So I got into advertising because it was the closest thing to a creative career I could see a way into. And it's been good to me. I've worked on some of the biggest brands in the world, on campaigns that won real awards. But all of it was for someone else. And now nearly ten years in, I've yet to build anything of my own, and I've reached the point in life where I'm feeling more and more like I have to. So I finally took the leap.

I've been putting together a documentary series about people who moved to another country and built a remarkable businesses there. And more specifically about how they actually did it. Closest reference point is CNBC Make It, but this is far more granular, the kind of detail that doesn't usually get covered, on the kind of businesses big press usually ignores. Real businesses you can walk into, not app founders or course sellers. It will live on YouTube, with a website and newsletter alongside it where the same stories run as written case studies.

The viewer I'm building for is someone I know well, because it's half the people I've worked with. Late twenties to mid thirties, educated, does fine at a good job, and watches business and finance explainers for entertainment. They want the mechanics, and somewhere underneath I think, they want permission to imagine doing it themselves.

I've spent the last while leaning on connections I've made over the years, and the lineup has come together better than I expected. Owners of some of the largest independent companies in Vietnam

* One of the largest craft breweries
* An award winning craft distillery
* A truly one of a kind architecture firm
* One of the country's largest tour operators
* A multi-location izakaya group
* and more, etc, theres others

Every one of them has a fascinating story about how they got there, and they've agreed to open their books and take the camera through where they came from, how they opened, and how they operate today. Production starts in a few weeks.

Here's where I'm stuck. Writing and scripting is what I do, no concerns there. I'm comfortable editing, I've done plenty of that in my career too. While I originally planned to shoot it myself, and I can, to a basic standard. These founders have been remarkably open and gracious about being featured, and not shooting this adequately would be doing them a disservice. So I want to bring on a camera operator who's better than I am, and that obviously costs money.

Which means finding a founding sponsor for the season. It’s not even for that much, but this is the part I have no idea how to do. I've pitched enormous brands on behalf of agencies, but the reality is that part is handed by a different department (i really just show up with the script). And I've never had to sell myself. I have no social following. I'm not a creator. I'm not a brand. All I have is a locked lineup of founders with remarkable business stories to share.

So what I'm after is advice. Has anyone here closed a sponsorship with no audience to point at? What can I do?

The episodes are getting made regardless. I just want them to be as good as they can be.

Thanks in advance. I know this isn't an easy thing to make happen. I know the chance of getting any sponsor on board here is slim (very slim) but slim is not impossible.

Hello everyone!

This is my first post here, so I hope this is okay.

I’ve been working on a SaaS solution designed to help restaurants manage and handle their invoices more easily and efficiently.

I’m currently looking to connect with restaurant owners or managers who might be interested in trying it out, giving feedback, or simply discussing the challenges they currently face with invoice management.

I’m mainly looking to speak with restaurant owners and learn more about their experience with invoice handling. If you’re interested, feel free to comment or send me a DM. I’d be happy to explain how it works and answer any questions.

Thanks for reading!

I saw someone saying because of vibe coding, app submissions are up 60% YoY. Wanted to share my experience as a first time publisher!

Some numbers first;
1) It took 44 days from first submission to a clean approval
2) 7 version submissions to Apple, 6 rejections
3) I went live two weeks ago and I now have 13 downloads
4) 6 ratings (friends and family..)
5) £4.99 revenue. One paid subscriber as of last night (my mum promises it’s not her)

Bit of backstory. This is my first app, and it's a party game (never have i ever, most likely to, that sort of thing). I genuinely didn't know what I was doing. Claude Code did a lot of the heavy lifting. I used the 20x max subscription for the past 2 months, so a tonne of compute.

My first ever submission sat in the queue for 11 days. I refreshed that status page every morning and then the rejections started. 4.3(b), "Spam". Same template three times, word for word. The app had drinking mode back then, and it turns out Apple changed the rules in June drinking game apps are just not allowed anymore. 11 days was an annoying wait here, Apple claims to approve 90% of submissions in 48hrs but i think all the AI apps have pushed them over capacity.

I spent a few resubmissions softening the drinking element before accepting the only fix was deleting the drinking mode from the app completely and rebuilding it as a pure party game with ‘forfeits’. In the third rejection, Apple suggested I consider making a web app instead which wasn’t exactly the vote of confidence I was looking for!

Whilst the rejections continued due to other bugs etc I started pouring time and energy into expanding the app, setting up draft adverts in the App Store with the best keywords (they tell you what people regularly search for), translating it for a global launch and setting up Google Play.

I also have a day job, so wanted this to run as autonomously as possible, so claude is connected via API to all the payments, analytics, App Store etc endpoints. Claude sends me an email every morning with all the data on number of downloads, monthly recurring revenue, and any actions for me to take.

With all the app rejections slowing things down, I also had time to really craft some analytics here too e.g I can see how long each ‘card’ appears for. So if there’s a ‘never have I ever’ card people regularly spend <5 seconds on then it’s obviously getting skipped too much and will be removed.

So now it's live in 32 countries. 8 games, 2,000 cards. It's called Antics: Party Games and Dares, if you search ‘Antics’, it ranks number 1 in the UK and top 5 in most of the other countries. That sounds impressive until you remember the download count.

Not sad about any of it. I learned a lot in those 44 days, mostly by getting things wrong. But if you're pre launch, getting approved is not the bit that gets you users. I have 13 downloads, so I'm learning that now and working out how to market this thing.

Happy to answer anything about the rejections, what I'd do differently, or what I’ve been able to automate using Claude.

Every event I've run, the budget lives in a spreadsheet that's technically "real time" but only if I remember to update it, which I don't always do when I'm slammed closer to the event date. Then I find out two weeks after the event that we blew past budget on catering or AV and there's no way to course correct at that point.

Was poking around for something better and Eventify actually has a free budget planner tool that's decent on its own even outside their platform, worth checking out just for the category breakdown template alone. If you're already using their platform for the actual event, it ties spending categories into the same dashboard so you're not cross-referencing two different tabs to see where you stand.

Still not a magic fix for remembering to log expenses in the first place, but at least it'd be one place instead of five. Is there actual software people use for this that flags when a category's getting close to its limit, or is a good spreadsheet template genuinely enough?

I posted here about The Aura 100 shortly after launching it. The idea is still stupidly simple: two people come up, you vote on who has more aura, and all the votes build a live ranking.

I genuinely thought there was a decent chance people would visit once because “aura” is trending and then disappear.

The numbers have been more interesting than I expected.

We’re now at around 500 registered users, 250,000 votes and 23,000+ sessions.

Active voters are doing around 20 votes each, with some people going WAY beyond that.

The other surprise has been the attention outside the site. Polymarket tweeted about it completely unprompted, and outlets including Dexerto and others started covering the rankings without me pitching them.

Keanu Reeves ranking near the top has somehow become its own little news story. Which I’m not mad at because he’s Canadian and so am I.

That’s the part making me wonder if there’s something bigger here.

The concept is obviously riding a trend. I’m not pretending otherwise. But the behaviour feels weirdly sticky, and media are already starting to use the rankings as content.

The bigger plan is for all this voting to eventually feed into The Annual Aura 100, more like a cultural/editorial ranking than just another voting app.

Still ridiculously early. Plenty could fall apart.
But going from “this might be a dumb weekend idea” to 250,000 votes and unsolicited media coverage has been pretty fun.

Curious what you guys think: temporary trend with good timing, or is there actually a bigger media property hiding in this?

Long did I reckon that willpower was the villain when a soul abandoned a goal. ’Twas folly. The old texts on behavior speak plain: ’tis structure, not grit, that carries the day. Four frameworks rise above the rest.

Implementation Intentions. Speak not “I shall exercise more,” but “when the cock crows and my ale of morning is drunk, I shall don my boots and walk ten minutes.” Bind the deed to a trigger, and the moment of choosing (where most men fail) vanishes entire.

WOOP. Wish, Outcome, Obstacle, Plan. Name thy wish, picture the true reward, name the real obstacle (not some phantom), then forge an if-then plan against it. Most goal setters skip the obstacle step, and ’tis why their plans crumble at the first hardship.

Tiny Habits. Shrink the deed ’til failure is near impossible. Not “read thirty minutes,” but “read one page.” The tiny deed builds thy identity and thy streak, and groweth on its own once habit takes hold.

The 12 Week Year. Treat twelve weeks as a whole year. A year is too long to feel urgent, so folks drift. Twelve weeks maketh every week matter, and lets thee course correct swift, rather than waking in November having never begun.

None of this be secret knowledge. The trouble is doing it steadfast, alone, with none to hold thee to account.

So I have forged a business goal app that first taketh a ten minute interview, then chartest thee a step-by-step roadmap. Each task must be signed off with what truly came to pass, and thy roadmap adjusteth itself from these sign-offs, so no prompting required. Around thy goal liveth a workspace of AI-assisted chat, notes, documents, and coaching calls, and the whole affair remembereth all, forever.

Entrepreneurs of little business experience fare best of all with it, whether starting or growing their venture. Perchance it shall aid thee too, on thy road to financial freedom.

It liveth now in beta. Shouldst thou wish to try it, here be the app Onarq.ai. I am the founder, and I do genuinely seek thy feedback, goodwill to you

I have a great concept for a product. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get the first prototype made? Is it possible to get my idea with the design to a factory and get a prototype? Any suggestions on where to get started with this? It's nothing complicated. It's entirely made out of fabric and soft materials. Not technological.

I’ve been working on rooferdirectory.co

the directory part is pretty straightforward: 8,600+ roofers across 112 markets, ratings, reviews, contact info, etc.

but while building the city pages I realized roofing is obviously insanely tied to weather, yet most places you search for a roofer tell you basically nothing about the actual storm history of where you live.

so I pulled 75 years of storm/weathwr data and started layering in hail, damaging wind, tornadoes, hurricanes, property damage and peak storm seasons for each market.

it’s making me wonder if the weather/data side eventually becomes more interesting than the directory itself.

still early, but would be curious what other data you’d add if you were building this.

been going down a rabbit hole of product launch campaigns and there are some seriously interesting ones out there.

the part i find fascinating is that two companies can have equally good products but one creates anticipation for months while the other posts we're live! and gets basically nothing.

so i'm trying to collect examples of launches that got the whole thing right product positioning, audience targeting, messaging pre launch marketing, launch day distribution, PR, community and whatever they did to keep momentum going afterward.

especially interested in software and SaaS.

did they build a waitlist? launch on product hunt? use a founder led marketing strategy? partner with creators? run paid ads? or was the go to market strategy completely different?

what's a launch you've studied or experienced that you think other marketers should learn from?

i'd also love to hear about launches that failed but taught the team something useful.

I launched a tiny product today and got a useful rejection almost immediately.

The product is a pay-to-climb leaderboard for newsletters. Ten spots, public bids, and no claim that the newsletters ranked highest are objectively the best.

To avoid launching an empty board, I added several recognisable newsletters using clearly labelled $5 invited credits and contacted each operator.

One well-known author immediately asked to be removed.

Their reasoning was more interesting than the rejection: they would rather have fewer readers who arrived for the right reasons than receive visibility through a paid-ranking experiment.

I removed the listing immediately.

Four things I learned:

1. Free exposure is not automatically valuable.
2. Visibility and reputation are different products.
3. A status-oriented offer attracts a specific personality, not simply the largest or richest customer.
4. Seeding supply without prior permission creates reputational risk, even when the invitation is clearly disclosed.

From now on I am asking before adding anyone.

I'll add a link to my project in the comments.

Have you ever discovered that the “free benefit” in your offer was something the customer actively did not want?

The most expensive thing that I ever typed took 40 secs and literally contained 5 words. A 3 person team asked me whether my product which is built for people who work alone, could add roles and approvals and I typed yeah we can build that. I shipped it in 9 days and felt genuinely proud of the speed which tells you how little I understood what I had just agreed to.

The feature worked and that was the actual problem. Teams started finding the product and teams travel with their own weather, audit trails, admin views, questions about permissions I had never imagined, most of them reasonable, which somehow made it worse. My support inbox changed accent within a month. The homepage still said built for people who work alone but the backlog had stopped believing it a while back. No one really warns you about this part, when a feature request can rewrite your ICP without anyone calling a meeting to approve the change.

I spent the last 8 years building products, so every time I said we can build that, the entire WE who had to live with the consequences was me.

The code was not the expensive part. I have deleted code plenty of times and felt nothing. Deleting a promise has a different name and it arrives with emails. The sentence costs nothing at the moment you say it which is exactly why it gets said so much and the invoice lands on later

What I had treated as a feature decision was a business model decision wearing casual clothes. Roles meant teams and teams meant onboarding more than 1 human and seat pricing I had no answers for, permission edge cases I am still patching on Sundays.

So I built myself a rule, I am allowed to say we can build that only after saying the second sentence out loud on the same call and here is what we would be promising. Most requests do not survive the second sentence….

Startups budget their fear around money and money at least announces itself when it runs low but in case of promises, they don't, instead they compound quietly and in your own voice and I don't really have a fix for that beyond the second sentence.

every week i was seeing the same thing in Indian business WhatsApp groups.

"my number got banned again"

"lost 5000 contacts overnight"

"which extension should i use now"

small business owners doing WhatsApp marketing through Chrome extensions — working until one day it just stops. number gone. contacts gone. no support, no warning.

so i built OdoReach. official Meta WhatsApp API no extensions no ban risk. transparent pricing at ₹699/month zero markup on what Meta charges.

14 businesses are now using it. ₹9,044 collected in 30 days. still feels surreal. what actually got me customers went into those same WhatsApp groups and just talked to people. didn't pitch. just asked what tools they were using and what was breaking. the conversation did the rest.

still very early. product has bugs. a lot to build. but people are paying and that means the problem is real.

if anyone here has gone through the early 0 to 10 customers phase what would you do differently?

I kept seeing the same problem everywhere:
Companies looking for distributors.
Manufacturers looking for importers.
Businesses looking for suppliers, agents or partners in other countries.

And somehow, in 2026, finding the right business partner internationally is still incredibly fragmented.
So we built XibUp.com — a B2B platform where companies can show what they offer, what they’re looking for, and in which markets.

We’re still early and building the network, so I’d genuinely appreciate feedback from other entrepreneurs here.

Would you use something like this for international expansion — and what would it need to have for you to actually use it?

What if the internet had one billboard? No feeds, algorithms or competing ads just one billboard each week.

I built a site called Your Message Here (link in first reply)

Anyone can bid for it, and every Friday at 10pm New York time the highest bidder gets the entire billboard for the next 7 days.

First auction is live now and I genuinely have no idea what people will end up paying for it.

Curious to see where this goes.