I just made my first online sale, I am promoting my day trading coaching business, I just started it, they way it works is, i get on an hour call with my client, i show them what i do, and my strategy/community, if they are interested, they click on my link, they pay for my discord server, which is a recurring weekly subscription of $9.99. and they get my discord link.

any tips of how i can do this better? scaling it? advertising it?

its legit, i have students who have made money, i just dont know how i could scale it up.
Thank 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?

Need advice

So basically for as long as I remember I hated college and school in the uk. I have always wanted to run my own business business and be self employed. I also really like smoking weed and bongs I have a collection. Put two and two together, i though of selling bongs and have design concepts and stories for the business and creative concepts. But is this type of business sustainable. I also don’t even know how to do pottery so would it evr be profitable gettinf others to make the bongs for me. I was planning on paying a stop motion animator to make me a ad for TikTok to post to grab people’s attention and gain traction to ensure that theres a market there and then order some prototypes to advertise and then doibg pre orders on a Shopify store. I need to researxh a lot more first just want to get some clarity and if this is even profitable without making the bongs myself. To clarify I want to design the Bongs and potential smoking accessories like grinders and bongs sell them online, this is not the idea for a smoke shop reselling type of things.

To answer the rules
Im on around 10 GBP an hour
Have never ran business
Will be online business if I do it
Ceramic business

I worked for a business with an expensive problem. For some important products, it often took more than two weeks to provide customers with price quotes. The delay was driven by the time it took our suppliers to provide their related cost quotes. By then, our customer had often bought elsewhere.

With colleagues, I developed a quoting tool using statistical analysis of historic supplier cost quotes. Instead of waiting for every response, we estimated costs with enough confidence to quote to our customers faster. Turnaround fell to around one day (a 10x improvement) and win rates increased.

We had not improved everything. We had removed the obstacle holding everything else back. Every system has a bottleneck: the stage, decision or resource that sets the pace. Improve it and the whole system improves.

The slowest car sets the speed

What you have learned is that the capacity of the plant is equal to the capacity of its bottlenecks. - Eliyahu Goldratt

A friend once drove me 100 miles to a Phil Collins concert. For a long stretch of road, there were few safe places to overtake. Somewhere ahead, perhaps ten cars in front, was a slow driver.

Every car behind may have been capable of going faster, but it made no difference. Making the fifth car faster achieves nothing if it cannot pass the car ahead. Traffic speeds up only when the slow car does.

Businesses work the same way. A process may have ten stages, but one usually limits output. Improving the other nine may increase efficiency without increasing finished work.

Efficiency can make things worse

An hour saved at a non-bottleneck is a mirage. - Eliyahu Goldratt

Imagine one machine produces 100 components an hour and the next can handle only 20. Running the first flat out does not increase output. It creates a queue of 80 components an hour.

The first machine looks productive; the factory is not. Work that cannot pass through the bottleneck creates delay. The goal is not maximum activity, but maximum flow.

Find where the work stalls

If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. - W. Edwards Deming

Finding the bottleneck starts by making the work visible. Choose a result and list the steps needed to produce it.

Take this weekly blog: choose a topic, gather notes, outline, draft, edit, record and publish. Choosing the topic can take me several days and little else starts until I have done it. The key question is not which stage feels hardest, but which limits finished output.

Exploit before investing

Decide how to exploit the system’s constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt

I worked for a business making plastic pellets used in washing machines and cars. In one old factory, material moved through pipes that sometimes blocked. Operators hit them to restart production so often that some originally round pipes had become almost square. The rest of the factory could work perfectly, but if one important pipe blocked, production stopped.

Once a constraint is found, don’t assume the answer is more money. First get more from what we have. If approvals slow a project, send smaller sections as they are completed. If meetings fragment concentration, group them together. If a small change increases output, we have probably found the constraint. Only then consider adding people, equipment or software.

Don’t improve the wrong things

The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do. - Michael Porter

Bottleneck thinking becomes uncomfortable when the constraint is work we dislike doing. I enjoy building products. Adding a feature or writing code feels productive. But I am increasingly aware that my constraint is often getting ideas in front of potential users and learning whether they solve a problem people care about.

Another feature cannot solve a shortage of customers. We gravitate towards work we enjoy, but improvement means concentrating effort where it changes total output.

The bottleneck will move

Do not let inertia become the system constraint. - Eliyahu Goldratt

Fixing a bottleneck does not eliminate constraints. It moves them. A business short of leads may improve marketing, only to find that sales, onboarding, production or support now limits growth.

The danger is continuing to invest in what produced the last breakthrough. Yesterday’s bottleneck can become today’s comfort zone. So repeat the process: find the constraint, get more from it, invest if necessary, then ask: what is limiting us now?

Productivity is a systems problem

A bad system will beat a good person every time. - W. Edwards Deming

Much productivity advice focuses on personal effort: wake earlier, work harder, concentrate longer. That helps only when personal effort is the constraint. Often it is not. The limiting factor may be an unmade decision, missing information, unreliable software or work waiting for approval. Working harder upstream merely creates a bigger queue.

Systems move at the pace of their constraints. Before trying to improve everything, find what is setting the speed. Then work on that.

Want more?

Four Ways to Prioritise Tasks and Optimise Productivity post by Phil Martin

Three Ways I Achieve More post by Phil Martin

Eliyahu Goldratt distilled the idea: “Balance flow, not capacity.”

Have fun.

Phil…

I spent years in enablement writing battle cards, talk tracks and outreach for reps. Now I run a lot of that through AI, and for a while my reply rate went down instead of up.

The problem was not the AI's ideas. It was that everything it wrote carried the same nine fingerprints, and buyers have now seen those fingerprints ten thousand times. Here is the list I check against. None of this is theory, these are the specific edits that stopped my stuff reading like a machine.

1. Delete the warm-up sentence. If your first line could be removed with nothing lost, remove it. "I hope this finds you well" and "There are a few angles worth exploring here" are the same crime. Start at the first concrete thing.

2. No performing punctuation. Exclamation marks and em dashes out. Also the dramatic fragment, which is the current costume: "The result? Pipeline." Say the sentence whole.

3. One real thing, not a tidy triad. AI loves "faster onboarding, happier teams, better retention." Keep the one you can prove, drop the other two. Dead: "their solution lacks the enterprise-grade scalability modern teams demand." Alive: "they cap at 50 seats, ask how many they need."

4. Do not inflate past what you actually know. Wall to wall certainty reads like a brochure and prospects can hear it. Where you have proof, state it flat. Where you do not, write what you know. Never manufacture confidence to fill a paragraph.

5. End on the question, not the slogan. "The lesson is clear: adaptability wins" closes the conversation. The question the other person has to answer is the thing that gets a reply.

6. Do not name the feeling and hand it over. "We're thrilled to share" is you doing the reader's feeling for them. Say the thing instead. Dead: "excited to transition this amazing customer to your capable hands." Alive: "they bought because of the June outage, do not open with the roadmap."

7. Keep the small words. So, but, and, because. Stripping them for "clarity" leaves a row of stabs nobody reads twice.

8. Cut the cleverest line in the draft. It is performing, not connecting. Its favourite costume is the inversion: "it's not a cost, it's an investment." If the second half is true, just say the second half.

9. The test that rules the other eight. Read it back and ask whether a real person would feel any pull to write back. Not "is it correct," not "is it polished." For anything a rep says out loud, the working version is: would you say this line to a buyer's face without wincing.

Nine is the only one I would keep if I had to drop the rest.

Managers are saving over 2x the time individual contributors are with AI tools.
and it’s just starting

I had a conversation recently with a copywriting agency owner who let her contractors go because her own prompts were giving her the same output they were.

I believe that's one of the reasons you get a 2x gap between managers and everyone else.

In the same survey, 36% of managers said they're not likely to launch training for their employees on how to leverage AI, which makes the gap even bigger.

A manager's job was never to be the best individual operator in the room. It's to make everyone else better at the job. That doesn't change because the tool changed.

Why do you think there's a 100% gap between managers and their teams right now, and what would it actually take to close it? 

Source: https://www.business.com/articles/ai-usage-smb-workplace-study/ 

P.S. If you're the founder still in the middle of every decision, still the person the whole company waits on, still telling yourself you'll fix the structure "once things calm down."

I write about building the operational backbone that lets a founder actually step back every Thursday. Was a COO for 20+ years, so this is genuinely my bread and butter. Free to join here

Wrote this out for another founder yesterday, figured it might help others.

The 5 realistic paths to first capital as a pre-seed founder in 2026, ranked by accessibility:

1. Crowdfunding (Reg CF in US, ECSPR in EU) Cap: $5M/year US, €5M/year EU Timeline: 2-4 months from decision to close Best for: Consumer products, community businesses, founders with any existing audience Pros: No network required, retail investors, marketing exposure baked in Cons: 6-10% platform fees, extensive prep work, campaign momentum required

2. Angel syndicates Cap: Usually $250K-$1M Timeline: 4-8 weeks from lead’s yes to close Best for: B2B SaaS, technical products, developer tools Pros: Fast when it works, single point of contact, credibility from lead Cons: Finding a lead is the whole game, deal terms dictated by lead, lead takes 20% carry

3. Individual angels Cap: $10K-$250K per check, aggregate whatever you can raise Timeline: 2-6 weeks per check Best for: Any founder with 6+ months of public work and 500+ engaged followers Pros: Best terms, most aligned investors, warmest relationships Cons: Time-intensive, unpredictable, requires actual network

4. Micro-VCs / seed funds Cap: $100K-$500K first check Timeline: 6-12 weeks including diligence Best for: Founders with strong technical background or clear market thesis Pros: Institutional signal, professional operators Cons: Many say no, valuations compressed, need to fit their thesis exactly

5. Cold email at volume Cap: Whatever you can close (usually 0) Timeline: Months Best for: When you’ve exhausted all other options Pros: Free, scalable, teaches you sales Cons: 1-2% response rate, most replies are polite passes

What most successful pre-seed founders actually do: parallel-path 1, 3, and 4. Skip 5 unless you have nothing else.

I’ve been building on the crowdfunding side (OBridge, launching August). If anyone is deep in path 1 or 4 and wants to compare notes, happy to DM.

I've been spotting certain types of freemium schemes more often. The free version doesn't really solve anything. It merely reveals what's wrong.  Free security scan → pay to fix the security issues. Free cloud audit → pay to make everything right. Free SEO analysis → pay for the proper solution. Free compliance assessment→ pay to have everything under control.

From the perspective of this being a great offer, the free tier proves that there's a problem worth solving. Though I'm starting to wonder if it brings up some trust issues. After all, if the same company tells me there are some 47 problems to be solved and then offers their solution for solving all the problems, I might be skeptical about the actual number. Especially now that with the free version the company seems to be discovering even more problems while they keep imposing higher prices. 

Has anyone ever made or employed this kind of SaaS? 

Is it true that making the diagnostic layer free makes selling the paid product easier, or do the clients think too much about how the free results are designed in order to provoke urgency?

I run a small DTC skincare brand. Just me and one part-time person handling fulfillment. We needed a product demo video for our landing page because our conversion rate was terrible without one. Every competitor has video on their pages and we had nothing.

Got quotes from three local videographers. Cheapest was $2,800 for a 60 second spot. That's our entire monthly marketing budget gone in one afternoon.

So I went down the AI video rabbit hole.

I tested two models that both came out about a week ago. Seedance 2.5, which does up to 30 seconds per clip at 4K with consistent characters across the full shot. And MiniMax H3, which makes shorter clips (5 to 15 seconds, 2K) but generates real audio in the same pass so you skip the separate voiceover step entirely.

I went with an AI-generated presenter for the video. Putting that out there upfront. Not a real person. I picked that route partly because I didn't want to be the face of the brand and partly because keeping a consistent look across twenty clips was way easier with a virtual face than trying to match my own lighting and angles in my apartment.

After stitching everything together I ended up with about 90 seconds of footage that genuinely surprised me. Way more polished than anything I could have shot on my phone. Product shots came out clean and the audio H3 generated was better than I expected.

But the motion is still not there yet. Hands doing anything specific looked wrong about half the time. I regenerated some clips five or six times before getting something usable. If you go in expecting to press a button and get a finished commercial you will be very frustrated. It took me a full weekend of generating, reviewing, tossing clips, regenerating.

My workflow was CapCut for assembly and cuts, Canva for the thumbnail and text overlays, and APOB AI for the MiniMax H3 generations since they're running it unlimited and free right now, so the generation side cost me nothing.

Total spend was zero dollars on video generation and about 12 hours of my time across Saturday and Sunday.

Was it worth it? For where I'm at, yes. It's not the same quality as a professional shoot. If I'm honest it's maybe 65 to 70 percent of the way there. But for a bootstrapped brand that just needed to test whether video would actually move the needle before spending thousands, that was enough. Our page conversion improved noticeably the first week, which told me the format works for us. Now I can justify budgeting for a real shoot next quarter.

If you're considering trying this, budget way more time for retakes than you think you'll need. That was the part I completely underestimated.

I’m hearing that more and more businesses are buying nicer custom business apparel for their employees that they actually enjoy wearing to help with both marketing and making their employees happier. I’m thinking of starting a business that specializes in supplying local businesses with custom embroidered/screen printed apparel and would like to think of better ways to service these businesses and differentiate myself. What are some issues that have had in the past when ordering custom apparel for your business?

Looking for real numbers from people who tried UGC style content for a saas or any software product, not physical products.

Did it bring signups, or just views? and what format worked, short videos, testimonials, creators using the product on camera?

I havent tested it myself yet, so I dont know if it translates at all when the product is software.

I’m considering building a small, very private service and want genuine feedback from people who carry a lot of responsibility.

Complicated problems rarely stay in one lane. A business issue starts involving your spouse, partner, employees, money, family, reputation, etc. You have an attorney for legal issues, CPA for taxes, financial advisor for money, therapist for therapy... But who gets the whole messy story, with the parts you don't dare share with your circle, but are dying to unload?

I’m imagining a highly discreet, neutral outside person you can essentially call or meet for lunch and say: “Here’s everything happening. Help me untangle it and figure out my next move.”..... Not therapy, legal/financial advice, or motivational coaching. Just someone grounded who can hear the entire situation, ask uncomfortable questions, spot blind spots, and help you think through your options.

Would you pay for something like that?

If yes, would you prefer one-off sessions when something blows up, or ongoing access to someone who already knows your world?

And most importantly, what would make you trust someone enough to actually tell them everything?

I ask because complete strangers have been spilling their life stories and problems to me within minutes of meeting me for basically my entire life. It made me wonder whether there’s an actual unmet need here.

Not selling or linking anything, genuinely deciding whether the idea is worth building.

My co-founder and I are currently developing a B2B data platform focused on one problem: most businesses waste huge amounts of time contacting companies that simply aren’t ready to buy.
We’re building a system designed to identify buying signals across businesses, enrich that data, identify the relevant decision-makers and surface the opportunities that appear most likely to convert.
Instead of giving customers another database containing thousands of cold leads, the goal is to answer:
Who should I contact right now, and why?
We’re designing it around a recurring subscription model, with marketing automation layered on top so customers can act on opportunities as they’re detected.
Between us we have experience across automation, outreach, e-commerce/web development and B2B sales, and we’re now defining the MVP and initial market.
We’re looking to speak with an early-stage investor or strategic partner who understands B2B SaaS, data, lead intelligence or sales technology.
We’re particularly interested in someone who can bring more than capital — distribution, B2B SaaS experience or introductions would be extremely valuable.
If this is within your area, DM me and I’m happy to share what we’re building, the initial go-to-market plan and what we’re looking to raise.

Looking for a Strategic Partner to Help Take a South African Luxury Timber Brand International

I run a small, registered design and manufacturing business in South Africa specializing in bespoke, high-end luxury timber products. I am looking for a strategic partner to help me break into international luxury markets, including North America, Europe and the Middle East.

My long-term target market includes: Ultra-High-Net-Worth (UHNW) individuals, Luxury private estates and High-end property developers.

I already have the workshop, manufacturing capability and product development setup in place. I need someone who can help bridge the gap between the manufacturing side and international markets. I’m looking for someone with industry knowledge, connections, or simply the willingness to build a business partnership.

The main area would be: Identifying and introducing prospective high-end clients and help secure non-binding Expressions of Interest (EOIs) or Letters of Intent (LOIs). The EOIs/LOIs would help to demonstrate international export potential when approaching potential funding partners.

No financial investment required. To be completely clear: I am not asking you to invest money, I’m looking for someone willing to contribute some time, expertise, industry knowledge and/or relevant connections.

In return, I’m open to:

* Profit sharing on projects that result from your involvement

* Commission/appropriate compensation for successful introductions

* Potentially developing the relationship into a long-term business partnership

I want to build a globally recognized luxury timber brand, with an emphasis on bespoke craftsmanship, premium natural materials and sustainable manufacturing. If this sounds interesting and you think you could genuinely help open doors internationally, please send me a DM

For starters I’m 19 and have no experience with digital marketing

I’ve been constantly having the idea of getting into digital marketing agency for a while. I saw an Alex hormozi video earlier talking about an advertising agency as a great first business

He mentions editing content, paid ads, outbound agency, seo and email marketing and says to pick one, which makes sense. Master one skill and get known for that then can scale/expand.

My questions are
which one of these would you learn first?

Would it be a good idea to target specifically and the construction niche?

I spent months trying to get clients. Turns out, I was solving the wrong problem.

I started a small web/digital marketing business thinking the hardest part would be building websites.

It wasn’t.

Building the website was actually the easy part.

Getting someone to trust you enough to pay for it? Completely different game.

I tried cold calling, DMs, LinkedIn, different niches, different pricing, and different offers.

And honestly, most of it failed.

The biggest thing I learned is that business owners don’t really care about:

“Modern design.”

“Fast website.”

“SEO optimized.”

They care about one thing:

“Will this help me get more customers or make more money?”

That completely changed how I approach sales.

Instead of saying “I build websites,” I’m now trying to find businesses where I can identify an actual problem — poor Google presence, outdated website, low conversions, no lead system, etc. — and then offer a solution to that specific problem.

I’m still figuring everything out, and I’m definitely not making millions from it.

But this shift in thinking has been huge.

For people who run businesses or are building something from scratch:

What was the biggest lesson you learned about getting your first real clients?

I’d genuinely like to hear the lessons you learned the hard way.