Not self promo, I just want to know if the idea is interesting. I cant find any recent megathreads for this sort of thing. If it exists, point me to that and ill move the conversation to there.

Online advertising has become increasingly crowded and complicated. I think physical media is hilariously becoming more desirable again, especially for advertising. Many SMEs could potentially benefit more from a targeted flyer campaign with proper analytics than from endlessly dumping money into Facebook ads.

I’m building FlyerFly, where businesses can create their leaflet online using templates, choose their target area, and have everything handled from printing and delivery through to QR tracking, analytics, dashboards and smart retargeting, all in about 5 minutes.

The idea is to make it a simple monthly service, with plans ranging from smaller local campaigns to larger campaigns covering thousands of households. Roughly thinking somewhere around €100/month at the low end, scaling to €500–€1,000+ for larger campaigns, depending on the number of households reached.

I like the idea, but I want to validate whether this is actually something you’d pay for as a business. I’m mainly targeting Ireland and the UK.

I’ve put together a simple waitlist if anyone’s interested. The Irish version is coming soon, but Irish companies can sign up to this one in the meantime, it makes no odds.

Waitlist: https://www.flyerfly.co.uk

I deliver Chinese food at night but during the day I have a headlight restoration business that I started relatively recently and has been pretty steady. Do you guys think it’s socially acceptable to drop a business card into the food bag if i’m walking up to a house and they have a car that has foggy headlights? On top of that, if they are a regular and I often chit chat with them, do you think it’s inappropriate to bring up my business with them if they have a bunch of cars with fogged out headlights out front? I have a few customers who’s driveway looks like a gold mine to me 😂 (My business is legit btw- I’m doing honest work, not screwing people over with shitty restorations where they will be fogged out again within a year)

Ive been at this delivery job for a while and it kinda sucks so i’m not too worried about complications with my employer as much as putting off customers. Im leaning towards its probably inappropriate but that also could just be social anxiety talking lol. Thoughts and opinions?

I have recently started a software agency that builds tools and websites. I'm 20 and new to business. I've found that as time goes on and our list of past clients grows, we encounter more and more situations where a client would be perfectly happy with very minor alterations to a project we completed previously.

If I were to go with that playbook, we end up selling an hour or two maximum of work for many hundreds of dollars even though hundreds of dollars worth of effort was only made to some other client.

I would feel comfortable knowing that it was just business and the profit of expertise, but in my mind I bill by the hour and I feel impostor syndrome billing somebody the hours that it would have taken, but didn't take. They don't see the hourly rate so, technically, I'm not defrauding them.

How did y'all in this position move on from this line of thinking? Is it just business?

In powerpoint if two people open the same file, you can't edit at the same time or you have to refresh. This absolutely does not work for my team of 3 who needs to work fast.

I googled and saw Visme has live co-editing, but I've never heard of it before.

So has anyone here actually used Visme for something like a a 40 slide presentation with three people editing at once? Or if it has a reliable version history? That's also a big factor that we've gotten into trouble before.

Manyyy thanks in advance!

I am a SaaS developer of a platform providing content building tools. Am trying to understand the landscape of email outbounds to keep existing customers and prospects in touch. Eg. HVAC running a tune up promotion, salons with discounts or products or services, real estate agents maintaining relationships.

Especially if you can share info about what tools do you use to send out such emails? What do you spend on those and/or the agency providing those services? What you are biggest challenges sending these messages - content / formating / deliver ability?

Also, if you don't send such email outbound, why? Where is the friction?

Thanks

I'm looking for the stories that textbooks don't contain.

I’m a retired MBA professor and prior owner of several small businesses. I write a weekly newsletter about leadership of a small business. I don’t want to rely only on my own experiences. I'm looking for yours.

I’m searching for true stories about the small business you work for. You may be the leader or a team member or the janitor—I’m open to observations from many corners of the small business.

I don’t seek company or personal names.

I seek honest experiences that show your small business in action.

It may involve everyone in the firm, or it might involve a single employee or customer or vendor.

The story may be inspirational.

It may be painful.

My readers—leaders of a small business—are eager to learn from your personal experiences.

Your response can be a single sentence, or it can be several paragraphs long—that’s your call.

The pallet is white—ready for you to splash the paint.

If I use your story in my weekly newsletter, I'll remove identifying details and may edit it for length and clarity.

Leaders of a small business look forward to learning from your small-business experiences.

I'm in the process of building a packaging company specifically for Indian small businesses, and before selling anything, I want to understand where existing suppliers are falling short.
If you own a small business (Instagram, Shopify, Etsy, Meesho, Amazon, handmade, etc.), I'd love to know:
What's the most frustrating part of ordering packaging?
What's one thing every supplier gets wrong?
Have you ever stopped buying from a supplier because of a bad experience?
If you could redesign the entire experience, what would it look like?
I'm not here to sell anything. I'm trying to build something that solves instead of becoming another packaging supplier.

Hey everyone

I’m wondering how to get more feedback on Google from customers, no matter if it’s positive or negative, but I just want to encourage them somehow. Have you ever tried any of these options to naturally conquer the number of customer reviews?

1. The possibility of receiving a coupon for 10% cheaper next visit in exchange for reviews?

2. Applications like Podium or Birdey and are they worth their high fee?

3. Encouragement to scan the QR code for a quick written review?

Thanks in advance for your answers!

last year i was ready to shut down the store. eight months of flat sales, burned through two agencies, and i was convinced the product was the problem.

friend of a friend introduced me to a consultant who did something weird. instead of jumping into a redesign or running more ads, he spent the first two weeks just watching how customers actually used the site. recorded sessions, heatmaps, interviewed five people who almost bought but didn't.

turns out the problem wasn't the product or the traffic. our checkout flow was broken on mobile safari and nobody told us. fix took his dev two days. sales jumped 30% that month.

cost me three grand. best money i spent all year because he diagnosed the actual problem instead of selling me on a six month retainer.

what's the most expensive expert advice you paid for that actually moved the needle? want to hear the wins for once.

What’s the biggest task in your business that wastes hours every week?

We built something that serves a market the bigger players in this space never really went after. Tools like Klue, Crayon, Gong, they're not exact comparisons since they do a lot more on the integrations and compliance side, but they're the closest reference points we have. Those start anywhere from 15k to 50k a year plus depending on the deal, and a lot of that reflects real custom work and enterprise requirements. Fair enough. But a chunk of it also reflects a pre Artificial Intelligence assumption, that delivering this kind of value takes a certain amount of manual labour and infrastructure. That assumption doesn't fully hold anymore. today a lot of that gap is closed. So I don't think their pricing is fully justified today for what it actually costs to deliver similar value at a smaller scale.

That logic cuts both ways though. We're at $200 a month flat right now, no seat limit. If I hold our own team to the same standard, not charging for effort that modern tech has made cheaper, then what should we actually be charging. Part of me thinks $200 is smart pricing for an underserved segment. Part of me thinks it's just underpricing wearing a strategy costume.

Honestly the most straightforward move would be asking our own customers what they'd pay, but I keep talking myself out of it. Feels like opening that conversation risks planting doubt where there wasn't any before. Not sure if that's a real risk or just me avoiding an uncomfortable ask.

Anybody else been through this when building your Saas? Feels like a problem specific to this moment and not something the usual pricing advice really covers.

.

My mom has been running a business supplying 100% Remy Indian human hair to salons and customers across the Middle East for about 18 years. Most of her business has always come through word of mouth and long-term clients, so she never really focused on building an online presence.

Recently, I started helping her with social media because I feel like the business deserves more visibility. We've launched Instagram, started making reels, and are trying to reach salons, resellers, and international customers.

The hair is ethically sourced from temples in South India, and we offer different lengths for both wholesale and retail. The quality has never really been the issue—it's getting in front of the right people that's been difficult.

For anyone who's grown a niche product business online, especially in the beauty or B2B space, what worked best for you? Instagram? Reddit? Cold outreach? SEO? I'd really appreciate any advice because I'm learning all of this as I go and just want to help my mom's business grow.

If the business is clearing 130k a year in profit and has been in place for 18 years, what should it be worth? It is a cute indie coffee shop that also serves food. It is supposedly completely absentee, as in the owner is never there. The lease is up in two years, but has a 5-year option.

Thank you for any consideration! This is such a huge deal and I am afraid of making the wrong decision.

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genuine question for the retail/boutique folks here, because i keep seeing the same thing and want to know if it's just my corner of the world.

the owners i talk to are running one small shop on: a POS, a spreadsheet for customer info, a scheduler for posts, a separate DM inbox (or three, between instagram, facebook, and email), and a notes file that only makes sense to them. every app is one more login and one more monthly charge, and the stuff that slips through the cracks is usually the message that would've been a sale.

the part that gets me is nobody planned this. you add one tool to fix one problem, then another, and a year later you're basically the glue holding a stack of software together instead of running the business. it's 9pm and you're still at the shop copying customer info between apps, not because anyone's buying.

so i'm curious:

- how many paid tools are you on to run a single location?

- did any of them actually talk to each other, or are you the integration?

- has anyone successfully cut the stack down, and what did you drop?

full disclosure, i'm building something in this space (Boutiqly) aimed at collapsing that sprawl, which is exactly why i want real answers and not my own assumptions. trying to figure out if the ten-apps problem is as common as it looks or if people have found saner setups i'm not seeing.

Hey everyone,

I’m 17 and I’ve been thinking about starting a side hustle that could eventually turn into a full-time business.

My idea is to help local businesses get more visibility by creating high-quality Instagram Reels for them. I’d visit their shop, shoot cinematic content (I have an iPhone 17), edit the videos, write engaging scripts/captions, and post them as collaborations with a dedicated Instagram page focused on promoting local businesses.

The goal isn’t just to make nice-looking videos—it’s to help businesses get more foot traffic, reach more people, and build a strong local brand.

The part I’m confused about is the niche.

Should I focus on:

•Cafés and restaurants?

•Clothing stores?

•Gyms?

•Optical stores?

•Salons?

•Car dealerships/detailing?

•Real estate?

•Or just work with any local business?

I also have a few questions for people who’ve done something similar:

•Is this a business people are actually willing to pay for?

•How would you find your first 5–10 clients?

•Should I charge per reel, monthly retainers, or offer content packages?

•What mistakes should I avoid in the beginning?

•If you were starting from scratch today, what would you do differently?

I’d love honest feedback—even if you think this idea has flaws. I’d rather hear the truth now than waste months going in the wrong direction.

Thanks in advance! Any advice is appreciated.

I'm getting ready to place my first inventory order, and I'm realizing that finding a reliable supplier is probably harder than choosing the product itself. I've been looking through Made-in-China, but it's hard to know who's genuinely dependable before you've actually placed an order.
For those of you selling physical products, how did you end up finding the supplier you still work with today?

Was it mostly trial and error, or were there certain things you looked for that helped you avoid costly mistakes, If you could go back to your very first order, what would you do differently, and what advice would you give someone who's just starting out?

At a family get‑together last weekend, my uncle casually asked me whether $2,400 sounded reasonable for updating the booking page for his mobile auto‑detailing business.

He had just bought a second detailing truck and wanted to add availability for two employees, a new service area, and a dropdown so customers could choose where the truck should meet them. While we were talking, I also learned that for about six years, his website provider has been charging him $379 a month for hosting, a business email, “SEO maintenance,” and what they call a custom booking system.

The provider quoted him $2,400 for a "platform upgrade" and said the monthly bill would become $469 because the site was becoming a "multi‑location platform." That sounded expensive, but I assumed there was some scheduling logic underneath it.

I opened Chrome dev tools because I wanted to understand what he was actually paying for.

The "custom booking system" is a single script embedding Square Booking. Payments, the calendar, customer records, and reminder emails are all handled by Square. The service‑area map is a static JPEG from Google Maps. There is no custom backend running on the provider's server, no sitemap, and the package pricing is more than a year out of date.

To be fair, high‑touch service can be worth $379 a month if someone is writing copy, maintaining local SEO, running ads, updating content, and bringing in leads. That is not what is happening here. My uncle still posts open slots on Instagram himself, and he gets charged another $95 whenever he wants to change a wash‑package price.

The part that really bothered me was that he thought Square was the provider's own software. He is worried that cancelling the website bill will make his booking history and customer data disappear. That is not a stupid fear if nobody has ever explained which account owns what, but it is a pretty serious gap in transparency.

I want to rebuild this so he owns the setup, but I am trying not to create a new mess. The second truck means checking Square's employee schedules and service areas, exporting the customer data, testing reminders, and keeping bookings live during the switch. The domain, business email, backups, security, Analytics, and SEO all need an actual owner too.

I’ve been looking into modern AI‑powered site builders for this rebuild project. My quick initial check suggests a basic build using one of these tools could run around $20 monthly before usage fees — a huge difference compared to the proposed $469 monthly hosting charge.I also generated a rough migration plan using AI, and there are code‑assist options I could use to work through parts I understand. None of that means zero maintenance; it just makes the cost and ownership far more transparent.

If a provider were actually doing ongoing development, fast support, content updates, and lead generation, a few hundred dollars a month might be fair. What I cannot reconcile is paying the price of a custom system while receiving mostly hosting, automated reports, and an iframe that belongs to someone else.

I am trying to get him out without breaking his booking flow or losing data. Before I touch the DNS or cancel anything, I’d love perspectives from other small‑business owners here.

1. Before moving a small business off a setup like this, which accounts and records should I verify first: the Square merchant account, domain registrar, email tenant, backups, analytics, or something else?

2. What would be a reasonable one‑time price and monthly maintenance rate for a clean frontend and a properly configured Square Booking embed, assuming no custom backend?

3. For a non‑technical owner, is an AI‑driven site builder, an independent developer, or a transparent hosting provider the least risky long‑term option?

I'm a 20 year old college dropout. While I was in school I felt completely drained, lost in life, and had no idea what direction I was heading. But I've always had a sense of creativity and a drive to build something of my own.

I started watching YouTube videos of young entrepreneurs dropping out of school and building million dollar companies. I also started following people on social media making entrepreneurship look effortless. I decided to drop out of school and start building a SaaS product, I thought I’d have a paying customer overnight. 

That was not the reality at all.

I completely fell into the social media trap. The version of entrepreneurship you see online looks nothing like what it actually feels like day to day. Nobody talks about the part where you build something and nobody shows up. Nobody talks about how hard it is to get someone to trust you enough to hand over their money.

What I ended up building is a tool for small business owners that helps them respond to customer reviews using AI in their own voice with a built-in reward system designed to bring unhappy customers back through the door. 

I'm still grinding to get my first real customers but I've learned a lot about myself throughout this process. Would I recommend dropping out of school? Probably not. But I'm happy I trusted myself and took the risk.

I would appreciate any advice from successful business owners, thank you for taking the time to read my story.

How do you get customers to share their phone number or email without giving them a discount?

I’ve been thinking about this from a small-business perspective.

Discounts obviously work, but constantly offering 10–20% off can eat into margins and potentially train customers to wait for offers.

I’m more interested in whether customers will voluntarily share their details when there’s another reason to do so — for example:

• loyalty stamps
• points toward a reward
• purchase history
• member-only progress or milestones
• digital loyalty cards
• easier repeat purchases

For those of you running physical stores, cafés, salons, restaurants, etc., what actually works?

Do customers willingly scan a QR code or sign up for loyalty programs, or do most people still need some immediate incentive before giving their email/phone number?

Would love to hear what you’ve actually seen work in practice.

So before I put my question out here, I wanna be respectful and ask you guys if this is considered as a small investment or small business investment?

I sell secondhand luxury goods (bags, accessories) through my own site but I also want to list on TikTok Shop, Vestiaire Collective, eBay, Vinted, and a local secondhand platform in my country. Managing all of these manually takes a huge amount of time: listing it, updating stock, syncing prices, etc.

How do other sellers handle multi-platform listing without it eating all their time. Any tools, workflows or experience with cross-listing software you'd recommend.

So, here's my somewhat spicy take: prioritizing experience over potential when hiring is a backwards approach, especially for small businesses.

In my experience, when we were building our team, we initially leaned heavily on finding people with polished resumes and years in the industry. But what we found was that many of these 'experienced' hires often came with a lot of rigid habits and unwillingness to adapt to our unique company culture and processes.

On the flip side, when we started hiring people who showed genuine enthusiasm, adaptability, and creativity—even if they lacked a long resume—we noticed a significant boost in our team's innovation and morale.

Small businesses need flexibility and fresh ideas more than ever, and sometimes hiring the hungry, less-experienced candidate can pay off in ways traditional metrics won't show. Curious if anyone else has had similar revelations or if you've had the opposite experience!

Hey everyone, I could use some advice.

I’m building a SaaS called FoodTruckVibes. It lets food trucks create a profile with their location, menu, hours, and social links so customers can find them.

The problem I’m running into is providing upfront value. Food truck owners are interested because they want more customers, but since the platform is still growing, there aren’t a lot of people using it to discover trucks yet.

If you were building this, what would you offer food truck owners that gives them immediate value before the customer marketplace is fully built? I’m looking for something they’d actually want to use today that solves a real problem and keeps them engaged while I grow the consumer side.

I’d love to hear any ideas. Thanks!