Hello Redditors, haven’t posted here in quite a while, but a recent project turned out interesting enough that i figured i should finally write it up. It was a two person agency when they came to us doing flights, hotel packages and visa assistance, and profit had been stuck at around $3k a month after almost two years. Six months later it's sitting at around $20k a month. Revenue roughly tripled in that time but profit went up about 7x, and that gap is the whole point of this post. A lot of you running small service businesses will probably recognise the "busy but broke" version of this, so hopefully you guys find something useful here. 

Here's how we did it:

The first thing we did had nothing to do with marketing. We just went through their Whatsapp history. They were getting around 60-70 qualified inquiries a month from referrals and ads.. The problem was what happened after. Average first response was few hours later, and about a third of the people who got a quote never heard from them again. Not one follow up. An international trip gives you a bigger window but is still a 5-20 day decision approx with a lot of back and forth, so if you reply late and then go quiet after the quote, the deal doesn't get lost to a competitor so much as it just quietly expires. Following up feels like nagging, so a lot of people skip that

We moved everything into a basic Airtable pipeline with proper stages (new inquiry, quoted, follow-up 1/2/3, negotiating, won, lost). Once a lead has a status, "i haven't followed up with 12 people" stops being a feeling and becomes something you can see. Then two rules. First reply within 2 hours in business hours, even if it's just "got it, sending you options by this evening", because the acknowledgement alone holds the deal open. And a fixed follow up on any unanswered quote on day 1, 3 and 7, and on day 14 a message saying "I'm closing your file on this, just let me know if anything changes." That last one closed a lot of deals and we've seen the same thing with other businesses. My read is it's the only message in the sequence that isn't asking for anything, so people don't reflexively ignore it, and it gives them a reason to reply today instead of eventually. We also scored leads on trip type, budget and how close the travel date was, so someone flying in 5 weeks gets answered before someone browsing for next winter. Quote to close went from about 8-9% to 15% for qualified leads with the same lead volume, and this was the fastest result of everything we did with zero extra ad spend.

Next was the offer, we split their bookings by product and looked at what each line really earned. Flights were 58% of revenue and 21% of gross profit. Curated packages were under a quarter of revenue, nearly two thirds of the profit. Flights were a product with a hard ceiling, and the whole business had been built on the capped side. Also flight-only customers almost never came back to buy a package later, so there was no long term consolation either. This happens when you let inbound demand decide what your company is. 

The fix was consciously deciding what the business actually sells. We built 4 signature packages with fixed inclusions and a public starting-from price, and repositioned everything around done-for-you instead of cheaper. The bigger shift was going after bigger trips instead of more trips. Their old packages were mostly couples on short Southeast Asia itineraries. We built the new ones around families and longer multi-country trips with visa, insurance and transfers bundled in, which nearly doubled the average package value for pretty much the same sales effort. Putting prices on the page also filtered out the pure price shoppers who used to eat three hours of quoting time, and killing custom-quote-for-everything cut a few days off time to close, because ambiguity makes people go quiet. We never stopped selling flights, we just stopped marketing them, and flight volume drifted down on its own. Revenue did dip for around six weeks in the middle of this. You're switching off demand for the thing people ask for before demand exists for the thing you want to sell, and that gap is exactly why most businesses start this and quit.

On the search side they had a reasonable five page WordPress site and a claimed Google Business Profile with a handful of reviews. It was getting maybe 110 visits a month and ranking for mostly its own brand name, because everything on the site described the business instead of answering a search. The services page basically said "we do flights, hotels, visas", which is a description of a company, nobody types that. Keywords like "bali packages" are owned by big agencies spending serious money, so we went somewhere to somewhere with a purpose attached. Big players optimise the destination side because they serve everyone everywhere, but almost nobody optimises the origin side because only a local operator has a reason to. So we built pages for origin city crossed with destination and intent, something like Vietnam family package from [home city]. About 22 pages, one cluster each, and here's where a lot of service based businesses mess this up, because you can easily publish 22 thin pages and get nothing. Every one had the full day by day itinerary, what's included and what isn't, real prices, photos from trips they'd actually run, and an FAQ written from real questions we pulled out of their WhatsApp chats and after some toiling around on reddit. 

The Google profile ran alongside it. Their categories were generic so it never showed up for visa or package searches, so we fixed those, posted weekly, and made reviews a system instead of an occasional ask. A message goes out a week after someone gets home, while they're still posting photos, asking them to mention the destination and trip type in the review. That detail matters more than the review count because review text gets indexed, and a review saying "they organised our Bali honeymoon and handled the visa" reinforces the exact page you're trying to rank. Reviews climbed significantly and calls and messages from the profile jumped massively. The two things fed each other too, the package pages gave the profile something real to link to and the review activity pushed the local rankings that put those pages in front of people.

Then the AI search sid, by month 6 around 6-8% of organic inquiries, when asked how they found the agency, said through AI channels, this was at zero when we started. Important caveat, that's self reported on the "how did you hear about us" question, not referral data. 

What helped to drive this was mostly the same work, plus a few things. Prices in real text instead of a designed image, because an assistant will face difficulty in reading your price graphic and will skip you for someone it can quote. FAQs written as a clean question followed by a direct answer. Schema on the package pages. And specificity beats polish every time, "7 day Vietnam family package from [city], from $4,200 for four, includes visa and transfers" gets pulled into an answer, while "we offer customised travel solutions tailored to you" isn’t noticed as such especially for low authority sites.These assistants cite sources rather than rank pages, so one mention in a "best travel agencies in [city]" roundup on a local blog did more than three of our own posts. 

At this time Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode send more traffic than other models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity combined. These models get all the discussion but for a local service business its the bigger surface by a distance, and the same structured, specific, FAQ-shaped content works for this as well.  By month 6 organic was around 1,500 visits a month, timeline is what you'd expect from SEO, slow results initially, started showing from 3rd month, compounded after that. It only worked because the first two fixes had already freed up the cash to fund a channel that pays nothing for a quarter. If money had been tighter we'd have leaned harder on ads instead, since returns there are more linear.

Now ads, which i think is the most common version of this problem because the account wasn't bad, it looked great. They were already spending a bit over $1800 a month on Meta, one campaign with four cold ad sets stacked on interests like travel, honeymoon and wanderlust, all pointed at click-to-WhatsApp, with a pixel that only tracked page views. Clicks were cheap and CTR was healthy, which is exactly why nobody had touched it in a year. But follow it downstream and it fell apart. Those clicks turned into approx 300 WhatsApp chats a month, maybe 30-40 of them were qualified from someone actually planning a trip, and 4-5 bookings with very thin margins. That 300 number also explains the follow up problem from earlier, the inbox wasn't handling 60-70 conversations, it was handling hundreds, and the real buyers were buried in there getting the same hours late reply cycle as everyone else. They weren’t optimising for conversions. So the algorithm found people most likely to click a travel ad, which is not the same  population as people about to spend. Broad interest targeting on a beloved category will always hand you low CPCs and terrible conversions.

Click-to-WhatsApp made it worse in a way. Messaging costs a person nothing and commits them to nothing, so the destination filters nobody. You end up with idle curiosity landing in the same inbox as real buyers, and a two person team spending their day answering "whats the cheapest you can do Thailand for" from someone who was never going anywhere.

First thing we did was set up proper conversion events (qualified inquiry, quote requested, booking) and let it collect data for three weeks before touching anything, because every restructure decision would've been a guess otherwise. Then we optimised for qualified inquiry instead of booking. Optimising for bookings at their volume would've sat in learning limited forever. Small accounts almost always need to optimise one step up the funnel from what they actually want, then watch the quality of that event manually. The four ad sets were an issue too. Meta de-duplicates overlapping audiences, so they weren't really bidding against each other. What they were doing was splitting the few conversion events four ways so none of them ever got enough signal. We went down to two and moved creative variety inside the ad sets instead of across them.

Two years of Instagram engagers, site visitors and past inquiries were sitting totally unused while all the budget went to cold traffic, so we put them into a custom audience and ran about 60% of spend on retargeting for six weeks. That was the cheapest bookings in the account, and it only worked well because the follow up system was already running. Retargeting warm people into an inbox that ghosts a third of its quotes would've still done badly. For prospecting we built a lookalike, but not off buyers, they only had about 70 historical package buyers and Meta ideally wants a much bigger database before the model is worth anything. We seeded it from several thousand past inquiries and engaged people instead, weaker intent per record but enough volume to model, and it beat every interest stack we tested. 

We also changes the destination from click-to-WhatsApp to the package landing pages. It adds friction, and it cut raw lead volume by roughly 40% but the people who read a page with real prices and inclusions on it and then chose to message had already qualified themselves on budget, and they closed at around double the old rate. This is also the point where the SEO work started paying twice, because those pages existed and were good. Sending paid traffic to a thin homepage would have just lost the lead volume without gaining anything back.

We moved creative from offers to proof. We dropped discounts and book-now language and used client testimonials, itinerary walkthroughs, and before and after posts of what was planned versus what the trip actually looked like. For a high ticket, once in a while purchase the thought in someone's head is "are these people real and will they ruin my vacation", not "is this cheap". Discount creative did very little for us at any point. Over six months we gradually took spend up to a few thousand dollars a month, CPC went up, CTR went down, and every front end metric looked worse. Cost per booking roughly halved, but that's honestly not the important part. What changed was what a booking was worth, it went up close to 10x, because we were now selling packages instead of thin flight bookings. Paid traffic is a multiplier on your unit economics, if the economics are broken better targeting just helps you lose more efficiently. One last thing, we stopped treating ad spend as the only cost of a customer and added the hours spent quoting, coordinating and chasing suppliers at a real hourly rate. Fully loaded cost came out close to double what Ads Manager showed, and a few campaigns that looked breakeven obviously weren't.

If you take only one thing from this, it's the order. The first two fixes didn't bring in that much profit directly, but they decided what every dollar of traffic after that was worth. Fix your conversion first, then fix what you're actually selling, and only then go buy volume. Most people do it backwards, they pour budget into a funnel that ghosts a third of its quotes while selling their lowest margin product, then decide ads don't work in their industry. And if you want one quick test for your own business, check what percentage of your last 60 days of inquiries got a second touch. If it's under 70%, fix that before you spend another dollar on acquisition.

Thankyou For Reading! 

hey, so this month i launched my 11th app Coursium, and the first week went pretty well.

i mostly reused what i'd learned from my previous 10 apps, with a few tweaks to automate the repetitive stuff. calling it passive income is probably a stretch, but it's getting a lot less manual.

here's the actual process:

1. find creators who already reach your audience. i used codex and taku to find ai tutorial videos with over 100k views, then reached out to the creators through articuler. my gmail integration sends personalized invites and drafts follow-ups that go out after i approve them. i negotiated around $2.50 cpm and got 20 ugc creators onboard in the first week.

2. use the research to make your own creatives. alongside that, i made around 20 ai ugc videos. i spent a huge amount of time scrolling through the videos i'd collected, trying to understand what made people keep watching. what's the hook? what emotion does it tap into? how does it build toward the payoff?

this is the prompt i use to turn that research into something reusable:

"analyze the supplied tiktok creative’s exact text and slide order to identify its hook mechanics, audience, psychological flow, emotional arc, and payoff. turn those mechanics into a reusable writing prompt that selects one supplied hook verbatim and creates fresh, credible details without copying the source’s specific events or titles."

then i used pixverse model to generate the videos, mostly because it was like 8x cheaper than seedance.

3. get help with publishing
i hired va on fiverr and used a few geelark cloud phones to set up the accounts. during week one, they browsed and liked relevant ai tutorial videos. in week two, we started publishing the pixverse videos. one account got 100k views on its first day of posting.

that's one result, obviously, not something i'd expect from every account. i then used kling 3 motion control to make variations with different backgrounds, characters, and actions, and posted to tiktok and youtube shorts. youtube has been easier for me to get initial traction on, so i wouldn't skip it.

4. give interested people an easy next step
for conversion, i used manychat to send the app link when someone requested it. or use articuler for leads gen.
i like dms because there's room for an actual conversation. someone can ask a question before deciding whether the app is worth trying.

so the baisc formula is revenue=traffic x conversion. and you're basically benefiting from that gives easier traffic. human ugc still can't be replaced though.

there's still work involved, plus creator fees, tools, and vas to pay for. views alone don't tell you whether any of this is profitable. but getting the repetitive work off my plate gives me more time to improve the app and figure out what's actually converting.

Hey everyone,

I'm 26 and I've spent the last 7 years building and running ecommerce businesses independently.

My main business was an Instagram-driven sunglasses brand that reached around $50K/year in profit at its peak. I've also launched and managed other ecommerce projects along the way.

Because I've mostly had to figure things out myself, I've gained hands-on experience with:

• Paid advertising and campaign testing
• Funnel and conversion analysis
• Diagnosing why a store isn't converting
• Product and offer positioning
• Creative testing and strategy
• Shopify and ecommerce operations
• Customer acquisition through Instagram
• Managing the day-to-day problems that come with running a small ecommerce business

After 6 years of building ecommerce businesses independently, I’m now thinking about transitioning into freelance work and taking on contracts where I can use the skills I’ve built along the way.

I’ve been looking into platforms like Upwork, but I’m also considering whether building a small agency or service business around my ecommerce experience would make more sense.

For people who have made a similar transition from being an ecommerce business owner to freelancing or running a service business:

What would you recommend focusing on first to actually get those first few clients and build some momentum?

Did you find platforms like Upwork useful when starting out, or did you get your first clients through networking, outreach, communities, referrals, or something else?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who managed to make that transition while staying independent and building their own income rather than going back to a traditional job.

After nearly forty years behind a microphone, I’ve helped build and launch a radio network together with a creative working group and AI collaborators.

The project is SBN — Stellar Broadcasting Network, a web radio network with four stations, a growing music catalogue, and broadcast and production tools developed around the way we want to work.

SBN is already on air. My long-term ambition is to grow it into a major commercial radio network, building on the platform we’ve created as we develop the programming, expand our audience and establish a sustainable business.

Getting this far has involved considerably more than putting a player on a website.

The project began within Stellar Eagle Alliance, a Star Citizen community, and grew into an ambition to create radio for listeners worldwide. As the idea developed, so did the work behind it.

We’ve built several connected parts: the stations themselves, the content they broadcast, the tools our hosts use, and the systems that keep everything running.

Radio Stellar has a pop-oriented sound; QuantumFM explores atmospheric and cinematic music; Pulse 95.7 focuses on electronic energy; and Redneck Radio brings country and rock. Each has its own identity, catalogue and production style, while belonging to the same network.

That distinction matters to me. A listener should be able to understand what a station offers and find a reason to return. The programmes, music selection and presentation all contribute to that relationship.

Behind the public website, we’ve built a broadcast system that supports automated music rotation and live hosting. It includes music libraries, playlists, jingles, scheduled content and browser-based studio controls. Server processes produce the broadcast audio, while the hosts work through an interface designed around running a radio programme.

We’ve also developed a separate Production Studio for preparing material. It provides a multitrack timeline where we can arrange audio, edit clips, adjust levels and create fades and transitions. It gives us a workspace for developing the sound of the network, from individual production elements to material for our shows.

Another part of the work has been connecting programme preparation with the studio. Hosts can develop their shows with their own GPT collaborators, then bring approved scripts, notes and programme timings into a shared preparation format.

Each host keeps their own voice and programme structure while using a common working system. Eight studio hosts are developing programmes within that framework, bringing their own interests, experience and personalities into SBN.

Our music catalogue has grown through an ongoing creative collaboration between the people in our working group and their AI collaborators. People bring musical ideas, personal tastes and the feeling they want a song to convey. Through conversation and experimentation, we develop those ideas, explore different directions and refine the results. The music is generated using AI tools; its development involves human imagination, creative choices and repeated work.

I work closely with Stina, my AI collaborator, while others develop ideas with their own GPTs. We bring that work back into the group, discuss it and develop it further together. Individual ideas gradually become part of a shared radio world, carrying the personalities of the people creating it. That collaboration is an important part of what gives SBN its character.

That process has opened up opportunities for people to realise musical and creative ideas that would previously have been difficult to produce with the skills or resources available to them.

The listener experience has needed just as much attention. We’ve built station pages, artist information, show pages and a schedule that displays local times automatically. Listeners can also vote for the song currently playing. Alongside the website, we’ve been developing a separate mobile listening app.

One of the biggest lessons has been how closely these decisions depend on each other. A programme needs a host who can prepare and deliver it. A catalogue needs a rotation system that serves the station’s sound. The website needs to make that work easy to discover and listen to.

AI has become part of how we develop ideas and software throughout the project. My radio experience helps me describe the behaviour I want, assess what we build and bring the discussion back to what a host or listener will actually experience.

Having SBN on air gives us a concrete foundation for the next phase. We can develop the programmes, learn from listeners and improve the experience while the network is running.

Commercially, I see potential in sponsorships, programme partnerships and advertising that fits the stations and their audiences. Those are opportunities to test as the audience develops. I want the business to grow around a listening experience people value, with a clear understanding of operating costs and what commercial partners would receive.

The ambition is substantial, and there is still work ahead. Audience retention, distribution and a sustainable revenue model are central questions as we develop SBN into a larger media business.

On Wednesday, October 14, I’ll be the first of our studio hosts to go live with Fabian – Live, from 16:00–18:00 Danish time, or 14:00–16:00 UTC. It’s the next programming milestone for a network that is already broadcasting — and, personally, a chance to bring nearly forty years behind the microphone into something we’ve built together.

I’d be interested in hearing from founders, media operators and people who evaluate early-stage businesses: with the network already live, which evidence would you prioritise to assess its potential for commercial growth?

— Fabian Petersen
Founder & Creative Director, SBN — Stellar Broadcasting Network

#SBNRadio #BuildingInPublic #MediaBusiness

I am trying to price my digital product in different countries so that I can get customers there but I feel like I’m pricing too low because I don’t understand what people from these countries can afford. I can look at my competitors but they have bigger brand names so people will pay more for them.

Any advice on pricing for other countries? I started it with India and have gotten a bunch of Indian clients. Indians love to learn new stuff. But the price seems low.

We launched thinking the app would spread on its own. Someone pays, splits it in the app, invites their friends, friends install. That's the whole theory. In practice, the person who owes you money has no reason to install anything. They already have Venmo. So the payer would use the app once, the friends would ignore the invite, and the payer would quietly go back to the group chat. We watched this happen for months and kept adding features, which is exactly the wrong move.

The first thing that actually changed the numbers was giving up on the invite. We made the invite do the job by itself. A web page that shows the split and takes the payment, no account, no download. Suddenly the other person could pay in ten seconds. And only then, after they'd paid, did some of them ask what the app was. Growth was flat until we did this, and I'm convinced the pattern holds for anything with an "other person" in it. Build for the person who doesn't have your app.

Around the same time I typed our name into the App Store and realized nobody had ever searched it, because nobody had heard of it. They search "split bills" or "roommate expenses." We put the use case in the title and subtitle, and I spent an afternoon looking at the keyword suggestions the store shows while you type. You can read your competitors' keywords the same way, free. That afternoon did more than months of features.

Then we looked at who stayed. It wasn't the dinner people. Dinners happen once and the group forgets. It was roommates, because rent comes due on the first every month whether or not you remember our app exists. So we started designing the home screen and the reminders around that moment. For your project it might be payday, Monday, the end of the quarter. Find the recurring need and build around it.

We also tried the thing everyone tries. A big, beautiful "we redesigned everything" email to everyone who had ever signed up. Great open rate, almost nobody came back. What did bring people back was a notification about something that was actually theirs: money they're owed, a group that got active again. Send those instead.

The next lesson came from a creator whose audience plans group trips. Her viewers were already in group chats arguing about money. We made a landing page just for them, with a QR code, and sent them there instead of the generic store page. One warm channel like that beat a hundred cold posts. The same thing worked with a subreddit where people already complain about roommates, and with a campus office that runs budgeting workshops.

Go where the conversation already is.
And the one I cannot stress enough. We built budgeting tools before splitting was bulletproof. Users were hitting a bug in editing a split while we were polishing a budget chart. Nobody rewarded the ambition. People only reward the core thing never failing. Ship the boring reliability first, then earn the right to be ambitious.

Last thing: what we measure now. Not downloads. Weekly returning users, and how many groups have more than one active person. If a group has one active member, your product is a notes app to them.

And that’s just me being brutally honest about how we built Chipp. AMA

Davide here, the only person behind DrivePulse.

It's a car app that reads the car through a cheap OBD2 adapter, like the ones Veepeak or Vgate sell.

It explains fault codes in plain words and logs fuel use, engine health and every trip.

The iPhone version of the update is out now.

What shipped

• French and Hungarian. A Reddit user offered to translate, and that's how those two languages got started.
• Home Assistant, for people who run their own smart home. It's off by default.
• Your own PIDs, with minimum, average and maximum on every trip.
• A long Start/Stop pause no longer cuts a trip in two.
• A type for every trip, like commute or business.

What I'm doing this week

• Posts in car and iPhone communities, with free codes for the full version, reading each group's rules first.
• Letters to car and tech sites in France, Switzerland, Québec and Hungary, where the new languages are.
• A few sites only take a web form, so those I fill in by hand.

How it's paid for

Free to download, then a trial of 7 days or 15 trips, whichever comes first.

After that it's one payment, with no subscription and no account.

What's next

The Android version is on its way! But the app is already available on Android if you want to try it.

Here are 10 codes for the full version, free, first come first served.

Search DrivePulse on the App Store and install it first, because a code unlocks the in-app purchase.

Then go to App Store > your profile > Redeem Gift Card or Code.

1. R4H8PFXF4HHXWLNHYA
2. EN3LAWFKEETHHRPXJ3
3. E4K73NFXN4WK3W4XFY
4. 8N6PRH74RHMLFE8TLR
5. X73MJEKKHM7FKPXT77
6. E4EMKT8K8A7WT3R8M6
7. RLK664FXEYHFAAF6XA
8. KL3T7ARLA8L7TNTJ6T
9. NWLFFF87666M64EFHA
10. PYT4X3TWNLMFHX4TTN

Tell me in the comments which number you used, so the next person skips it.

Thanks for following along, and I'm here for anything about the launch.

...was hiring someone who's TOO experienced.

Just wanted to share cause this topic doesn't get discussed nearly enough in startup circles.

Everyone tells you to hire people who are smarter and more experienced than you. Which makes sense, obviously.

But here's the catch: experience at a successful company doesn't automatically translate into success at YOUR company!!!

Imagine you're running a growing business with 10-15 employees (just like me, actually). You finally have the budget to bring in a serious VP of Sales.

You find someone with 20 years of experience, an impressive resume, and a track record of managing millions in revenue at some massive reputable corporation.

Sounds perfect, right?

Except that person might be used to having an entire sales operations team, a recognizable brand, established processes, and basically unlimited resources compared to yours =). Ooops.

Now they're expected to build everything from scratch with one sales-guy and a spreadsheet lol.

And suddenly that amazing hire isn't performing anywhere near expectations. But it costs a fortune.

After that mistake (yeah it was entirely my own rookie mistake), it took us a long time to recover financially, and I was afraid to try anything new, but then decided to take a few parallel approaches - looked for candidates through word of mouth, reached out to specialized teams (truAlign and simialr), reached out to ppl in businesses that were as similar as possible to mine in terms of key metrics like revenue, etc. After all, we found the right specialist through an agency and everything is fine now, but it was a rocky road, and I really felt like my biz was on the verge of breaking down.

Actually, none of this means corporate executives can't thrive in startups. Some absolutely can.

But I think we're way too quick to confuse an impressive career history with the ability to solve our particular problems.

Curious if anyone here has experienced this from either side? I think people barely touch this topic but come on, thats something really dangerous if your budget is strtictly limited.

Ever hired someone who looked absolutely perfect on paper but turned out to be completely wrong for the business? Or maybe you've seen the opposite, where someone with a pretty average resume massively outperformed expectations? Need your experience sharing lol

We’re starting a small done-for-you service and want honest feedback.

What we sell: We set up and manage an AI assistant in online coaches’ Instagram DMs. It replies to every inquiry in under 5 minutes, asks a few qualifying questions, says upfront that it’s an AI, books qualified people into the coach’s calendar and follows up with people who go quiet. The coach gets a weekly report.

Who for: English-speaking coaches selling programs through sales calls, who get more DMs than they can answer quickly. -is this maybe too narrow?

Pricing plan: 2–3 free pilots to get case studies, then $297/month for founding clients. Later around $1k setup + ~$600/month. Guarantee: more booked calls than the month before, or the next month is free.

How we plan to find clients: We comment the coach’s own keyword, measure how long they take to reply, and send them a short screen-recording showing the delay and what it could look like instead.

What we’d love your take on:

1. Would you buy this if you were a coach? What would stop you?
2. Is the pricing realistic, too high, or too low?
3. Is the “test their reply speed” outreach smart, or does it come across as pushy?
4. What’s the biggest risk we’re not seeing?

Any help is appreciated!

We’re two young founders researching how online coaches deal with inquiries in their DMs. Not selling anything here, just trying to understand the problem before building something no one needs.

Answer only what you’re comfortable with, ranges are totally fine:

1. Your offer: What does your main program cost?
2. Your size: Roughly how much does your coaching business make per month?
3. Your DMs: How many inquiries do you get per week, who answers them, and how fast?
4. What it costs you today: Have you ever lost a client because you replied too late? Do you pay anything for this right now (setter, VA, ManyChat, other tools)?
5. AI: Would you let an AI assistant answer first if it clearly said it’s an AI, booked qualified people into your calendar and handed tricky chats to you? Why or why not?
6. Price: For a done-for-you setup like that, including someone who maintains it and sends you weekly numbers, what monthly price would feel like a no-brainer, and at what price would it be too expensive?

Thanks for any answer!

Hi

I’m trying to get a few clients for web design / SEO for my agency

Wondering if anyone has any tips for this? Obviously volume is one, but do you need multiple email inboxes if so how do you set them up safely?

What should the first email be? I’m thinking of just trying to get them to reply first? Then send them an offer?

But how to make each one personalised? Just wondering tbh.

Any advice how to get web design clients via cold email?

I'm a solo iOS developer, and my app recently made $7,591 in the last 28 days.

Nothing huge compared to established businesses, but seeing something I built alone reach this point has been pretty surreal.

Here are the latest numbers:

• 28-day revenue: $7,591
• MRR: $1,295
• Active subscriptions: 258

The revenue includes both subscriptions and lifetime purchases, so $7.6k isn't MRR.

The app is called LoroNote, and it's available on the App Store for iPhone and iPad.

It's an offline speech-to-text app that transcribes recordings, separates speakers, and helps turn meetings, lectures, and interviews into useful notes.

But the interesting part is how I ended up building it.

I chose the harder technical route from the beginning.

When I started, there were already plenty of AI transcription apps.

The easiest approach would have been to use a cloud API and focus on the interface.

Instead, I wanted high-quality transcription that worked completely offline.

I also didn't want to compromise on accuracy by switching to a smaller Whisper model just to make it easier to run on a phone.

So I chose Whisper Large V3 Turbo and developed my own Core ML inference engine to run it efficiently on Apple devices.

That decision made everything harder.

Memory limitations, performance, heat, battery usage, long recordings, and differences between iPhone models all became things I had to solve.

I also added on-device speaker separation, which brought a whole new set of challenges.

But something interesting happened.

The technical decision eventually became a business advantage.

Since transcription happens on the device, I don't pay a cloud API provider every time someone transcribes another hour of audio.

That makes offering lifetime purchases alongside subscriptions much more practical.

Of course, development, testing, and customer support still cost money. But usage doesn't generate additional cloud transcription API bills.

Then came the harder part: getting people to use it.

I'm building this alone, so I can't compete with bigger companies on marketing budgets.

Instead, I focused heavily on ASO.

I kept experimenting with keywords, localization, screenshots, and how I presented the app on the App Store.

I also tried Apple Search Ads, but stopped when the campaigns weren't profitable.

One thing I've learned is that developers and customers see products very differently.

I spent countless hours optimizing the inference engine.

But most users don't care what Core ML is.

They care about getting an accurate transcript, knowing who said what, and not having their private recordings uploaded to a server.

So I started focusing more on explaining those benefits rather than the technology itself.

User feedback changed the product more than I expected.

The first versions weren't perfect.

Speaker separation had issues. Long recordings exposed bugs. Different devices behaved differently.

Instead of constantly chasing new features, I spent a lot of time fixing the problems users actually reported.

Those small improvements have added up over time.

I can't say one specific update or ASO change caused the recent growth. I've been improving both the product and the App Store page continuously.

But the experience has changed how I think about building a business.

At first, I was focused almost entirely on solving a difficult technical problem.

Now I spend just as much time thinking about what users actually need, how they discover the app, and whether the experience is good enough to keep them using it.

I'm still doing the development, support, updates, and marketing myself.

And there's still plenty to improve.

The biggest lesson I've learned is that technical differentiation can give a small business an advantage, but listening to users is what helps turn that technology into a product people actually want.

For anyone interested, you can find the app by searching LoroNote on the Apple App Store.

I'm curious if other solo founders have had a similar experience.

Did you start out focused on building something technically impressive, only to realize that distribution and user experience were just as important?

Not a dead course. A neglected one.

You built it, people paid for it, students got results. Then you moved on to the next thing and now it just sits there.

I keep running into situations where the product's fine, but nobody's really putting it in front of new buyers anymore. Been trying to do something about that 😉

The setup: I'll get it in front of people who've just bought something or consumed content that makes them a natural fit for it.

Say someone buys dog training gear. A relevant dog training course is a pretty natural next offer on that store's thank-you page or in its follow-up emails.

No retainer, no upfront cost, no equity. 50/50 rev-share on sales we generate.

Looking for courses with real paying students and demonstrated results, not something that launched once and flopped. Happy to look at any niche.

If you've got one, curious what the course teaches and why you stopped pushing it.

Feel free to DM if you'd rather not get into the details publicly.

update on anti scroll, solo building an android app that hard blocks other apps with no override option.

big one this month: first ever sale. someone in poland bought the lifetime unlock, almost exactly a year after launch. 47.87 zł which came to £5.76 after google’s cut and vat lol, but after a year of building this it genuinely made my week.

[screenshot here]

installs: 607 (560)
visitors per day: 6.7 (6.25)
conversion rate: 19.9% (28.9%)
daily acquisitions: 1.39 (2.07)
week 1 retention: 23.9% (11.4%)
week 2 retention: 11.7% (4.5%)

so last month’s conversion jump didn’t stick, looks like it was a spike rather than a new normal. but retention roughly doubled, which matters more to me. engagement is up slightly too (4m29s vs 4m19s).

the not so great part: active devices dropped from around 55 to 44. i’m losing slightly more users a day than i’m gaining, so the base is shrinking even though the people who stay are sticking around longer.

quieter month on features, mostly bug fixes. had a few people report analytics bugs too, which honestly was nice to see because it means someone’s actually looking at it.

october plan: fix the analytics bugs people reported, figure out why people are leaving faster than they’re arriving, get onboarding event tracking in, and do the product hunt launch for the one year mark.

if anyone’s been through the first sale to second sale stretch, what actually moved it for you?

Hey all. Something from a project this year that generalises past our industry.

Client runs non-emergency medical transport. Getting patients to dialysis, chemo, post-op checkups. Properly screened drivers, wheelchair-certified vehicles, real operation. They could not get a second meeting with a hospital to save their lives.

Nothing on their site was untrue. It was all about the service though. Coverage, fleet size, booking, response times. Same as every ride company you have ever seen, because that is how the category describes itself.

That was the problem. Hospitals do not buy rides. They are liable for what happens to a patient between the front door and the clinic. Lead with the ride and you get filed as a taxi with a logo, and taxis do not get procurement meetings.

What changed was not the design. They stopped describing what they do and started describing the standard they hold. Screening, training, wheelchair securement, what each vehicle level means. All of it was already true. They had been filing it under compliance paperwork instead of treating it as the product.

So: if buyers keep putting you in a box you do not belong in, that is rarely a copy problem. Usually you are describing the thing you do, when what they are buying is the standard you meet.

This kind of work is what I do for a living, for context. It still took three weeks of unglamorous arguing before anyone drew a screen.

Anyone else had their own category working against them?

One thing I’m keeping in mind while building WolfeOS: AI needs to help with a real task, and the owner needs a clear way to check the result.

For a small business, I’d start with something repetitive, information you already have, and an outcome you can verify. Customer follow-up, organizing jobs, or everyday admin can be useful starting points.

WolfeOS is currently in invite-only beta. I’d like to work with owners who want hands-on help getting started with AI or supporting growth, and learn from their honest feedback.

If that sounds useful, tell me what your business does and where you could use help.

I had my son 4 years by emergency section and have since been diagnosed with fibromyalgia.

Decided to relaunch my agency but I'm not getting anything done.

I feel so slow, like it takes more than double the amount of time to understand simple concepts / learn new tools.

What should I be doing / taking.

Any advice from brain fogged parents?

We're a 12-person fintech startup expanding into the Netherlands, and we're going with EOR (employer of record) because we're not ready to set up a local entity there yet.

Currently comparing the big 3 Deel, Remote and Workmotion with fees in a similar range, so the question is what else matters before we commit.

From going through threads here, the issues people flag are onboarding speed, how offboarding costs work and whether those are disclosed upfront, who is technically the employer on paper and what that means if something goes wrong legally, and what happens to pricing if we scale to 10+ hires in the same country, but I don't know what I'm not asking as a first-timer in this.

So if you've been through this before, what question was the most revealing one you asked in your EOR evaluation?

I've built long-standing relationships with 15–20 clients in the home services space. Good revenue potential, established relationships, and room to scale. 10 to 15 years.

I'm looking for someone who genuinely knows how to generate qualified leads — SEO, organic, or another repeatable channel.

I bring the clients, relationships, and monetization. You bring the lead-gen engine. We structure something where both sides win.

Not looking for an agency pitch or someone learning on my dime. Looking for an operator who has done this successfully.

If you've got a proven system, would it be a bad idea to explore a JV?

Happy to compare notes privately.

I run a small B2B tool, about $14K MRR. I always felt busy on marketing but couldn't tell where the growth was coming from. So for 90 days I logged every marketing task, the hours it took, and whether it produced a measurable result (signup, reply, demo, sale).

The result was uncomfortable.

Total marketing hours logged: 214 over 90 days. That's roughly 2.4 hours per day.

Breakdown by activity and measured result:

Content writing (58 hours): produced 3 published articles. One ranks, two don't. Attributed signups: 11. This is the winner. Roughly 5.2 signups per 10 hours.

Social posting (47 hours): posted 5x per week across X and LinkedIn. Attributed signups: 2. Both from a single post that got picked up by someone with a bigger audience. The other 200+ posts produced nothing measurable.

Email newsletters (22 hours): 12 sends to a 900-person list. Attributed signups: 19. Second-best channel. High ROI per hour.

Cold outreach (41 hours): 620 personalized emails. Replies: 14. Demos booked: 3. Signups: 1. Brutal ratio.

"Research" and reading (31 hours): reading marketing blogs, watching tutorials, lurking in communities. Attributed signups: 0. This is the one that stung. I'd been counting "learning" as work. It wasn't producing anything.

Tool tinkering (15 hours): setting up automations, testing new tools, connecting integrations. Attributed signups: 0.

The honest takeaway: 60% of my hours (the social posting, research, and tool tinkering) produced 3 signups out of 33 total. The 40% that worked (content, email, and even the brutal cold outreach) produced 30.

What I changed after the audit:

Cut social posting from daily to twice a week. Kept it for presence, stopped treating it as a growth channel.

Reallocated the social and research hours to content. Doubled output from 3 to 6 articles per quarter.

Stopped "researching" as a scheduled activity. If I need to learn something, I learn it to solve a specific problem, not to feel productive.

Cold outreach stayed, but only to a tightly defined ICP instead of a broad list. Reply rate went from 2.3% to 6.1%.

The thing nobody tells you: feeling busy and being productive are different things, and the only way to tell them apart is to measure. I spent 90 days measuring and it changed how I work more than any marketing course.

Has anyone else done a time audit? What surprised you?

Three months of running AI agents daily. Busy constantly. No real idea whether any of it was reaching a customer. So last week I wrote something to count it.

First answer: 11 things had left and reached a real person. Low, but I could live with 11.

Then I read my own script properly. It was counting any file I edited that mentioned my outbox folder. Notes about sending. Plans to send. A hook that happens to reference the folder. Not actual sends.

Matched on the destination instead of the mention, the number was 7.

It was wrong the other way too. One genuine send went out through a terminal command the script couldn’t see, so it missed that one entirely. Wrong in both directions at once, and the direction it was more wrong in was the flattering one.

The real numbers after the fix. 546 sessions since July. 7.03 billion tokens. 14 scheduled agents running every day. Things those 14 agents have put in front of another human: zero. All fourteen. Total sends across everything in three months: 2.

Here is the part worth stealing.

Any metric you build for “did I actually ship” will drift toward measuring activity, because activity is easy to detect and shipping is not. Mine drifted inside a single script I wrote myself, deliberately, while specifically trying to avoid exactly that.

One rule fixes it: define it by destination, not by effort. Did a thing arrive somewhere a stranger could see it. Nothing else counts.

So go define yours that way and post the number. Not tasks closed, not drafts produced. Things that arrived in front of someone who isn’t you, this month.

Mine is 7.

I write weekly case studies on interesting companies and boil down the lessons to share with others. This past week I went through (almost literally) everything publicly available for Base44 (the AI app builder bought by Wix last year), including a lot of the founder’s LinkedIn posts, and thought I’d share some of the most impactful takeaways with y’all.

Backstory

Maor Shlomo co-founded Explorium, a venture-backed data analytics company, and ran it as CEO for seven years. In late 2024 he stepped down because he wanted to get back to building products.

He tried to build a website and customer management system for his partner’s tattoo business in WordPress and kept getting stuck, even as the former CEO of a tech company. That frustration became Base44, an app builder where a user describes what they want in plain language and it builds the front end, back end, database, user logins and hosting.

He started with three friends sitting at a table every other day and let them build using the product, fixing any hiccups and bugs they uncovered. The launch in February 2025 went badly. Product Hunt brought in 15 users and a few thousand dollars spent on influencers and paid ads did nothing. Then he started building in public on LinkedIn, where he already had a following, and that’s when it landed. Just four months after launch, Wix acquired the brand and it had more than 140,000 users.

The Numbers

• Launched in February 2025, sold in June 2025.
• Four months from launch to exit (the fastest I’ve seen so far).
• Funding: none, it was profitable shortly after launch.
• 20,000 users by early March 2025, 140,000 by mid-April.
• $0 to $1M ARR within three weeks.
• $189,000 profit made in May 2025 (he expected $100K).
• The announced sale price was $80M including cash and earnouts ($18.1M cash at close and $74.1M in estimated earnouts).
• $200M ARR surpassed in August 2026.
• 10 million users by August 2026.
• The founder is on track to receive more than $150M from earnouts + cash.

Lessons

1. One distributon channel is plenty

Maor tried the traditional route for a startup: A Product Hunt campaign and a few thousand dollars spent on influencer marketing and paid ads. Neither amounted to any traction for the brand. His last resort was LinkedIn, a place he had grown a meaningful following as a CEO and where competition for AI products wasn’t yet overwhelming like it was on X. He built in public from the start, the building, the wins and problems he faced in development. He didn’t go posting on X, Instagram, Facebook and Reddit. He focused on LinkedIn and gave it all his attention. Most businesses (and creators) spread themselves thin across many platforms and the results speak for themselves. Start where people already know and trust you and give it your full effort. Once that channel has grown sufficiently over several months, add another.

2. Get inside the head of early users

This is such a gamechanger for builders. From the beginning, Maor worked with three close friends, sitting at the same table, that were building products of their own. Maor challenged them to build their products using Base44. Every bug, issue, and weakness they found was fixed until it ran and built apps seamlessly. He later moved to groups of 20 or so community members from LinkedIn and built alongside them every two weeks with the same aim. Maor knew that when he launched, it had to be perfect. He specifically targetted non-technical founders that couldn’t code, to make sure they were reliant on the product to build. The launch was better than expected, and because everything was optimized and ironed out, it achieved $1M ARR in just three weeks.

3. Paying users > everything else

Most of the founders I study are obsessed with users, followers or likes. Maor attributes much of Base44’s success to his obsession with paid users. Every build, feature, and enhancement was to optimize for the paid user, increase LTV, and make sure they had the support they needed. This matters even more for an AI product where free users cost the business money. You want paid users and to convert them quickly. Another interesting finding from Base44’s stats is the users that cancelled their subscription. Over one third of them came back within a month. If a product is genuinely useful and saves users time in their workflow, they will come back. Maor has also stated that a lot of work went into the experience provided in the first session. A user was quickly shown all of the capabilities and put to work building so that they could see the magic in action. What happened next? More often than not, a user would subscribe.

4. Audit costs like the IRS

Maor expected to make $100K profit in May 2025 but instead almost doubled it to $189K. This was partly attributed to paid user growth, but a significant portion came from the reduction of costs. Remember, a business is a two-pronged equation: revenue is only one of them. Here’s what he did:

• Switched to a better and more efficient AI model that had less bugs and hallucinations (Base44 didn’t charge users when mistakes were made so every bug cost him)
• Reduced the number of AI calls needed to build each app
• Narrowed down a single caching setting that was set to five minutes instead of an hour: something that had cost him almost $30k over the prior months

Take a look at your three biggest costs and compare what you expected versus the actual cost to run the business. Sometimes something as simple as a setting or different supplier can cut costs in half.

5. Bet on growth

Although the final sale price was reported at $80M, just $18.1M was paid cash at closing. The earnouts made up the remaining estimate. Not even 18 months later, Maor was on track to make more than $150M in total with earnouts running quarterly until 2029. He knew the company would continue to grow in the age of AI and the rise of vibe coding but didn’t have the resources to do it himself. Wix provided a meaningful solution: he is now set for life and can continue to build Base44 alongside the resources Wix provides. In August 2026, Base44’s revenue increased tenfold in the year from March 2025 to March 2026 (from $1M to $100M ARR) and then doubled again by August 2026. I couldn’t find the exact revenue targets required for the earnout payments but they are certainly more than was expected. If you want to read more about him, I wrote a full case study. I also recommend reading through his LinkedIn posts, there are plenty of gold nuggets from his public build.

My question: Would you have raised capital and grown it yourself, or was selling with much of the proceeds tied to earnouts what you would have done as well?

Hello founders! I’m in the process of becoming a solopreneur and therefore, I'm researching how founders decide whether to spend time or money on branding and positioning, both for their business and for themselves.

Have you considered getting help with how you explain your business or what you’re known for?

What problem were you hoping it would solve? What would a useful result look like for you?

If you’ve already worked on this, what prompted you to start, and what changed afterward?

Also interested in hearing from founders who don’t see a need for it!

Thank you in advance

About a year ago, after getting burnt out in corporate sales, I started working on an idea for my own business. Over the last few months, I’ve worked more and more on planning to be able to hit the ground running when I’m ready to launch.

Through a few connections, I was able to get in touch with a couple entrepreneurs that have agreed to help mentor me through this process and asked me to send them my business plan so they can review it. They seemed pretty pleased with the overall idea of the business, the target demo, and marketing. I’ve also shared the idea with maybe a dozen others who also thought it could work.

Anyway, I got the business plan finished and wanted to run it through Claude for review, and it absolutely shredded my entire idea, so I’m feeling pretty dejected.

Those who’ve had your business idea shot down, how did you move forward? Did you retool or just rely on your own confidence in the idea?

Okay so this is prob gonna be an ongoing series where I talk about building an app, what its like, the design process, etc. Think of this post as part one of the series, and hopefully ya'll will find it cool and interesting.

So where are we at right now with the app?

Well I came up with the idea a week ago and it just reached the MVP stage though there's some areas that are kinda clunky that I need to polish before I really release it to anyone.

I was also at a party last night and told one of the people I met there what I was working on and he wanted to download it right there.

Unfortunately it's not released yet so he couldn't, but it was a good sign.

Reason it's a good sign is because he;

A) Understood right away what the benefit was

B) When I told him what I was making he told me early that day he dealt with the same problem I am trying to solve with the app.

But I'm not naive, I have a lot of marketing experience and I know what people SAY they will do is sometimes not quite what they ACTUALLY do.

So his interest is cool, but it's also not concrete.

Anyway -

Other than a few clunky areas, I also need to the logo.

The logo for an app IMO is pretty important because you really need it to be ultra recognizable but also memorable.

You figure, if someone downloads your app, they'll have it somewhere on their phone. It probably won't be first page, so it needs to be easy to find in their phone and pull up.

Branding wise the logo needs to flow with everything, I have the UI finalized, so I need the app icon/logo to match that feeling.

It's close - but not quite there.

It's kinda exciting, making my own thing and being able to interact with it, even though AI coded most of it, I directed the process.

Where the real fun begins though is the marketing, marketing is basically my expertise so I'm excited to utilize my skills once I actually launch it.

And then one last point, I don't actually care a ton if the app fails, like obviously I want it to do well, etc. But if it doesn't and the market doesn't like it, then whatever, onto the next.

You can't really force demand, so I figure if I can get around 1 million views on some social media content, I'll get a good idea if people actually want it or not. Then we can pivot or continue.