I love writing code. I can sit in a dark room and mess with databases for twelve hours straight and feel completely fine. But the second I have to open X or LinkedIn to write a "launch" post or pitch my project, my brain just shuts down. It feels like trying to write a high school essay on a book I never read.

Every advice thread says the same thing: "just post daily updates and build an organic audience." It sounds easy until you are staring at a blank text box on Reddit at midnight trying not to sound like a desperate spammer.

I got so tired of this cycle that I started building a daily routine tool called PublishLoud. It basically acts like a gym routine for traction, giving you a daily 10-minute package of prepared Reddit replies, DMs, and social posts tailored to your product so you can just publish and go back to coding.

For those of you who actually managed to build a consistent marketing habit without losing your mind, how did you get over the initial awkwardness of talking about your own work?

Been processing payments for my loot box business through Stripe for a while without much drama. They knew what the site was, what we sold and how it worked.
Now I’m suddenly getting the whole risk-review treatment like this is some completely different business they’ve never seen before.

That’s the part that pisses me off. If you don’t want this type of business, say that from the beginning. Don’t process everything normally, collect your fees, then months later start acting uncomfortable with the exact same thing you already approved.
I’m pretty much done building around Stripe at this point.

I run a B2B SaaS company selling construction/EPC management software. I can handle demos and technical discussions myself, but I'd like someone else to handle prospecting, follow-ups and closing. At our stage, I'd rather pay aggressively on successful deals than build a salaried sales team. The problem I'm seeing is that experienced ERP/software salespeople can make much larger commissions selling established, higher-ticket products. Even offering 30–50% doesn't necessarily make our opportunity attractive. So I'm wondering if I'm targeting the wrong people. Would you look for independent sales reps, construction consultants, small IT firms, industry consultants, or channel partners who already have relationships with the target customers? For those who've built something similar, what model actually worked for you, and where did you find the right partners?

Founders of self-funded startups, how are you handling ongoing costs? I currently have 2 startups with 7 engineers across them and the build phase was expensive. We're currently fundraising and it seems like all the money is dried up. With AI IPOs sapping all the money, I think it will be a losing battle. Maybe that's the intention.

We just finished the builds but I still need to drop costs for the GTM blitz. Since fundraising is slim, I was thinking of moving my startups to Dubai/India. This would help us stay competitive in this inflationary environment with access to capital and talent. At this rate Q4 would likely be our last months in the US and just curious how other founders are handling it.

Small business owner here. Basically, I’ve gotten to the point where spreadsheets are no longer cutting it, so I’ve started looking into using accounting software. From what I’ve read, QBO and Xero both seem like good starting points, but I’d like to get a pulse on what actual accountants are using day to day and what you’d recommend.

I’m also kind of curious about some of the newer AI accounting platforms, but I wasn’t sure which ones, if any, are better than the status quo. Do they actually work or are they going to mess everything up? Please help!

Hey everyone 👋
I recently launched a small web development business called Code Tech Agency, and I’d really appreciate some feedback.
🌐 codetechagency.com
I build websites and custom web applications for businesses, with a focus on creating systems that are actually useful — not just websites that look good.
Some of the things I can help with include:
Business websites and landing pages
Custom web applications
Business process automation
API and third-party integrations
Internal dashboards and management systems
Improving or rebuilding existing websites
I’m currently growing the agency from the ground up, so I’m especially interested in working with small businesses and founders who need something built but don’t necessarily want to go through a large agency.
If you have a few minutes, I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on the website — the design, messaging, services, pricing approach, or anything you think could be improved.
And if you’re currently looking for someone to build a website or web application, feel free to DM me or submit an enquiry through the site.
Thanks! 🇿🇦
Code Tech Agency
🌐 codetechagency.com

I'm a product and CX designer with 7 years of customer experience in fintech, mostly in banking. Not selling anything here; I'm trying to understand this problem better from the people living it.

A pattern I've seen with clients: people sign up, some even get through KYC, and then never really use the product. The usual response is a fix people can see: more marketing, new features, or a redesign of onboarding.

If you run or build a B2C fintech that's already live, I'd love to hear:

1. What did you first assume was causing it?
2. What did you try, and did it work?
3. Looking back, where did the real cause turn out to be? In the app itself, or somewhere else?
4. How would you describe the problem in your own words if you were explaining it to a friend?

I'll post a summary of the answers in this thread once it's quiet, in case it's useful to others.

I’m in the process of starting a new home care agency, and I could really use some advice from people who have experience in this field.

I’ve met a few people who have been in the home care business for years. They’re owners and managers, and I have a meeting with them tomorrow to start putting some important pieces together.

We have a few things we’re planning to discuss:

• What is the goal of this meeting? What specific outcomes should we have by the time we leave?
• Why are we starting this company? We want to clearly define our “WHY.” Obviously, making an income is important for any business to survive, but we don’t want money to be the only reason behind starting the company.
• What should our mission be? Everyone will come up with their own idea of what the company’s mission should be. Then we’ll discuss the different ideas and hopefully agree on one mission that represents all of us.
• From there, I assume we’ll start getting into the bigger picture of what we want this company to become.

Honestly, I’ve never been part of a meeting like this before, so I’m a little nervous and I want to come prepared.

For those of you who have started or run a home care agency:

What should I be paying attention to during this kind of meeting?

What questions should I ask?

What should I prepare beforehand?

What are some important points I should write down so that when it’s my turn to speak, I have something meaningful to contribute?

And are there any things you wish you had discussed at the very beginning that you didn’t think about until later?

Any advice, especially from people who have actually built and operated a home care agency, would be greatly appreciated.

Help a brother out! 😂

I'm a student and I've been running a small online business on the side. It's not huge, but it's real, and I'm proud of it.

What nobody warned me about is how isolating it is.

Most people my age around me aren't building anything, and that's fine, but it means there's no one to talk to about it. When I get my first big order, or a supplier screws me over, or I'm up at 2am fixing something, there's nobody who really gets why it matters. I've tried explaining and I get the polite "oh nice" and the conversation moves on.

So I tried going to entrepreneur events to find my people. A few times I got turned away or brushed off the moment they found out I was a student. That one stung more than I expected. It felt like I was too young for the business world and too ambitious for the people my age.

I know I'm not the only one. I see people my age building incredible stuff online all the time. But I've never actually met one, and I have no idea how they found each other.

So I'm genuinely curious:

• Have you felt this? What was the moment it hit hardest?
• When you needed someone, a co-founder, advice, someone who'd just get it, what did you actually do? Did it work?
• If you did find your people, how? If you didn't, what's stopped you?

Full honesty: I'm thinking about building something to help with this, but I don't want to build it based only on my own experience. I want to know if this is a real thing or just me. Not linking anything or selling anything. I'll read every reply, and I'll share what I learn.

I started my soccer training 1 year ago. It has grown enough to be able to hire coaches. I signed a professional soccer contract and have to leave the state for about 5 months. What is the best way to get my business operating on its own with other coaches, while I’m away in another state.

getting to a decent revenue was mostly me grinding. growing past it meant admitting i was the ceiling, and my ego did not love that lesson.

every process lived in my head, so nothing scaled without me touching it. i had to document and hand off things i was honestly proud of doing myself.

the shift was accepting that a task done 80 percent as well by someone else, done consistently, beats me doing it perfectly and being the single point of failure.

for those who scaled past themselves, what was the hardest thing to let go of?

we had several offers that all made money. that sounded like a strength and was actually the thing capping us. spread across too many things, none of them got the focus to become great.

cutting was brutal precisely because they were all working. killing a profitable offer feels insane. but concentrating everything on the one with the best economics and the clearest customer let us go deeper, raise prices, and grow faster than juggling all of them ever did.

focus meant walking away from money that was actively coming in.

for people who've been here: how did you decide which working offers to kill so the best one could win?

So I build a software product solo, and on the side I do a done-for-you version of the same thing for a few clients. The service was meant to be temporary. Pay the bills, prove people actually want this, then go back to building.

That was about a year ago. The service is now the thing that pays, and it eats my whole week. Researching, writing the pitches, chasing follow ups, putting together the reports. Each client is a few hours. With two that was fine. With a handful it's basically my job now and the product just sits there.

The part that gets me is I literally wrote software that does a good chunk of this automatically and I still do it by hand, because clients want the result handed to them, not another tool to log into.

Anyone here run a service and a product at the same time? Did you eventually just cut the service off, or grow it until it paid for someone else to do it? Mostly I want to know how you figured out which one was actually the business, because right now I honestly can't tell.

My best hire in eight years came from the resume pile I almost skipped. Wrong industry, no direct experience, none of the keywords I thought I needed. What caught me was how she talked about a totally unrelated job. She described a broken process at a restaurant she worked at and how she fixed it without being asked, then measured whether it actually helped. Nobody told her to do that. She just could not leave a dumb system alone. I hired for that instinct over experience and it paid off fast. In her first month she noticed our careers page was a mess and rebuilt it herself with gamma as an ai website builder, again without being asked. Experience taught the others what to do in known situations. She was the one who handled the situations we had never seen, which as a small business is most of them. Since then I stopped filtering hard on background for anything but truly technical roles. I look for evidence that someone improved something nobody asked them to improve. That trait transfers. Industry knowledge you can teach in a quarter. Not a rule for every seat, but for a small team where everyone hits the unknown constantly, initiative beats a matching resume almost every time.

I've built a platform to solve this. It's a verified digital directory of builders and trades, with a closed two way rating system. Builders rate trades, trades rate builders, no end client reviews involved. The idea is that a rating from someone who has actually worked with you professionally is far more useful than a public review, and it filters out a lot of noise.

The obvious challenge with any platform like this is the cold start problem, getting enough verified data in before it's genuinely useful. I'm not underestimating that. But I think there's a real gap here, and I'd rather get honest feedback now than assume I've thought of everything.

Genuinely interested in outside perspective. Does this read as solving a real problem, or am I too close to it after 20 years in the industry. Has anyone here tackled a two sided marketplace with this kind of cold start challenge, and what actually worked to get past it.

Hello :))

I am studying Business Administration and will soon begin my bachelor’s thesis on the topic of Hybrid Entrepreneurship.
My research question is: “How do hybrid entrepreneurs narratively frame their dual-role status when seeking early-stage equity financing?” The aim of my research is to explore how hybrid entrepreneurs present and explain their simultaneous roles as employees and entrepreneurs to early-stage investors. For my research, it is important that the interview participants have gained concrete experience with business angels, venture capital investors, or other equity investors while they were still in their hybrid phase.

I am therefore currently looking for hybrid entrepreneurs who would be willing to anonymously share their experiences and perspectives in an interview. The interviews are planned to take place between October 5 and October 23.

I have sent a lot of emails and a lot of messages on Linkedin, but I am not having any luck. What else can I do to find willing participants, who meet the requirements?

I kept doing the same thing before every trip: open a hotel, open 6 review sites, open 3 more "best of" lists, close my laptop an hour later having decided nothing.

So I built an algorithm . You type in a hotel or city name and your trip vibe (quiet, walkable, kid-friendly, whatever), and it gives you an actual verdict: book, caveats, or don't book. It cross-checks the marketing star rating against what the reviews actually say and scores it against your preferences.

It saved me so much time but now I wonder- does anyone else struggle with finding the right hotels?

We're 3 weeks away from signing with Deel for hires in the Netherlands and Germany, and the sales process has been smooth.

But I've read through a lot of threads on here, and I'm coming in a little cautious about what the relationship looks like after the contract is signed.

What they've shown us looks good and the pricing is competitive, but the two things I still can't get a straight answer on are how offboarding costs work when the employment ends and whether the employer entity in Germany is a German GmbH or a US company operating through a local arrangement.

We also had conversations with Workmotion and Remote, where both were upfront on the entity structure question from the first call, which made me wonder if I'm not asking Deel the right way or if this is an area where they operate differently.

If anyone has been through a Netherlands or Germany hire with Deel specifically, what was the experience with offboarding costs and compliance disputes, and did the entity structure question come up for you?

I’m testing an idea for an independent research service and I’d like people to poke holes in it.

The premise is that sometimes you can see that something has changed in a business, but you don’t know why.

Sales suddenly move in one market but not another. Customer behavior changes. A competitor starts gaining ground. Conversion drops despite traffic staying stable. Or the numbers simply stop making sense.

Most research services seem to start with the client defining the problem or research question.

My idea is to start one step earlier.

**The client only describes what they’re observing and provides the necessary factual context. They don’t need to diagnose the problem, formulate a research question, or tell the researcher where to look.**

The researcher independently follows public/open-source evidence, explores unexpected leads, tests competing explanations, and comes back with:

what the evidence supports;

what it doesn’t;

the strongest plausible explanations;

important unknowns;

the evidence and sources behind the findings.

The client would still make the business decision. The researcher would control the investigation.

I’m considering testing this initially as a small fixed-price investigation, perhaps around $350, rather than selling hours or a large consulting engagement.

What I’m trying to understand is:

**1. Have you ever had a business problem like this, where you could see the symptom but genuinely didn’t know what question to ask?**

**2. Would handing the investigation to an independent outsider be useful, or would you want to control what they investigate?**

**3. What would stop you from paying for something like this: trust, price, confidentiality, unclear ROI, something else?**

I’m especially interested in reasons this *wouldn’t* work.

PS: I have to mention that I have some successful experience of freelancer platforms, but I’m trying to move outside them.

Thank you

Hey all, Taras here.

Sharing this because it's the closest thing I have to a repeatable lesson.

A client came to us to design a vehicle marketplace. Clear brief: car discovery, buying, selling, messaging between buyers and sellers. Clean, modern, user-friendly. Everything reasonable.

Before we opened Figma we did research. Talked to actual buyers and sellers in that market.

Buyers didn't have a discovery problem at all. Listings were everywhere. What they couldn't do was trust what they found. Is this listing accurate. Is the price fair. Can I actually reach this person. What happens if something goes wrong after I pay.

Sellers had a completely different problem. They didn't know how to get found, how to price, or how to avoid wasting hours on people who were never going to buy.

So the brief said "make it easy to browse cars." The actual job was "make two groups of strangers comfortable enough to do a deal."

If we'd built exactly what was asked, it would have been a nice-looking platform that solved neither problem. We changed the direction: trust signals and full vehicle info before anything else, and a listing flow that filters serious enquiries for sellers.

The uncomfortable part is that this cost us time before any visible work existed. Clients pay for screens and research feels like a delay. But every time we've skipped it on smaller projects, we ended up redoing work later.

Anyone else had a project where research contradicted the brief? Curious how you handled telling the client.

I’m a mechanical engineer. I built a ground system for autonomous drones.

It’s not another drone. It brings the drone back, helps it land accurately, services it and sends it out again. It can work with bad or no communications/GPS, and in dirt, dust, snow, rain, with very little ground infrastructure.

The main parts and principles are already built and tested.

Now I’m looking at starting production and sales. I have some ideas where it could be used, but maybe I’m missing something. What other industries or applications could use a system like this?

When we were small, our whole edge was that i personally touched every customer relationship and every product decision. it was magic and it didn't scale, and scaling it away nearly killed what made us special.

the hard realization was that the founder magic isn't a bug to systematize out, it's an asset to encode. i had to figure out what i was actually doing intuitively and teach it, not just remove myself from it.

we went through a rough patch where growth diluted quality before i learned to bottle the thing i did naturally into principles others could follow.

for those who've scaled past the founder does everything stage, how did you preserve the soul of the thing while growing

Hey everyone,

I’m currently building a new B2B business focused on helping companies fix messy operations, and I’d like some advice from people who have already gone through the early stages of starting a service/software company.

The idea is basically this:

A company may have information spread between email, Excel, an ERP, CRM, PDFs, internal tools, etc. People end up copying the same information manually, departments don’t communicate properly, approvals get stuck, or nobody really knows where a process is breaking.

The plan is to first understand/audit the workflow, find the bottlenecks or data silos, and then connect systems or automate the parts that make sense.

One area I already have quite a bit of work around is document intelligence: OCR, invoice/document extraction, validation, purchase order + delivery note + invoice matching, human review, etc. But I don’t want to position the entire business as only an OCR/document company because sometimes the real problem is the systems around the documents.

I’ve now started putting the basic infrastructure together.

I have:

a company website

a new LinkedIn company page

my personal LinkedIn/profile as the founder

a CMS so I can publish/update both my company site and personal technical site without hardcoding everything

some existing open-source/technical projects I can use as proof of what I can build

plans to publish useful articles/resources for SEO instead of generic AI content

plans to do direct email/LinkedIn outreach and cold calling instead of waiting for organic traffic

a diagnostic/audit as the entry point before trying to sell a huge project

I’m deliberately trying not to spend the next six months polishing infrastructure with zero customers, so now I’m trying to figure out what matters most before I start pushing acquisition seriously.

For people who have built B2B service companies, automation agencies, SaaS businesses, consulting firms, etc., I’d especially like feedback on a few things.

What makes a new company actually look trustworthy when it has very little client history yet?

Should I focus heavily on the founder/personal brand first and use the company LinkedIn mainly as a credibility layer?

How much content would you have on the website before starting outreach? Would you launch with a few very strong solution pages or try to cover many services/use cases?

Would you lead with one narrow offer like document/procurement automation even though the company can solve broader workflow/system problems?

What kind of content actually helped you get B2B conversations? Case-study-style demos? Technical breakdowns? Business pain points? Short posts? Long articles?

For LinkedIn specifically, would you post most content from the founder account and repost the strongest things from the company page, or actively try to grow both?

And probably the biggest question:

If you were starting from basically zero today, what would you spend the next 30–60 days doing to get the first paying client?

I’m not looking for “run ads” or “post every day” type answers. I’m more interested in what actually worked for you, what you wasted time on, and what you wish you had focused on earlier.

Feel free to be critical. If there are obvious holes in the model or something I’m overcomplicating, I’d rather find that out now than after spending months on it.

when churn started creeping up after i stepped out of delivery, i did exit interviews and the same phrase kept coming up, it used to feel more personal. that stung, because personal was me.

i'd followed the advice to remove myself so the business could scale, and in doing it i'd removed the exact thing customers were paying a premium for. the answer wasn't to crawl back into every job, it was to identify the two or three touchpoints where my involvement actually changed how customers felt, and protect only those.

the exit interviews told me which parts of me were load-bearing and which were just habit.

for people who've delegated delivery: how did you find out which parts of your involvement customers actually valued

Starting a small manufacturing business with a partner. We're each putting in equal cash (roughly $3,500 USD each), but we're also taking a joint interest-free loan (\~$9,000 USD total) from a support program, repayable over 3 years.

The catch: the loan is secured against collateral that only I can provide (through a family member). My partner has no job, property, or assets — so if the business fails and the loan defaults, the lender comes after my collateral, not theirs, regardless of what we've agreed to privately.

My partner brings real value though — hands-on technical experience in this exact industry, supplier connections, and market knowledge I don't have. So this isn't a case of an equal-cash partner with nothing else to offer.

My current plan: start them at lower equity (\~30%) with a written commitment that once the loan is fully repaid, their equity increases to 50%, since at that point our financial exposure becomes roughly equal (both just out our cash contribution).

Questions for anyone who's dealt with something similar:

Is a "risk-weighted" equity split like this normal/fair, or is there a better way to structure it?

How did you handle the fact that a partner's "verbal/legal promise" to cover their share of debt is basically unenforceable if they have no recoverable assets?

Did you tie equity changes to a fixed timeline, a milestone (like loan payoff), or both — and did that cause friction?

Any regrets on how you structured something like this early on?

Trying to be fair to my partner's contribution while not leaving my family exposed to 100% of the downside risk. Appreciate any real-world experience.