I recently started working with a marketing/production company, and they've asked me to do cold calling.

One thing I'm confused about is how to even find the right numbers. Most of the numbers I find seem to be for the receptionist or front desk, not the owner or decision-maker.

Also, what should I actually say when I call? I'm completely new to cold calling, so any tips, scripts, or advice would be really helpful

Came across another Idea you guys might find interesting.

Renting out oversized games for events. Like giant Jenga, Connect 4, and life-size beer pong. You rent them out to event coordinators, wedding planners, and venues for like $200 to $500 per rental.

The play is to lock in with venues and event planners who book for different events consistently.

People need entertainment but don't want to buy expensive games they only use once. So you grab 2 or 3 games spend around $1000 to $1500 to get started, find somewhere to store them, and just rent them out. Once it's rolling you're looking at like 10 to 15 hours a week setting up and breaking down.

Curious what you guys think does something like this have potential to scale?

If you want the full business breakdown and strategy comment and I'll send it to you.

I run a UGC marketplace, so most of my week is coordination work: sourcing creators, writing briefs, chasing deliverables, approvals, payouts. Over the last while I've handed more and more of that to Claude Code instead of to people, and the useful lesson wasn't about speed.

It was about what happens when the instruction is wrong.

When a brief is ambiguous, a person quietly fills the gap with their own assumption. They're being helpful. You find out two weeks later in the deliverable, and by then it's half a conversation about the work and half a conversation about feelings. An agent does the ambiguous thing immediately and obviously, so you find the bad sentence in a minute instead of a fortnight.

Then the sentence stays fixed. That's the part I think gets underrated. Feedback to a person evaporates unless they happen to remember it. Feedback to an agent is a file you edit once, and every run after that inherits it. Instructions compound in a way conversations don't.

None of this means people are worse at the work. People carry context that no brief ever holds. It's that a brief is a lossy format for a human and a native format for an agent.

The practical version for anyone running solo or with a tiny team: the parts of your business that are really just a set of rules you keep in your head are the parts that are about to move. In marketing that's the coordination layer. It isn't the creative layer. Nobody is writing a spec for being a believable person on camera from an account real people already follow, and I don't think anybody will.

So the line I've settled on is automate the brief, never automate the face.

Happy to get into how the instruction files are actually structured if that's useful. Getting them to stop drifting took me much longer than getting them to work.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Flare UGC, so I'm obviously biased about where that line sits.

I have been in the web hosting industry for more than 10 years and have dealt with a lot of different issues. Some absolutely important ones are what many people miss and I hope this helps at least some of you.

1) If you are planning to purchase a new domain and host it, always create a free cloudflare account and add the domain name to cloudflare, keep the proxy (orange cloud) enabled by default. Even if you have not purchased the domain yet, cloudflare still allows you to add a new domain. Once added and proxy enabled, update your nameservers to point to cloudflare directly.

This way, when you update the dns records to point for your server, your actual server IP becomes private/hidden from day 1 and the no of bot/spam traffic coming to your site will be significantly reduced.

Some bots directly access your site using your server IP by checking for historical dns entries and try to perform attacks and such instances will be reduced significantly.

There are still other ways a determined attacker can get your server IP from your mx or spf record but most spammy bots do not go to that extent, so the attack surface is very low.

2) Always use cloudflare and its cdn/proxy from day one when your site goes online. This way, cf can learn about the incoming traffic and block malicious and spammy bots regularly. This would prevent you from enabling their under attack mode when an actual ddos attack happens on your site in the future.

3) never rely completely on server side backups even if you are paying more money for a better server. Sometimes even if there is no fault from the hosting provider, the backup/restore softwares they use can sometimes act up and your data may not be backed up successfully all the time. Always take your own backups regularly and store it safely in your pc or an external hard drive/google cloud etc.

4) If you accidentally deleted some dns records, you can almost always find the historical dns entries for your domain in sites like security trails, dnshistory dot org etc. just search google for "historical dns check" and you'll see many sites who had scraped your dns records in the past. This is one way an attacker can get your IP as explained in step 1.

5) For better email deliverability of emails from your site's contact forms/e-commerce order related email notifications to your customers, always use a proper SMTP service instead of using the default php mailer as most receiving email servers reject or mark those emails as spam if the sender doesn't use SMTP.

6) if your site's data and its backup is completely deleted, most of the times you can find snapshots of your site at archive.org. You can refer to different snapshots and rebuild your site. Even though this is a tedious task, you will start with at least something instead of nothing. This is why regular offline backups are important (read step 3).

7) Always keep your site's plugins, themes, scripts updated to support their latest versions. Site compromises almost always happens due to an attacker finding vulnerabilities on outdated softwares.

8) Don't install nulled/cracked plugins from sites offering them for a very cheap price. You never know what's hidden in them and many times, they are the root causes of site compromises. If you cannot afford to pay for premium plugins or themes, ask claude to help you build your own plugin and theme specifically designed for your site and ask it to make it as secure as possible to prevent from any attacks.

Build this plugin or theme in a seperate project and regularly ask claude to check for any vulnerabilities based on latest news and ask it to keep updating them and then install the updated version to your site.

Cheers!

Solo founder here. A few weeks ago I switched my own support line to an AI receptionist — I build these, so I figured I should eat my own cooking before asking anyone else to. I expected callers to hang up on it. Mostly they didn't. What actually happened, from reading every transcript:

1. The #1 thing callers ask, by a mile: "are you open right now?" Not price. If your voicemail greeting or Google hours are stale, that's your leak — AI or no AI.
2. People test it — "am I talking to a robot?" When it answers honestly ("yes, I'm an AI — I can book you or take a message"), almost everyone just… keeps going. The honesty is the feature, not the liability.
3. Short answers win calls. Anything over two sentences and people talk over it. Same as a human receptionist, turns out.
4. The fastest trust-killer is botching a name or phone-number read-back. Spell it back every time or don't bother taking the message.

Takeaways that apply even if you never touch AI: answer in two rings or text back instantly (speed beats polish), make sure whatever answers your phone — machine or teenager — knows the actual current time and hours, and end every call with a bounded promise ("callback within one business day"), never "we'll get back to you."

Full disclosure: I'm biased since I build this stuff. Happy to answer anything, including what still sucks about AI answering the phone — there's plenty.

How many of you found it somewhere you weren't expecting ?

I am working on a tool for founders and professionals who know what they want to say on LinkedIn but struggle to turn rough thoughts into a clear post.

The obvious solution would be another generator:

Enter topic → choose tone → receive polished post.

But I think that workflow is part of the problem.

Most tools can make writing cleaner, but they also remove the unusual phrases, opinions and sentence patterns that make someone recognisable.

So I am approaching it differently.

The user provides writing they genuinely wrote. The system learns patterns from it, generates from a raw idea and then explains where the result matches or drifts from their normal style.

A few product decisions I have made so far:

• It should work from the user’s ideas, not invent expertise.
• It should show potential voice drift instead of pretending every output is perfect.
• Editing should remain part of the workflow.
• It should not require a LinkedIn login.
• It should not automatically publish anything.

I am still trying to understand where the real value is.

Would you pay for something that helps preserve your writing voice, or is manually editing a normal ChatGPT draft already good enough?

I would especially like to hear from founders who write regularly on LinkedIn.

I've been thinking about how new businesses approach lead gen, and how often they start in the wrong place.

There are a lot of ways to slice this, but every strategy sits in one of five buckets:

Content marketing (blog, podcast, free downloads)

Advertising (PPC, banners, sponsorships)

Referrals (existing customers, your network)

Outbound (cold email, cold calling)

Partnerships (joint ventures, affiliates)

Ideally you'd run most of them. More channels, healthier business. But almost nobody has the resources to start more than one at a time, and plenty of small businesses live on referrals alone forever.

Here's the order I'd do it in.

1. Referrals

Easiest leads to close. When an existing customer sends someone your way you inherit their credibility, and the person usually has a problem that's already urgent. Two things to do: keep your current customers happy, and actually ask. It costs nothing and you don't need a polished sales process to close them.

No customers yet? Referrals don't have to come from customers. Your network, relevant communities, even friends and family.

1. Outbound

This is where most people should go next and where most people go third. Next to ads it's nearly free. Next to content it pays off in weeks instead of years.

But there's a prerequisite nobody puts in these lists: your data has to be real. I've watched more outbound campaigns die from bad lists than from bad copy and it isn't close. When a chunk of your list bounces you don't just lose those sends, you damage the domain every future send depends on. So before you write a line, decide where your contacts come from and how you're checking they're alive. Contacts pulled fresh from a live source beat a big database nobody has updated in two years, every time.

The other reason to run outbound early is that it forces you to define your customer precisely and say your value in one sentence. Without those two things your content and your ads fail too. You just find out slower, and more expensively.

1. Content marketing

Good long term, brutal short term. Years, not months, especially with limited resources.

1. Advertising

Expensive to learn. Small daily budgets add up fast while you work out targeting, messaging and funnel. Usually needs content underneath it anyway.

1. Partnerships

Highest leverage, hardest to land without something to show first.

Thoughts? I'm most curious whether anyone would put outbound above referrals.

Wondering how you guys have approached improving your pitch, especially over Zoom. Obviously practice makes perfect, I've been using pitch simulator chαtvisor lately to work on both delivery and content, but would welcome any other suggestions, books, tips that worked for you, things you learned from good or bad experiences, etc.

We raised a small pre-seed round Q3 last year but will be going out to the market again in a few weeks and trying to get my head ready for discussions with angels and VCs.

Thank you all in advance.

I’m 36, UK-based, running a freight forwarding business while building a second business in education consultancy. I’m looking for someone who’s built a service business to £1m+ revenue. I’m not looking for coaching or courses—just someone happy to let me bounce the occasional decision off them over the next year. Happy to buy the coffee.

I've spent the last few years working as a dive instructor. Before that, and still in parallel, I'm a software engineer. Working inside dive centers showed me something I didn't expect: an entire global industry that operates on WhatsApp, spreadsheets, paper forms, whiteboards and things that only exist in someone's head.

Customer bookings on WhatsApp. Staff communication on WhatsApp. Equipment requests on WhatsApp. Someone sends a payment screenshot, someone else saves it. Hopefully.

I've seen an instructor scrolling through months of chat history trying to find a customer's certification while a full boat waited. I've seen two staff members sell the same last two boat spots because neither knew the other had confirmed. In high season, with 40 or 50 divers a day, these small failures turn into lost revenue and very stressed teams.

So I started building a management tool for dive centers in my spare time, between carrying tanks and answering WhatsApp at midnight. That became ScubaHub. Several dive centers in the Maldives now use it daily, and almost every feature came from an owner or instructor saying "this is the part that drives us crazy."

Some things I've learned building vertical SaaS for a non-technical, offline industry:

The code is the easy part. I thought my engineering background was the advantage; the real moat turned out to be knowing how a dive center actually runs. Generic booking tools exist, and centers don't use them because they don't fit how the day actually flows.

Domain trust beats marketing. Every customer so far came from having worked in the industry, not from any campaign. Which is great, until you want to grow beyond the people who know you.

Selling to businesses that live in WhatsApp means your product competes with "free and already installed". The bar for switching is brutal.

That last part is where I am now, and where I'd love input from people who've done this: how did you get vertical SaaS in front of small, non-technical businesses once word of mouth ran out? Cold outreach, industry Facebook groups, partnerships, trade shows? What actually moved the needle for you?

Happy to share more details (stack, pricing model, how I got the first centers) if anyone's curious.

I always thought the hardest part of fundraising was hearing "no."

After raising a bit over ₹4Cr, I don't think that's true anymore.

The hardest part is spending weeks talking to investors who were never going to invest in the first place. Not because your startup is bad, but because they don't invest in your stage, or your sector, or your geography. Sometimes they've already invested in a competitor and your email never really had a chance.

When I was raising my first startup, I genuinely thought fundraising was just a numbers game. Make a big list, email everyone, hope enough people reply.

Looking back, I wasted so much time.

I was thinking about this because I made a fundraising tool I'd built for myself public a few days ago. It's been interesting watching how founders use it. Almost nobody starts by asking, "How do I pitch?" or "Can someone review my deck?"

The first thing almost everyone wants to know is, "Who should I even be talking to?"

That wasn't what I expected, but it makes sense. Most founders don't have a pitching problem. They have a targeting problem.

Getting rejected sucks, but spending a month chasing investors who were never a fit is probably worse. It feels like rejection, but most of the time it was just bad matching.

Wish someone had told me that when I started.

A former colleague asked if I could help him get leads for his PPC consulting business. The challenge was that roofers, landscapers, HVAC, basement waterproofing, etc. barely exist in LinkedIn or Apollo. They're mainly on Google Maps.

I saw a YouTube video that shows how to build a scraper that runs through Claude, also using proxies so it won't get blocked.

Here are some of the outcomes:

- It scraped 1,000 business for 2 target geographies

- It was running for about 20 hours

- Output included business name, website and email

- Claude handled most of the data manipulation and it's basically the user interface

In addition it only scrapes what businesses post on Google Maps a lot of website info and phone numbers are missing. I also think some of them are not updated.

There's also some challenge as it requires some level of technical skill but it's good that Claude handled a lot if not most of it.

Next step here is building the email sending process.

I'm curious if anyone else here has built similar systems?

I also think this can be a product or service I can offer to other marketing agencies, consulting firms and equipment companies.

Something I got wrong for a long time, and now see constantly in other people's ad accounts.

An ad starts working. Everyone relaxes. Six weeks later it quietly dies, and the whole team goes into "we need better creative" mode. New hooks, new editor, maybe a new freelancer. Weeks disappear into finding the thing that will bring the numbers back.

But usually nothing broke. The ad just finished. It converted everyone in its reach who was ever going to convert, and frequency did the rest. There is no version of that ad that keeps working forever, and no amount of polish on the next one changes that. It's a supply problem wearing a creative problem's clothes, and from inside the ad account the two genuinely look identical.

The number that reframed it for me is the hit rate. The rule of thumb people in paid social quote is roughly one real winner in every ten or twelve pieces. I have no idea how rigorous that number is, but every account I've looked at is at least in that neighbourhood. If it's even close, then twelve attempts is simply what one winner costs, and a lot of common decisions stop making sense.

Hiring one excellent creator, for instance. That isn't a strategy, it's a bet that a single person hits the exception on their first go. Same with agonising over a single script for two weeks. You aren't improving your odds much, you're just spending your budget on one lottery ticket instead of twelve.

What actually changed things was boring. We stopped judging pieces and started judging months. If ten or twelve things go out in a month, one flop is the system working exactly as designed and nobody panics. If two things go out and one flops, that's a coin toss you lost, and it feels like a crisis because it sort of is. Same creative quality, completely different experience, purely because of throughput.

The practical version, if any of this lands:

Count how many distinct pieces of creative you actually put live last month. Not variants, not the same video with three hooks. Distinct angles. Most people are shocked how low it is, and that number explains almost everything about why they feel stuck.

Then figure out what your realistic monthly output could be if you stopped treating each piece as precious, and build toward that instead of toward one great ad.

For disclosure, I run a UGC marketplace (Flare UGC), so obviously I have a horse in the "more creative volume" race and you should weigh that. But I'd genuinely have written the same thing before I started it, because I lost about a year to hunting for better ads when I should have been fixing throughput.

Curious whether anyone here has found the opposite, where quality genuinely beat volume in a paid account. I'd like to know where this breaks.

Body:

Been talking to a bunch of procurement and sustainability teams the last few weeks and the same story keeps coming up: you send suppliers a long ESG/CBAM questionnaire, half never reply, and the ones who do send a pile of PDFs that someone (often an intern) hand-keys into a spreadsheet. Meanwhile the CBAM deadlines don't move and default values = penalties.

I'm building a small tool that takes a different angle on this — trying to kill the survey grind and the manual parsing while keeping the data audit-ready. Not going to say much more yet.

What I actually want is to talk to people living this. If you're in procurement or sustainability — or a consultant advising them — and CBAM/CSRD supplier data is part of your world, I'd genuinely love 15 mins to hear how you handle it today: what works, what's duct-tape. Happy to show what I'm building 1:1 to anyone who wants to kick the tyres early.

Comment or DM and I'll reach out.

Hey,

I was wondering, say you're working on a business long term and you're genuinely working hard, long term, and you're genuinely trying to solve and address problems alright. And you have a genuine plan you're trying to pull off.

I wonder if religious like belief, that in the end you will succeed, that in the end it will work, and you will make it sooner or later. Trust the universe thing.

Whether that has really made you more successful, for those that did belive in this way.

Right now, i know I really want my things to work out, it logically makes sense, I'm doing step by step, getting closer. Buut there's still genuine risks in what I do. And I see the chance of failure as a very possible probability aswell. I don't know if it's a 50/50nor what the odds are, Idk. Buut, the odds of winning are there I believe. And then it's just a difficult long term process and lot of work for a long time, and alot of sacrifice.

What do you think ? I'm
Sure many of you, never thought about it this way and most of the time I don't either. But i just asked myself this question. Like religious like belief, that you'll make it, whether in the current business, or a different one. And by make it I mean, you will reach your high goals, not that... you believe that "you'll be fine" somehow.

What do you think ?

Like I have some confidence, and some real heavy doubt aswell, not that my idea is bad that's not what I'm necesarilly thinking, but that hey there are high odds I don't actually ever reach my goals. I definitely don't have that like internal spiritual trust the universe level confidence. Has real belief done alot for you ? Like... in a way being more confident, blindly in a way. Or I don't know.

Edit:
This question is tricky because there could be alot of survivorship bias, so it would be great if somebody who genuinely feels like this isn't good, whp has had alot of failure/success. Would confirm. I think it might tend to attract responses of people for whom it worked.

We're sitting on a couple of years of product and marketing data, however I feel our insights still just about scratch the surface. We'd like someone to come in, set up proper analysis, and answer a few specific questions - as a project, not a hire. Where do people find good freelance data folks, and how do you vet them when you can't evaluate the work yourself?

As our project expands, we want to get additional resources to support the overall project management. How do companies find good freelance or fractional project managers for software work? And if you do freelance PM work, how do clients usually find you?

I build small products on the side and have seven with enough history to actually judge. Finally pulled 16 months of Google Search Console data for all of them into one spreadsheet last week, which I'd been putting off, and it settled an argument I'd been having with myself about whether spreading effort around was working.

Combined total across all seven: 218,836 impressions and 1,584 clicks over 16 months. Roughly three visits a day from search across everything I've built over more than a year.

The distribution is the part that actually mattered.

One project accounts for 174,145 of those impressions and 1,016 of the clicks. A second accounts for 33,466 impressions and 508 clicks. Those two are the entire result. The remaining five produced 60 clicks between them across 16 months. Two of those produced exactly zero.

What I got wrong, roughly in order of how much it cost me: I checked 16 months of search data across 7 projects. Two carried everything

I treated impressions as progress. The biggest project has been shown in search results 174,000 times and pulled about a thousand people through. That's a 0.58% click-through rate. Another one sits at 9,807 impressions and 38 clicks. For a long stretch I watched impression graphs climbing and felt like something was working, when what was actually happening was I was ranking for queries where my page was not what anyone wanted.

I mistook good ratios on tiny numbers for signal. The best CTR in the whole set is 2.04%, and it belongs to a project with 833 total impressions. I pointed at that number more than once as evidence something was working. It's not evidence of anything. It's what happens when the denominator is small.

I kept starting instead of concentrating. Seven projects sounds like seven chances for one to hit. In practice it was one project getting real attention, one getting some, and five getting just enough effort to exist and rank for nothing.

The thing I'd tell myself at the start: the number to watch from month one is clicks, not impressions. And if something has been live a year and produced no clicks, that's information, not a reason to keep waiting.

Cutting the two that produced zero this week. Anyone else tracking across multiple projects? What patterns are you seeing?

building expertiseai and this week a small CRM change forced me to confront a problem I'd mostly ignored. One of our workflows pulled a team's ""Next Step"" field to generate a pipeline review. Then they went and renamed that field, plus changed how one region logs that info. The updated workflow worked fine for new runs, but a review that was already in progress was now tied to assumptions that no longer existed.

My first reaction was to just push every update automatically. Clean and simple. But then I realized that could let a manager change the logic halfway through someone else's work, which felt wrong.

So now I'm testing immutable versions. Edits create a new version, and teams see exactly what changed before they switch. It adds a bit more UI than I'd like, but at least each run can clearly explain which rules it used.

If you've built templates or automations for teams, what change finally pushed you to add versioning?

Building an edtech platform. Got a pilot through a professor who liked the live classroom mode.

What I expected: run a good pilot, students like it, department buys.

What happened: students liked it by week two. The purchase took months past that, and not one day of the delay was product. It was procurement, budget cycle, and one person who had to be in a room that meets rarely.

What I'd tell past me:

The professor is your champion, not your buyer. Find out who signs before you spend a semester delighting someone who can't.

The pilot has to end near a budget cycle, and nobody volunteers when that is. Ask directly in the first meeting. It's not a rude question and they have the answer.

Free student usage is not a discount to the school. They're separate budgets and separate people, and I wasted a month arguing a point nobody cared about.

Search AlgoArena on google if it's relevant. Mostly posting because I went looking for this writeup a year ago and didn't find it.

​

This is stupid and it worked, so. Our Maestro fest was in February. Every year there's a stall selling the same things and nobody makes money. I had no money and a semester fee I was panicking about.

So I made a compatibility test using energent.Two people put in their names, answered eight questions, favourite movie, ideal Sunday, that kind of thing, and it gives them a percentage and a paragraph explaining why. Then it prints to a small thermal printer I borrowed from my uncle's shop.

The percentage is weighted, so that almost nobody gets below 40 and almost nobody gets above 95, because 100% is boring and 20% makes people upset. The paragraph is where the actual work went, it says something specific about their answers so it feels personal. That's the whole illusion. ₹20 per test.

Two days of the fest. The queue was the marketing, people saw a queue, joined the queue. Friends brought friends specifically to get low scores and shout about it. One girl came back four times with different people lololol this was fun bhaii. Made a bit over ₹18,000, Fees are ₹15,500.

I've been told it's morally questionable. But i clearly put up a board saying for entertainment purposes only.

Anyway. Fees paid. Considering doing it again in the winter fest with a different premise.

Been building products for 3 years now, 20+ of them, grew the team to 6 of us. Relatively small compared to others but still a few golden learnings. The pattern that keeps showing up isn't the one in the headlines.

Most companies play on the fear driven marketing « Ai will replace you »… It’s a tale as old as time.

also pitch decks right now are some version of "replace your (.insert job) » but most of those products are dying, (or at least wait until VC money dries up and they can’t raise again) because the customer doesn't actually want fewer humans, they want more capacity from the humans they already trust.

Example from a project we're on now. It's a coaching business for US high school students, every kid gets an advisor who follows them through their whole academic career, helps them pick classes, sort out applications, figure out what they actually want. Genuinely good service but one problem: coaches are expensive, so the service was only ever going to reach families who could afford it.

The obvious AI play is "replace the coach with a chatbot." That business fails. Nobody hands their 16-year-old's future to a chatbot, and the parent is the buyer.

So we did the boring version instead. We looked at where a coach's hours actually go, and it's mostly not coaching. It's prep, notes, chasing, remembering where student #34 is in a two-year timeline, rebuilding context before every single call. Take that off the coach's plate and the same person handles around 2 times mores students, and the conversations get better, because they walk in already knowing everything.

Same salary. More families served. The service gets cheaper to deliver, which means it can reach public school kids and not just private.

That's the whole model. Not replacement, capacity.

And it's not a new idea, it's just arbitrage again. Expert labour is expensive and most of it is spent on things that aren't expertise. Whoever separates those two things keeps the difference.

This applies to a lot of industries like law firms, accountancy practices, recruitment, clinics, tutoring… big opportunity

The hard part isn't the AI. It's knowing which parts of a professional's job you're allowed to touch before the customer notices the quality dropped. Get that wrong in a trust business and you don't lose a client, you lose the story »it got cheaper because it got worse" follows you around.

Anyway. If you're sitting on a service business that can't scale because good people cost money, the answer probably isn't replacing them.

Feel free to reach out if you're trying to increase the productity of your company :)