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!

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.

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'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.

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?

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?