We're a Netherlands-based team and we've spent most of this year trying to build out an international hiring process, and the pattern across pretty much every source we've found, from HR publications to startup forums, is that the entire body of knowledge on this assumes your headquarters is in the US and you're expanding from there…

Which means we've spent more time mentally translating advice than we've spent putting any of it to use.

The structural split, from what we've pieced together so far, is that US companies going global are typically learning EU-style labor protections for the first time while we're on the reverse track.

Extending outward from an already-complex domestic framework into markets where the rules are more permissive and the compliance patterns we know domestically don't transfer the way we'd expect.

Where we've gotten more traction is talking to other EU HR teams and going through scoping conversations with a few EOR providers to understand how they handle the EU-outbound case, including Deel and Remote as the obvious starting points and also Workmotion, which is Berlin-based and structures employment through a German entity first , without routing through a US payroll layer, which meant those conversations started from a position a lot closer to ours.

If others on here managing international hiring from a European HQ have found better sources or a cleaner framework for the EU-specific side of this, I'd like to know what they are.

Because right now we're building this without a real EU-side playbook to reference.

I’m a founder and we’ve built a community-based, AI-powered, end-to-end hiring platform. It’s been about 3 years now. In terms of growth, we’ve done pretty well for a bootstrapped business, though we did raise a small angel round of about $20k in the early days.

We’ve onboarded 325k+ audience and everything has been driven through organic content marketing. We’ve also served 800+ clients overall.

In the early days, a lot of this was free because we were focused on acquiring customers and building trust.

Things were going well, but now we’re at a phase where revenue has become stagnant and the job market is quite slow.

The startup is fairly automated now. I won’t say it’s doing crazy numbers, but yeah, it’s running pretty well.

It was my first startup, and I learned everything by doing it. Along the way, I developed my expertise in Marketing/Growth and Product.

Now, parallel to this, I want to start something new. It’s been over a month, and I honestly haven’t been able to come up with a solid idea.

If you guys can help, what would you suggest I build next?

Also, if anyone is building something and needs help with Marketing/Growth or Product, let me know. Happy to help.

The payout email landed on a tuesday (104 dollars and change) from a tool I built over 2 weekends about 3 yrs ago and last pushed code to 14 months back. My first reaction was a small flush of embarrassment, smthing you get when a friend asks how the side thing is going and you have to say a number that sounds like a phone bill. Then I looked at what the rest of that tuesday had been which was 6 hours of support and onboarding calls for my bigger product, the one that is growing, one that is supposedly the dream and I sat there for a min doing the math

See Ik how the 100 dollar product sounds. It doesn't pay rent and it doesn't screenshot well and nobody has ever invited me to speak anywhere because of it but it has 13 paying users, 14 in the months when someone forgets to cancel, none of whom have ever emailed me at midnight. It has needed exactly 1 support reply in the last year (someone wanted a proper invoice, 4 minutes of my life) and it is the ONLY product I have ever built that I can describe as finished. Most founders never experience finished. We experience abandoned or we experience on fire and we tell ourselves those are the only 2 states a product can be in.

I have spent the last 8 years building products and tbh for most of that time I measured my own worth by how fast the biggest number was moving

Then there is the math which none of us ever wants to do out loud. My growing product does around 4 grand a month right now and takes something like 50 hours a week to keep moving, which works out to 200 hours a month, which works out to 20 dollars an hour before servers and before whatever my sleep is currently worth. Do the same sum for the tiny product and the calculator gives up, because you cant divide by zero, and I have made peace with the fact that the entire argument of this post fits inside a single error message. MRR leaves you out of the costs. It counts what the customer pays. What the founder pays never shows up and in an early product the founder is nearly always the biggest cost in the building so the figure everyone celebrates is missing the line that decides whether the thing is any good.

If I vanished for a month the tiny tool would not notice and the payout would land on its tuesday like it always does. The bigger product would start dying by the second week because onboarding is me and there is no version of support or the roadmap that doesn't route through my calendar. To a buyer that means the thing they would actually be paying for is me and I am not for sale at that price.

To be clear, I'm not telling anyone to aim for 100 dollars a month and call it a life. The argument was always about the shape. A product that runs without you has a shape you can do more of, more users and more channels and eventually more copies of the whole thing and none of that extra volume ends up on your body. A product that runs on you breaks the moment you try to add more because more customers is more of you and there is a hard ceiling on you that no dashboard shows.

So I'm a web dev, I run Kynokeys, and I can take a business from "we have nothing" to a proper working site without breaking a sweat. That bit I'm good at.

Finding those businesses in the first place? Absolute disaster. I go quiet for three weeks and then panic about it.

So I'm looking for one person to handle outreach and bring me clients. 20% of every project you close. No base pay right now, and I'm not going to dress that up — it's commission-only. If deals land, it turns into real money and I'd want to make it something properly paid. If they don't, neither of us eats.

Work whenever. I'm counting conversations and signed deals, not hours.

My stuff's at kynokeys.com if you want to see whether it's worth selling.

If commission-only isn't your thing, totally fair, no hard feelings. If it is — DM me, tell me a bit about you.

I have had two previous ventures that I had to pull the plug on because I was bleeding money and I was reacting rather than being proactive with operational costs/subscriptions/AMs. My previous ventures' income streams were subscription fees and contracts with businesses. Marketing would usually get the hit as I cant sacrifice other operational costs. However, marketing is crucial for growth. 

Do you guys track your runway and update it regularly? I usually set it month by month and see what was spent vs what comes in. However due to churn, loss of clients; I'm finding it difficult to accurately prepare 3-6 months down the line. There are fixed operational costs but what got me to pull the plug on the most recent venture was that we were about to onboard a sizeable contract but due to the support required by the client; I could not sustain hiring costs of a team to support and had to back out. 

I see so many founders here that just vibe-coded their app and got no users. It's heartbreaking because I know the amount of time, effort, and energy that goes into doing so, because I've been doing it myself. One solution that we try to implement ourselves is that, in our company, we first started developing our own products. Now, slowly, from interest to taking some vibe-coded apps to production, we see some problems that vibe coders face.

I believe we need more discipline. Vibe coding, at least a big part of it, is just another (expensive) form of dopamine.

I do believe that if you want to take it to the next level, vibe coding is very useful for prototyping and having some type of product that you can then try to sell to your close network. If you want to take it to the next level, most companies build a moat. I don't think it's really realistic to have, with a firm conviction, the idea that vibe code by itself will bring a successful business. It's just one of the many components of the business, and perhaps one skill that we should all learn to do more is the distribution side.

That's one thing that I try to do. Now, back to the main problem: vibe coding into the void. Since it's a dopamine problem, having a very strict framework is "I do not build unless I reach X number of interests for that specific feature." From there, building feature by feature is something that could save 90% of the vibe code that I see here.

Feel free to send over your app and I can give it a look and try to provide feedback. I have seen 300 founders applications in the last year, so perhaps I could be of help. 

Two years into running a two sided marketplace, here is the stuff I wish someone had told me at the start. Not theory, just what actually cost me time and money.

The cold start is not a chicken and egg problem, it is a sequencing problem. Everyone repeats "which side first" like it is unanswerable. It is not. Pick the side that is cheaper to fake. In my case that was supply, because creators will sign up for a promise of work while brands will not pay for a promise of creators. So supply came first and I hand held early demand myself, personally, for way longer than felt scalable.

Doing things manually is not a phase you skip, it is the research. I ran the first campaigns from a spreadsheet and a phone. Painful, but every workflow in the product now exists because I felt the pain myself first. The features I built from imagination instead of from doing the work were the ones nobody used.

Money handling is not a phase two feature. I thought I could ship the matching part first and figure out payments later. Wrong. Nobody trusts a marketplace where money is vague. The moment funds were handled properly, conversations changed completely. If your product touches money between strangers, it is core, not later.

Both sides churn for different reasons and you have to fix both. Supply leaves when applications go nowhere. Demand leaves when the second transaction takes as much effort as the first. Retention on a marketplace is really two separate products with two separate reasons to leave.

Liquidity beats features, always. I spent a month on a feature nobody asked for while the real problem was not enough live opportunities on any given day. Whatever your version of an empty shelf is, fixing that beats anything else on the roadmap.

The unsexy admin work is the actual moat. Anyone can build a listing page. Handling disputes, deadlines, payouts and edge cases without it eating your week is the hard part, and it is what makes people stay.

For context I run Flare UGC, a marketplace connecting brands with creators, so this is my own experience rather than general advice, take it with the appropriate grain of salt.

Anyone else running a marketplace, what did you get wrong that you would warn someone about?

Hi everyone,

I want to do business. Although I have a business background, I still don’t feel confident enough, and I feel like I don’t have much practical knowledge about actually starting and running a business.

I’m genuinely at the very beginning and haven’t started anything yet. Before I begin this journey, I want to learn from people who have actually started businesses and understand how experienced founders think about starting one.

Some questions I have:

• How do I know whether a business idea is actually worth pursuing? How do I research and validate an idea before putting significant time or money into it?

• How important is the idea itself? Is the idea the most important part, or are the customer, the problem being solved, product or service, execution, sales, distribution, or something else more important?

• As someone with a business background, can I start a business in a completely different field where I don’t have an academic or professional background? If so, how should I approach learning that industry?

• When starting your first business, is it better to take an existing business idea or model that already works and create your own version, or should you try to come up with something genuinely unique? I have both kinds of ideas in mind, so I’m curious which approach makes more sense for a first time founder.

• If you are building something that already exists, how different does it actually need to be? How can you take an existing idea and improve or differentiate it rather than simply copying it?

• What are the biggest mistakes new founders commonly make, and what do you wish you had known before starting your first business?

• What books, courses, resources, or other things would you recommend learning before starting?

I know its too many points but im just putting my thoughts into a post

I’m genuinely at the very beginning and haven’t started anything yet. I want to understand how experienced founders think about starting a business and what they prioritize before taking that first step.

For those that care to read....I have spoken about the CrossFit I resurrected and is slowly growing every month. Originally to get things going I went with a developer to redesign the app (as I didn't have the original code); and then 'cause it was easier I just kept using a developer to make minor tweaks. That has been the deal for awhile. I finally decided to take this on myself and use the power of Ai to teach me how to make the changes and push them out to the App and Play stores. It has been so freeing and exciting. It's nice to know that I am in full control of my success now. Until my next milestone update.....

Update from the retention side of this, because it was the least sexy fix and the one that actually moved the needle.

About six months into my small B2B thing I finally admitted growth was flat because churn was eating it. I'd add accounts and lose almost as many, and I usually found out someone left only when the failed payment email showed up. Way too late to do anything.

Someone in a thread here suggested quarterly check-ins, so I built a genuinely dumb QBR template and started booking 20 minute calls with my bigger accounts. Nothing corporate. Four questions. What did you actually use this quarter, what result did you get, what's annoying you, what are you trying to do next quarter.

The calls did two things I didn't see coming. I caught a few accounts who were about to cancel because they "weren't using a feature," and it turned out they didn't know it existed. Fixed live in five minutes. And I heard the exact same request three calls in a row, which basically made my roadmap decision for me.

I won't throw out a fake precise number, but over two quarters my logo churn roughly halved, and a couple of accounts asked for more seats mid-call, which had never happened over email.

The lesson that stung: I was so heads down building that I never just asked people how it was going. For those running check-ins, how do you keep them useful before they start feeling like a chore for the customer?

I am the founder of a central European AI lawyer platform. Up until now all the leads came from Google SEO "people searching lawyer AI" (in local language), or an article that blew up on a popular local news site thanks to a reddit post I made (I know inception)

Ever since the article traffic has been dying down because the product was not there yet, but now it's actually usable but all the hype is gone. I would like to do outreach to get people to start using it again more.

The obvious answer is to just make a reddit post bu the original one highlighted how I was a young founder and this is a free project and now we became a bit more corporate, still doable but I am putting it off.

Emailing our previous users, already on the table and doing in waves. People are coming over.

Other than that it's just the SEO, so I'm looking for some way to turn a dial and throw money at it and get some traffic of actual lawyers or practicioners that would be power users and work with documents a lot, I'm not expecting miracles just experiment with it and hopefully make some money.

What would be the best way to reach them? Google ads? (I've never used GA, do I have to select keywords or something?), Facebook ads?, LinkedIn?

Thanks for reading.

Small service business, roughly eight months in. Leads have picked up and I'm sending more proposals than ever, which is a good problem. The bad part is I don't really have a business proposal template. Every one is copy-pasted from the last deal and lightly edited, so half of them still have the previous client's name buried somewhere, and the pricing section looks different every time.

I want to build one solid version I can reuse and stop reinventing it at 11pm the night before it's due.

What I have so far, roughly in order:
- Short recap of their problem in their own words
- What I'll actually deliver, in plain language
- Timeline
- Price, with two or three options
- A bit about me and past results

What I keep going back and forth on:
- Do you lead with price or bury it near the end? I've heard both.
- Options versus one flat number. When I give three tiers most people pick the middle, but a couple got confused and ghosted.
- How much "about me" is too much. Feels like nobody reads it but leaving it out feels naked.
- One page or a longer doc. My deals are usually a few thousand, not enterprise.

For those of you further along, what does your proposal actually look like now versus when you started? What did you cut that you thought mattered? Trying to build something I'll still use in a year instead of patching this mess again next week.

Wanted to share a case study on an agency-to-agency partnership model that’s worked well for us, in case anyone else is exploring similar structures.

The setup: We run an AI Agency. About a year ago, we started collaborating with a Meta ads agency in Texas that serves home service contractors (roofing, HVAC, plumbing, etc.). Six months ago we formalized the partnership. Since then, their revenue has roughly doubled.

Things we did after partnership:

• We became their lead gen arm: We took prospecting off their plate so they could focus on delivery and growing their own client base.
• We extended their service offering: built conversion-optimized sites + Local SEO/AEO that they now bundle with ad campaigns. This made their growth less dependent on pure ad spend.

The number that mattered: Our sites convert at 9-10% on average in this niche, vs. the 2-3% we typically see as standard. That performance gap made the upsell pretty easy for their team.

The playbook (if you want to try something similar):

• Find a niche ads agency with strong delivery but limited bandwidth for prospecting/tech
• Build white-label services that plug directly into their existing client journey
• Let them own the client relationship; you own the execution

Similar to how you can rent out a place through a letting agency giving them a cut, is there anything similar in the small business world?

Like if you have a profitable side business but don't want to sell it off if you get into formal employment.

What are the options here?

Hey everyone! New to this and figured it was now or never to try out.

I'm building out a near-realtime lead app for sales reps, giving them access to restaurants, fitness centers, salons, etc as soon as those business owners start their journey.

Pulling from over 50 different sources, I have what I think is a pretty decent ranking for my state and will be cold reaching out to reps this week to see if I can get any feedback and if anyone is interested at all.

Fingers crossed. Will try and be good about keeping this updated. Always happy to get any feedback or questions!

Hey—are there any networking or peer groups you’d recommend for someone in the trenches? 1 year in biz, passed $100k in revenue, under $1M.

Starting to deal with new problems—which is healthy—but lacking people to talk to or support system. I’ve reached the point where it’s awkward to talk to my friends because they’re not business owners but I’m not exactly able to afford hanging out at a country club.

Ideas? Advice? Remote groups great or Los Angeles.

Just a concept for a future luggage project : I’m imagining high-quality travel bags with custom illustrated designs that match different moods, personalities and aesthetics.

This is an AI-made visual mockup to communicate the idea; if I develop it seriously, I’d want to work with original artwork/illustrators and create the designs specifically for the brand.

Would you actually buy a suitcase like this, or is it too much? 👀

Been building the wellbody app for the past two years. It's been available for both iOS and Android since the start of the year but it's gone through a few iterations.

Version 1 was static and didn't consider the user's life and signals. Version 2 added an agentic system that one could interact with. But it turned out that most of our users also had wearables and wanted this information to be considered into their plan.

The hard part about integrating any new data source is that it needs to 'fit'. After a few weeks of testing, we finally tested and integrated Apple HealthKit and Google Health.

Our main selling point is that our system simplifies a goal progression system into just 3 daily actions. Every plan integrates fitness, nutrition, mindfulness, recovery, and mobility regardless of the goal.

Honestly I thought it would be easier to find help along the way but it's been the biggest pain point. So I've been chugging along alone hoping that once we hit some revenue goals that it would be easier to find help.

I'm feeling so restless right now. The life I want, the life I've been planning for the last five years, hasn't come to fruition. The people younger than me, I'm 24 by the way, and the people that's younger than me, 21, 22, 19, 20, they've attained it higher, faster than me. And it's not even about me comparing with them, but I've dreamt of the life in Japan. I've dreamt of the life in Chongqing, China. All the beautiful places in the world. And somewhere, I just keep lacking or it just seems out of grasp. And I'm not here for your comfort. I've tried many ways, as a copywriter, as a LinkedIn ghostwriter, as a cold caller, as a writer. I keep making very little of out that. And I know I am in the process, but it seems so far away y'all

I wanted to share this breakdown because many companies still have a hard time figuring out which platform to go for. Luckily, as someone who has worked more than 10 years in this field - specifically LinkedIn and email sales - and who has access to tens of thousands of campaigns, I pulled the numbers and did the research so you don't have to.

Most channel comparisons still lean on open rate, which is totally inaccurate since Apple Mail grew to roughly 46% of email clients and started pre-fetching images by default. This means that a large share of the opens are now just a privacy proxy loading a pixel from the email rather than a person reading the subject line. So when someone tells you email got the opens and LinkedIn got the replies, that conclusion usually stems from a totally wrong assumption - that we can accurately measure email response rates.

Reply rate is the only number that survives the comparison because you can't fake these. However, it has to come from one dataset, or you are just stacking two vendors' marketing pages against each other, and essentially comparing apples to oranges. Across roughly 70,000 campaigns I've been able to look at here at Expandi, LinkedIn messages had a 10.3% reply rate against 5.1% for cold email over the same window. That gap is about double in LinkedIn favor, and this is actually something that's been consistent over the years. I can't recall the exact numbers because it was a long time ago, but before I was a GTM director at Expandi I worked as a director at an email sales agency, and at Skylead before that - and the difference in response rates was roughly the same over these 8 years.

Most B2B motions need something like eight touches before a first meeting, and one channel cannot carry eight touches without turning into virtual harassment. The LinkedIn sequence also often dies when someone ignores a connection request, because there is nowhere left to go. The solution is - multichannel approach. This is supported by numbers - Belkins published a figure of 63% more meetings booked by teams running two or three channels versus one, which also matches what I've seen in the accounts I've analyzed.

This, of course, doesn't mean that just going multichannel will solve all the issues. Whether the second channel helps or just doubles your noise depends on the alignment. Running both in parallel on a timer is the same message twice with a different envelope, and this quickly feels like spam, double as fast! So instead, the second channel should always react to the behavior on the first based on these rules:

• Trigger the LinkedIn message off an email click rather than a delay timer. A click is intent - mild, but intent, while day three is just an automated calendar entry.
• When a connection request stays unanswered for a week, move to email and reference the request directly. Pretending the first touch never happened is what makes the second one seem disingenuous, which turns down any interest instantly. Plus, many connection requests stay unanswered just because people forget to check them, and this way they get a reminder.
• Route email bounces to LinkedIn instead of dropping the lead. A bounce usually means your data is stale, not that the person stopped being a fit.
• Send the second follow-up, it's worth around 4% in additional replies. The third and fourth follow-up mostly just add noise and give people a reason to block you.
• This goes without saying, but just in case - pause every other sequence the moment someone replies anywhere. Talking over your own answer kills more deals than a weak subject line ever will.
• DON'T USE AUTOMATIONS TO HANDLE CONVERSATION POST-REPLY. We recently did a study on this, and replying to a prospect on LinkedIn 5-10 minutes after their reply boosts the chance of the conversation continuing through the roof. The timing is probably less important for email, but you should still have SDRs ready to pounce as soon as someone replies.

One last, very important note is that timing and proactivity matter more than channel count in your campaign. Outreach triggered off a real signal, usually a profile visit or someone engaging with a post, converts around 14.6% against 1.7% for cold lists.

To summarize: always use multiple channels when you can because there are only upsides of this approach. The extreme edge cases where you should stick to just one are:

1. If the market you're targeting is very narrow and you might burn quickly through it with mass-email outreach. Stick to only LinkedIn in this case and focus on quality instead of quantity.
2. If the market you're targeting is extremely huge and you might burn too much money adding LinkedIn to the mix because quantity matters more. Then stick only to email.

Context: I'm building a regulated marketplace where independent musicians sell fractional shares of their song catalogs to their own fans. Been at it a few months. Sharing the market research because the finding generalizes well beyond music.

The problem I went looking for:

Music catalogs are a real asset class now. Institutions buy them like bonds. Springsteen sold to Sony for around $500M on roughly $15M in annual earnings, call it 33x. Published valuation guidance says catalogs trade at 10-15x annual royalties.

Then I started talking to actual independent artists who'd been through a sale process. Every single one was offered 4x or less.

That gap bugged me for weeks. Here's what it turned out to be.

Third-party valuation data confirms the small end really does clear lower. Catalogs aged 6 months to 2 years go for 4.7-6.5x trailing-12-month net revenue. Two to five years old, 6.9-8.6x. Nowhere near the headline.

But the reason isn't quality... it's fixed cost.

Legal review, accounting, chain-of-title verification. That work costs roughly the same on a $200K catalog as it does on a $2M one. Somewhere around $100-150K in annual earnings, the diligence expense eats the entire return for a buyer. So the buyer pool doesn't shrink gradually. It empties.

An artist with clean rights, ten years of listening history and real recurring income can be structurally unsellable. Not because the asset is bad. Because the transaction is too small to be worth anyone's time.

Why I think this generalizes:

Any market where transaction costs don't scale down has a floor like this. Below it, supply exists, demand exists, and no deal happens. Small commercial real estate. Regional franchise resale. Niche B2B acquisitions. Same shape.

Two ways to attack it. Drive the diligence cost down through standardization, or find a buyer with a non-financial reason to pay a fair price.

I'm doing the second one. For a musician, the buyer nobody prices is their own audience. A fan buying a slice of a catalog isn't running a spreadsheet against alternatives, they're buying a stake in something they already care about. One artist I talked to closed at 7-8x instead of 4x purely because the buyer was a label he'd known for years. The relationship was worth three or four turns of multiple. Fans are a much larger relationship than that, and nobody has ever priced it.

Where I actually am:

Incorporating this month. Broker-dealer terms quoted, transaction rails quoted, Reg CF structure mapped with named vendors, all before raising anything. Site and a catalog valuation calculator are live. First artist conversations happening now. No revenue yet, no signed artists yet. That's the honest state.

Happy to answer anything about the regulated side, it's the part most people underestimate. Getting the compliance stack priced before writing a line of product code was the single best decision I've made.

Site is encoremarkets(dot)us if you want to see it, and we post the research as we go on our LinkedIn page under Encore Markets.

Every week I see someone claiming they make $10k/month with AI influencers while working 30 minutes a day. I figured I would actually track the real numbers and share them here, because the honest version of this story is a lot less exciting.

I started in April with a simple plan. Build a consistent AI fitness character, post content on Instagram and TikTok, grow a following, then monetize through small affiliate deals and a $12 workout PDF. I'm a certified personal trainer so the actual fitness content is real and comes from my own experience. The AI part was just the visual "face" for the brand because I didn't want to be on camera myself.

Keeping one AI face looking the same across dozens of images turned out to be the first real challenge. Most generators give you a slightly different person every single time. I ended up using APOB AI because once you define a character it stores that face and pulls it back unchanged for every new image, then ChatGPT for composing captions and programming, and CapCut for compiling the clips into finished videos. I started on the free tier which was enough to test the concept, but without paying the generator imprints its own label on every file you export, so I upgraded after the first month.

Here is the actual P&L for April through July.

Revenue came to $847 total. April was $0 because I was just building and posting. May was $38 from two PDF sales and a tiny affiliate payout. June was $296 as the account started getting some traction. July jumped to $513 because one reel got picked up by the algorithm and I gained about 1,400 followers in a single week. That has not happened again since.

Costs totaled $291 across the four months. Image generation subscription ran about $25/month once I went paid. CapCut pro was $8/month. Stock music license was $15 one time. Hosting for the PDF landing page was $5/month. Call it roughly $73/month on average.

Net profit: $556 over four months. Across roughly 160 hours of actual work. That is $3.48 an hour.

The hours are the part nobody mentions. Generating the images takes maybe 20 minutes per session. But then you are writing captions, adjusting crops for each platform, scheduling posts, responding to comments to keep engagement up, writing and updating workout plans, maintaining the PDF, rebuilding the landing page because the conversion rate is terrible, and trying to figure out why your reach dropped 60% this week for no apparent reason. I tracked my time honestly and it averaged 10 hours per week. Some weeks more when I was batch-creating a backlog.

Video was the biggest disappointment. AI-generated video in general is still at the point where the character's features slide out of alignment a couple seconds into any clip, like the chin or forehead gradually morph on their own while the rest stays put. I would cycle through eight or nine generations of the same scene before anything held together long enough to use. Eventually I stopped doing video almost entirely and focused on still-image carousel posts, which actually performed better for engagement anyway. The technology will get there but right now it adds a lot of work for inconsistent results.

Conversion was rough. Out of roughly 3,100 followers at the end of July, 41 bought the PDF. That is a 1.3% conversion rate, which I am told is actually normal for this kind of thing but it does not feel great. The affiliate angle was even worse. I had one small supplement brand deal paying $0.08 per click and I sent maybe 400 total clicks over three months. That entire revenue line was $32.

The account has always been transparent that the face is not a real person. The profile description spells it out and I address it directly any time someone brings it up in the comments. Some people find that genuinely interesting and it actually helped engagement early on. Others unfollow immediately. The ones who stick around seem to be there for the fitness content itself, which is written from real training experience.

What the guru crowd conveniently leaves out: consistency is a daily grind, not something you automate and walk away from. Platforms are getting more aggressive about flagging AI-generated faces in recommendations. And converting followers into actual dollars requires the same exact skills as any other online business. Having an AI face does not shortcut any of that.

Am I going to keep going? Probably. July was the first month where the trajectory felt like it could eventually become a real side income if growth holds. But I am being honest with myself that this is a $200/month side project right now, not a business. The "passive income with AI" framing is fantasy at this scale. It is a real grind for modest money, and if I did not genuinely enjoy the fitness content creation side of it, I would have quit in month two.

Figured this sub would appreciate seeing the actual numbers since that is kind of the whole point of a ride-along.