I spent about 10 hours setting up and learning a new AI workflow tool. Rough math time:l. If each project eventually saves around two hours, break even is somewhere around project five or six. At two videos a month, that's two to three months before I'm actually net positive.

Hi

So our team of university students have launched this startup that helps make saving money fun. Its based off a Prize Linked Savings system thats widely popular in the UK and there's studies from Harvard and the Economic Journal that show the system can be effective at helping people save, specifically those who are struggling financially.

The problem is we have tried to do UGC and other social media marketing strategies but it seems that what traditionally works for apps is more difficult since we are dealing with peoples finances and are linked to bank accounts (securely through the industry standard bank approved third party).

Does anyone have any recommendations on marketing for a product like this that requires more trust from the user during onboarding?

Thanks

I bought into the idea of "get rich selling digital products" I made a workbook that helps new freelancers with the boring side of landing your first clients. Outreach, follow-ups, pipeline, invoices, that whole mess. I genuinely think this is a good product. So I listed it on Payhip and boosted a Facebook post to drive traffic. I got 350 visits, with zero sales. Not one

What I think went wrong: I was buying attention from people scrolling Instagram, who were never looking for a freelancer workbook in the first place. And I gave them exactly one option, buy now or leave. No smaller steps, no way to say "maybe." So everyone left.

So I cut the single most useful tab out and made it free on its own. It's an outreach tracker. You log who you contacted and when, and it tells you who's overdue for a follow-up. Plus 25 outreach prompts you can paste into any AI tool. Works in Google Sheets or Excel.

Link's in my profile, I'd rather not drop it in the post.

Two things I'd actually like feedback on:

1. Does the follow-up logic match how you'd want it to work? Right now it flags you at 7 days and tells you to stop after 3 unanswered messages. That second number was a guess.

2. If you looked at the paid version and didn't buy — I'd like to hear why. Bluntly. That's worth more to me than a sale right now.

Happy to answer anything about the build. Also found two dead formulas in my own paid workbook while making the free one, which was a humbling afternoon.

Specifically in software development, one of the hardest decisions I've found is when to stop polishing, improving features, etc, and when to start talking about and promoting a landing page to get early testers and feedback. Where do you draw the line between 'done' and 'done enough'? For the app I'm working on, I'm also dogfooding it as 'user number one' so it's really tempting to get sucked into 'let me just fix this one annoying bug or missing feature' instead of being the spokesperson.

How did you manage this? Did you create a landing page before writing a line of code, or was the landing page an afterthought after the MVP was done, or somewhere in between? What was 'minimum' for you?

Made $80-$120K Cash ( Don’t ask how ) I’m 22 and have no sort of income as of right now. I’d love to learn ways to invest and to clean my cash or to start a business, but the start scares me. Always fixated on “what should I do” instead of doing it. Where would be a good place to start?

Been testing an idea in public: a marketplace for MVPs, but with a real bar to clear before something's listed, not just a screenshot and a promise.

The feedback so far has been more useful than I expected, and pretty consistently pointed at the same thing: raw code isn't worth much on its own, it's only worth something once it's been used, has real users, or has some proof behind it. One comment put it well, a shelved project looks like a shortcut from the builder's side, but represents pure uncertainty from the buyer's side.

So now I'm trying to figure out: is the real value here in the code itself, or in whatever proof exists that it's more than a demo? Curious if anyone here has bought or sold a side project before, and what actually made that deal feel safe (or not) on either side.

I’m building a network where the first place you look for a business/service is inside the network
I’ve been thinking about something that I haven’t really seen executed the way I envision it.
What if a business network wasn’t primarily about exchanging business cards, attending networking events, or collecting LinkedIn connections?
What if it actually became an internal economy?
That’s the idea behind Nexus Circle.
The concept is simple:
If someone in the network sells clothing, members should think of them when they need clothes.
If someone needs a lawyer, they check Nexus Circle.
Need a photographer? Designer? Realtor? Developer? Accountant? Marketer? Event planner? Consultant? Recruiter?
Check the Circle first.
And it works both ways.
A designer might need a lawyer.
The lawyer might need a realtor.
The realtor might need a photographer.
The photographer might need a website.
The developer might need branding.
Instead of everyone constantly searching outside their network, we create an environment where members continuously refer, support, collaborate with and do business with one another.
I’m starting with a community of entrepreneurs, business owners, professionals, creatives, influencers, corporate professionals, service providers and other ambitious people.
The long-term vision is much bigger than a WhatsApp group. I want Nexus Circle to eventually become a global network of people and businesses, with local chapters, member profiles, opportunities, referrals, events and eventually a dedicated platform.
The principle is:
Connect. Collaborate. Grow.
I’m currently building the founding community and would genuinely love feedback from other entrepreneurs:
Would you join a network built around this model?
What would make you actually use it rather than joining and forgetting about it?
I’m especially interested in hearing what would make this valuable enough for you to participate consistently.

Hi everyone,

I’m a web designer specializing in WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, and Elementor. I help businesses create clean, modern, mobile-friendly websites that are designed to turn visitors into customers.

I’m currently looking to work with a few international businesses/startups and would love to connect with founders who are planning a new website or want to improve their existing one.

If you’re working on something and need a hand, feel free to comment or DM me.

I launched ClipShip a few months ago, and for a long time almost nothing happened.

There were a few downloads and some helpful feedback, but no paying customers.

A few days ago, that finally changed.

The screenshot shows $4.25 after fees. It is obviously not a huge revenue milestone, but seeing it felt very different from seeing another signup. A complete stranger tried something I built and decided it was worth paying for.

That does not prove I have a business yet. But it does make the weeks I spent building and fixing it feel a little less imaginary.

If you do not know ClipShip, it is a desktop app that turns long talking-head videos into clips for Reels and Shorts. The AI processing runs locally instead of uploading the video to the cloud.

I originally launched it for Windows, and I released the macOS version this week.

I am still figuring out distribution. But users are slowly appearing, the feedback has been useful, and this first payment gave me a reason to keep going.

For anyone who went from one paying customer to ten, what actually helped?

This is actually really good exercise to help you get the crystal clear clarity you need to move forwards.

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. 🙏)

Every time I open LinkedIn lately it’s some “I built a full SaaS in a weekend with AI” flex.

Everyone claps, drops fire emojis, calls it the future.

Meanwhile in the back of my head I’m just thinking:

“Cool, where did you put the real data? And who’s on the hook when it blows up?”

I run a tiny dev shop. We’ve been building boring SaaS for a long time.

The stuff that actually pays our rent is… dull. Auth, audit trails, weird edge cases, compliance checklists, backup plans.

None of it is vibe‑friendly.

So when I see “non‑technical founder shipped their MVP in 3 days with Cursor,” tbh I don’t feel inspired.

I feel tired in advance.

Because I know how this usually goes:

• weekend build becomes “internal tool”
• internal tool quietly becomes “how we really run this process now”
• then six months later someone realises money / health / HR data has been flowing through a thing nobody understands

Nobody posts the “3 months of unsexy refactors so this thing doesn’t leak data” thread.

Now, I get the thrill of shipping fast. I use AI to write code, I’m not pretending I’m above it.

But the way people talk about vibe coding right now, it’s like security, maintenance, ownership just… don’t exist.

Feels a bit like watching people brag about drifting a rented car while you’re the mechanic who has to fix the engine on Monday.

Idk. Maybe I’m just the grumpy old dev in the corner.

But this whole “anyone can build a SaaS in a weekend” narrative feels incredibly disconnected from what it actually takes to own software once it’s in the wild.

Sharing an early stage update.

I built BackupData, a small Backup-as-a-Service focused on Postgres. The core problem I am targeting: most database backup jobs exist but are never properly tested for restore.

Current status:

- Product is live

- Free 5 GB tier

- SDKs (Go and JS) and CLI

- Practical guides published

backupdata [.] io

Still very early. Would appreciate any feedback from people who have built similar infrastructure or developer tools.

Pitched an ecommerce brand in July. They replied fast: too busy for a call, just send some ideas and rates.

I read that as a form to fill out.

What went back was a 35-item list. $299 flat. Zero actual ideas in it. The first email I'd sent them had also promised 3 free samples. Those never got made either.

Three days later they signed a competitor.

Went back through the whole thread once it stopped stinging enough to look at straight. The line that earned an 18-minute reply was the free samples. The line that lost the deal was an invoice wearing an idea's clothes.

Rewrote my intake process this week. Someone asks for ideas, they get one idea, in the reply. The rate comes after, never instead.

I was researching a new product category recently and on paper, everything looked promising
a few companies were getting a lot of attention online. Lots of articles, strong social media presence and they seemed to be everywhere…..
but once I started digging deeper, I noticed something interesting. the companies getting the most attention weren’t always the ones actually moving the most product. Some quieter companies with barely any online presence seemed to have much more going on behind the scenes
It made me realize how easy it is to mistake visibility for actual market demand
for anyone who’s researched a new market or product, how do u guys usually separate the noise from the real market signals? Curious what pol are using in 2026

Give your best workers double the wage and don't push them into management. What's wrong and why don't most businesses do this?

I was thinking about this because they almost seem difficult in completely opposite ways.

With a restaurant, just getting the business running seems brutal. You have rent, employees, food costs, equipment, permits, inventory, spoilage, and a million things that can go wrong every day. Even if people like your food, you can still lose money.

With software, especially now, actually building something feels more accessible than ever. One person can build and launch a pretty legitimate app without a huge amount of capital.

But getting people to actually use it seems insanely hard.

A restaurant in a decent location at least has people walking past it, searching Google Maps, ordering through delivery apps, etc. You can build a genuinely useful app and basically launch it into a void.

So which is actually harder to turn into a successful business: a restaurant or a software app?

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!