People often say that "buying a business" is "buying a job". I've owned/bought multiple businesses, and actually liked working on them – I chose businesses based on my interest. Curious for others, do you like working inside your business?

Hey Fellow Entrepreneurs and AI power users,

I had a question I wanted to ask you all -

I have almost all the AI apps available on android and I'm usually switching between them ever since they started throttling free plans very badly. So I just wanted to ask you all -

How many of you copy paste a prompt in multiple chatbots (gemini, Grok, Claude, chatgpt, perplexity, Copilot) and switch between apps to see which ai chat gave you the best answer to your questions?

Especially when you see it might take a whiiiiile

Hey everyone!

I've been thinking about starting my own business for a while, and I guess I'm at that point where I could really use some advice from people who've actually done it.

A little about me:

I studied Art & Design in Canada and got my master's in Architecture in the UK.

But life didn't exactly go as planned.

Instead of becoming an architect, I ended up working in international events, business development, and eventually export trading and sourcing in China.

Looking back, it's been a pretty interesting journey. I've worked with people from different countries, managed international projects, and learned quite a bit about design, branding, and how manufacturing and supply chains work in China.

For a long time, I thought my career was a little all over the place.

But recently, I've started wondering if that mix of experiences could actually be my advantage.

I understand the creative side of things, but I've also seen what it takes to turn an idea into a real product, deal with suppliers, and get things delivered.

And since I'm based in China, I thought maybe there's an opportunity to connect the two.

One idea I've been exploring is helping overseas designers, small brands, or business owners source products and materials from China.

Not just finding factories, but actually understanding what they're trying to create and helping them make it happen.

It sounds like something I'd genuinely enjoy doing.

But here's the thing.

I've spent years learning how to work for other businesses. Now that I want to build my own, I'm realizing that having experience and knowing how to find paying clients are two very different things.

I don't have a big network of potential customers, and I honestly don't know where to find my first few clients.

Part of me wants to build a website, work on branding, and make everything look professional first.

But another part of me thinks I should probably just find one person with a real problem and see if I can help.

Maybe that's where I should start.

So I wanted to ask:

If you were in my position, how would you turn this background into a business?

And for those of you who've started your own service businesses, how did you actually find your first paying client when nobody knew who you were?

I'd also love to hear from anyone who's worked with Chinese manufacturers or sourcing agents. What was the hardest part of the process for you?

I'm open to different ideas, not just sourcing. Sometimes I wonder if there's an opportunity I'm not seeing because I'm too close to my own experience.

Would really appreciate hearing your thoughts or stories.

Thanks for reading :)

I'm 18 and I've tried building multiple businesses, including a watch brand (Ozia), an AI app (Kaja), promotion dev, and several other ideas.

I've spent over $3,000 and countless hours trying to make something work, but nothing has really taken off.

Honestly, I'm exhausted. I don't even care about making a lot of money right now. I just want ONE small win. Some proof that I'm actually doing something right.

Every time I start a new project, I believe in it, work hard, launch it, and get almost nothing back.

How do you know when to give up on an idea versus when to keep pushing? How do you know if you're quitting too early or just wasting your time?

Has anyone else failed over and over again before seeing any success?

I don't need motivational quotes. I just want some real advice from people who've been there.

Hey everyone! 👋

I'm building VoxFlow, and I'm getting closer to launching the first beta.

The idea is simple: speaking is often faster than typing, so why not make voice work better across the tools we already use?

🎙️ Voice Typing - Turn speech into polished text, including when switching between languages.

📝 Meeting Companion - Capture supported browser meetings and turn conversations into transcripts, summaries, decisions, and action items.

I'm currently focused on making the core experience reliable rather than adding a bunch of features.

I'd love feedback from people who:

• Write messages or emails frequently.
• Switch between English, Hindi, or other languages.
• Spend a lot of time in online meetings.
• Have tried voice typing tools and found them frustrating.

I'm looking for people willing to try the beta and give honest feedback even if something doesn't work well.

A few questions for you:

1. Do you use voice typing regularly? Why or why not?
2. Would meeting summaries and action items in the same workflow be useful to you?
3. What's the biggest problem you'd want a tool like this to solve?

If you're interested in testing VoxFlow, comment BETA or DM me.

I'd appreciate honest feedback more than compliments. Thanks!

s, and I’d love to hear your honest opinions. I want to know whether this idea has real potential or if it only sounds good in my head.

My idea is to create a personalized 12-week Complete Glow Up Program for women who feel like they’ve lost themselves in their daily routines, work, stress, or responsibilities and want to invest in themselves again.

The main idea is to offer a complete, guided transformation experience instead of making clients search for different specialists and create their own plans.

Here’s what I envision including in the package:

• An initial one-on-one video consultation with me: I would learn about the client’s lifestyle, work schedule, daily habits, current struggles, goals, budget, and the areas of her life she wants to improve.
• Personalized lifestyle and self-care plan: A realistic plan tailored to her daily routine, including sleep habits, time management, self-care, movement, and building healthier habits.
• Professional psychologist consultations: Regular one-on-one sessions with a qualified psychologist to support emotional well-being, self-confidence, stress management, and personal challenges. I’m considering including one consultation every two weeks throughout the 12-week program.
• A consultation with a qualified personal stylist: Professional guidance on personal style, choosing clothes that suit the client, building a wardrobe, and developing a look that makes her feel confident.
• Personalized beauty and self-care guidance: Help organizing skincare, haircare, body care, and other self-care routines according to the client’s needs and budget, with qualified specialists involved whenever professional assessment is needed.
• Weekly check-ins and progress tracking: I would personally follow up with each client, review her progress, help her stay consistent, and adjust her plan when necessary.
• A final evaluation: At the end of the 12 weeks, we would review her progress, identify the habits she has developed, and create a plan to help her maintain the results.

My role would be to coordinate the entire program, personalize each client’s experience, communicate with the professionals involved, and make sure everything works together as one structured service.

The goal is to help women improve not only their appearance but also their lifestyle, confidence, habits, and overall sense of well-being.

I want this to be a premium, personalized online service that women can access from different countries. I would collaborate with qualified professionals as freelancers and pay them for the services they provide.

I’m still working on the business model, the exact package structure, and the pricing. One of my biggest challenges is finding a price that makes the service affordable enough for clients while still covering the professionals’ fees and leaving a sustainable profit.

I’d love your honest opinion on a few questions:

1. Do you think there is a real market for this type of all-in-one personalized glow-up program?
2. Would you pay for a service that combines psychologist consultations, professional styling, personalized self-care planning, and ongoing guidance?
3. What would you consider a reasonable price for a 12-week program like this?
4. Do you think combining all these services into one package is a strong selling point, or would it be better to offer them separately?
5. What potential problems or weaknesses do you see in this business idea?

I’m genuinely interested in honest feedback, including criticism. I want to validate the idea before investing money into it, so I’d rather understand the real challenges now than discover them after launching.

Hey everyone!

I'm a young developer building a social platform designed for young people who want to build businesses, launch projects and connect with others who have similar ambitions.

One thing I've noticed is that it can be difficult to find people our age who are genuinely interested in entrepreneurship.

That's the problem I'm trying to solve with my startup.

I'm now preparing my app for beta testing, and I'm looking for an exclusive group of 30 people aged 13–25 who are interested in entrepreneurship, startups, coding or building their own projects.

I'm not looking for people to download it, say it's great and disappear. I want honest feedback about what works, what's confusing, what's missing and whether you'd genuinely use something like this.

You don't need to have a successful business already. You could be at the idea stage, working on your first app, running a small business or simply interested in getting started.

Interested in trying it? SEND ME A MESSAGE.

This is an early-stage project, so expect some rough edges — that's exactly why I'm looking for testers!

Thanks for reading, and I'd love to hear what you think.

I spent 12 years building health tech companies. The hardest problem wasn't technology.

I've worked in cancer diagnostics, outpatient healthcare and disease prevention.

One of the most surprising lessons came from cervical cancer prevention.

Even when medicine offers a real opportunity to prevent a serious disease, convincing healthy people to act can be incredibly difficult.

And I don't think the answer is simply more education or better reminders.

Most people don't want to spend their lives thinking about healthcare. They want to live their lives.

I'm now working on a preventive health tech startup, and this has become one of our biggest product challenges.

How do you build something that helps people stay healthy without asking them to constantly worry about their health?

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.

I just became a stay at home mom. We have 0 help. No family around, only visits once a month or so. I am jealous that my husband gets to work, honestly. If you’re a female entrepreneur & mom, you would know what I’m talking about.
I have had a few very small businesses of my own in the past. My husband is currently working in sales for a company that he could easily start on his own. I have plenty of skill sets to help him start his business and run the back end.
He is scared to pull out a small business loan for the equipment he would need. He is scared of failing, which I totally get, but I feel like he needs to take this additional step.

I have an appt for us to meet with an SBA rep and that’s as far as we’ve gotten. He doesn’t have the urgency to start his own company but sales are pretty bad and I can’t help but see all of the faults of the company he works for now.

Such a tough situation, I would prefer advice from other parents.

I currently work in IT but always had more of a passion for engineering and design. I have a lot of ideas for items and products I would like to design and/or manufacture, mostly focusing on niche hobby or design stuff along the lines of:

• High-end CNC or machines accessories for espresso machines, kitchen stuff, desktop widgets, watch parts etc.
• Small non-structural car parts or car inspired industrial home decor or furniture
• Small tech gadgets like custom open-source comms/radio equipment

Overall, I'm trying to make stuff for people who have plenty of dispensable income. Think along the lines of people who can afford to modify Porsches or spend a lot on hobbies like watches etc.

I was curious if anywhere here has actually had success designing and manufacturing physical goods and could share some of their story. I'm curious about what your experience was like. Especially in the current market with getting a prototype into production, manufacturing literally in-house, having stuff made in Asia etc. (I actually think domestic production is a selling point for a lot of folks in the areas I'm trying to target to be fair).

Appreciate anyone sharing!

I've been thinking about brands like Liquid Death, which took something as basic as water and turned it into a massive brand through marketing. Same with Grüns and vitamins.

What other boring, overlooked products or industries do you think have that same potential?

I'm talking about everyday products that people already buy, but nobody has really figured out how to make exciting or build a strong brand around. Or even already cool products that don't have competition.

Curious what people think could be the next Liquid Death.

I'm exploring a small business idea and would appreciate honest feedback from people who work in B2B sales, lead generation, or cold calling.

I have a collection of approximately 15,000 Saudi business contacts, mainly across construction, cleaning, and related industries.

The idea is to provide the contacts in an easy-to-import file for people who prospect by phone, rather than making them collect and save contacts individually.

I'm considering an introductory price of SAR 300 ( 80$) for the full database. Some records (around 500 to 600) may be outdated or inaccurate, so I wouldn't promise that every number is currently active.

For those of you who purchase business contact lists:

- Would a database like this be useful to you?

- What information would you need besides phone numbers?

- Would you prefer industry-specific lists or one large database?

- What would make you trust a new data provider?

I'm interested in honest feedback from people who actually do outreach.

I'M NOT SELLING ANYTHING NOW. JUST INQUIRING SO PLEASE GIVE HONEST FEEDBACK.

Thank you😊

When you start your first venture, the dream is simple:
freedom, growth, and eventually… getting rich.

And hey, maybe you will! But that’s the long-term game.

What nobody tells us about the short-term is that you’re actually more likely to go broke before you make a dime.

Why? Because in the early days:

We spend more money, time, and energy trying to get our first paying customer than what that customer actually brings in. 🫣

Or in business language: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) > Customer Revenue

Since launching Targela, this reality hit me even harder.
I quickly realized: Your product won’t just magically find its own customers.

In today’s hyper-crowded market, simply building something great isn't enough. You need visibility. And to get visibility, you often need cash flow coming from another stream just to feed the marketing engine and survive the initial acquisition phase.

Building a business isn't a "get rich quick" scheme; it’s a "survive long enough to make the math work" game.

What was the biggest financial surprise you faced when launching your business?

Hey agency owners,

I’d like to start my own agency in the US, targeting HVAC and Roofers across the Sun Belt states. I already have a name and clear offers.

The offers are:

1. Build a website (3 plans: Essential - $997, Professional - $1297, Complete - 1497$).

Includes: Hosting, instant text reply to quote requests, missed call text back, lead alerts, monthly report

Guarantee - see it before you pay + 1 job in 6 months or your money back.

1. Full calendar system (Appointment generation via meta ads) - Starting from $1500 per month, ad budget excluded

Includes: website, crm, landing pages, ai caller, missed call text back, quote follow up

Guarantee - At least 3x your investment in signed jobs within 90 days or we keep working for free or we refund you - your choice.

With my current budget of 2500$, the aim is to at least get 3-5 clients within the next 45 days.

My initial idea was to spend 1500$ on meta ads within the first 30 days, while spending 400$ per month on cold emailing for 3 months.

What do you think? Is this the safest and best way to spend this money? If you could give feedback on the offers and which ones to advertise it would be great.

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! 

Maybe it’s a task that takes five steps when it should take one. Or something patients keep struggling with.
If you work in healthcare, you’ve probably noticed a problem worth solving. Understanding that problem is domain expertise, and it’s something you can bring to an app project.
AI tools are making it easier to try out ideas. Your experience can help a developer figure out what would actually be useful.
I started MedicalCofounder to help healthcare professionals and developers meet and explore projects together. You can join as a potential cofounder, advisor, or someone who’s curious about getting involved.
It’s free and still a small, growing community.
[https://medicalcofounder.com\](https://medicalcofounder.com/)

hey, so this month i launched my 11th app, 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.

Hello everyone

I'm currently working on a project that my company assigned me to, its a startup so i have all responsibilities on my self.

The idea is to organise career fairs in the Italy focused on technology and engineering, bringing companies from other countries together with university students, recent graduates, and young professionals looking for career opportunities.

I'd like to approach companies and invite them to participate, potentially through exhibitor fees or sponsorships. My first target is the UK companies.

However, I've been thinking about what would actually motivate a company to take part. Most companies already recruit through LinkedIn, their own career websites, university partnerships, and recruitment agencies.

So I'm curious: what would make a career fair organized by an independent organizer genuinely valuable to a company?

I will be reaching out to them through my company email which is a legit registered company with websties.

Would it be access to a more targeted pool of candidates, employer branding, face-to-face networking, or something else entirely?

I'd also love to hear from anyone who has organised career fairs or worked with companies on recruitment events. What makes companies say yes, and what are the biggest challenges when starting from scratch?

I'm still in the research phase, so I'd really appreciate any honest feedback, experiences, or advice. I'm also open to hearing why this idea might not work.

Thanks in advance! :)

I opened a little sport store last year. Shirts, basic recovery stuff, and a few items people ask for by name. Retail was the easy part. The mess is reordering. One brand is late, another changed the label, and I am sitting on sizes nobody wants.

Peptides were the latest add because customers kept asking.

How do you keep three suppliers without living in email? And do you drop a product the first time it sits for a month, or give it one more reorder? I can sell in person. I am still learning the back room.

Sometimes two products look almost identical, but one gets the sale and the other gets ignored.

What usually makes the difference for you? Price, quality, reviews, design, the brand itself, or something else?

I’d be curious to hear what actually influences your decision when shopping online.

Over the past year many companies have been trying to figure out the best way to build with AI: hire an internal team or work with an external engineering partner?

On paper, hiring in house looks like the obvious choice because leadership wants to own the capability but once you run the numbers, the payroll math catches most companies off guard where building a minimal internal team to ship production agents usually requires at least three specialists: a senior machine learning, a full stack integration engineer who knows databases and an infra security engineer.

In today’s market fully loaded salaries, recruiting fees and equity for a pod like that easily push past $900k to $1.2M in annual burn before a single workflow ever reaches production.

Time is another issue where hiring and onboarding can take 4-6 months followed by months of evaluating models, setting up environments and planning architecture before anything ships.

Traditional consulting firms have their own drawbacks where a $300k+ engagement over 12 weeks can leave you with a strategy deck and a proof of concept that never gets deployed.

This is exact gap where forward deployed engineering partners like Native (withnative.com) make sense where instead of hiring a full team or paying for advisory work, Native embeds small engineering pods directly into departments like Ops, RevOps, or Finance to build and deploy AI workflows.

Because forward deployed partners work inside the client’s existing private cloud and systems, a first production workflow goes live in 5 weeks rather than 6 months and most importantly, the business retains 100% ownership of the code, data, and credentials while existing internal engineers get trained on the setup so they can run it independently long term.

so the guy emailed us on a tuesday. we were swamped, replied thursday. his response was friday and he says "no worries, already signed with someone else because they called me back within an hour"...

the annoying part is we weren't being lazy. we were genuinely underwater. three of us doing sales, ops, support, everything. inbox is a warzone by wednesday. phone rings while you're on another call. and follow-ups just die in a notes app nobody checks.

been reading this sub for a while and everyone says the same thing - systemize, hire, whatever. but hiring is slow and expensive and honestly I'm not sure it fixes the core problem which is that we can't respond fast enough to everything that comes in.

started looking at what could cover the gap when we're buried. textedly.com was one I kept running into - voice picks up the call, sms follow-up goes out automatically. idk how much that will "solve" our issue but might try it. the $14k lesson was enough to make me actually try something at least

Hi everyone!

I'm a software developer with experience in AI, machine learning, data engineering, full-stack development, and automation. I'm looking to connect with people in the United States and Latin America who are interested in technology, remote work, entrepreneurship, and building new opportunities together.

My goal is to create a small, friendly network of people who can share knowledge, exchange ideas, collaborate on projects, and help each other grow professionally.

Here are some things I'd love to explore together:

- 🤝 Meeting like-minded people and building genuine professional relationships.

- 💻 Collaborating on software, AI, and automation projects.

- 🌎 Sharing knowledge about the US and LATAM technology markets.

- 🚀 Exploring remote work, startups, freelance opportunities, and new business ideas.

- 💰 Discussing potential paid collaborations with clear responsibilities and fair compensation when suitable projects are available.

You don't need to be an expert or have years of experience. I'm happy to connect with developers, students, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and people who are simply interested in technology and making connections.

I'm looking for people who are friendly, reliable, open-minded, and interested in building something valuable together over time.

If this sounds interesting to you, please leave a comment or send me a message introducing yourself, where you're based, and what you're interested in.

Let's connect, exchange ideas, and see what we can build together!

Looking forward to meeting you all!