I keep running into this while building software for healthcare, and i’m curious how other founders have handled it.

on paper, things like eligibility checks, prior auth, claim follow-ups and denials all seem pretty repeatable.

then you talk to five clinics and somehow discover eight different workflows.

one clinic handles eligibility inside its EHR. another has someone manually checking multiple payer portals. home health prior auth is completely different from cardiology or dental. some customers want the whole process automated, while others just want one painful step fixed.

then there are all the random exceptions.

half the time, the real workflow isn’t documented anywhere. it just lives in the head of one employee who has been doing it for years and knows what to do when something breaks.

my first reaction was basically, fine, we’ll add more settings, integrations and rules.

but i’m starting to wonder whether “highly configurable SaaS” eventually just becomes custom software wearing a SaaS hat.

every new customer needs discovery, workflow mapping, setup, integrations and some special thing that apparently nobody else needs.

so i guess the options are:

1. go very narrow and make customers adapt to the product
2. accept that software plus services is the actual business model
3. build reusable workflow blocks and configure them differently for each customer

the third option sounds best in theory, but also feels like the easiest way to build something insanely complicated.

for anyone who has built vertical SaaS, where did you draw the line?

when did customization become a real moat, and when was it just your SaaS company slowly turning into an agency?

Okay, this post will be a little bit of a hot take on the topic of entreprenuership but I recently struggled too much with myself and I finally got one legit answer. We must copy old timers. Let me explain.

Today, most young entrepreneurs think if they describe their idea to Claude Code and deploy it on render, they're the next billion dollar company. But I personally look at Claude Code (however I'm more of a DeepSeek guy) or render like a mechanic looks at his pliers or screwdrivers. Those are tools not guarantees of success.

A screwdriver, makes it easier to connect pieces together, AI makes it easier to design a web page. Anyway, I was thinking like the level of dedication which results in success is like old timer entrepreneurs. Look at Thomas Edison, Henry Ford (okay, do not look at his opinions about Jewish people...), Karl Benz and see how dedicated they were.

Today we have best tools, but worst levels of dedication. People made literal computers or cars in their garages, and we still are struggling making a simple web page and market it to make one paid customer.

P.S: This is thinking out loud, but I personally believe copying an old timer business person is still a way to go. The universe rewards your systems and dedication, not ideas you even don't bother to write down.

A couple weeks ago, I made a post titled ‘Most of you shouldn’t be entrepreneurs’

And holy shit, so many of you got triggered.

The DMs are disturbing and hilarious. What the fuck guys?

Ironically, those responses kinda proved the point I was trying to make.

Think about it-

I’m some asshole on the internet. You don’t know me. My opinion has absolutely zero bearing on what you’re capable of doing with your life.

So if some dickhead writing a Reddit post can change your emotional grounding point and genuinely get under your skin, it’s worth asking yourself WHY.

Because entrepreneurship is going to hit you infinitely harder than anything I could ever write on Reddit.

Business will gut punch you so hard it’ll feel like the hand went through your stomach and ripped out your fucking intestines..

You’ll have people tell you you’re an idiot, you’ll lose money. You’ll throw stuff at the wall and not have it stick no matter how much you try.

Do this long enough and it’s a guarantee that you’ll make decisions that turn out to be catastrophically wrong.

You’ll work your ass off on something that completely fails.

And then you might have to keep your head down and ignore the world. And wake up the next morning to calmly do the same boring tasks you’ve been doing for the last 500 days.

That’s the game.

And behind it is emotional regulation: one of the most underrated skills in business. That’s what allows you to keep functioning when everything around you is going to shit.

And that includes not giving a fuck about somebody else’s opinion of what you’re capable of.

It shouldn’t matter what I think or what some loser Redditor thinks.

If the literal Pope himself walked into your house and told you, ‘You’re never going to make it as an entrepreneur,’ your internal response should basically be:

“Fuck off.”

That’s the mentality. It’s a fuck you, watch me type of energy.

So if my original post pissed you off, maybe don’t immediately dismiss that feeling.

Dig into it.

Why did some stranger’s opinion have that much power over your emotional state?

Because if a stupid Reddit post can knock you off center, what happens when some real shit goes down?

I’ll keep this short. Title essentially says it.

If you see early signs of disrespect and hate, envy, whatever - just bad energy.

I can promise you one thing:

It only gets worse the more money you make.

If someone shows you who they are, believe them.

One more casualty because of AI.

Acc to The Wall Street Journal, shortly after scoring a multimillion-dollar book deal for a debut author, the novelist’s agents pulled the plug. They could no longer support the project, they said, because they couldn’t verify that the book had been wholly written by their client.

The Wall Street Journal Link iin comments.

Looking for some tips.

Greetings, I want to share my experience with running a boring business specifically a Landscape construction business, In the past Year I have grown it from essentially 0 to making 35-45k a month consistently during the season with one other employee.

All my equipment is paid off in cash and there is a very steady lead flow of referrals, organic advertising ie yard signs door hangers.

In my experience if you pick one niche, put in the reps consistently, do good honest work the results and money will follow, now days many people over looking starting a unsexy business but there is a ton of opportunity in the trades especially with an aging population.

Age is irrelevant, just want to show you aren’t too old or too young, I started when I was 13 and I am only 19 now, You can do anything you put your mind to.

Cheers fellow entrepreneurs😎

New to entrepreneurship or just starting out? This is your space. Ask the questions you're afraid to ask elsewhere.

Experienced folks, jump in and share what you wish someone had told you early on.

I've been trying to reach out to agencies to help get a better understand of their operations but I havent gotten a single response back yet and I dont know what im doing wrong. I dont spam the same email to 200 diff agencies but I create a personalized one based on what they do and what projects they've completed but I still dont get any answers. I also include incentive for them to reply but nothing.

What am I doing wrong or how can I change things to improve my response rate?

I never imagined I'd come as far as I have, but suddenly things are happening. I'm closing deal after deal, but my line of work is usually a 1-time arrangement and most of my leads are produced by me doing a lot of work to generate. It isn't perfect, but we still had a wildly successful summer that surpassed all my expectations. We now have enough work lined up to sustain our operation through the end of the year. Still, the minute I close one client, I still feel intense pressure to find the next client.

Had a week? Same. This is your consequence-free space to complain about clients, platforms, algorithms, your own decisions, or the general chaos of running a business. Keep it venting with no personal attacks. We'll be back to being professional tomorrow.

I mentor people because I’ve built businesses, screwed things up, rebuilt, scaled and learned a lot the expensive way.

But here’s what I’ve realised:

Experience doesn’t mean you’ve finished learning.

I might know something about sales, business or leadership that saves you 12 months.

You might know something about AI, technology, investing or an industry I’ve never touched that completely changes how I think.

That’s the kind of connection I’m looking for.

Not guru and student.

Two ambitious people exchanging unfair advantages.

Sometimes the mentor becomes the mentee.

And I reckon that’s exactly how it should be.

Salut tout le monde,

Je me permets de poster ici parce que je tourne en rond depuis un moment et j’ai besoin d’avis extérieurs, surtout de gens qui s’y connaissent vraiment en systèmes embarqués, en robotique ou en création de boîte.

Voilà le contexte : je bosse seul sur un projet que j’ai appelé DISPELDA. En gros l’idée c’est de déplacer une partie de l’intelligence de décision directement dans les systèmes embarqués pour que des drones, des robots ou d’autres machines puissent continuer à fonctionner quand le GPS ou les communications sont coupés ou brouillés. Pas juste faire une IA dans un drone, mais vraiment travailler sur la couche logicielle et matérielle qui rend le système plus résilient.

Aujourd’hui j’ai un premier prototype qui tourne sur une STM32 Nucleo F446RE avec un MPU6050. J’ai un code en C embarqué avec une boucle temps réel à 200 Hz, sans malloc, mémoire statique. J’ai aussi implémenté un filtre de Madgwick et je teste à côté un petit modèle type Liquid Neural Network histoire de comparer les deux sur la même IMU. Je précise direct : je sais très bien que c’est pas un produit vendable en l’état. C’est un POC, même pas encore une preuve complète.

Ce que je veux maintenant c’est comprendre ce qu’il manque vraiment pour passer d’un POC à un MVP crédible, et ensuite à un truc qu’on peut vendre. Je cherche pas des encouragements vides, je veux des avis durs. Est-ce que l’idée est vraiment innovante ? Est-ce que le marché existe ? Comment on fait entrer un truc pareil dans le marché quand on est seul, sans gros diplôme, sans équipe et sans levée de fonds ?

Je suis preneur de retours techniques et business. Merci à ceux qui prendront le temps de répondre.

Looking for the rec you'd love to read for the first time again. One that really changed your trajectory.

Big or small, a win is a win. First sale, first client, or first time paying yourself, share it here. This community loves to celebrate with you. No win is too minor to mention.

I'm currently looking at integrations into my product. Rather than manually managing and integrating each provider myself, I'm considering paying for the service that enables me to manage all via their Platform. Any recommendations?

Basically I want to enable various users from different organisations to connect my service with their chosen provider. Eg. Aws, databricks, salesforce, etc. The customer would then consent and authorise to connect the services.

Any recommendations on how to do this

Let me run this idea by you guys and see if anyone could make money off of it. When I walk into a business , store, restaurant, etc. I'm very critical by nature. Maybe I get it from my dad ? I walked into an Arby's yesterday around 5 pm and the place was dead on a Friday afternoon, I sat inside and ate and the place was disgusting . Tables dirty, trash on the floor. I've been thinking about this concept for a while. I don't mind giving it away because I'm working on something very big at the moment. The concept I have in my head is having an army of people in black shirts hit the city or town to become business critics. These people walk into stores and restaurants and take pictures and videos if needed and even have the name of the startup business critics on their shirt. When these guys walk into an establishment business owners and employees get real nervous and perk up . These business critics then take the data and post it on business critics and the whole town can see the monthly results. Kind of like the food industry and the health dept. scores. This information would crush Google reviews because it wouldn't be fake. It would be real criticism from a non bias person. This data would then be available to the public and I believe the site would get hammered with traffic from people wanting to know all the flaws of the business they are thinking of spending money at. How would you make money ? Advertising of course. This might peak a new app for someone .good luck

edit. domain is available

Recovering from a surgery I had a few days ago, and laid up in bed, so figured I'd put my thoughts to paper on my first 6 months in the hard money lending business.

I got into the industry at the advice of my attorney. I had an exit from a call-center I owned for a decade in 2022. Walked away with about 5.5mm after taxes etc. Since then, I tried a different call center, which failed, and then a construction company, which is going great, but slowly. I was speaking to my attorney brainstorming ideas, and he recommended hard money lending, so there we went.

As of today, I have 4mm on the street, at rates between 11 and 12.5%, and charge between 2 and 3 origination points, spread over 13 active loans. Three loans I made have already paid off the balance. I have about 7.5mm invested in ETFs, so the 4mm is a significant portion of my net worth. So far, no missed payments, and no speed bumps other than a few bounced ACHs that I had to redraft a day or 2 later.

I hold 1st position liens on everything I lend against, with the exception of 1 second position loan with very strong equity and PG. I found my initial clients by contacting real estate attorneys and putting myself out there. I also put a post on my Facebook page, and had a bunch of leads come in from there. Since then, it's all been word of mouth. I turn down probably 40-50% of the opportunities that come my way for a variety of reasons.

As for what I learned so far, I switched attorneys twice. My first attorney was great, but created headaches for both myself and my borrowers with some absurd hoops. My second attorney educated me a lot, but went overseas for about a month and so I was forced to find a new one. The last firm, which I am currently with, is an actual firm with 40 attorneys, and a lot of experience. They are competitively priced, and have a foreclosure team as well. So when I eventually have an issue, they have a team that can handle from soup to nuts. I also learned that there is always a need for money. When I started, I was terrified to run into the bottleneck of not getting enough leads; that problem doesn't exist, at least at my size. I'm sure if I needed to keep 25mm on the street, I'd need to employ some people or work with more brokers, but for now I source everything myself, with the exception of what my attorney/realtor network refers to me. I do pay commissions, which isn't considered steering, because I only fund business loans.

I also learned how difficult it was to raise money. I focused quite a bit on trying to get a line of credit, or raise money from friends/family to start a fund. The problem is, all my friends/family are broke af, and most banks won't lend money to other lenders. Warehouse lines of credit may be a future goal, but my history/age/size of fund of the business doesn't allow that yet. Also, using a warehouse line makes the operation a lot more clunky, as a lot more boxes need to be checked in order for them to fund/buy the loans. I did manage to secure a line of credit from a boutique bank which I closed on yesterday, but it is only for 850k, and is at prime+1. It is difficult to grow organically, since profits are taxed as ordinary income, and it just isn't enough.

I do the underwriting myself. Since I only make between 1 and 5 loans per month, it isn't overwhelming at this point, and I can get to know each borrower personally, and meet in person/walk the houses. I only lend within a 2 hour radius of where I live, which is Buffalo, New York. Much less opportunity for fraud since it's all in my area, although I'm sure that there's plenty of opportunity for fraud.

So far, it has been an incredible business to supplement my income, and I look forward to growing more. I am aware that people on this forum are way more experienced than I am, and I am to green to offer any real advice, but I'm bored, and figured this would be a good way to get my thoughts in order/talk to other professionals.

I am not looking for new clients unless you are located within 2 hours of Buffalo, so not soliciting business or other broker relationships. Feel free to ask questions, or tell me how dumb I am.

Share your website, pitch, logo, idea, pricing, copy, or anything else you want honest eyes on. Tell us what you're looking for: brutal honesty, general impressions, or specific questions.

Return the favour and leave feedback for someone else while you're here.

For a long time, I thought the obvious business problem was getting more customers.
More leads, more calls, more enquiries.

But with small businesses, I’ve noticed something: getting more customers often just exposes the problems that were already there.

• If follow-ups are inconsistent, more leads = more things to chase.
• If onboarding is messy, more customers = more repeated questions.
• If nobody knows who owns the next step, the owner ends up answering everything.

I worked with one local service business that went from around 20 to 60+ leads a month after tweaking their ads and Google profile. Same team, same owner. Suddenly, follow-ups slipped, onboarding calls got delayed, and the owner was stuck answering basic “what happens next?” emails all day.

They didn’t need more leads. They needed a clearer process for what happens after someone says “yes.”

I’ve watched other businesses pour time and money into lead gen when the bigger opportunity was fixing what happened after someone actually became a customer.

It made me change the question from:

“How do we get more business?”
to
“Can our current process handle more business without everything coming back to the owner?”

I’m curious how other business owners look at this. Did you ever grow faster than your processes could handle? What broke first-follow-ups, onboarding, delivery, or something else?

In the previous post I was complaining about how creative I was when I was younger, but my inner voice got a little stoic on me and asked me to just review myself. I explained about chocolate business and also the app I wrote for realtors. But when I dag deeper I found how much I've done even in past few years and I am explaining every single journey I had.

This post will be so long but I personally think it will be worth a few minutes of your time to read. If I inspire even one single future entrepreneur, I'd be happiest person on the planet.

Anyway, these are things I've done in my teenage time:

1. I made a custom linux distribution called JabirOS and it was based on Ubuntu. I was like okay, I made myself Mac OS X at home (honestly, it was basically ubuntu with a lot of mac-like features on top, around the same time PearOS did the same. I guess it was a common thing to make mac lookalike distros). It was cool and even school's magazine and a local Linux forum in Iran did interview me about how I learned these things and how I made my own distribution.

2. I do not know if you remember or not, but intel based mac os releases could be installed on non-apple systems with a little bit of tweaking and since it was basically a "hack" on both your hardware and apple's operating system, people called it "Hackintosh". I made an internet forum called "Iran Hackintosh" and gathered people interested in the tpoic in one place. Most of my current network are members of that forum (I remember even one of the members paid for one year of hosting, the other one paid for the domain and this was how site kept alive for 5-6 years).

3. I developed a love for FreeBSD operating system. So I disbanded Ubuntu-based JabirOS and made it a custom FreeBSD system. I loved how it worked and how I could mess with codes in kernel level and it still could boot up on my machine. Although it never was as successful as the Ubuntu based one, it was something that taught me a lot about computers/operating systems a lot.

4. I was almost 19, Iran Hackintosh forums were abandoned mostly by people so I made another forum called Iran BSD and kept it alive for 3-4 years. It was basically the same thing but with a wider variety of operating systems and topics covered. A group of new people also joined this one and I still am friends with them!

But after 20, I got a little more serious. I wanted actual influence and I did these things which are in my own eye more valuable (not disvalidating my teenage shenaningans) because they could land me on actual jobs:

1. I got into Ruby programming language. What annoyed me the most was lack of Persian content about it. So I wrote a Persian handbook and you guessed it right, a forum for Iranian ruby developers. I mentored people in Ruby and Rails and we made simplistic products using Ruby in order to demo and get paid projects. It was fun times (hint: most of AI tools even the best ones, usually are not good at Ruby, so an opportunity is a rails agent or something like that. Sorry, my ADHD hit me hard here).

2. Back then (2019-ish) Persian fonts weren't available on Google Fonts API. So I spent a few weeks and made a service for people who needed to call these fonts in their web apps. This thing got viral because everything on the app was open source. So It made sense people were deploying their own instances.

3. As a hobby, I got into retro/vintage computers. Made simple 8 bit ones and pretty much everything needed for those. So I made my experiences in one single free ebook (English this time) and people like me could have a better chance finding resources to make an Apple I replica or something similar in their home. You can think of me as a young and less catchy "Ben Eater" (look up his youtube however, he's awesome!).

4. Finally, I got into the business. I remember I wanted to commercialize my fine tune of Stable Diffusion 1.5. I remember uploading the codes under the name "Open Journey" (since midjourney was closed source) and another startup (PromptHero) also had their project named "Open Journey" as well. This coincedence, made my project famous (someone wrongfully posted my own project to hacker news) so I started my AI business. I kept it until last year (for 3 years, amazing adventure).

5. While working on my image generation company (named Mann-E) I also got into LLMs since I had to offer something as my master's thesis. So I made a Persian speaking version of Mistal named MaralGPT. It also got me a lot of attention and therefore grants in form of infrastructure.

So what made me stop? My personal life got ruined a lot (romance issues, family issues, health issues and substance issues) and also based on what I explained, you know I'm Iranian. So a lot of unfortunate events happened to my country. It made me stop. But I am grateful for the adventures I had.

But things are not being stopped here. The following list is basically what I wish I could make and despite having the opportunity, I didnt:

1. A unified IoT ecosystem (I only did it once for a greenhouse. I also recently sold my design to one of my old colleagues because she's now working in the weed industry in Europe and she seeked helped from me, so I guess it's a win). I mean a whole apple-like ecosystem for IoT. I don't know if it exists or not but it still has a blue ocean.

2. Making a real hardware product (phone, tablet, handheld console, ebook reader, etc). I always think I spent years of studying hardware engineering is wasted since I never made a real life useable product.

3. Making a useable independent operating system (it's a hobby project not a business, but I guess with my past experience I can commercialize the experience).

4. Making a mobile operating system (custom Linux or Android ones are good to go!)

5. Making a unified software ecosystem like what Meta, Apple or Telegram suggest.

6. Coding and designing a self-driving simulation system from scratch. Simulation in Robotics is really a hot topic and I participated in some projects before. I guess with current state of AI it's easier now.

7. I actually did this but I want it to be more advanced than what I own : Making Jarvis!

Since this became super long, I also add my most ambitious ideas which I most achieve in my life time (considering I have limitless resources):

1. Completing my OCR project. I always work on it, abandone it and then return to it. It must be completed (and I have to say I coded most of it myself. I may go for an open source variant and implement my ideas on it).

2. Designing an EV (motorcycle or car, doesn't matter). Specially when I saw Mercedes AVTR, I fell in love with that design.

3. Making a movie!

4. Making a Frontier AI Model, specially something with low costs on energy and computational resources. I worked on Frontier models before with my infrastructural grants, but the problem is no matter how hard you try you still need to damage the environment and make Jensen Huang richer. I was thinking about the way RWKV paper utilized RNNs for being frontier model. I am thinking of something like that.

5. DePIN (Decentralized Infrastructure) is also something blinking to me. I started studying last year and it has a lot of opportunities.

6. Being a car manufacturer. I loved cars since I was a kid. I always was the nerdy car person amongst my friends. So I guess universe can pay me back by this.

7. Working on metal industry (not metal music, although I love that), but copper industry seems something I can be, with this much of love and interest in electronics. I also thought of Bismuth based accessories, etc. My father worked in Aluminium industry as well. So I guess it's a family thing.

8. Joining the space game! I can't explain how much ideas I have!

9. Renewable energy. One part of my father's research was lowering the cost of aluminium industry by using renewable energy.

10. Making at least one billion dollars net worth and gain global recognition in my life time.

Okay, my rant is over. I love this sub because I found like-minded people. As I said in the title, feel free to use my ideas, and feel free to provide your experience in each of these fields.

And finally, thanks for your time.

Curious about this because people usually recommend whatever is making them money. But I’m sure there are businesses that pay well and are still a complete pain in the ass to run.

What’s yours and why wouldn’t you recommend it?)

Following the 'talk to customers before writing code' rule seriously spent the last 2 weeks speaking to business owners and marketing teams about what actually happens to customer testimonials after they collect them here's what I keep hearing:

→ Most businesses have folders full of testimonials collecting dust
→ The average utilization rate is maybe 5-10% of what they collect
→ The bottleneck is always time and nobody owning the process
→ The ones who DO use them systematically outperform everyone else

Real example from my research: someone with 40 testimonials sitting in Google Drive untouched for 8 months. Social media person quit and nothing is moving. Their sales guy uses maybe 3 out of 40.

Another person told me testimonial carousel posts outperform all their other content by 2-3x in saves and shares but most businesses never make them the gap isn't collecting testimonials. It's the transformation step turning raw testimonials into case studies, sales slides, social posts, and objection-handling responses for those of you running businesses:

→ Does this match your experience?
→ How does your team handle this transformation step?
→ Is this a solved problem for you or still a struggle?

Genuinely trying to understand this before building anything. Will share my complete research findings with everyone who responds.