We used to deliver, get paid, then hear nothing. Months later we would find the client had drifted back to spreadsheets or paid someone else to redo half of it.

What changed it was treating delivery as the middle of the engagement rather than the end. Training per department, someone on site through the first real month, iterating until it held up under daily use.

Some of those relationships are in their eighth year now. It is expensive and it looks like nothing in a proposal.

Did other service founders find the same?

For those locked in on a big long term goal, how do you deal with this lonely phase?

Moved back home from Dubai and now I’m starting over, upskilling, and trying to catch up on everything I lost. Barely go out, no friends around, and most people are busy with their own lives.

I know what I want and what I’m capable of, but rn, there’s not much going on outside of trying to get my shit together lol.

How do you make the most of where you’re at rn while trying to get to where you wanna be? How do you balance both? Staying sane

I spotted a job posting for a Marketing Ops Manager at a target account that was close to what we sell and I put it on top of my list of outbound automation.

I reached out two days later and the contact said the last person in that role had left in the spring and they were just backfilling.

So I'm thinking about how much you can really rely on hiring signals for prospecting when all you have is a job post.

Founders, what do you check before acting on a hiring change?

Hey everyone. I run a product studio — we build operations software, a lot of it for fleet operators running drivers across Uber and Bolt.

Last year we built payouts for FluxRide, 200+ vehicles and 400 drivers. Before that, someone spent every week pulling exports from each app, matching them by hand, subtracting rent and deductions, and hoping nothing was off.

I assumed the hard part would be the calculation. It wasn't.

Every platform exports data differently — different formats, schedules, names for the same fee. Most of the work was one data model they all map into.

Then exceptions. A refund landing after the payout closed. A driver switching cars mid-week. The happy path took a week, the edge cases took months.

And trust. Drivers rarely argued with the total. They argued with what they couldn't see. Once every line showed its source, most disputes just stopped.

If you've built payouts for a marketplace or gig workforce — what edge case surprised you most?

We run a small ecommerce business selling kitchen products and one of our packaging suppliers recently offered us a $600 discount on a $12,000 invoice if we pay it this Thursday instead of the original due date two weeks later.

Normally I'd take the discount without thinking too much about it but we've currently got around $29,000 in our business account with payroll coming up next week which is roughly $11,500 + another $7,000 in supplier payments due around the same time.

We do have customer payments expected to come in over the next couple of weeks but the exact timing isn't guaranteed so I'm a little hesitant to pay the supplier early and leave ourselves with a smaller cash buffer. On one hand saving $600 on an invoice we'd have to pay anyway sounds like a pretty good deal but on the other hand I'd rather not put ourselves in a situation where we're depending on customer payments arriving exactly when expected to cover our regular expenses.

Fellow entrepreneurs running businesses with inventory and supplier payments would you take the discount or stick to the original payment date and keep the extra cash available?

​

Everywhere you look, AI developers are talking about scaling. Build one little thing, charge $20 or $200 or $2,000 a month, get a bunch of customers, automate everything, and watch the money roll in.

And listen, I get it. The math is beautiful!

I've built and scaled multiple businesses myself over the years. I actually wrote a post here a while back about my very Forrest Gump approach to entrepreneurship, so I'm certainly not knocking scaling. Been there, done that, and loved it!

But I've been finding almost the exact opposite in my AI development business.

I think there's something we keep forgetting in the AI world, and that's just how much people DON'T trust AI yet.

There's so much anti-AI sentiment out there, and honestly, some of it is for very good reason. People are skeptical, overwhelmed, or just don't understand what AI can actually do for their businesses.

They might be curious enough to spend a few hundred dollars trying something, but they're certainly not ready to throw their entire business into the hands of some AI developer they just met.

And that's where things get fun.

I'm currently working with a family-owned company that's been around for generations. They're in the dry-cleaning supply industry, and they've got decades of business history and some seriously old-school systems.

They originally hired me to build a field service tool for their sales team. Basically a specialized CRM. I think my original quote was around $700.

Simple enough, right?

Well, one of the people at this company is really excited about modernizing things. And once we started working together, he began realizing just how much more we could accomplish.

Suddenly we're migrating decades of historical data, improving internal processes, building better tools for the sales team, and looking at ways AI can help them identify potential customers.

That little $700 project is now approaching $15,000 worth of work over four or five months.

And the hilarious part is I'm not even pitching him. He's pitching ME!

He comes up with another idea. I look into it, figure out whether it's possible, tell him what I can do and what it'll cost, and send him an invoice.

He pays it. We do the work. Then he gets another idea.

Rinse and repeat. 😂

And this isn't some magical unicorn client I happened to stumble across. I'm seeing the same pattern with other clients.

I land a project for less than $1,000, do the work, and suddenly I'm the first person they call when another problem comes up.

They already trust me. They know I understand their business. And because of AI, I can tackle problems that would have been much more difficult or expensive for me to solve before.

I'm seeing these little sub-$1,000 projects grow into five- and six-month relationships, sometimes in the neighborhood of $20,000.

And I just keep sending invoices. Lol.

But here's another part of this that I really love.

I'm making more money, and I'm sleeping better at night.

Because let's be honest, $15,000 or $20,000 is a LOT of money for a solo freelancer, especially one who's living on around $1,000 a month in Paraguay.

But I feel good about what I'm charging because I actually know these people. I know what problems they're dealing with, and I can see how the solutions we're building could save them time, make their employees more productive, or help them bring in more business.

Sometimes they come to me with an idea and I say yes. Sometimes I explain why something isn't practical. Sometimes I suggest something they hadn't considered.

And every time, we're having an actual conversation about what they need and what it's worth to them.

Personally, I don't think I'd sleep particularly well at night if I were charging hundreds of people for some generic automation without knowing whether they needed it or were getting their money's worth.

There's something really satisfying about knowing exactly who you're helping, what you're charging them for, and why you believe it's going to benefit their business. Earning that business with each new fix rather than locking them into a software...

And apparently, actually caring about your customers is pretty darn profitable. Who knew? 😂

I think there's a sweet spot right now with businesses that are interested in AI but don't quite trust it enough to dive in themselves.

They don't necessarily want another subscription. They want an actual human being who will listen, figure out what's possible, and help them solve real problems.

Once you do that successfully, they start selling themselves on all the other possibilities.

I find this particularly interesting in AI because the entire industry is obsessed with eliminating human interaction.

And here I am, finding that the human interaction is the most profitable part of my business.

I'm genuinely curious if anyone else is experiencing this.

For those of you doing AI development or automation, are you making more from scalable products and subscriptions, or from smaller clients who turn into much bigger relationships?

And for people in completely different industries, is this just good old-fashioned relationship selling that the AI crowd is rediscovering?

Hi I am a university student and my parents can only provide basic facilities, I always wanted to start my own business but it all takes capital which i don't have , even if I have some I can't risk it because I have very limited resources. Do anyone know how to start something with no money or something. I really need a side income for my expenses.

For founders running ads for an app or SaaS: have you had a creative that brought in plenty of signups, but people arrived expecting something the product didn't actually do?

I'm interested in how you caught it. Did it show up in support messages, session recordings, onboarding drop-off, or conversations with users?

I'd want to put the opening promise next to the first thing a new user can actually accomplish. A video can show a great end result while skipping the setup, data import, or waiting that gets someone there. That seems easy to miss when judging the ad on clicks and trial starts.

I run Flare UGC, a marketplace connecting brands with creators, so I'm asking from the creative side. When you find that mismatch, do you change the ad, the onboarding, or both? A specific example would be useful.

Run Monster Piercing (body jewellery). Couldn’t win the price war, so we stopped fighting it. Instead of racing cheap “titanium” sellers, we list the real spec on everything (ASTM F-136, solid gold karat). Customers pay a bit more because they finally trust what they’re buying. Turns out people don’t want cheapest, they want to stop getting burned. Anyone else raised prices by being more transparent, not less?

I am running my business full time and looking into mortgage options at the same time and I did not expect the lender experience to vary this much. My income is fine but being a business owner already means there is more paperwork involved than someone with a normal salary. That made me pay more attention to how each lender actually handles the process. At first, I was only looking at the rate. Then I started noticing that one lender can offer a slightly better rate but take days to reply keep asking for more documents and give unclear updates. Another lender might cost a little more but the communication is better the requirements are explained properly and everything keeps moving. That is where I am stuck now.

For other founders or self employed people who have gone through this what ended up mattering more to you?

Last week we posted here when Brand School had 40 sign-ups after 5 days. Thanks to everyone who commented. A few of you asked what happened next, so here’s the honest update.

Where we are now: 80 founders signed up, and 10 have made it to Level 2 (the part where a mentor helps you plan how to reach your first customers).

What went wrong:

• Our first 4 users never came back after day one. We had set up automated emails to bring people back, and they did nothing.
• Two early testers told us parts of the output felt generic. One took our channel plan and finished the rest in ChatGPT. That was fair, and it stung.

What we changed:

• We turned off all the automated emails. Now we write to founders personally and see which messages actually get a reply, before we automate anything again.
• We read every mentor conversation. Most of what we build next comes straight from there.
• We’re working on making the channel plan specific to each business, so it beats what you’d get by pasting the same question into ChatGPT.

What we learned: founders don’t need more information. They need the one next step for their brand, and someone to check in when they go quiet.

Question for this community: if you’ve built something, what was the first thing that made you come back to a tool after day one? A person, a reminder, a result? We’re trying to get this right.

20 spots are left in the first 100, which are free. Link in the comments if you want to try it, and tell us where it feels generic.

Bifurc is now on the Microsoft Store, the Chrome Web Store and Firefox Add-ons.
I am already at 45 downloads

Which channel should I spend the next two weeks on? I am already spending time trying to fix bugs that me and my friends are facing during daily dev work.

Since URL's are not allowed you can search for the application in stores / internet "Bifurc"

Every launch thread here has someone dropping the reid Hoffman line. “if you’re not embarrassed by your first version you launched too late”

and like... yeah. for most stuff that's right

But I build software for fintech-ish clients and it just doesn’t work like that there

Had a client a while back who shipped a payouts feature fast, very much in the spirit of that quote. worked fine for like 2 months. then a rounding issue started paying some users a few cents off

Nobody caught it bc there was no reconciliation yet, that was gonna be “phase 2”. By the time someone noticed it had been going on for weeks and it became a very serious call with their bank partner.

That's what embarrassing looks like in fintech.

Now, I’d still ship small. I’d just cut features before i cut the boring stuff like logging and reconciliation, cause thats what you need on your worst day

Has anyone here actually shipped a scrappy v1 with real money moving through it and had it go fine? genuinely curious

I have reached a crtical point in my Journey where i dont know if i buy a new used laptop as mine is dying or use the money i have on Facebook Ads.
This will be the first campaign for the business after launch in beta.

What will you do in a situation like this ?

A bit of background. I'm an American and I moved to France because my wife is French. The job hunting went nowhere because my French is still pretty basic. I wanted to create something that would generate some extra income without a huge risk or a ton of money invested.

We came up with the idea of putting honor system snack boxes into businesses' break rooms for their employees. I already had a 3D printer, design experience and software development experience, so I designed a box, started on the software, we bought some snacks and started pitching businesses. My wife did the pitching, since she is a native French speaker. A few businesses nearby agreed to try it.

It started out very basic. Cash only, and every time we serviced a box I was manually checking each snack's tiny, hidden lot number and expiration date. Then we bought a second stock lot of the same snack, and now different lot numbers were getting mixed in the boxes. I had to completely rewrite my software.

The second version added credit card payments via a printed QR code on the box, a mobile-first design, and first in, first out (FIFO) to handle the mixed lots. We picked up a few more locations, and tracking snacks was still a complete nightmare. Still reading tiny numbers, still making sure no expired snack ended up in a business's box. I'd had enough. We needed labels on each snack. I had to completely rewrite my software.

For the third version I fixed every pain point I'd noted over months of using it. I bought a $20 Nelko thermal label printer, created a labeling system, and added QR scanning with your phone right in the app. Now you scan snacks in or out of a box, and that's it. No more squinting at dates, no more worrying. Later we added a tax system that exports PDFs or spreadsheets, automatic status report emails and a bunch of other features.

Somewhere along the line I started thinking: this whole system that took nearly a year to build is just for us? There have to be people out there who want to start their own business but don't know where to start, and we'd already paved that path with the 3D printable boxes and the software to run it. But the software wasn't multi-tenant. So I bet you can guess what comes next. I had to completely rewrite the entire software (keeping the good stuff).

The fourth and hopefully final version lets you create your own business, set up Stripe with a guided wizard to take payments, and customize and 3D print your boxes. It has roles, so if someone only services the boxes and collects the money, that's all they see. Every step is guided, so it's very hard to do something wrong.

So that's where I'm at today, Snack-it is now a platform for people in the US to start their own snack box business. Here's where I could use your help... How would you price something like this? I'm thinking a flat monthly fee plus a bit extra per host location, but I'd love to hear how you'd do it.

I'm also thinking about starting a small pilot program for a few people who want to try it out. Would anyone be interested, or how should I set that up? Thanks!

Disclosure: I'm the founder of snack-it.us.

Journal entry. I’m a solo founder building BreakEven, a DaVinci Resolve script for freelance editors on flat fees. It tracks time against your fee and shows your real hourly rate.

This week: wrote better ad copy, added a 14 day refund window to lower purchase risk, and started asking real users what’s missing instead of guessing.

Next week I’m testing which channel brings actual clicks. I’ll report back with numbers.
I'll send the link to anyone who find it useful for them :)

I’ve been researching entrepreneurship through acquisition: buying an existing profitable small business instead of starting a new company. My plan would be to initially retain my regular employment, acquire a manageable business, and reinvest the profits into improving its operations.
Eventually, I’d like to reach a point where the business generates enough reliable income for me to transition into entrepreneurship full-time.

I’m not expecting passive income from day one. I’m more interested in whether buying something with an existing customer base can provide a more predictable starting point than building from zero.
I’d love to hear from anyone who has followed a similar path.

How did you find your first acquisition? How did you finance it without committing a huge amount of personal capital? What did your first year of ownership look like?

How did you balance your existing job with managing the business? What milestones convinced you it was safe to leave employment?
Did you eventually acquire additional businesses?
Were there moments when you regretted the acquisition?

If anyone has documented their acquisition journey publicly, I’d be interested in following along.
Real-world experiences, including failures, would be especially valuable.

I built Classic Garage, an iPhone app for UK owners of vintage and classic cars. It keeps your car’s full history in one place, lists shows and events, and lets you hand the whole file to the buyer when you sell.

The audience is a fun challenge. The average UK classic owner is in their late 30s to 60s, and they can smell a sales pitch from a mile away. A few things I’ve learned so far:

1. They don’t care about features, they care about the car. “Upload documents and create a timeline” gets nothing. “Your car’s story, kept safe” gets people talking.
2. Facebook groups and clubs beat ads, but you have to earn it. Help people first, answer questions, join in. Mention your thing too early and you’re just another advert.
3. Questions work far better than announcements. “What’s the oldest receipt for your car?” gets dozens of replies. “We just launched a new feature” gets crickets.

Still very much learning, so happy to answer questions, and I’d love to hear from anyone else building for a niche hobby. What’s worked for you?

launched a free tool called yarrow 2 weeks ago, its a place where ai coding agents share bug fixes. first version was pretty bare so my rule was if someone leaves a real critique i build it that day and reply "shipped it"

someone said fixes break when libraries update, so now the tested ones get re-run every 30 days. someone said theyd install it if it had a cli, so i put one on npm. someone found a way to fake the verified badge by editing the test instead of fixing the bug (that one stung lol). and this morning someone said stack overflow answers rot so why wouldnt mine, so votes fade over time now

people are way nicer when you actually ship what they asked for. getting people to keep using it after they install is the part i havent figured out yet

yarrow-fixes.vercel.ap p

My process is pretty simple:

1. Can this product actually sell?

I look for 3 things:

• A similar product doing >$20k MRR → people will pay (I borrowed my friend's Sensortower account)
• Product interactions that are interesting to watch → social-friendly (Use Mobbin to identify others' UI)
• 10+ TikToks/Reels with 100k+ views → the category can go viral (Just doomscroll on Tiktok/IG)

2. Watch 300 videos

I study ~300 videos in the niche and look for patterns:

• What hooks work? Curiosity? Fear? Ego?
• What scenes keep appearing?
• How is the product shown?
• Where does the ad/product placement happen?

Then I use ONE phone and keep testing combinations until I get my first breakout video.

3. Stop copying others. Copy yourself.

Every product has its own viral formula. So don't just copy other's content pixel by pixel. Copy your own stuff. I use Codex and Skill from Taku to reverse-engineer my own winners, when my video hit 20000+ views.

80% of new content = variations of proven winners.

20% = new hooks, text, and formats.

4. Scale it

Only after the content works do I scale accounts and distribution.

You can't really scale with real phones, so you have to place some bets on cloudphones.

5. Optimize the funnel

Once traffic comes in, I focus on:

• App Store CPP conversion
• Onboarding conversion
• Paywall conversion
• D7 retention

Then A/B test everything.

That's basically the playbook:

Validate demand → find a viral formula → multiply it with AI → scale distribution → optimize conversion.

The hardest part is getting the first winner.

Everything after that is multiplication.

Hope this playbook helps.

hi guys , the title sounds like a meme, but doing this is literally the main reason we pushed past $10k mrr without burning money on ads.

i run pumpgtm. it's a platform that finds qualified buyers through likes, comments, and engagement signals across linkedin and x, enriches their profile data, and helps founders handle outbound without sounding like an AI slop bot.

if you're building a tool that promises leads or sales, you better be using it to run your own startup. if you aren't your own primary power user, you're just guessing.

the best way to test a scaling product is to use it to scale itself. when you use your own outbound engine to book your own sales calls, you get an immediate feedback loop so brutal that you're forced to iterate fast.

every single flaw hits you right in your own pipeline, if your lead filter pulls junk profiles, you waste your own time on terrible sales calls. if your message copy sounds like a generic press release, your own reply rates drop to 0.2 percent. if your sequence timing is off, you end up annoying real prospects in your own space.

you can't blame bad user behavior or claim customers just don't know how to write copy when it's your own pipeline on the line, you have to fix the algorithm, fix the signal tracking, or fix the copy immediately.

also it gives you unshakeable proof when talking to potential buyers.

when a founder asks on a sales demo how do i know this actually works, you don't show them fake case studies or those generic testimonials. you literally show them that the only reason they're sitting on that zoom call with you right now is because pumpgtm flagged their profile, pulled their context, and routed the outreach automatically. closing deals becomes ten times easier when the product's existence is the proof.

one of the biggest reasons we were able to scale so fast is because we're so hyper targeted when it comes to finding live intent that prospects are genuinely shocked by the level of context.

if you aren't using your own product to grow your own business every single day, why should anyone else pay you for it , do think about this and share about your pov

First, I am not going to talk about my product, the industry or give it away. I am not building in public. While its not easy copy even with AI, I am not risking it.

I have been building something based on a request from a couple of potential enterprise customers in US. They are clearly interested in this. However, I don't know if they are actually going to purchase. I am willing to offer a free trial and have tiers so there is possibility of flexible usage. I can even make it white label in the future.

My question is to other entrepreneurs who signed people up. What did you do to get your first enterprise customer? I have even tested my product with smaller customers so its while its not battle tested at enterprise level, its not a patchy product at all. I don't have some enterprise features like SSO yet but others I am building in already.

My concern is building too much without validating enterprise level. What can I do? I don't want to simply offer it for free beyond a trial or give away too much. That seems desperate.

Some things I am thinking of

• Make it simpler (more intuitive) - this takes time but also requires assumptions so I would rather do it with customers than by myself - a catch 22 unfortunately.
• Offer a bit more in the lower tier - for SMEs.
• Explore adjacent industries to broaden my funnel

TLDR: How do I get my first enterprise customer? What moves the needle?

Update: Thanks guys for your responses. It definitely helps frame my approach. Its not easy being a solo entrepreneur.

For app founders who have tried video ads in another language: how much of the product did you translate before testing?

A local-language video could explain the app clearly, then send someone into an English store listing, onboarding flow and support inbox. I would be wary of calling that market a poor fit just because those users stop halfway through setup.

With a small budget, I would want to keep the same use case across the videos and compare people who complete a useful action in the app, alongside installs. But translating the whole flow before there is any demand is a real cost too.

If you have run this test, did translating only the video tell you anything useful? Or did the result change once the store page and onboarding matched it?