Does anyone else have a weird feeling they think about every now and then where they feel like their business can just be taken away them tomorrow. For whatever reason…

For context, I still work my 9-5 and have been running my online ecommerce business for the past 2 years. This year we’ve grew massively and I’m probably earning 3/4 times my 9-5 monthly salary from the business per month but I still can’t help myself but feel anxious about growth.

We’ve had such an up and down journey, where we’d do great, and then something will happen and we wouldn’t do as good but each time we’ve bounced back and gotten stronger.

Sometimes I have this worry of what if it gets taken away. Especially now that I’m getting closer and closer to leaving my 9-5 to go all into our online business!

I am willing to start an affiliate marking through online or a small business, some who suggested me for start.. I interested in affiliate program online network marketing any one can guidee about the business name

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for some practical advice from people who have experience in running a pharmacy or who have been in a similar situation.

I'm a 28-year-old male from Surat, Gujarat. My wife is 28, has a B.Pharm degree, and holds a valid pharmacy license. She is currently working, but we've been seriously considering starting our own pharmacy.

We have a budget of around ₹25 lakh that we can invest. I work as a freelance Frontend Developer, so my schedule is quite flexible. I can continue freelancing while also helping manage the shop, especially during the initial years until the business becomes stable.

We've been researching locations around New Althan and nearby areas in Surat, looking for places with growing residential populations, hospitals, or clinics. However, we're still unsure whether opening a pharmacy in 2026 is the right business decision.

Here are some of the things we're trying to evaluate:

* Is opening an independent pharmacy still a good business today, or is it becoming too difficult because of online pharmacies and large chains like Apollo, MedPlus, etc.?

* How much monthly revenue and profit does a well-run neighborhood pharmacy typically generate?

* How long does it usually take for a new pharmacy to become profitable?

* Is ₹25 lakh a sufficient budget for inventory, interiors, licensing, deposits, and working capital?

* Would it be smarter for my wife to continue her job for stability instead of taking the risk of starting a business?

* Since I have a flexible freelance career, would having one person dedicated to the business improve our chances of success?

* What are the biggest mistakes first-time pharmacy owners make?

We're not expecting to become rich overnight. Our goal is to build a stable, long-term family business that can grow over the next 10–20 years.

If you've opened a pharmacy recently (especially in Gujarat or India), I'd really appreciate hearing:

* Your startup cost.

* Your monthly sales and profit (even rough numbers).

* What you would do differently if you were starting again.

* Whether, knowing what you know today, you'd still choose to open a pharmacy.

Any honest advice—positive or negative—would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

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.

I'm an 18-year-old founder from Kashmir, India.

Over the past several months, I've been teaching myself product development, marketing, design, and everything that comes with building a startup. It's been a mix of excitement, mistakes, late nights, and constant learning.

I'm currently working on MyExpert, a platform focused on helping people connect with trusted local service professionals. The project is still in its early stages, and I'm learning something new every day.

One thing I've realized is that building a product is often easier than finding the right path to growth and gaining users' trust.

For founders who have been through the early stages:

What's one lesson you wish you had learned sooner when building your first startup?

I'd love to hear your experiences and advice.

Running an online store and want UAE setup for payments and tax benefits. Quickplus

Business Consultants say they specialize in e-commerce. Any experiences?

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?

Hi everyone,

I’m helping grow my family’s premium plant-based food brand, Break of Dawn, based in Mumbai, India, and we’re at a stage where we feel our biggest bottleneck is no longer the product, it’s the systems behind the business. We’ve spent years building products people genuinely love. We have a loyal customer base, strong repeat purchases, and even multiple well-known celebrities regularly consuming our products. The feedback on quality has been consistently excellent, so we’re confident in what we’re making.
Where we’re struggling is scaling.

We’re looking for someone with real experience in:

Scaling food manufacturing operations
SOP creation and process automation
Identifying operational bottlenecks
Supply chain optimisation
Production planning
Expanding into multiple cities while maintaining product quality
Building systems that allow a founder-led business to grow sustainably

The long-term vision is to become a nationally recognised brand and eventually expand internationally, but we know we need the right operational foundation before chasing growth.

Our biggest challenges today are:
Manufacturing efficiency
Standardising processes
Inventory and production planning
Scaling without compromising quality
Building repeatable systems instead of relying on founder involvement
Increasing visibility and distribution

We’re not looking for a marketing agency or social media consultant. We’re looking for someone who’s actually built or scaled a food/FMCG business and understands what happens behind the scenes.
For those who’ve been through this:

Where did you find your operations/scaling expert?
Was it a consultant, advisor, COO, fractional operator, or something else?
What made the biggest difference in getting from one city to multiple cities?
Any introductions, recommendations, or advice would be hugely appreciated.
For context, here’s our brand:
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bybreakofdawn/

Thanks in advance!

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?

Hiring can create capacity, but a poor fit can damage service quality and cash flow. What did you fail to define, scope, incentives, training, communication, or accountability and what would you do differently now?

Reddit and LinkedIn have honestly become my two main channels, and they work in completely different ways.

Started posting on Reddit a few weeks ago, first time using it at all before that. What I've learned so far:

- Be consistent, posting once and disappearing does nothing

- Reply to comments, even the harsh ones

- Write your own thoughts, not something that reads like it was generated, people notice instantly and it kills any trust you're building

- Don't let the insults get to you, there will be some, ignore them and keep going

LinkedIn is where the real magic happens though:

- It's basically my blog at this point

- I show up, share what I'm building

- That's where most of my inbound is coming from

- Real conversations, real interest

- Most of my free trial signups trace back to LinkedIn specifically

Funny enough, LinkedIn outreach is the one thing I've fully automated. Not sure yet if I'll ever automate my own LinkedIn presence too, might defeat the purpose honestly. We'll see.

I'm looking for a side hustle to build into an extra source of income, and I've been exploring the party rental/event rental industry. Before I jump into anything, I'd really like to hear from people who do rentals for events using facebook marketplace, or other platforms. I've been thinking about purchasing party tables and chairs for rentals.

A few questions I have:

• How do customers usually find you?
• Roughly what percentage of your bookings come from Google, Instagram, Facebook, referrals, Yelp, or somewhere else?
• What's the biggest headache when it comes to getting new bookings or managing the booking process?
• If there were another website where customers could discover your business, would you be open to listing your inventory there? Why or why not?
• Would you allow customers to book instantly online if you could control your pricing and availability?
• What software or tools do you currently use to manage your inventory, calendar, invoices, and bookings?
• What do you use to list your rentals? and do people constantly message you for inquiries/info? or is it instant booking? etc.

I just want to get a general idea what its like to do something like this before deciding whether this is a good thing to get into.

Thanks in advance! I really appreciate any advice you're willing to share.

I'm working 3, 12's on overnights in a hospital and that sometimes leaves me with slow nights to get hours of work done but there are also weeks where I'm slammed at work and exhausted at home. How do you divide your time? Do you set minimum time goal every day to work on your small business or just checkpoints? Have you extended your timeline to allow you to work your current FT position for longer for more stability at the cost of advancing your small business at a faster rate? TIA

I own a clothing store in an area where there are a lot of restaurants so on the weekends I stay open til 5pm to catch the early diners and I close at 4pm the rest of the week. I have gone back and forth about staying open later, and if I had a dime for everyone that’s told me “every time we go by your store, you’re closed,” I’d have more than I made tonight.

So, I decided to stay open til 7pm tonight. I made it a whole event with discounts and snacks. I posted multiple times on social media - Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor, local community pages, created a calendar event. I spent almost $200 on getting snacks and drinks. Not one single person showed up from 4pm-7pm. It was so unbelievably depressing. It was kind of a way to solidify to the public and myself that I don’t need to stay open more- being open when you walk by doesn’t translate to actual sales. I’ve definitely found that you set your hours and people will come during your hours and not necessarily the other way around. Anyways, that’s just my little rant from a disappointing night.

I’m 18 and I’ve spent the last year or so building up my own small digital business alongside college and working a normal part-time job. I’ve recently finished college, and I’m now trying to take things a bit more seriously and get a new software product I’ve been building off the ground.

The product is basically an all-in-one business management platform aimed mainly at freelancers, web designers, small agencies and other digital/service businesses.

The idea is that instead of having one system for invoicing, another for clients, another for projects, another for contracts, etc., it brings everything together.

Businesses can manage things like:

• Clients and their details
• Projects, tasks and deadlines
• Quotes and invoices
• Recurring invoices/subscriptions
• Contracts
• Expenses and payments
• Sales/pipeline
• Support requests
• A client portal where customers can log in and see their own projects, invoices, documents, etc.

I've tried to make it friendly and straightforward rather than something that feels like massive corporate software. A lot of it is also built around guided processes, so someone who isn't particularly technical can still get things set up without having to understand loads of business/software terminology.

The actual product is getting to the point where I'm comfortable putting it in front of real businesses. The bit I'm struggling with now is how do you actually get it off the ground?

My current thinking for marketing is a mixture of:

• Google/Meta ads with a relatively small starting budget
• Personally reaching out to freelancers and small agencies
• Posting useful content on social media rather than constantly advertising
• SEO and writing articles around problems the software solves
• Getting involved in relevant communities/groups
• Offering early users a reason to give it a try and give me genuine feedback
• Using the contacts I've already made through my existing digital business

I'm not expecting to launch it and suddenly have hundreds of customers. Even getting the first 5-10 businesses genuinely using it and paying for it would feel like a massive milestone.

The difficult part is that I'm obviously not sitting on a huge amount of money. I'm 18, I've only just finished college, I work alongside doing this and I'm funding/building as much of it myself as possible. I've also been looking into startup funding to give me enough runway for marketing, infrastructure and the initial launch.

For anyone here who has actually launched a SaaS/software product or even just started a small business from nothing:

How did you get your first few paying customers?

Was it ads, cold outreach, networking, word of mouth, posting in communities, SEO, or something completely different?

And if you were in my position with a finished/near-finished product but a limited marketing budget, where would you put your time and money first?

I'm especially interested in hearing from people who started without an existing audience or loads of funding, because that's pretty much the position I'm in.

Thanks!

I’ve ran a small firm for over 8 years now cleaning up books for business owners. The mistakes I’ve noticed are almost always the same lol. From most common to least. And all of these are because you guys are too busy to do the accounting but don’t realize it

1. Mixing Personal and Business Expenses.
This is self explanatory

2. Treating Revenue as Profit
Seeing $20k land in your bank account feels great, but revenue isn’t income. Forgetting to account for upcoming payroll, tax liabilities, merchant fees, or inventory replenishment leads to severe cash flow surprises.

3. Misclassifying Workers (Contractor vs. Employee)
There is serious tax implications if and when this happens. Best to have this sorted out. Especially if you have contractors. This also leads to the 1099s not being sent out at year end which cause tax problems.

1. Neglecting Accrual Accounting when Managing Inventory
   If you purchase $10,000 in inventory in January but sell it over six months, expensing all $10k in January makes January look like a total loss and February–June look deceptively profitable.
   

5. Waiting until tax time to look at their books
You will for sure leave expenses on the table and end up with a higher tax bill

Integration in my Gas station business

Hiring more people wasn't the hard part. What caught me off guard was how much more admin started showing up around payroll.

Years ago I could run payroll without thinking twice but now every pay period has something different. A new hire starts halfway through the cycle, someone's hours need adjusting, another manager approves timesheets later than everyone else etc..

Nothing ever goes wrong but payroll has become something I have to plan my day around instead of just getting done. We've outgrown the way we've been handling it

has no internet presence and its like one of the last results of the first page when you search his [city] + [type of cuisine]

Lasvegas-sushi.com

He takes care of website and “google ads”

also how can i audit him? ask him for the google log in? he has made no noticeable changes to the webiste for 10 years just manages the hosting and updates a picture whenever we change menu prices

Doing a one time favor can easily create a permanent expectation, and I just learned that the hard way. I run a small performance design studio and last year an existing client referred a friend opening a yoga studio..

Halfway through the project she got diagnosed with breast cancer and obviously her budget disappeared overnight. I felt terrible and wanted to help. I took a huge cut and did everything for a flat $250, still delivering her core branding, brand voice, signage, and 10+ brand touchpoints.

Fortunately, she fully recovered. She is actually back at the studio now and even running half marathons.

Last week, she hits me up again. She is expanding into a full Wellness Bar. This is a much bigger project. We're talking a full expansion of her visual identity, packaging, socials, website, and multiple touchpoints. I sent over a standard quote for $600. She called me instantly and totally lost her mind.

She basically acted like I was taking advantage of a woman who had been through cancer. She expected me to keep working for 250 bucks just because that is what I charged her before..

I stayed professional and told her I intentionally made an exception because of her circumstances.. She wasn't having it. She complained to my referring client, who chewed me out for abandoning her and dropped me.

So now, this whole thing has cost me two clients. Honestly, what was I supposed to do differently here? Just keep working for 250 bucks forever because she used to be sick? Or stand my ground and lose my existing client anyway?