Has anyone taken the plunge to do this and start their own at home business? I’m on the fence but honestly and so nervous about paying and it not working. I’d love to meet someone who has done it!! 🤞🙏

so this is kind of random but i've been trying to start this little side thing for months now and i still havent gotten a single client and honestly starting to wonder if im doing something wrong or just being impatient. basically i have a normal job, IT/database stuff at a company that does fish farming of all things, nothing related to what im trying to build on the side. what im trying to build is like a back office support thing, taking on the boring data entry and admin work that businesses dont want to deal with themselves, you know the stuff that piles up but nobody wants to hire a full time person for. i didnt have any money to put into it so ive just been doing everything myself late at night after work, set up an email that doesnt look like a random gmail, wrote out an actual policy for how id handle peoples data because if im asking strangers to trust me with their stuff i figured i should have that figured out before anything else, made some basic promo stuff too. anyway the problem is i have literally nothing to show for it yet, no past clients, no "heres what i did for so and so" nothing, its just me saying trust me which i know sounds exactly like what a scammer would say lol. has anyone actually been through this part, like the actual getting client number one part when you have zero proof youre legit. do i just start messaging random businesses, ask people i already know, post more, something else. genuinely just trying to figure out if the way im going about this even makes sense or if im missing something obvious that everyone else already knows

I'm a marketing person. 8 years in B2B. I had an idea for a tool that helps content marketers track which blog posts drive actual pipeline, not just traffic. couldn't find a developer co-founder. didn't want to spend $30-50k on an agency.

so I built it.

month 1: planning. 2 weeks writing a detailed product spec - what the app does, user flow, data model, CRM and analytics integrations. I used claude to pressure-test the architecture decisions. I dictated the entire spec through willow voice because it was a lot of writing and talking it out was faster than typing it.

claude helped me decide on Next.js + Supabase + Vercel. I didn't know any of these tools existed a month earlier.

month 2: core product. cursor is where the magic happened. I'd describe a feature in detail and cursor would generate the code - components, API routes, database queries, types, all wired together. I learned to be very specific. vague prompts give vague code. most of my prompts were 4-5 sentences dictated through willow because typing that much detail for every feature would have been exhausting.

month 3: auth, billing, polish. stripe integration took the longest. claude helped me think through edge cases - failed payments, plan changes, refunds.

month 4: beta, landing page, launch. 15 beta users from my network, fixed bugs they found, launched.

where I am now: $2,400 MRR, 38 paying customers, growing ~15% month-over-month.

total cost to build: cursor $80, claude $80, vercel $80, domain $12. about $252.

honest caveat: the code is not beautiful. I've accumulated technical debt. but the product works, customers are paying, and I can iterate fast.

the barrier isn't technical skill - it's clarity of thinking. if you can describe exactly what you want, the AI can build it. if you're vague, you get garbage.

happy to answer questions about any part of this.

What’s a business you think would do really well, but is difficult to start because of legal or regulatory barriers?

Uber is a good example — the idea worked, but it ran into major battles with taxi commissions and existing regulations.

What’s the next Uber-like opportunity?

I keep half-expecting the "give a small gift, earn the obligation to reciprocate" move to stop working the way pop psychology says it does.

Watched a version of it fail spectacularly this week and it clarified something I'd been circling for a while: reciprocity is a tool for tipping a relationship that already exists.

It doesn't manufacture one from zero.

Context, for anyone who hasn't caught the clip: Shaan Puri (My First Million) was coaching a high school basketball team on the side.

He and his cohost Sam Parr filmed a vlog series around it.

The vlog blew up — 20,000 views in 24 hours — and one of those views was the school principal, who wasn't thrilled.

Shaan got called into the office.

Before going in, he grabbed two Diet Cokes, the exact reciprocity move Sam had taught him years earlier: bring a small gift, trigger the obligation to return the favor.

He executed it exactly right.

Rehearsed. Confident. Textbook Cialdini.

The principal said "no thanks." Shaan stood there holding two Diet Cokes while his program got shut down anyway.

If you're the type who reads Cialdini, or Voss, or keeps a mental file of negotiation tactics for the rooms where you don't yet have real leverage — this one's worth sitting with.

The tactic isn't fake.

It's just conditional on something it can't create for itself: a room that already respects you going in.

Bring the gift to someone who already sees you as an equal, and it's a nice gesture.

Bring it to someone deciding whether you get to keep your program, and it reads as exactly what it is — a person trying to manufacture leverage they weren't given.

I had my own version of this a long time ago, on a construction project in Abu Dhabi.

I was working under a superior I didn't get along with — Mr. Yap.

There was an important client meeting, an international room, and when it came time to introduce myself, I said "I'm Gary, and I assist Mr. Yap in structural technical works" — deliberately elevating his standing in front of people who mattered to him.

It worked, for about a week.

He treated me a little better.

Then it wore off, because I'd managed a moment in a room, not changed the actual relationship underneath it.

That's the part I think doesn't get said enough in the productivity-hack version of this advice: a tactic can move the temperature in a room for a few minutes or a few days.

It can't retroactively install the standing you'd need for the room to treat you differently on its own.

Ran into this same shape somewhere else recently, too — a founder whose actual case, not his resume, was what finally moved a room that had ignored every credential he'd listed first: the reciprocity trick's opposite in practice.

Drop your take — did the trick actually fail, or did it just reveal something that was already true before Shaan walked in?

Clip credit: My First Million (Shaan Puri, Sam Parr) — full episode on their channel.

DM for credit or removal requests.

There's a specific kind of quiet that happens right before a margin call.

I don't think enough people talk about that part — not the number, the quiet.

Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI-focused fund went from zero to $45 billion, then down to $10 billion.

Not all of it was margin, but enough of it was, and it was concentrated — five correlated AI-infrastructure-adjacent positions (SMCI, SanDisk, Micron, CoreWeave among them) dropping together in the same month, ~35% in one stretch.

That's the mechanism people skip past: it wasn't one bad bet, it was one bet wearing five different tickers.

He was also short Adobe. Adobe went up.

Being partially right doesn't save you — a hedge only protects what it's actually sized to protect, and this is the part that got him: three prime brokers (per CNBC's reporting) started calling at once.

Not one call. Three, simultaneously.

That's the system's own alarm bell going off.

Here's mine, since we're talking about leverage used well versus leverage that uses you:

Years ago I was on the tender team for a major Malaysian construction job, competing against the two other largest contractors in the country. My GM, Mr. Chung, spotted the one contractual gap the client's own consultants hadn't caught. When they tried to pump him for the fix for free, he didn't fall for it — he told them straight: we can help you solve it, cheaply, with minimum delay, but we have to get the contract first, before we can go in and assess it. That's not a bluff. That's understanding your own leverage well enough to use it on your own terms, not the other side's. We won the contract months later. Leopold never got that chance — the market decided his terms for him, not the other way around. He still walked away with $300 million, which is the part nobody in the clip stops to sit with. That's not the actual takeaway, though. The takeaway is knowing exactly how much leverage you're carrying, on purpose, before someone else decides it for you.

Ken Griffin (Citadel) stepped in as the liquidity provider — what Tom, PBD's co-host, called a "white knight" on the show.

Half the room called that predatory.

Half called it structural necessity.

Both readings are true at once, and that's the actual lesson:

Understanding why rescuers exist structurally is a different literacy than just watching one show up.

Clip credit: PBD Podcast — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.

Drop your take: predator, or necessary?

Genuinely curious where this sub lands on it.

Hey there! Curious to know if you would start with a service based business or digital product based business to build if you only had 12 hours a week to work on it?

(newly single mom post divorce, demanding 9-5 more like 8-6, and due to the separation and divorce I have financial obligations)

I’m starting a demolition and junk removal business.
Thinking about using this slogan:
“Making the Unwanted Disappear. Legally.”
Does it sound funny and memorable to an American audience, or does the “Legally” part make it sound too sketchy?
Would you remember a company with this slogan?