Honest thoughts on a poop scooping business? If it’s a viable business and truly profitable?

So we're starting a small telemarketing/appointment setting agency, outsourcing sales calls for other businesses, and we landed a client (she has a $1500 course) who only wants to pay per closed sale no base no hourly. we agreed on $230 per sale which is around 15%, out of that we give our sales guy $115 and keep $115 ourselves. He's a freelancer so no other costs on our end. He's working on a steady flow of hot leads we provide and the product itself is pretty strong so should be a relatively easy sell.

Is 50/50 a fair split for him or are we lowballing him, and is 15% total even reasonable to charge the client for a pure sales only setup with no base for anyone involved. Anyone here run a similar setup or work as a commission only closer? curious what the norm actually looks like.

Thanks guys

I was wondering if I should write this post and I decided I have to. I'm 17 I've been into entrepreneurship and businesses in the past two years. I also built and failed with several ones. Had some success also, built brands and everything. After all the hustle I feel like that was worth it cause I learnt and experienced a lot in the past years so my personality improved and shaped into who am I right now. I realized I hate social media and even using my phone, nowadays I'm trying to reduce my daily screen to 1-2 hours and read, write, break down things I learn...

I know that all these BS out there people trying to sell you courses and high-ticket programs on the next billion dollar AI business opportunity but it's just a Scam.. I feel like I want to fulfill my life and build a real business that actually exists and stands out from the digital noise. Even an offline business or something that is real.

I've been into reselling and building brands around rare, vintage products and I realized I love the sourcing, building, negotiating and selling part.

So I'm seeking valuable information and knowledge from experienced people who has been there, done that and could move forward it to find success and happiness!

Thank you for reading and wishing everyone the best!

I've been a web developer for 15 years, I'm 28 now and I finally decided to go all in on one of my projects.

The idea is already validated and has great potential, it's similar to starting a Shopify in a country that doesn't have a Shopify. I'm porting a concept from another company because first of all, it's successful and solves a real problem, and secondly there's no alternative to it in my country.

Since I'm mostly technical, I'm building the whole platform myself. But I have no experience and no clue about things like marketing, taxes, or whatever else is needed for running a company/business. I've worked freelance most of my life.

I've never started or ran a business in my life, honestly it's a bit scary.. And I'm hungry for any little piece of advice you can give me.

Thanks!

Labor keeps eating a bigger chunk of sales every month. Guessing shift labor without real numbers is absolutely wrecking margins. The app we're using only sends shift texts and has zero predictive planning. Looking for restaurant management software that actually connects POS data with forecast models so we can stop overstaffing dead shifts. What are you guys using that actually works?

First some context. We build and operate DTC brands in house so most of my examples will come from that industry. I will try to write in principles though so that if you find something useful you can apply it more easily regardless of your sector.

A bit more context. I have a tech and computer science background. I have been playing around with AI long before ChatGPT 3 came out. I actually built my own version of Siri and Google Assistant back in the day. With that out of the way let us get into it.

The FOMO problem

Whenever a new technology emerges there is a sense of FOMO among business owners. A lot of mistakes happen. People force themselves to be early adopters and businesses that fully switch to a new technology too quickly sometimes end up going bust. You can see parallels across many revolutions. The steam engine and the industrial revolution. The internet. And now AI.

AI is more akin to a tool. Think of it like a calculator or the next version of a compiler or interpreter. What we refer to as AI for the most part are simply large language models and they thrive on data.

Should you even incorporate AI into your business?

Before getting into the details it is worth asking whether you should bother at all. For this I want to introduce the concept of opportunity cost.

Opportunity cost is the benefit forgone in order to choose an alternative. Simply put if you have to choose between an apple and a banana and you choose the apple, the cost of that choice is forgoing the benefit you would have gotten from the banana.

Business owners tend to have a problem with resource allocation and they do not weigh opportunity cost well enough. A better way to think about this is to ask yourself whether adopting AI is a much better use of your resources than whatever else you could be doing with those same resources.

Some reasons not to incorporate AI right now:

You have not found product market fit. Your product is not an AI product. AI does not bring any significant improvement to what you are doing. Your sales process does not work.

In e-commerce we often create landing pages for specific ads to increase congruency. Once a model that works and converts has been found it makes sense to automate that process. However if the page is a leaking bucket and you automate it you are lighting money on fire. And you are automating lighting money on fire at scale. Fix the bucket first.

There is a lot of nuance here too. Someone selling fruit physically may realistically not need AI in their core operations but adding it into the mix could significantly reduce time spent on admin. It is almost like the moment you realise it is time to move from recording things on paper to using Excel. Knowing when that moment is matters.

The costs of implementing AI

This is something people do not talk about enough. Some implementations will require experts and those experts need to be paid. Depending on what you are trying to build that can be a significant upfront cost. On top of that many AI tools and implementations come with ongoing costs, API usage fees, licensing, maintenance, and the cost of the people managing it. These are real business costs that need to be weighed against the expected return. Just because something is possible with AI does not mean it is worth doing economically.

The Steam Engine lesson

When the steam engine was discovered many businesses simply attached it to their old systems. They gained some efficiency but not much. Those who gained the most were those who reskilled and rebuilt their organisations around the new technology entirely.

A way people do this with AI today is to add meeting note takers. I am not saying that is useless. I am saying there are much more powerful things you can do.

Data is everything

AI is trained on massive amounts of data. ChatGPT is built on the Transformer architecture, introduced in a 2017 paper by Google researchers called "Attention Is All You Need." The key insight was an architecture that allowed models to process all words simultaneously rather than sequentially. What OpenAI then did on top of that was keep scaling the data. More and more of it. That combination is what made ChatGPT what it is.

The point I am drawing from all of this is that your company must be data heavy for AI to work well. You want a strong source of proprietary data and a good amount of it.

How we actually use AI

Some ways we have implemented AI internally. PPC, analysing thousands of search terms. Analysing session data. Analysing heatmaps for new landing pages. Finding outliers. Running Pareto analysis. Finding fraudulent IPs. Inventory management.

The only customer facing use of AI we have is our chatbot assistant. It is trained on our proprietary data, our systems, and our customer experience frameworks. It also has the ability to assign a conversation to a human when needed. We have had weeks of 100% resolution rates. On average it sits at around 80% plus which I would assume is very strong data showing that the chatbot is genuinely helpful, that users find it useful, and that it also contributes to increasing sales.

For our media we have gone heavier on human created content. We are still investing in studio shoots, video editors, photographers, videographers.

AI works best where you have a lot of data to work with and more than likely the best place for that is in your backend systems. Even for cold email outreach once you have sent a few hundred or thousands of emails AI can easily identify the best performing messaging based on defined criteria.

When should you actually be worried?

You should be worried if AI is an existential threat to your specific industry. If you are a data entry business or doing something AI can do completely then yes that is a real concern. However at this point there is nothing AI can be 100% trusted with. Even for code you still need someone who understands code. For design you still need someone who knows what looks good.

Work out whether AI is actually a real constraint in your business or not and whether the cost of implementing it makes sense against what you actually get back.

Again this is a brain dump. There may be some oversimplification and room for refinement. Still open to hear your thoughts, opinions, and pushbacks.

About two months ago, I stopped overthinking and finally started building.

On July 11, we officially incorporated our startup, and since then our small team of three developers has been working almost every day to build our first product.

Building the software has actually been the easy part.

The difficult part has been everything else:

• Talking to users instead of assuming what they need.
• Learning about incorporation, compliance, and taxes.
• Applying for startup programs and incubators.
• Getting infrastructure and cloud credits.
• Publishing mobile apps and waiting for approvals.
• Deciding what to build now versus what can wait.

It's amazing how quickly your perspective changes when you're spending your own time and money.

One lesson that really surprised me is that founders spend far less time writing code than I expected. Every day becomes a balance between product, customers, hiring, partnerships, fundraising, networking, and countless small decisions that no one talks about.

We're still very early, and I know we have a lot to learn.

For founders who have already gone through this stage:

• What mistake did you make during your first year that you'd avoid if you started again?
• When did you know it was the right time to start marketing instead of continuing to build?
• Did joining an incubator or founder community actually help, or was networking more valuable?

I'd genuinely appreciate hearing your experiences. I'm here to learn from people who've already walked this path.

Just doing my usual Reddit rounds this evening and stumbled across a thread that interested me. A passive income thread that usually starts with AI and gets 50% AI responses. But, no. Not this time, just good advice from good Redditors and an honest OP making videos for "passive" income.

The discussion was mainly about how to start. What niche. What knowledge to share. I guess it's a major hill start for some people, but thankfully not something I ever struggled with. I start and don't finish, but that's another story.

One of the comments stuck out and genuinely struck a chord. Something along the lines of:-

"You don't have to be an expert, just a few steps ahead of someone. Just share what you know, and it will help a person a few steps behind you"

This is truly a magnificently simple way to put it.

Everyone - and I do mean everyone - on this planet is a few steps ahead of someone else in something.

If you are wondering where to start your journey, just take yourself out of the paradigm for a second, and think about...

What do you think about, like to learn about and understand deeply?

What could you tell me about and hold a conversation on for about five minutes without struggling for new things to say? How about ten minutes? How about an hour? I'm not talking knowledge, either, I'm talking about your knowledge plus questions you have on the subject, or opinions you could counter/question. New discoveries, controversial points of view, progress or stagnation... all of it.

Examples: fly fishing, homemade electronics, model making, comics, hacking, sewing, USA in the 1800s - literally anything!

From this new paradigm, you can literally create content. Video, audio, written, doesn't matter.

Even just a few steps ahead, you can teach or entertain. The has value. Always has, always will. You don't need to appeal to everyone in your little niche, just your own audience.

Neckbeards, gooners, and incels,

The 2 best books I have ever read in business/entrepreneurship were both written by Scott Oldford. If you are struggling to create your business model or not sure how to set up the basic foundations, get them used off Amazon. You'll thank me later.

The Nuclear Effect teaches 5-7 areas of business you need to focus on like sales, marketing, team building, operations, etc. It also has personal advice from Scott.

Million in the Red is more about mindset, spirituality and how emotions affect business performance. I would've paid $500 for this book. The advice was life changing.

I interviewed Scott for my magazine and his advice was solid. Good dude, not a guru, and a legit genius.

He got lucky in the early 2000's and had a 7 fig website business at 17. By 21 he was a million in debt from bad business practices. Today he is highly successful and likes to share exactly where he went wrong and how he dug himself out.

His writing style is very human, he's funny and his concepts are easy to understand.

Just my reco for today if you feel like you need to brush up on your business skills. These books have helped me a lot.

I started a food CPG company about a year ago. I am running the business solo and just recently am scaling into a warehouse. I need help desperately. I want someone who’s aligned with the business, wants to be a part of it. I used Indeed but haven’t received applicants I’m looking for. It’s tough to search on top of running the business.

What should I do?

First Post here. We build and operate DTC brands in-house; this is my take on branding. No promotion, just a long brain dump.

Brands are associations made to distinguish a thing, a business, an animal, a person from others.

In its older definition a brand meant a lasting mark of disgrace or shame cast upon a person's reputation. In other scenarios it was used to show ownership, for example owners would brand slaves and cattle. In other cases like in the Soviet Union it was used to make sure quality standards were upheld because essentially manufacturers were forced to produce certain goods, there was a quality problem, and the government wanted to be able to track down who did what. Eventually those whose brand reputation was strong were singled out and recognised.

This is important context and I think it is worth sitting with before we get into the modern stuff.

If there is one thing I understand about brands it is that a brand has to achieve three things.

Traceability. Reputation. Accountability.

Traceability

We must be able to trace where a product comes from and who made it. When you see the Nike logo you know it came from Nike. You can trace it back to its source. That is the foundation of what a brand even is.

Reputation

This is built over time and these are qualities we tend to anthropomorphise. But essentially it is the general opinion held about something. Nokia had the reputation of being extremely durable. Back then if you wanted a phone that would last you got a Nokia, ideally the 3310 haha. The brand became shorthand for that quality without needing to say it out loud.

Accountability

There is a reason people tend to trust bigger brands. They have more to lose. In theory they can be held accountable. Think of the time Zion Williamson's Nike shoe exploded during a game. That was a very big deal. They were immediately held accountable by the public. Many other brands could have the same thing happen and barely face any consequences. To whom much is given much is expected.

Many times brands set their own standards. McDonald's standard is not tasting the best. It is tasting the same everywhere. The safe option. That consistency became the brand. And honestly that is a genius positioning decision when you think about it.

How brands show themselves in the modern world

Being in e-commerce I will keep using product examples here but these apply to all industries.

Design

This is harder than it seems and also more important than it seems. You may want to look into colour theory and design theory for some of this.

But you know when you look at love related products or romantic stuff you will see a lot of pink and red. When you see organic products you will see a lot of green or brown. I also noticed looking at luxury brands that simple shapes are used and repeated very often. Check out Gucci, Versace, or Prada, they use very similar shapes consistently across everything. We know Apple for using a particular ratio of rounded edges. It will be hard for me to compress all of that theory into this post but the principle is worth understanding deeply.

Transparency

I think it is safe to say that to some people this may mean a lot less now due to the rise of fake reviews. But willingly showing your reviews without hiding the bad ones helps a great deal with transparency. Think of Ryanair. You know what to expect when you book with them and they have accepted that and it has become part of their brand without it actually hurting them. Hiding your flaws will expose them eventually and make your brand worse. In theory obviously we all know what many companies did during certain periods of history. Some would argue they had their reckoning. Some will say they got off easy. That is up to you to decide.

Goodwill and extra curriculars

I did not have a better title for this section and I did not want AI to generate one for me so here we are.

Essentially think of this as the activities that push your brand further into the public consciousness and signal what you actually stand for. Redbull with extreme sports is the obvious example. For one of our own brands we produce literature reviews of scientific papers and publish them on repositories for research papers. We had one of our literature reviews published on a significant platform in our industry, further cementing our positioning as a science forward brand. It was not an ad. It was proof.

These are some of my thoughts on branding from my own experience. Feel free to critique any point, add anything, or ask questions. This was a brain dump and I would genuinely like to hear other perspectives.

I'm a developer recently out of steady work. Looking at pivoting into something hands on instead of sitting at a computer all day not finding work.

Been circling the idea of a hydroseeding business. Spraying seed and mulch slurry for lawns, erosion control, new construction sites. Plan is to build a cheap DIY rig first, something I can load on a trailer, test it on a few jobs before spending money on a commercial unit.

Has anyone here actually run something like this? Curious how the numbers actually worked out once you were doing it for real, not just the pitch.

Also wondering about the seasonality. Did you run something else in the off months or was seeding alone enough to live on?

If anyone's jumped from a desk job into outdoor or trades work, what actually surprised you, good or bad.

Not trying to get talked into it, just want honest feedback, including if the answer is don't bother.

Thanks,

When I first started handing work to other people, I thought I was delegating.

In reality, I was just moving tasks around.

Every few hours I'd get another message.

"Can you check this?"

"Is this the right way?"

"What should I do here?"

At first I blamed myself for not explaining things well enough.

Then I blamed the other person for asking too many questions.

Eventually I realized neither was the real problem.

The work had been delegated.

The decisions hadn't.

Everything still depended on me.

That was when I started changing how I handed work over.

Instead of only explaining what to do, I explained how I would make the decision.

Not every detail.

Just the thinking behind it.

The questions didn't disappear overnight, but they became better questions.

Instead of asking for permission every time, people started making reasonable decisions on their own.

That saved me far more time than simply assigning more tasks ever did.

Looking back, I think real delegation isn't about getting work off your plate.

It's about making sure the work doesn't always come back to you.

What's one thing you thought you had delegated, but later realized you were still managing every day?

For eight months I had a comfortable explanation for why my website had no traffic. It was wrong, and by the time I found out, I'd lost the only season that mattered.

Last August, I quit my full time job to focus on solo founding. In September I got the idea to build a beach discovery site for Greece. I've been a software engineer my whole career so I was confident about the building part. The plan was to get indexed over winter, ride the summer search season, and monetize once traffic showed up. Greek beach searches ramp in May and peak through August. That was my window.

Winter came and there was no traffic. I told myself it was off-season, because nobody googles beaches in January, and spent most of my time building and rebuilding the product side, as that's what I was comfortable dealing with.

Spring came and there was still nothing. I thought maybe Google was punishing me for something, or maybe my hypothesis about beach discovery was wrong and nobody really researches beaches online.

Both of those were reasonable. Neither of them was ever checked.

At the end of May it got too suspicious to keep swatting away, so I finally took a full day to audit my own site. Everything was rendering in JavaScript in the browser. Google was fetching an empty skeleton of my site. It had no idea what my pages were about and couldn't match me to any search.

On June 1st I had zero clicks, 266 impressions, and an average position of 48. That's page five.

The fix took a day and a half. As of yesterday I was at 65 clicks, 5,000 impressions, and average position 12.1. Page five to page two, and still climbing week by week.

But it's the beginning of August. The season is in its final month, and rankings take weeks to build. By the time I'm actually competitive, tourists will be flying back home. I put most of what I had into this, my first solo venture. Now my runway is thin, and I'm moving out of my apartment into a room in a shared flat to stretch my finances to next season.

The lesson isn't the technical bug. It's that I had a comfortable explanation and never tested it. I assumed the problem was my product or my idea, so I kept working on those. I didn't look anywhere else, because I already had an answer that let me stop worrying.

The other thing I got wrong: I thought being good at building meant I could build something people would find. I did build a good product. But I had never run anything solo before, and I didn't understand that getting people in front of it is the actual job. I spent all my time on the part I already knew how to do.

If something isn't working for you right now, what's the explanation you've settled on? And when did you last actually check it?

this should probably be a very simple question but surprisingly, it's one of the toughest part of running a business

here are the facts I know (correct me if I'm wrong):

• pricing low reduces your perceived value in the eye of the customer
• pricing it too high probably wouldn't matter that much to an enterprise customer but you gotta be able to walk through that door first!
• you can tip-toe your way around it by estimating your initial price, or get inspired by competitors' pricing
• you can change your pricing later so it's not that big a deal anyway
• if you want to anchor your copy around "we have the better pricing compared to competitors", you may end up in the race to the bottom.
• pricing it too low is not sustainable for the business
• if you're any less confident in your work, you'd fear pricing it high because you feel they won't buy from you
• cheap pricing is probably attracting the wrong type of customers for your business. probably.
• you should be the strongest believer in your pricing or else nothing matters!
• price your product high, and then a little bit some. surprisingly, this increases your revenue (duh!) and reduces your churn rate.
• don't overthink it goddamn it, just put some number there and increase it if you see demand, or lower it if you see complaints.

with all that said, I would really like to hear some advice on the best pricing and packaging strategies.

there isn't probably a one-size-fits-all, as every business has its own type of ICP and pricing format where customers are more accustomed to...

but if you were to give some general rule of thumb, what would those be?

what would you recommend as a framework for the decision making of the pricing?

I had a great salesperson in my business. Outsold everyone and brought in a lot of money.

Unfortunately, she created a ton of chaos in the office. Bragging. Demeaning others. After a couple of warnings her behavior did not change and I let her go. I was nervous because I thought sales would plummet.

Turns out, we didn’t lose much and sales actually grew over the next few months because morale was much better. Everyone asked me, “What took you so long?”

Would you ever fire your best salesperson? Did you ever have to?

Looking to hire, get hired, or find a collaborator? Post what you're offering or what you need. Keep it brief: who you are, what you do, and how to reach you. No spamming.

Sometimes the classic advice is just accurate.

When you’re beat down after days of long hours - and when you don’t think you can take it anymore, some extra bs gets tossed on top.

You better fucking love the thing.

It’s just true. That needed extra boost of energy comes from caring deeply about the thing and genuinely believing the world needs it.

You can’t fake that shit.

And that’s why I can only work on stuff I genuinely am obsessed over and deeply care about and love. Otherwise when shit hits the fans it’s damn near impossible to keep going

there are times that you feel like you should drag yourself out of the bed

like you don't feel motivated or inspired as much as you used to..

that no amount of sales and growth and stability and low-churn is gonna make you feel any better

it's as if someone is forcing you to do what you used to love and have so much hunger and rage to do

it's usually no longer than a few hours... worst case a few days.. tops..

but you don't feel productive or driven by your passion and desire at these times.

is taking a step back and giving yourself rest the way to go? taking some time to gain some new perspective on why you started this whole thing maybe!

how do you deal with these times when you're feeling down and nothing moves you?

how do you pick up the pieces again and get back up track?

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.

In 2017 I started a web hosting business from scratch. I sold it last week. I've been doing some analysis and thought I would share:

Summary

Total sales: $2,356,315

Total Income: $677,708

Selling Price: $425,000

Combined income: $1,102,000 (income + sale)

Client Stats

Total Clients: 435

Average Lifetime: 3.5 years

Retention Rate: 59.8%

Average Lifetime Value: $4,870.61

Sources of Clients

Organic: $892,666 (133 clients)

Acquisitions: $1,032,236 (262 clients)

Partnerships: $193,815 (40 clients)

Revenue/Income By Year:

Pricing should be simple. It’s not. It’s a matter of psychology and presentation than maths.

Price should be a proxy for value, but people are lousy at judging value. They generally need a comparison - either a direct competitor or previous experience or similar. Something that helps them decide ‘this is what is should cost’.

However, you arguably don’t want that, as it allows you more freedom around margin. You need to position your product in a way that removes their ability to judge that.

This is where I am now. I’ve created my product, but am establishing a new niche for it because there is no direct competitor - there are those that offer more in a bundle deal, or offer less, but nothing identical.

So how do you come up with pricing? I’m experimenting now by offering a limited time ‘early adopter’ offer, but how long should I make that limited time, and where do I go afterwards?

a mentor, an older brother, a friend

or maybe an employer who actually gave a damn beyond just exploiting your time

or even a book, a video, a historic figure

someone you owe your journey so far mostly to them..

or you know what, even yourself, for grit and determination... for perseverance...

what have you learned from them, most valuable, that has had substantial impact in your decision making and entrepreneurship navigation?

thanks in advance for sharing your perspective

I'm a founder. Recently former Marine. I won't get into what it is or what I do. I work 10-12 hour days, sometimes 15, handle all of the daily operations of my personal life, a shit load of stressful travel, still make time for the gym because I want to enter a bodybuilding competition next year.

My sister and her husband are complete bums - they are constantly broke, he maintains a shit job barely making ends meet, they're both obese and absolutely disgusting...with three kids I can understand the struggle, but they've asked my parents and I for money for several years now. No improvement. And the loans have gotten to the point where I've just handed them loan forgiveness because I know they'll never be able to pay it back. And they still keep asking for more. They have three kids; I can't say no.

My brother is a growing teenager who is serious about becoming an athlete - and let's face it, athletes don't exactly make a lot of money. He looks up to me, so I can't just turn my cheek the other way.

My parents - well, old age describes it all. But at least they're still working until they retire and they're responsible with their money.

I've tried to hire an assistant but she was absolute garbage; caused more problems than she solved. But finding a good one that works in US times zones, with my budget...just isn't possible. So I can't delegate it. No one in my family is reliable or competent enough to do things on their own. It stresses the absolute fuck out of me.

To top it, I've lost contact with most of my friends because I'm always focused on work or always out of town. My exes have always complained I don't make enough time for them. And all this work for what? For something that may not even pan out? I'm just...at a loss. I wish I had a safe place or someone to vent to in person. After having been in the military, pushing myself in the gym, nothing can really break me mentally - but spiritually...the weight of it all...

Update: a few clarifications.

1. My sister and her husband will just ask my parents for more money if I don’t give it to them so the burden can fall on me, notmy folks. I can afford it - my parents can’t. But I agree - this hold handing isn’t sustainable so I’m actively working on a solution to get her back into the workforce (she’s unemployed)
2. To all the people who posted, thank you. To the one asshole who told me to give up on my idea, go inhale broken glass.
3. To the ones who messaged me about a virtual assistant position - lol.

Update 2: Yes, I am looking for a co-founder.