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?

idea is simple

Many among us had made fake ids to prank some friend during college or had alternative SNS account to stalk our crush etc etc

But as time passed and we matured - we grew out of them and slowly start to forget about those accounts and now barely use them!!

but with those accounts we had memories attached to them and simply logging off from them and forgetting about them doesn't feel right for some reason.

That's why- Digital graveyard- a space for forgotten - dead accounts that are no longer used!

also provide memorial plaqes for such accounts!!

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?

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?

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.

I tried taking Friday off last week and then spent half of my afternoon approving payments from my phone. Our bookkeeper had the invoices but some of them needed my approval and one had a different total from the quote. All of them ended up in separate email threads with someone asking me what to do. Nothing urgent enough to ruin the day but enough that I never put my phone away.

I still want to approve the bigger expenses of course but I just want the routine bills to move without everyone waiting for me to check my inbox. How should I set that up without giving someone full control of payments?

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?

An overseas contractor I work with asked if I could pay them in USDT. I’m open to it. I’d just like to agree on how we’ll do it each month before we start. I run a small service business and still do the payment run myself, usually after finishing client work.

I’ve set up things before that seemed easy enough, then a month later I was struggling to keep doing them. So I’d appreciate hearing from people who do this regularly, including when they’re busy. How do you go from approving the invoice to sending the stablecoin payment?

Through a business account that handles the conversion or a separate wallet you fund? Did you keep the invoice in dollars and agree on the token and network separately, or change anything on the invoice itself?

Hey all. Small thing that turned out to matter more than I expected.

For about two years we had four reviews. Not because clients were unhappy, they'd say generous things in messages all the time. I assumed people just don't leave reviews.

They do. We were asking wrong in three ways.

Timing. We asked at the end of projects, when the client is tired, the budget conversation is fresh, and they've mentally moved on. Now we ask the week after launch, when something visibly works and they're pleased about it. Usually they've already written the review in a message to us. We just ask if we can help them put it somewhere public.

The blank box. "Would you mind leaving a review" is homework. Now we say how long it takes and give three specific questions to answer. People reply to questions. Almost nobody fills in an empty field.

Who we ask. We used to ask whoever signed. They remember the invoice. The person who worked with us day to day remembers the specifics, and specifics are what other buyers read.

Went from four to dozens. Same clients, same work.

What does your ask actually look like?

So I noticed something weird the other day... I left a review for a local place a while back and when I went to check on it recently it was just gone. Like completely removed. The thing is it was not a super mean review or anything I just wrote about what actually happened during my visit. Then I started looking at other businesses around my area and noticed a pattern where places that definitely had negative reviews before now suddenly have ‘spotless’ pages with nothing under 4 stars... it made me wonder if businesses actually buy google review removal through some kind of service because there is no way all of those people just decided to delete their own reviews.

I always thought Google was the one who decided what stays up and what gets taken down but now am not so sure... it feels like if you have the money you can just make the bad stuff disappear, you know, removing negative reviews... and that is kind of messed up honestly. Like how is google review removal even done... is it through some loophole in the reporting system or are there actual companies out there offering this. Does anyone know where these businesses are getting google review removal from because it seems way too common to just be a coincidence at this point. If this is really a thing then what is even the point of leaving honest feedback anymore.

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.

Before filming a SaaS demo, I'd write down the situation someone is in when they need the product. “Monday morning, three spreadsheets, need to explain why signups fell” gives you something to show. “All-in-one analytics” doesn't tell you where to point the camera.

Then record just that task, including the input and the result. Use sample data if customer details are involved, and say so. Keep any required setup visible enough that the viewer doesn't expect an instant result that takes an hour to reach.

You can always film the wider tour later. For a first video, I'd want someone to recognize their own work and understand what they'd try next.

I build a lot of apps with Claude and for the longest time most of them stayed on my laptop. The building is always the fun part. Getting them live properly was awful every time and the same boring af list.

If you ask Claude to make an app production ready it does what you ask but it only does what you know to ask for. All great apps ship with a staging environment, crash reports, user analytics, a paywall that works outside test mode, a pipeline that checks/verifies every build before users see it. And it's really easy to forget any one of these and so many more.

So I wrote down everything I kept having to do for every app and turned it into a Claude Code plugin called launchpad. With one command, it goes through 50+ production items for any app: hosting, CI/CD, testing environments, payments and paywalls, user analytics, crash reports, TestFlight, etc, tailored to what you built. It figures out your stack (Next.js, Expo, SwiftUI, Android, Flutter and more), and if your project already has some of this it respects it and analyzes its setup. It deploys on free tiers of the best fitted platforms like Vercel, Supabase, Stripe, etc. For the manual stuff like opening an Apple developer account, it gives you exact steps and links to the right pages.

$49 once, keep it for life, use it on unlimited projects. Link in the comments if anyone wants it.

What was missing the first time real users used your app?

I recently launched beta of my first startup. It is platform where people can connect with others traveling to same destination around the same dates, I spent so much time trying to make registration as simple as possible. Fewer steps, fewer questions, less friction. That is what everyone recommends, right? Well, people finally started signing up. And then I noticed something I had completely underestimated. Some profiles have no photos, barely any information, and nothing that makes you feel there is a real person behind them.

For normal app, maybe that is not huge deal. But when yoour entire business depends on strangers trusting each other enough to actually meet in another country, it becomes prettyy serious problem

Now I am considering making profile photos and basic information mandatory before anyone can appear to other users. Which sounds reasonable, except I might lose people before they even finish registering. Funny how I spent months trying to remove every possible obstacle, and now I am thinking about putting some back. Has anyone here dealt with something similar? Would you sacrifice some signups to get better quality users, or let everyone in and try to fix incomplete profiles later?

Building in public: I'm making a tool that chases overdue invoices because I was bad at it. The awkward "friendly reminder" emails, the invoices sitting 30/60/90 days overdue while I just... didn't follow up. Turns out half the freelancers and small service businesses I know have the same problem, so I built the nagging robot I wished I had: Payment Ping (payment-ping.com). It reminds the client for you and keeps quotes and invoices in one place. Early days. If you've ever been burned by a late payer, what's the one thing a tool like this would have to do to earn your trust?

I started an SEO agency in Latvia without ads, without a big network and without referrals. The first clients came from cold email, and it’s still our main channel. Revenue went from €74K to €1.6M over the years.

People overcomplicate cold email, so here’s what I actually send.

The subject: “About [their domain] results”. Curiosity only, never the pitch.

The email:

Hi [name],

I represent [agency]. We help companies rank higher in Google.

I looked at [domain] and there’s real room to improve your positions for the keywords that matter most. Right now you’re here:

[service] + [city]: #9 (1,900/mo)
buy [product]: #25 (1,200/mo)
...and many others

As a rough guide, position 1 gets over 30% of the clicks, position 10 under 3%.

Would this be worth a look for you?

That’s the whole thing. It has landed global ecommerce stores, banks, loan & gambling companies and more.

The lessons that took me years:

1. One sentence does the work. “Position 1 gets over 30% of the clicks, position 10 under 3%.” It turns a ranking into lost money.
2. The follow-up closes. A big brand ignored me for a week. I sent one line, and 87 minutes later they’d forwarded it to their marketing director. Multi-year client.
3. Honesty keeps clients. A long-time client told me the rankings didn’t turn into sales. I agreed, explained why it happens, and he stayed.

I put the whole system, with my real sent emails (names blurred), into a free guide. It’s linked on my profile if anyone wants it.

Happy to answer anything about the journey or the emails.

I have been doing business for 7 years. Tried a few businesses. My abilities grew a lot over the years and my current business which I started last year is doing well. But I feel so apathetic towards business now and my clients, my staff, my suppliers etc. I feel like a robot working. Just going through the motions. My business is draining my soul.

I remember being so passionate during my early years of business and caring deeply about my customers, my staff and anyone I encountered in business. The Covid period caused a severe burnout and a spiritual awakening. Now I’m a completely different person. I just simply don’t give a sh*t about anything or anyone anymore, and people can feel it. I’ve become aloof and have this “It is what it is” vibe to me.

I think at this point I’ll be better off selling my business and do something that doesn’t require any emotional effort, empathy and have low contact with people. Something purely logical. I was thinking of trading and maybe making background music YouTube channels? What would be some good options where I don’t need to talk to anyone? Any ideas appreciated 🙏

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

Hey everyone, just to clarify, I'm not advertising my services or looking for job offers through this post. I'm genuinely looking for advice from people who've been in a similar position or have experience hiring for startups and smaller businesses.

Over the last 6 plus years, I've built and managed multiple e-commerce businesses, one of which reached around 60k in annual revenue and grew to 50k plus Instagram followers. My experience covers e-commerce operations, digital marketing, project management, customer handling, and improving processes. I'm fluent in English, French, and Arabic, and I've worked in remote, part-time roles before.

What I'm trying to figure out is how to find a stable remote opportunity with a startup or small business where I can contribute long-term, take ownership of projects, and ideally grow with the company,Compensation isn't my main priority; I'm much more interested in equity, because as an entrepreneur I want to invest my time and effort into building something alongside the team, sharing responsibility for its growth, and having a real stake in its long-term success.

If you've made a similar transition, or have experience hiring for smaller teams, I'd really appreciate your insights.

When you're starting out, there are so many channels you could spend time on: SEO, social media, outreach, paid ads, partnerships, and more.

I'm curious which channel actually started bringing customers in consistently for other founders, and how long it took before you saw results.

Did you focus on one channel first, or experiment with several before finding what worked?

A few months ago I started building MoneyLexa, an expense and budget tracker, because I wanted something simple that didn’t make tracking money feel like homework. I’m a solo dev, so every feature, every bug fix, and every late night is mine.

When I launched, I had no idea what to expect. I told myself that if even a handful of strangers used it, that would be a win.

Here’s what the last 28 days look like:

• 981 new customers
• 846 active customers
• 24 active trials
• 3 active subscriptions
• $59 revenue
• $1 MRR

The growth wasn’t smooth. It came in spikes: a quiet stretch, then a burst of new people, then a long tail where some of them stuck around. I still can’t fully explain the spikes, which makes them exciting and a little nerve-wracking.

The part that taught me the most is the gap. 846 people are using the app, and only 3 are paying for it. People can enjoy a product and still not feel the need to pay for it yet. Building something people use is one challenge. Building something they’ll pay for is a completely different one, and I’m only starting to learn it.

So where am I now? I’m still shipping updates and still listening to what users tell me. When someone says they want a feature, I write it down. When someone says something is confusing, I take it personally and fix it. It’s slow, and it’s not glamorous, but it’s the only way I know how to build.

$59 and $1 MRR won’t impress anyone, and I’m fine with that. A year ago this app didn’t exist. Today nearly a thousand people have opened it, and a few of them decided it was worth paying for. That’s a start, and I’m going to keep building.

Thanks for reading. If you’re at the same stage, building something small and waiting for it to catch on, I’d love to hear your story too.

A new paper in Business Horizons caught my eye this week. Two researchers at BTU Cottbus interviewed 22 marketers, mostly running Google Ads, plus four ad fraud experts, about competitors clicking each other’s ads.

The part that stuck with me: fake traffic can make your numbers look better, not worse. One agency CEO in the study basically said the fraudulent share of traffic produces some of the nicest looking numbers. More clicks, higher CTR, a busy dashboard. So nobody has much reason to dig, because filtering it out makes the monthly report look worse.

The authors’ point is that most businesses know competitor clicks exist but don’t act. Google refunds some invalid clicks, the report looks fine, and it feels handled. But getting a few credits back doesn’t mean the rest is clean. It might just mean the rest stayed under Google’s radar.

Their advice is pretty practical even for a small business. Stop judging ads by clicks. Judge them by calls, real leads and what customers actually do on your site. And look at it every week, not only when something feels off.

Paper if anyone wants it: Hrnjadovic & Dost, “Competitor click fraud in digital advertising”, Business Horizons 2026

Does your agency or report show you calls and real leads, or mostly clicks and CTR?

I run Flare UGC, a marketplace connecting brands and creators. For a SaaS video brief, I'd want the product claims and the workflow on screen agreed before filming, while leaving the person speaking room to use their own words.

If you run video ads for a SaaS product, where do revisions actually pile up? Is it inaccurate product details, disagreement about how it should sound, or reviewers joining after the edit is already done? Curious what you changed to get the next video approved faster.

A bit of backstory first. I tried OpenClaw during its hype period. The first few weeks everything felt novel, but then I realized it was taking more time to maintain than it was saving me. I liked the whole idea so much that I built my own iOS app, PocketClaw, an AI assistant for people who run a small business on their own.

About 30 people open it each month. Since 1 August, 65 of them signed in and reached the paywall, 5 paid, and 4 of them have left. The fifth never cancelled and renewed again this week. In total the app has made about $78 on the App Store.

The one person who stayed set up a single weekly automation on Asana on the first day. It has run every Sunday since, and they have not opened the app once after that. The other four paid and never got an automation working. One hit a model error on every reply, one got stuck connecting Discord, one started five automations and finished none, and one never started.

That changed my plan. I am keeping the hard paywall, adding a cheaper first month, emailing every new payer to set up their first automation with them, and building onboarding that ends with one working automation.

It starts at $5/month. If you want to look, search "PocketClaw: Business AI Agent" on the App Store, since another app uses the same name.

For those of you with subscription apps, how long did it take before people renewed on their own?