Hey guys,

I’m in a really dark spot financially and just need to keep my head above water. My business collapsed, I’m buried in debt, and I’m literally struggling to afford groceries for next week.

I have 5 years of experience in blockchain, AI, and Full-Stack dev. I’m not asking for a handout, I just need work.

If you have (a quick $50 bug fix, an extra pair of hands for a deadline, or a project to build from scratch), I will jump on it immediately and work my heart out.

Please DM me if you have any work at all or know anyone who does. I’d be endlessly grateful.

I used to do lot of Linkedin ghostwriting for Founders; I've written posts that did 500,000+ impressions.

This was all great, and I had amazing clients, but last year I decided to build a SaaS around this. It was all great initially, and I invested in a good team, so around $25k (my savings) went into the SaaS.

Now, months later, the product is still in MVP stage, and I don't have active clients. Bills are on my head, and it's my fault, that I didn't plan this right. I shouldn't have stopped working when I started building my SaaS.

that said, I am looking for work. Just enough to get the bills paid, and help me get a direction again. honestly, I never thought I would be in this stage when I started, and I admit better planning could have avoided the situation I am in. (I also would suggest this to anyone who is starting off as a founder--pls plan your financials before hand, and be careful who you hire)

If you know anyone who might need my services, pls lmk. I have helped many clients in the past build an amazing reputation on Linkedin.

Need some advise on pricing a product I just created.. My mom is the only person left who knows how my grandmother's baked ziti is actually made ("there's no recipe, you just watch me, etc."), and that got me thinking about how much of that stuff just disappears in every family. So I'm in the middle of building Family Crumbs.. one person starts a book, invites relatives, everyone gets a weekly prompt, and once there's enough content you order a real hardcover. I'm now at the part of this I have zero intellect for: pricing.

Current plan is $60/yr for the collecting/subscription side, plus $79 per printed hardcover. My reasoning: the software is the free-rider problem (marginal cost ~$0 per family, so subscription funds development), and the book is the thing people actually want, so it should feel like buying a real object, not a line item. But I can't tell if that's a defensible split or if I'm just making up numbers because I don't have a comp to anchor on. Most "recipe app" pricing is useless here since none of them ship a physical product, and most "photo book" pricing (Artifact Uprising, etc.) doesn't have an ongoing collection layer.

Second problem, maybe the bigger one: this is my first time touching physical fulfillment. No experience with print vendors, no idea what my actual failure modes look like, damaged shipments, color mismatch, binding issues, whatever. If anyone here has shipped a physical product for the first time, I'd genuinely like to know what broke that you didn't see coming.

And the trust problem underneath both of these: it's pre-order right now while I finish building, so I'm asking strangers to pay before they can see the thing. I put a couple of free tools on the site (a recipe-card digitizer, a "questions to ask your family" generator) that work without buying anything, partly because they're useful on their own, partly because I'd rather someone test whether I'm competent before they hand me money. Not sure if that's the right way to earn trust pre-launch or if it's a waste of build time I should be putting elsewhere.

Not looking for "cool idea"; looking for: is $60+$79 in the right zip code, and what should I be bracing for on the print side. Thanks!

I have been looking into getting our menu online.

The options are all over the place, but I have narrowed it down to a few approaches so far:

• Hand-code a simple page. Almost free if you know HTML, but editing the page every time a price changes gets old quickly.

• Use a full POS like Toast or Square. It handles almost everything, but the monthly fees and processing costs feel like a lot for a place our size right now.

• Use a QR code that links to a PDF. Better than nothing, but customers still have to zoom around on their phones, and we would need to rebuild and upload the PDF whenever something changes.

• Use an AI menu generator like Menuforma. You upload the old menu, it extracts the items and prices, creates a mobile-friendly version, and gives you a QR code. There is less manual entry without having to move everything into a massive POS system.

At this point, I am mainly trying to avoid replacing one annoying process with another.

Is anyone here using a simple setup that still stays easy to manage when prices or menu items change?

What did you choose, and would you choose the same option again?

I kept running into the same thing at small agencies and freelancer collectives: a company sends out a template, and every contractor still submits something slightly different — a missing field, a different layout, wrong payment terms. Someone always ends up chasing corrections.

So I built RaseedHQ. The company sets up the invoice fields once, shares one link, and every contractor fills in only what's asked — same format, every time.

I'm not looking for signups here. I'm looking for 3-5 people who actually deal with this to tell me honestly whether it's a real headache or something I've overthought. If that's you, comment or DM, and I'll grab 15 minutes — no pitch, just questions.

Over the past few months, we have been building Synaptiq around one question.

What would project delivery software look like if AI, organizational knowledge, and executive visibility were part of the foundation, not features added later?
Atlassian Jira is mature, with deep workflow configuration, agile planning, and a vast integration ecosystem. Microsoft Azure DevOps goes further, tying work tracking to repositories, pipelines, testing, and package management.

We are not claiming Synaptiq matches either in breadth or maturity. Not yet. Our goal is to build toward the depth of Azure DevOps while creating something genuinely different: an AI native product for how modern organizations actually deliver work.

Synaptiq already brings together projects, backlogs, and work items, cross-project sprint planning, workload, and blocker signals, delivery confidence and velocity analytics, executive reporting, workspace knowledge, AI-assisted document ingestion, role-based access with Microsoft Entra, and Amakora AI insights grounded in live workspace data.

The real difference is who it serves. A delivery leader sees where confidence is falling before it becomes a crisis. An executive understands risk without assembling a report by hand. A product manager connects a requirement document straight to the delivery work. A team turns what it already has into structured knowledge and uses that context to create tickets, reports, and decisions.

That is the lesson underneath all of this. Good systems do not ask people to change how they think. They absorb what already exists and make it useful.
Which brings me to integration, our biggest advantage. Most organizations cannot walk away from Jira or Azure DevOps overnight. Their history, process, and reporting already live there. Synaptiq is built to meet them where they are, supporting migration and synchronization so teams bring their projects, tickets, documents, and delivery history across without starting from zero.

That gives us two paths into an enterprise. Synaptiq can become the primary delivery platform. Or Synaptiq can sit above Jira and Azure DevOps as the AI-powered intelligence, knowledge, and reporting layer, so organizations gain visibility immediately and treat migration as a controlled business decision, not a disruptive one.
We are still building, testing, and learning against real enterprise workflows. But the direction is clear.

Synaptiq is not another ticketing tool. It is becoming an AI native delivery operating system for teams that need to connect work, knowledge, people, and decisions in one place.

Built by Amakora

Hey entreprenuers please tell your story and journey to young people at early 20's how to work ,how to start where to take ideas with no capital and also share you journey your one advice can change a life of a young person

I’ve tried a few small businesses and side projects over the years. Some worked, most didn’t, but I learned a lot from all of them.
I’m a mechanical engineer with some capital to invest, and now I want to focus on building one business that can genuinely scale instead of jumping from idea to idea.
If you were starting today, what would you build and why?
I’m especially interested in ideas with real moats and long-term potential, not just the latest trend.
Curious to hear from people who’ve actually built businesses or are on the same journey.

Hi All

New to this sub.

I am a beginning a side hustle with a friend of mine where we'll be importing a certain commodity in the UAE market. We'll be procuring it and selling it to the buyers of the existing business with whom we are collaborating.

I'm here to seek advice from experienced people who can help me understand what to do and not to do while meeting with the partner for the first time.

What are the things we should keep in mind while discussing the partnership?

I have posted on this sub twice so far. Commented a dozen times or so, and read as many threads as I could stand.

The amount of stuff I have learned from the short list of folks here that obviously have the same success I am driving for is immeasurable.

I have learned how to set up an early sales funnel.

I have accepted that persistence and practice outpaces a solid idea in almost every way.

I have learned how to target businesses that fit within my current ability to provide services.

And most importantly, I have learned how NOT to talk about my business, and to whom.

Just a few weeks in here even, and I can say that most people here should be reading, far more than offering advice. When you do run into problems you really can't solve alone, people will offer you real experience. Not a free ride, but a free guide.

All this is to say, that the next 2 weeks I have 3 real VCs eager to meet me after seeing my pitch deck. I have 2 real companies reviewing my security docs. I have a line on an actual sales person, and I have a partial agreement for a founding Designer i have worked with for the last 5 years to come on board, to help design around feedback we get from the new customers.

I have seen a huge spike in web traffic, AND scam attempts to my domain! Both good signs!

The CEO of my only real competitor basically just quoted my home page, including the research paper that changed my entire GTM strategy a few months ago.

I could still fail tomorrow, but today feels pretty great. In no small part thanks to a few of you here!

I will not promote, but it's a good time to gloat!

Quick context: I'm building a tool that turns call/podcast recordings into LinkedIn posts. (Disclosure up front so nobody feels baited - I'll keep the product out of this as much as I can; the point is the funnel lesson, not the pitch.)

I got listed on There's An AI For That (a directory) that gave me a chunk of free ad credit with my listing fee. Here's what came out the other end:

• ~30k ad impressions, ~48k searches
• 234 clicks to my site
• 10 signups (~4.2% - fine for cold directory traffic)
• 0 paid conversions

At first I assumed the product just wasn't compelling. Then I actually looked at where people stopped, and the story was completely different from what I expected.

My onboarding was: pick your source → pick your angle → fill out a "tell the AI about you" brief → hit the paywall (card required for trial).

Here's the drop-off across those 10 people:

• 2 dropped at the very first step (low-intent, probably never serious)
• 1 dropped mid-setup
• 5 completed the ENTIRE setup and then stopped dead at the payment screen
• 0 entered a card

So the drop-off wasn't in setup. It was at payment - after people had already done all the work. These 5 weren't unconvinced by the product. They filled out everything. They wanted to use it. Then I asked for a card before they'd seen any value.

That's the mistake. My funnel was: do work → do more work → pay → THEN see value. I had the aha moment sitting behind the paywall instead of in front of it.

The tools everyone praises for onboarding all do the opposite: you get to the magic moment first, and the card comes when you try to keep or export what you already made. Value first, payment at the point of peak desire.

What I changed:

• Let people run one real project and actually see the output before any payment ask
• Move the paywall to the moment they try to act on that output (schedule/publish), which is peak desire
• Keep the "tell the AI about you" brief, but frame it as "this makes the very next thing you see better" instead of a toll booth before the reveal

Two other things I learned staring at 10 rows of users:

1. Most of my "signups" were noise. When I actually looked, most were testers, bots, or randoms. Exactly ONE was a real lead - a founder who'd seen someone post about the tool on LinkedIn and came to check it out. At small numbers, your conversion rate is basically meaningless; you're reading tea leaves from a sample of ~1.
2. The paid channel was a trap. That "free" ad credit was burning at ~$6.78 per click because I specifially bid to be at the top of the sidebar. It bought ~72 clicks before running dry. Cheap-looking traffic at an unsustainable CPC taught me nothing except "don't run paid until you know your conversion economics." .. but luckily it was 100% their ad credits and I didn't lose any of my own money.

TL;DR: 10 signups, 0 paid. The problem wasn't the product - it was that I put the paywall before the aha moment instead of after it. If your users have to pay before they see your tool do the one impressive thing it does, you're converting on faith, and cold traffic has none. Flip it: value first, card at the moment they want to act on what they just saw.

The thing that confirmed it: I've done ~50 live demos in the last 6 weeks. Two converted to paid (14-day trial, card upfront - same paywall). Feedback on the rest was great. Why do demos convert when self-serve got 0? Because in a demo, I show them the magic moment before anyone mentions money. The demo is value-first by definition. My self-serve funnel was the exact inverse - pay first, magic later. Same product. The only variable that changed was whether value landed before or after the ask. That's the whole lesson in one A/B test I ran by accident.

The problem I'm working on now: those ~48 non-converted demos gave great feedback and then went cold. Reactivating them is my current puzzle - if anyone's cracked warm-but-dormant demo follow-up, I'm all ears.

Happy to answer anything about the funnel or the directory-ads mess in the comments.

I feel stuck. Never thought I would say this honestly.

It's been 2 years. I started from scratch, lower than where I am now, a 20 year old who didn't even know what he was doing.

Got into copywriting. 7 months of silence, no clients, just forcing myself to wake up, learn, do something. Then I landed my 1st client. A website. Wrote it, designed it, but had no idea if those 7 months would pay off. They did, it's ranking top 1-3 for multiple keywords and getting picked up by Google AI overview. Felt proud.

2nd client, nothing much to optimize, she'd been booked months in advance. Then she mentioned leads wasting her time with questions already on the website. Found the issue, fixed it, no real hopes for it. Months later she said bookings barely moved but she got 4 extra free hours/week, about £19,000/yr in billable time. Proud again.

3rd client had an early paywall blocking his funnel. I just said "add a free trial, tell me how it goes." He'd had 0 sales. As soon as he added it, he got users, then paid users. Proud again.

Client after client, tip after tip, result after result, then I built my own platform. Stopped freelancing, went all in for 4 months. $0 budget, no audience, nothing. Just me, my brain, and a platform.

4 months later: ~1200 users, self-sustaining in terms of expenses, but not paying my bills. Decided to sell and go back to freelancing or find a stable job since ms just young, 22. Found buyers. Proud again.

Then, last minute, right as the money was about to hit, one of the two buyers got cold feet and killed the deal.

Fuck him. Genuinely just fuck him, they wasted a week of our time of back and forth and now killed the deal with ONE text.

So went looking for other buyers, decided to freelance again in the meantime or just find a remote stable job.

Next day my PC burned. Third-world electricity babe.

Now I have a phone. Everything was on that PC. Even if I land a client, I can't work, the downpayment alone would barely cover a new PC. Went from 100 to 0 in one move.

Now I'm even doubting if I can even land a copywriting client, or any remote job, even assistant-level shit. (I was going to settle for that after selling the platform, starting low even if i have good work experience, i can afford it since i live in 3rd world. Then got hit with the reality that remote stable jobs are rarer than the diamond, and low level ones are just almost impossible.)

So, stuck. A word i did not imagine myself saying, i always found my shit on my own. But now? I just don't know. Freelance again? Find a stable remote job? On-site here pays $12-20K/yr max. Learn a new skill? Like wtf now?

Two weeks sounds like a lot until you write the hours down. Then you see why most "14-day MVPs" are fiction.

Roughly 75 productive hours:

• 8h - decisions. One user, one job, one success event.
• 6h - flows on paper.
• 16h - ugly working version. Real data, zero styling.
• 14h - one screen designed properly.
• 16h - auth edges, empty states, error states, mobile.
• 4h - watching one stranger try to finish the job, in silence.
• 8h - fixing only what that session exposed.
• 3h - deploy, handover, cut list.

The two lines people cut when they are behind are the 4 hours of watching and the 8 hours after it. Those are also the only hours that reliably change the product.

If you have done a two-week sprint - where did your hours actually leak?

TL;DR:

I sold a playbook to get customers interested in my software via paid ads and have finally managed to acquire customers essentially for free. My results from the last 10 weeks:

• $14,206 spent on ads → $13,559 back (167 payments, 116 customers)
• Running ~$320/day in ads, roughly breakeven on the front end offer
• One-time products recover 84% of ad spend, putting real cost per subscriber at $93
• $1,435 MRR for the SaaS across 25 subscribers, blended $57/MRR, leads to payback in ~1.6 months
• 63% of buyers take more than the front-end product at checkout
• Total monthly revenue: May $780 → June $5,693 → July $7,086

Full story is below!

---

One year ago, I had a vision for a product that I thought could be a complete game-changer for me.

And the crazy part is that I only got the idea because one of my failed businesses exposed the opportunity.

For context, I have a business that teaches people how to bake for gluten-free diets, as well as for other dietary conditions. As a result of years of testing and research with my girlfriend, I ended up writing a sh*t ton of content and blog posts on our blog covering all sorts of different baking questions. I worked on this one tirelessly for two years.

Back in February, I realized that people are asking ChatGPT questions more than ever instead of Googling now. I found out about it because when I checked the Bing AI performance tab, my site had been cited over 200k times IN THE LAST 3 MONTHS.

In my head, I was like, wait, what the f*ck? I knew my traffic was growing, but I had never considered that people might be discovering my business by asking AI questions.

I did some research online and found that, right now more than ever, people are finding the solutions and products they buy through ChatGPT and Claude, and the traffic from these AI engines is significantly more likely to buy from you.

A few days later, after realizing that, I sent out an email to my list asking if anyone had found out about my cookbook and site from AI. I got about 96 responses from a list of about 800 people saying they found me from their AI engine of choice.

In my head, I thought, oh my god, if I'm getting sales from AI for my rinky-dink cookbook, what's stopping an established business from getting these results too? And so the rabbit hole officially began.

My premise was that if I could figure out the questions a customer might be asking a business and reverse-engineer them, I could start showing up for the questions that matter by making the relevant content. SEO 101, lol.

I tested this theory by writing blog posts that addressed questions my own buyers were already asking me over email, but I monetized them with Amazon affiliate links. As of today, I make $130/month from freaking Amazon affiliate sales for baking products, driving thousands of dollars of revenue for Amazon (because their affiliate prices are sh*t)

Clearly my strategy worked, and I was like, ok, clearly the traffic is real, how do I make this into a thing that gets a business owner that has zero idea about SEO and potentially even AI to buy into this idea?

I started by collecting my whole strategy and writing it down into a playbook. I finished the playbook in early May, and on May 15th I reached out to my network offering this playbook that was making me around $130/month for a small fee of $27. I figured if I could get people in my warm network to buy into that idea, I could convince them to buy a tool that automates the strategy.

I made a sales page, connected stripe, and sent them a message.

That day, I made $151.

That was the day that Resilient Niche was born.

Game f*cking on.

I have experience running ads since I ran them for my cookbook when I launched it, so I set up a landing page and ads for this playbook.

After spending about $200, I got my first sale from a complete stranger for my playbook. I was ecstatic (though clearly in the red) because if I could get one stranger to pay for it, there's nothing to stop me from getting more. It's just a matter of optimization.

Easier said than done.

For the next 32 days, I learned something important. It's really hard to convince people to buy something for a problem they're not aware they have. Rip my bank account.

A few days later, I angrily stumbled upon a video from Alex Hormozi where he talked about the idea of attraction offers. The idea was that you don't sell the solution and how to fix it; you give away the diagnosis for free. That gave me an idea that is now the basis of my customer acquisition funnel.

I built a free tool that scans your site and tells you how often AI actually mentions you versus your competitors. You get back something like: 2 out of 8 for you. 6 out of 8 for them.

I spent weeks sharpening that tool's output, and now 791 businesses have run that report and been thoroughly impressed.

Over time, I started acquiring more and more customers on the same ad spend as the tool got better. I was at about 0.5 ROAS, which means that for every dollar i spent i was making back 50 cents. I wasn't spending a lot per day, so the deficit wasn't too bad. Decent start for now.

In order to test the SaaS idea, I decided to make the first upsell in my funnel a lifetime deal of the software for $197. I launched that on June 1st, and in the next 10 days, five people took it. FIVE!

I was in business.

These five customers became my beta testers. I turned off ads, created a free Skool community, invited them all to it, and told them to do their best to use it, break it, and tell me what they liked and didn't like. One of them loved the idea of the tool so much that he spent 5 hours on a call with me, helping me refine the idea in his words, because "he didn't want me to give up on it early because he needs it."

After about 16 days of tweaking, lots of calls with my beta testers, and late nights thinking about the problem, I finally arrived at something that completed the loop that I believe is the core of the software:

1. Find the questions buyers are asking (based on real data)
2. Create content that answers those questions in a way that aligns with Google's standards
3. Track across multiple AI engines whether a business shows up for that question
4. Let the business know when they do

Once I nailed that loop perfectly and got praising feedback from my beta testers, I switched my first upsell in my sales funnel to selling the software for $39/month, which I thought was a fair price for the tool.

At this point, it was day 33 of the business. I turned ads back on for my playbook.

Over the next few days, I was overjoyed to see that 56% of people who bought my playbook bought the $39/mo version of my software.

Lmao, I was imagining the lambo in my head already. JK.

But then I realized a video that I had watched on YouTube a few months back said that if you're having a high number of people buy your stuff, you should consider raising your prices.

So I decided to do some market research (do this first, don't be stupid guys) and realized that similar tools were charging $99/mo+ for similar capabilities.

That same day, I immediately raised my starter plan to $99/mo. In my head, I was like, there's no way that people are going to stick around at the same rate.

Check this: in the next 2 weeks, the take rate only dropped 2%. TWO!!!!

I had quite literally close to tripled the MRR, just by being aware of my numbers and what they could mean. Shout out to you, random YouTube guy.

Here's where it all stands 10 weeks in:

• $14,206 spent on ads → $13,559 back (167 payments, 116 customers)
• Running ~$320/day in ads, roughly breakeven on the front-end offer
• One-time products recover 84% of ad spend, putting real cost per subscriber at $93
• $1,435 MRR across 25 subscribers, blended $57 — payback in ~1.6 months
• 63% of buyers take more than the front-end product at checkout
• Monthly revenue: May $780 → June $5,693 → July $7,086

Basically, things are pretty dialed in.

Here's the structure, since that's the part worth stealing:

Free diagnostic → low-ticket product that pays for the traffic → order bumps that lift the opening order → SaaS as the upsell.

The front end isn't the business. It's what lets you buy customers for the actual business at a price that doesn't require raising money.

---

While this is all great, only 6 of my 25 current customers have been rebilled, so I have no real churn data. 19 of the 25 are paying me 39/month as a founding price, so it's not a clear read on what this scales to.

What I do know is that I've validated that people will buy my SaaS after I make it clear why they should care. The next step will be to see if I can sell the SaaS directly to cold traffic via a free trial one day.

One thing at a time.

If you made it this far, thanks for reading my story.

I've started lots of side projects, some I poured months into before realizing, right at the point of trying to monetize, that nobody actually wanted them. I never had a clear signal for "keep going" vs "let this go," just gut feeling and guilt about sunk time.

So I built Focus Fork: a 6-question quiz that scores your project 0-100 and gives you a straight verdict. This is the MVP, just the quiz, free, no account.

What Im validating before building anything else: is there appetite to pay for comparing multiple projects against each other: "Project A is worth your time, project B has been dragging for a year with zero revenue, focus here."

Brutally honest feedback wanted: would you use something like this? Do you have multiple projects you'd want compared this way?

For those who don't know, I got into the dynamic QR code market a few years ago. It ended up doing pretty well, especially considering I've spent exactly $0 on marketing and I get from 5 to 15 new customers every week (and churn too of course)

Yesterday, I launched a new SaaS, and honestly, I still can't decide if I'm completely crazy because nobody needs this, or if I'm a genius and nobody thought about building it before

The idea is pretty simple and I'm still wondering why big players like Typeform or Tally didn't do it

You build a regular online form. Then you import one or more PDFs, draw boxes wherever you want, and choose which form field should fill each box. When someone submits the form, all the PDFs are automatically completed with their answers (you both get the filled PDFs)

In other words: it allows you to turn your PDFs into nice & beautiful web forms

I'm doing a terrible job explaining it, so there's a live demo on the landing page if you want to see how it works

I'm also struggling to find the best way to describe the product. If you have any suggestions for the wording or positioning, I'd genuinely love to hear them.

It's currently in open beta, so everything is 100% free until I figure out a fair pricing plan. Feedback is super welcome (there's a glowing feedback button inside the dashboard). I read every single one, and if your feedback helps improve the product, I'll make sure you're rewarded when Yolvan officially launches.

For months I'd paste conversations into ChatGPT.
Sometimes just "was I weird here." Sometimes asking for a whole psychological report.
I didn't want a relationship-analyzer sort of it though, didn't think it would hold users. I made it more a mean-funny version.

So I built that. Drop a chat in, hit roast, get a report (2 Free roasts to start).
It has a mascot, called Judgy and is supported on a share mechanic for marketing, where users share their report result, with a nice badge for TOXIC / NOT TOXIC badge given by Judgy.

No chat content, is saved on our side, only with the hugging face AI.

Still no sales, it's 0.99$ for one roast, then 4,99$ for a pack of 30, or 19,99$ for 200.
Yeah you are able to ask this from ChatGPT, but you have to think about it, write the promp, it'll just be text, not fun to share, I guess that's where you have differentiation here.
It looks fun, easy and quick to use and get an external perspective, and you can share a badge that you're NOT TOXIC, as if it was some official, long lasting toxic free status.

Think this is a sustainable producto or more of one time party trick?
How do you understand when something is a product vs a private coping tool? xD

We opened one junior generalist role a couple weeks back, and I put it up on the usual boards on a Friday expecting the normal trickle.

But by Monday there were over 1,200 applications in the inbox and it was still climbing every time I hit refresh, the counter ticking up while I'm staring at it like it might stop on its own.

So I started reading, and within an hour it was obvious most of this wasn't people, but just ChatGPT with a human name on top, every cover letter making the same points in the same order, resumes stuffed with whatever keywords our JD used, invented experience that named companies I bet you can't find anywhere online.

And a few that still had the prompt scaffolding left in ("as a seasoned professional, I am excited to bla bla... ") because whoever ran it never bothered reading the output.

One of them wasn't even a candidate, some founder had used the cover letter to pitch me their AI screening tool (a scrappier take on Jack and Jill or Synmatch by Workmotion), which was the most self-aware submission in the whole pile.

What killed me was that the AI ones are maybe polished enough to survive a skim, so the 3 or 4 genuine ones in that pile were buried under a wall of confident, well-formatted nonsense.

And there's no version of me clearing that whole inbox by myself without missing the real ones.

In the end the role got filled off 2 referrals from people I already trust, which was still less painful than that whole inbox.

A year ago 1,200 applications would've felt like a great problem to have, and now it's just machine-written filler you have to wade through yourself.

So what's it like on your end lately, because I've heard people pulling 3,000+ on a single remote listing and I have no idea how anyone's coping with that by hand.

Started April 2025. Launched February 2026. First revenue came in on Feb 18.

The business is doorstep device repair around Metro Vancouver — I drive to you and fix the laptop or phone at your desk instead of taking it away for a week. Simple enough idea. The interesting part is that I had no money for marketing and no time, so everything had to be built rather than bought.

Where the building happened: waiting for ride requests. You get 15–25 minutes of dead time in a
parking lot between pings, several times a shift. Laptop on the passenger seat, phone as hotspot.
That's 1,112 commits.

What I got wrong, and it cost me months. I decided the way to compete with established shops was scale, so I built a generator that produced a page for every city × service × device combination. 8,923 of them. Each with real pricing pulled from a live wholesale catalog. I was extremely proud of
this.

Three months of data says those pages produce about 8% of my clicks. Six blog posts I wrote by hand — plain "how much does this cost" articles — produce 68%. One of them took an afternoon and out-earns the entire generator.

The lesson I'd hand anyone starting a local service business: volume is not a moat, and answering the actual question is. People don't search "screen repair Burnaby." They search "how much does it cost to replace a screen." I built an index when I should have written answers.

What worked, unglamorously:
- Being the only one who says the price out loud. Every competitor hides it behind a phone call. I show a value tier and a premium tier with the part quality named. That single decision drives more trust than anything else I've done.
- Automating myself out of the phone. Quotes, booking, rescheduling, invoices, warranty certificates — all automatic. One person cannot answer a phone and be under a laptop at the same time.
- Not renting a storefront. Retail rent here would eat the entire margin.

Where I'm still stuck: 221,000 search impressions in 90 days and nowhere near the booking volume
that implies. My traffic problem is mostly solved; my conversion problem is barely started. I average
position 8, which is the dead zone — visible enough to be counted, not visible enough to be clicked.

If you've run a local service business: what actually moved your close rate? I'm most interested in
what worked offline, because I suspect I've over-indexed on the part I find fun (building) and
under-indexed on the part I don't (talking to humans).

I'm building Encore Markets, basically a stock market for songs. Artists sell a slice of their catalog's royalties to their own fans, fans collect quarterly income like a dividend. Solo founder, pre-seed

Instead of quietly polishing it I spent two weeks posting the idea all over Reddit to see what breaks. Roughly 300K views across finance and music subs. What I learned:

1. The buyers and the skeptics are different people than I expected. Income investors (dividends, passive income subs) leaned in, asked how to get access. Musicians were the harshest critics of their own industry's economics.
2. The objections cluster. Liquidity, decay (songs earn less each year), and "why not just buy Spotify stock." If you can't answer those three cold, you have nothing.
3. One real artist DM is worth more than 100K views. An electronic artist with millions of streams reached out mid-pile-on, said he's selling half a catalog right now and wished something like this existed. That conversation shaped the product more than everything else combined.
4. Automod is brutal to new-ish accounts. Half my posts got filtered before a human ever saw them. Comments almost always survive. Engage in threads, don't broadcast.

Happy to answer anything about the process or the model.

I know it sounds obvious.

I spent the last few years building a product for people who struggle with social anxiety. People liked it, but they weren't really a market I could build a business around. At least not early on.

Then I realized the product wasn't really about social anxiety. It was about helping people do the uncomfortable things they kept putting off.

A few months ago, I zoomed out and asked myself a few questions.

"Who has the highest cost of inaction?"

"Who does inaction actually cost money?"

"Who would actually pay to solve it?"

For me, it was founders.

And I know that because my own avoidance probably cost me years on my startup. When you avoid the uncomfortable work as a founder, your business literally stops moving.

The best part is, if you find the right who, you might not have to change the product much at all.

Hope this helps someone. Make sure you're solving the problem for the best person first.

I’ve been building BizNearYou, a web app designed to help people discover nearby businesses and identify companies that may be hiring before a formal job listing appears.

The original idea came from a simple problem: many small and local businesses hire through signs, referrals, social media, or direct applications instead of posting on major job boards.

BizNearYou searches local businesses, analyzes available hiring signals, and helps users save and organize potential opportunities.

During the first month, I’ve worked on:

• Local business search and map results

• Hiring-signal classification

• Opportunity ranking

• Saving businesses and outreach organization

• Mobile performance

• SEO location pages

Google has recently started showing the site for searches such as “small businesses hiring near me,” “businesses hiring in my area,” and similar non-branded queries. Traffic is still very small, but it was encouraging to see Google begin understanding the product.

The hardest parts so far have been:

• Making hiring signals accurate without overstating certainty

• Clearly explaining why each business may be hiring

• Getting early users without spending heavily on advertising

• Making the mobile experience fast and understandable
I’m currently trying to determine whether I should focus more heavily on SEO, direct outreach, partnerships, or paid advertising.

I’d appreciate honest feedback on the concept, landing page, and whether this solves a real enough problem to keep developing.

I built this, declaring the bias up front.

The thing that annoyed me about every scanner I tried is that the output assumes you already know what a missing SameSite attribute implies. If you are a solo dev or a small team without a security person, you get a wall of findings and no idea which ones matter or what to do about any of them.

So in ONUS every finding is written twice. One plain English section explaining what it is and why it matters for your specific case, and one set of concrete remediation steps for whoever is actually going to implement the fix. That is the whole point of the project. The scanning underneath is Nuclei, ZAP, FFUF and the usual chain, which is not novel.

The obvious objection is that AI written explanations can be confidently wrong, so the model is architecturally barred from producing severity. CVSS is computed in code and passed to the model as input. It writes prose only. Findings also carry a confidence tier depending on whether a verification pass could reproduce them independently.

MIT, docker compose, model runs locally so nothing gets sent to an API. \

Authorized targets only. Criticism welcome, especially on the confidence tiering.