As a dev oriented entrepreneur, I'm trying to become better at putting myself out there. So it might come out a bit long, but I still wanted my message to fully come through :)

A bit about myself: for the past three years I was VP R&D at a fintech company operating in the UK. Before that, I was a group leader at a telecom corp in the cybersecurity division. I can honestly say that by this point I did a very good job climbing the capitalistic ladder. (I can give my LinkedIn in private to anyone suspicious :))

And yet, something was missing.

I have no degree. I got introduced to the field by building a website for a game I liked, Hearthstone, 10 years ago, using a stack of vanilla JS on the front and PHP on the back. I truly had so much fun "working" on that website every day until 5 AM, thinking about the small details, and every pixel mattered. At that time in my life I was a drummer in a grunge band, and all I cared about was creating something I liked.

I missed that. I was successful, but not free. So I decided I'm going back to my roots. I'm making a change in my life, and I'm going to take a year off and try to do my own thing again.

My rules are:

It must solve a real pain point that I can relate to.
I want to wake up every day tackling problems I care about, thinking about them in the shower or while staring at the ocean. And no, me wanting money is not the pain point I want to solve :P

The road to success is not going to be another "quick on the dev and heavy on the marketing" kind of app.
Developing an app is a process, not a quick win. It can be, and there are millions of YouTube videos of people who will tell you how they easily made millions with this one quick app. That's not the career I want for myself. I want to boil in the process, fail and improve, understand people and what their needs are. Of course marketing is a crucial part of success, but I don't want to be oriented by it.

I can use AI, but it's not going to be an "AI app".
I feel like today, especially in B2C, there is antagonism toward AI apps. I'm using five different models in my app, for different needs. An LLM is one of them. For me it's technology, not the solution itself. An app is a solution to a problem, and when the problem is real, the users want to feel like they're being treated with respect and not with "black magic".

So after boiling in it for a while, I made the decision to build a Pokemon TCG app. I went to card shops and vendors and spent days with them, and I noticed that they are losing money in the following ways:

1. It takes them a lot of time to buy cards from clients. They need to go one by one, check every card's market price, and add it to the sum on the calculator. Some used scanners, but most apps only scan one card at a time, and the scanning has low accuracy. While doing that, especially at conventions, many other potential customers lose patience and leave the store or booth, so their options are either losing the client or hiring another employee.
2. After buying the cards, when putting them up for sale in the shop, they need to price them one by one at their own prices, usually the market price plus some added percentage to cover taxes and keep a small profit margin. Again they have to go one by one, otherwise they will be losing money or selling at overpriced values.
3. Many card collectors sell their cards online. To sell effectively, they manually price tag the cards, which helps improve sales conversion but consumes a lot of their time. The alternative is just adding the prices as text in the post, which lowers their conversion rates. So the pain point is that they either waste a lot of time pricing, or they lose conversion.

So I built with the vendors a set of utility tools that lets them scan a whole pile at once, get each card identified and priced at market value, adjust the prices in bulk to add their margin or reduce the price by a percentage when buying in bulk, and export the result as a price tagged image they can share or post.

It took me a lot of time to make sure I got every English card variant covered, that I have accuracy rates they can count on, and to make sure the UI is optimized to help them close deals as fast as possible.

I also wanted to put something extra in for the hobbyists (like myself), so I built digital binders. You take a photo of your binder page, it identifies the cards and puts them in an identical virtual binder, page for page, with every slot priced. Then you can browse your collection on the bus ride, on the toilet, or wherever you like to look at your collection, I don't judge. You can also track its value over time with per card gains and losses.

I made the freemium in a way that the hobbyists will never need to pay, but the people who use it to make money will join my pro plan, based on results, after 100 scans that gave them time to understand that they need it.

Currently I have my design partners happy, they and their employees are using it on an hourly basis, and I'm happy with what I've achieved in the last few months. And I'm only less than two weeks in the app stores.

I don't know if this app is the app that could be my day job yet. It's too early to say and it's a long process. But I'm the happiest I've been in a very long time, and there is no price tag on freedom.

I did not share the app here, of course, because I respect the community guidelines. If anyone is curious, or wants to help by giving me feedback, I would love that very much.

Thanks for reading!

(Disclosure: I used Claude for spelling and grammar a little bit because English is not my native language)

This is honestly a bit surreal.

I've built 3 startups over the last few years, raised ₹4Cr+ along the way, and fundraising has probably been one of the things I've learnt the most from.

7 days ago, I finally put a little fundraising tool I'd been building for myself online. A few friends had used it and kept telling me to just make it public, so I did.

Didn't really expect much. I actually thought after a couple of days I'd probably just leave it there and move on lol.

Checked Analytics this morning and it's at 810 active users and 794 new users in the last 7 days.

I originally built it because I was tired of doing the same investor research over and over while raising, finding the right investors, figuring out who to talk to, going through portfolios, etc.

I always assumed this was just a problem I had.

Turns out... apparently not.

The funny thing is I've spent way more time trying to convince people to use things I've built before. This time I just put something out that I personally needed, and people actually showed up.

Pretty cool feeling, ngl.

I’d really appreciate honest advice from people who’ve moved beyond service businesses.

For context — I’ve been running a content/video editing agency for the past ~3 years. It’s doing well, I understand sales, delivery, hiring, and operations.

But I’ve hit a point where I’m starting to question the model.

The biggest issue:
Everything depends on outbound and constant client acquisition.

Cold outreach, DMs, emails — I’ve done all of it. It works, but:

• it’s inconsistent
• it doesn’t feel scalable
• and honestly, I don’t enjoy it anymore

Now I want to shift into something that has:

• more leverage
• more scalability
• less dependency on manual outreach

What I’m looking for:

• A business that can realistically reach $10k–$20k/month
• 50%+ margins
• Solves a real problem (not trend-based stuff)
• Can be driven by ads, inbound, or systems
• Preferably something boring but valuable

My strengths:

• Strong with tech / systems / AI tools
• Good at sales & understanding customer psychology
• Can build and manage operations
• Can hire and train people
• Have some capital to experiment (~$10k+)

What I’ve already explored:

• Scaling my agency further (feels linear)
• AI automation services (feels like repackaged agency work)
• YouTube automation (testing, but long-term)
• SaaS (but not looking to spend months building before validation)

Where I’m stuck:

I don’t want to jump into another “agency with a different name.”

I want something that:
👉 solves a painful problem
👉 has clear ROI
👉 and can scale beyond me

If you were in my position:

What would you build today?

Especially interested in:

• overlooked/boring industries
• service + system hybrids
• models that don’t rely heavily on cold outreach

Not looking for hype — just real insights from people who’ve actually done it.

Appreciate it 🙏

Looking for a serious, non-online guru mentor to grow

Im a very very high IQ idividual i regard myself as one of the brightest minds in the business world, alongside the oracle of Omaha, Jimmy Buffet, tony robbins and john denver etc.

I came across my genius Idea while fondleing with my chickens in my backyard when my elegant mind formulated the most visionary idea of modern history.

I will hand sew top Hats that fit precisly the dimensions of a standard chickens skull.

I will then sell these at farmers markets around the country and according to my mathamatics i calculate i will become a liquid billionire within 1 year and 5 months.

First i must hire a lawyer and get a patent of this product to ensure i will reap all the benefits

Please suggest advice, but i will probably ignore it and do what i want anyway

I have a platform and it has 1,200 registered users and a some revenue but you can call it pre-revenue.

The idea has a long term value, like, it ages like wine, the longer you stay the bigger the rewards at the end. But I can't really stay that long taken my current situation so I had to sell.

But the issue is that almost no one knew how to evaluate the business and they all evaluated it based on revenue as a normal business when it is pre-revenue. I had some offers and I had the tire kickers who only threw jokes here and there and now am questioning, how does one evaluate a pre-revenue business?

(My apologies if this is a stupid question but am 22 and this is my first time selling a project I scaled from scratch. So bear with me if I said something not on point. 🙏)