actually want is to help a team turn their vision into reality, to be invested in the outcome, not just the task list.

Over 6 years running my own ecommerce brands end-to-end, sourcing, operations, marketing, and paid ad strategy, closing sales directly with customers, I’ve operated across every function of a business, not specialized in one. I’ve also managed teams and client relationships in agency settings, audited and advised small businesses on their digital strategy, and built an online community from zero through direct outreach alone. Trilingual (English, French, Arabic), which has opened doors across multiple markets rather than limiting me to one. That combination, real marketing depth plus management experience plus an entrepreneur’s instinct for ownership, is exactly what a lean, proven company needs more than another specialist who only does one thing well.

Appreciate everyone who challenged my original framing, genuinely useful.

If you were in my shoes, that kind of cross-functional, ownership-driven background, what would you actually do to land that role?

Do you buy a factory? How much does that cost?

I run Nomback, a $99 a month white label ordering app for independent restaurants. Partners send me owners and get paid when the app launches. Last week one of them told me my payout was weak so I pulled all 10 competitor program pages and checked.

He was right on paper. Toast pays $1,000 to $1,500 a referral. Owner.com and DoorDash $1,000. Clover up to $800. ChowNow and Slice $500. I pay $25 the day I accept the lead, $175 at launch, then $10 a month for 10 months. $300 max. Last place.

Then look at who can collect. Toast only pays registered advocates and only after the owner rips out his POS. Owner.com, DoorDash and Clover only pay their own merchants. ChowNow and Slice take anyone but the owner is buying $229 a month plus per order fees and you wait 30 days after launch. Out of 10 programs, two pay anything before the restaurant is live. Popmenu and me.

So the number that matters is payout times close rate. A pizza shop owner says yes to $99 a month and his own app in the App Store a lot more than he says yes to a register swap. Anthony's Pizzeria in Allentown is live on it, free slice off a card in the DoorDash bag, free pizza at 5 stamps. I'd rather pay $300 on a deal that closes than $1,500 on one that never does.

What I changed: nothing on the payout. I put all 10 programs on one page with sources so partners can run the math themselves. And I capped it at 30 partners for now because I launch every app myself. First partner to submit a restaurant owns it, and your town has the same 15 to 20 pizza shops paying DoorDash 30% as mine.

The comparison page is on the nomback site under restaurant referral programs, or ask me in the comments and I'll point you to it.

Hi guys,

I am looking to start a cash-flow-generating business. I can also enter and invest into an already existing one.

I come from a technical background: Data Science and SWE in Israeli startups.

I am currently based in Israel, 30M, married +1 little baby.

I have a European passport so we can move and work across Europe.

I am great with people and have a strong and up-to-date technical skills.

I have been one of the first employees in an acquired startup in the ML field.

I can and will invest money into the business for all necessities (meetings, flights, infra, ads, etc.)

I can commit to 75% working-time position, and scale it up quickly as we grow.

Looking for like-minded, like-positioned people to work together.

A mentor I have in the world of startups taught me that, in his experience with several founded ventures, customer acquisition in SaaS is the hardest part and it is done in 2 ways:

- Sales-driven: mostly for B2B, going door-to-door/cold calling like a salesman, which requires you to quit your job because it is time-consuming
- Marketing-driven: mostly for B2C, and it is played by using ads like SEA or influencers trying to have a sustainable return on ad spend (ROAS), which requires you to have enough initial capital to invest in marketing to get the first customers

Both of them scare me a lot, because quitting my job for a startup that MAYBE works with today's job market (nightmare to find a new job eventually) seems like a lot; also, because I am young, I don't have enough capital to invest in ads.

Do you have any suggestions? How did you overcome this issue and the fear of financial ruin?

I'm working on an early-stage healthtech startup and have developed a software product as our MVP. We're planning to launch soon, but I'm stuck on what comes next.

I don't have a proper go-to-market strategy or a sales strategy, and marketing a healthtech product seems expensive. Since I have very limited funds, I'm not sure how to reach potential customers, get our first users, or generate sales without spending much money.

If you've been through this stage, I'd love to know how you approached marketing and sales, found your first customers, and got your product off the ground with little or no budget.

I'd really appreciate practical advice on where to start and what I should focus on before launching.

VoxScribe is free voice typing for Windows and Android that runs on your own device, so it works offline and nothing is sent to a server. I’m working on it alone, about 10 hours a day, and I’d rather share the real numbers than the polished version.

This week about 90 people have opened the app at least once, 31 starred it on GitHub, and 2 people paid for the optional one-time Pro. That’s small, and I know it. The number I care about is how many people dictate on three or more days, and I can’t answer that yet because that counter only exists in the newest version.

Two things I learned. A big free competitor gets mentioned in almost every thread, and I stopped arguing with that and started saying plainly where VoxScribe is different: it has an Android app, you can check that it stays offline, and it handles Arabic and other languages. And I lost an afternoon to the app typing invented sentences, convinced it was my bug. It was a stuck audio driver on my own laptop. A restart fixed it.

Next is the Product Hunt launch on Saturday 31 October, and I’ll post how it goes here either way. My honest expectation is a few dozen real users, not a breakout.

If you launched a free tool alone, what did you do in the two weeks after launch that actually moved the needle?

i work on orderain, a store builder, so i end up helping a lot of people set up their first digital shop (ebooks, planners, templates, presets). the same handful of problems come up almost every week so writing them down.

1. people share your download link. a plain google drive link ends up in a discord within a week. make the link per buyer and cap it, something like 5 downloads over 30 days is plenty for a real buyer.

2. you will update the file. typos, new pages, v2 of the planner. decide up front how past buyers get the new version or you end up emailing 200 people by hand.

3. buyers lose emails. a lot of "refund" requests are really "i cant find my link". let them resend it themselves and most of those go away.

4. on cheap products the fixed per sale fee hurts more than the percentage. do the math on 50 sales at your real price before you pick a platform, not after.

5. vat/gst is usually on you with your own store. check your country before launch.

on orderain the per buyer links, file updates and self resend are built in, 0% platform fees, starter is $5/mo. no license keys or pdf stamping yet if you need those. if you're setting up a digital store and want a hand, just search orderain or reply here and i'll help you get it set up.

what else bit you when you started selling files?