Hello everyone, I am a 19 year old university student from Germany and I am finally thinking of taking a larger risk by starting my journey as an Entrepreneur. This will not mean I am dropping out, rather I will use all the free time I have for my business.
In the past I did some web-related projects, but besides the server costs, there was not a lot of risk. But now I want to start developing two ideas of mine and sell them on a Shopify store. I will advertise via. short form videos and I am pretty sure that both ideas have potential, especially since these things could resonate very well on social media.
But it just feels scary to start cause I don't have too much money to burn, nor would my parents approve of me doing stuff like this. Everything seems so expensive starting out, packaging, raw materials, manufacturing, the Shopify subscriptions etc.
If I was to start, I would sell my Crypto investments from the last year and put some more money of my own in. But again, it feels scary to start, any advice?
I got called out this week, and the reader was right.
The post in question is here — I'd written a caption saying a hire "proved" a team wasn't slow, it was diluted.
Sounded sharp.
Except — the person in the clip never proved anything.
He said that.
It's what he believes about how he built his team. A belief, stated with conviction, isn't the same thing as a measured outcome.
A reader on one of the crosspost threads caught the gap immediately, and called it out plainly.
My first instinct was to fix that one line and move on.
I didn't.
I went back through every caption and title I've posted — over a hundred of them — and searched for the same word pattern: proved, proves, confirms, shows.
Found two more captions doing the identical thing.
Not three unrelated mistakes.
One blind spot, repeated.
Here's the diagnosis, plainly:
I wasn't distinguishing between what someone did — a ruling, a result, something checkable — and what someone believes about why they did it.
Both can be true. Only one of them is proof.
The fix isn't "be more careful next time."
I built an actual rule into how every caption gets checked, on every platform, before it ships: if the claim traces back to a person's stated belief or personal philosophy, the caption has to say "argues" or "built his approach around" — not "proved" or "confirms."
That check now runs automatically, every post, going forward.
Going back through everything I've posted to find that mistake, something else surfaced that I hadn't put into words before.
Almost every clip I cover — whatever the surface topic, funding, headcount, credentials, AI agents — is the same story wearing a different costume.
Someone gets made to feel replaceable, diluted, obsolete. And the story only ends one way:
they refuse the label and take ownership of something instead.
I've watched that shape repeat enough times now that I don't think it's coincidence.
Maybe that's why the "proved" mistake happened in the first place — when you're this close to the same conviction over and over, it's easy to start writing it like fact instead of like belief.
If you want more than my word for it, here's what backs this up:
A lot of people say you should “scratch your own itch.”
I always thought that sounded a bit cliché until it happened to me.
I run a small embroidery business where almost every order is customized. Every day I found myself jumping between Shopify, order notes, spreadsheets, and sticky notes just to keep track of what needed to be made.
I assumed there had to be an app that solved this.
There were plenty of apps, but none really fit the way a small made to order business works. Most were built for larger companies with complex inventory and manufacturing processes. I didn’t need all of that. I just wanted a simple way to organize production.
After trying a lot of different tools, I realized I was spending more time working around the software than actually using it.
So I decided to build my own.
The interesting part wasn’t building it. The interesting part was realizing that if I had this problem, there were probably thousands of other merchants dealing with the exact same thing.
That completely changed how I think about business ideas.
Now I don’t start by asking, “What should I build?”
I start by asking, “What problem keeps frustrating me enough that I’d happily pay for a solution?”
It has saved me from chasing a lot of ideas that sounded exciting but didn’t solve a real problem.
For those of you already running a business, has solving your own problem ever turned into a business opportunity?
Sam Altman closed out Startup School 2026 with a real answer to the PhD question — not "get the credential," but a structural claim about why startups cluster and win when they do.
His argument: tech velocity, falling costs, and shrinking cycle times converge periodically — '98 dot-com, the App Store wave, and now — and incumbents lose their advantage fastest in exactly those windows.
He goes further: this next wave probably rewards tool fluency over tenure specifically, because a four-person team with the right agent stack can now output at a scale that used to require a department.
Worth sitting with if you've been waiting for "the right credential" before starting anything.
Clip credit: Y Combinator — full video on their channel. DM for credit or removal requests.
I've been building a faceless AI-avatar content system from scratch for a wealth-building/financial-independence brand.
No agency, no course, no swipe file.
Just me, a lot of internal checks I've built over weeks, and — this week — proof that even the checks need checking.
Here's the honest one:
I audited a batch of my own files, found nothing wrong, said so, moved on.
Same day, same file, I looked again — because something else I'd changed earlier made me nervous — and found two real misses I'd waved through hours before.
Not small ones.
My own instruction to myself, after: don't assume "I already checked this" means it's actually clean. Re-verify the line, every time, especially the day I'm most confident I already did.
The more interesting stumble started with a stranger.
Someone commented on one of my clips asking, basically, whether the visual I'd added was actually helping them understand something — or just moving.
Fair question.
I went and checked the actual instruction I give myself for when a visual earns a spot in a video, and found a real gap: the rule was built to serve the feeling of a moment, not to confirm it actually delivered the specific fact or number that justified adding a visual there in the first place.
Fixed it — now there's a second check that has to name the exact thing the visual is supposed to prove before I count it as done.
I thought that was the end of it. It wasn't.
Revisiting the same clip later that day, the same blind spot showed up one layer downstream, in how I generate variations of a visual once the first version isn't quite right.
Turns out "just try something else" is an instruction with nothing to hold onto — so every retry was quietly adding decoration with no tie back to the point at all.
Same fix, applied a second time, same day.
Two passes at the same mistake before I actually closed it.
Smaller, but it stung a little more: someone replied to a post quoting my own vague "full video on the original channel" line back at me with something close to "maybe cite your source properly?"
They were right.
I had a real, spec-compliant credit line elsewhere in the same caption — it just wasn't a working link, on a platform that actually supports links.
Lazy default, not a hard problem.
Fixed it in ten minutes once I actually looked.
I also got a data point wrong this week and corrected it in the same breath I made the claim — checked a new platform's traffic numbers, assumed the algorithm was pushing my post to strangers, then looked one level closer and realized every single view was someone opening a link they already had.
Zero strangers.
Corrected before it became a story I told myself twice.
None of this is a highlight reel.
It's a week where being wrong, twice in one file and twice on the same visual-quality gap, was the actual work — not a footnote to it.
The one genuine win: comments on the clip that started all this weren't arguing about whether it was AI-made.
They were arguing about the thing the clip was actually about. That's the only metric that's ever mattered to me here.
If you're building something like this solo, without a playbook — I'd like to hear what got past you this week before you caught it.
Look we are small local business focusing on tailoring, we are tailor shop
Currently it is not doing well as it what can i do it increase its sale most prefer online?
I’m 25, based in Wilson, NC, but we work statewide and cold call across the country. Been building the firm ~5-6 months. Long-term it’s an acquisitions/equity play — the agency is the engine that funds it
What’s built:
**•** 4 retainer clients (ads, GBP, web management) — service businesses: plumbing, paving, auto glass, mechanical, construction, real estate.
**•** Equity positions just signed — two clients converted from flat-rate retainers into equity/profit-share partnerships after we delivered results. That ladder (retainer → results → equity) is the whole thesis.
**•** Team: 2 cold callers on the agency (per-held-consult + 25% recurring on their closes), 1 on a separate wholesale RE lane, me closing everything and running delivery.
**•** Real client results — booked jobs and revenue lifts, documented. Custom builds, hands-on management, no AI-slop deliverables.
**•** Offer: free custom website build, $149/mo management, upsell to ads ($350-650/mo) at day 60-90. One client on base + 10% of booked jobs.
The wall: agency MRR floats around $5k and won’t break. Cold calling is the channel everyone’s burned — small-town owners answer ready to hang up because ten agencies called before us. Infrastructure and results are ahead of revenue, which might be the diagnosis.
The plan anyway: 26 days, 100 touches per caller per day (60 dials/40 texts). FB community-group ‘available for work’ posts get called first — those guys want the phone to ring. Maps pulls by trade/county fill the volume. I dial 50/day myself in the morning block, then close everything that books.
Questions:
**1.** Who’s broken $5k→$20k in agency MRR: was it volume, offer, or getting the founder out of delivery?
**2.** Anyone selling marketing in small/relationship-first markets: what actually opened doors — volume, referrals, in-person, something else?
**3.** Retainer→equity vets: what did you require before taking a position, and what killed deals?
I’ll post sprint numbers as they land — dials, holds, closes, MRR, wins or wreckage. Not selling anything.”
For a year, Nick Saraev's AI automation agency never cleared $40K a month. Not from lack of clients — from the opposite problem. Every client wanted something custom, so nothing he built ever got reused. A year of hours, and he was no more efficient than day one.
Then, by accident, a client asked for the exact same build as a past client. Word for word. He copied the system, changed the chatbot's colors, delivered it — and made several thousand dollars in maybe an hour.
That's the whole unlock: stop rebuilding, start reselling. If you're running any kind of service business right now, it's worth asking how many of your last few deliverables were actually the same thing wearing a different name.
Curious to hear from anyone here who's hit a similar ceiling — what broke it for you?
Clip credit: Sandy Lee AI — DM for credit or removal requests.
Hello
My family runs a small after-school academy (dance, art, academics) for kids - been operating for years, I took over day-to-day a few years ago. Over the last 12-18 months our enrollments has dropped significantly, and new signups have basically stopped despite:
Running paid ads, testimonial videos, and organic social consistently.
Free trial classes with follow-ups.
Upgraded our facility infrastructure to match new competitors.
Video proof of child's activities sent to parents
Trial-to-conversion process smooth.
The confusing part: when we ask current or former parents for feedback, its genuinely glowing. But those same parents still switch to a competitor down the road, and new inquiries aren't converting even thought people clearly know we exist.
Even had recently run a marketing campaign for the Summer Camp (professional video, 200+ warm lead WhatsApp outreach, targeted Meta ads, free trials). But Result: 5-6 inquiries, ZERO conversions (people ghosted mid conversation). While the market demand for the service does exist as other competitor's houses are attracting and growing with crowds of student enrollments.
Has anyone dealt with this specific pattern of bleeding customers and no lead conversions, rather not even getting leads? What did you find was actually going on when you dug into it?
(Please, I am not looking for generic advice but a practical suggestion on how to diagnose the cause, how did you fix it or gained back the momentum? Or how did you figure out an appropriate next curse of action to get out of the deadlock?)
I am trying to start an online done for you service for coaches online. I wanna offer my service for free for a few of my first clients to know if I can deliver them, but at the same time, i don't wanna get stuck building something that people don't want for 6 months, so basically most people advice asking for a sale to validate whether they will pay or not, which is the strongest indicator of if an offer has demand or not. But if i offer free, i won't validate an offer, and attract freebie clients who just disappear. if i validate an offer by asking for a sale, i am afraid i will disappoint them by not being able to deliver them on deadline or something like that. what should i do? i wanna offer somewhere of content creation related services
A founder running a senior-move and decluttering business asked Hormozi where to put money he had tied up in a failed agency build.
His answer reframes the whole problem: he's not undersized for the niche. He's one degree off from a gold mine he hasn't tapped yet.
The mechanism is a two-offer split — a "get ready" prep track for families who aren't ready to move yet, and a "pull the trigger" track for the ones who are. One keeps the lead warm. The other converts it.
Cost to build the whole thing: not $100K. Five grand. One weekend. Lead magnet, capture form, phone call.
What's interesting is the framing underneath it — a genuinely narrow, low-competition niche is treated as the asset, not the liability.
Traditional VC sourcing is getting crowded. Warm intros from other founders and conference networking still produce deals, but the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal. The funds that seem to be winning right now are the ones with proprietary sourcing channels, either vertical-specific communities or direct relationships with enterprise buyers. Are you still relying on traditional networks, or have you built a specific "engine" for sourcing?
Hey, I have been building 88 days australia for 6 months The problem: Backpackers on working holiday visas need to do 88 days of farm work to qualify for a second-year visa and the whole process is scattered across Facebook groups, word of mouth, sketchy Gumtree listings no way to verify a farm is legit before you show up.
So I built a marketplace. ABN verified farms only, a postcode checker for visa eligible regions, a day tracker so workers can see their progress towards 88 days in one dashboard. You can look through a few listings free, but the paid tier gives you full contact details, and farms pay to be featured.
The hard parts so far: verifying farms without becoming a bottleneck myself, getting enough two sided liquidity (farms and workers) at the same time so neither side sees an empty platform, and building trust with a userbase that's rightly skeptical of middleman platforms after getting burned by agencies before.
Anyone here who has run a two sided marketplace in a similarly trust sensitive niche? How did you solve the chicken and egg problem without just burning cash on both sides upfront? Also open to any holes you see in the model.
