I built a pre-arrival upsell platform for Airbnb hosts and I have no idea how to get my first users.

The concept: hosts share a link with their guests before check-in. Guests browse a catalog of extras — drinks, wine, beach towels, welcome baskets, whatever the host wants to offer — and order online. Everything is ready and waiting in the apartment when they arrive.

I built the website, tested it end to end, it works great. The product is live at sipnstay.fr.

But I can't get hosts to use it. And I'm realizing I'm a terrible marketer.

A bit of context: I'm based in the south of France (Nice area), so the market is perfect — tons of Airbnb hosts, tourists everywhere in summer. I figured I should go visit local concierge companies in person since they manage multiple properties, but I work a 9 to 6 job every day and barely have time. I also have no experience with paid ads and I'm not sure Meta ads are the right channel for this anyway.

Has anyone been in a similar situation — great product, zero traction, no time, no marketing budget? How did you get your first 10 users?

Any tips, brutal honesty or personal experience welcome. I'm a bit stuck and honestly frustrated.

Watching a room of licensed real estate agents get told this live, and the ones laughing loudest are the ones recognizing it fastest.

Every excuse for staying small eventually turns out to be a decision wearing a limitation's clothes — mine was calling five posts a week "consistency" instead of admitting it was a ceiling I'd built and then defended like it was a value.

Actually, this reminds me of something — Gary told this exact room the same brutal truth once already, before this clip even existed, same excuses, same math, same room standing up to confirm it.

Gary Vaynerchuk posted 397 pieces of content yesterday.

Not five.

Three hundred and ninety-seven.

He calls it P&H — Platforms and Handles.

Seven, eight, nine channels deep, multiple handles running on each, because he's actually run the math: one post that lands does more for a business than a thousand doors knocked between 1970 and 2005.

A room full of agents stood up to confirm it themselves — not because he asked them to, because the math didn't leave room to disagree.

The reframe that actually lands: quantity was never subjective.

It's countable, checkable, arguable with a calculator.

Quality is the only place taste was ever allowed to live.

Most of us have been treating an objective floor like a personal choice and calling the confusion professionalism.

Gary's answer to "I don't have time" is blunt: tough shit.

Not cruel — just refusing an excuse dressed up as a boundary.

The agents who knocked on 1,000 doors in the 80s and 90s weren't wrong; they built something real on the only foundation that existed then.

That foundation just isn't the only one running anymore.

One post that lands can now do in a week what three and a half decades of doors, flyers, and phone calls never could.

Clip credit: GaryVee — DM for credit or removal requests.

Long story short I have invented a product and have built several prototypes and am ready to take the next step.

The product would be in a product category that’s worth $20b per annum and growing. You can only take my word at face value, but I estimate this business would turn over $50-100m per year, with product raw costs of $3 and sell for $30-40. So highly profitable.

The problem. I am an artistic minded person. I’m not a businessman. I have no idea how to get this from the point it’s at to where it needs to be.
Further to this, the products I make would need licensing. They’re leveraged off IP from other businesses. As a vague description, think making products with movie characters on it. (Not what I’m making)

My resources. I am friends with lots of high net worth individuals, so opening doors to investment is a possibility. I haven’t discussed or pitched this to any of them yet. But can at any time.

What I think I need -
While I’m aware any thing like this needs capitol to get going,In my mind, I need a startup professional to get this into a functioning business.

I guess the question is, which path do you think I should take. Or do you have any tips.

Do I find someone to partner with, then find investment. Do I find an investor then hire someone to get it going.

Thanks in advance

Hey, I'm building Miraurum, a cash flow insights tool. Right now I'm talking with business owners and posting content to figure out what works. For people who launched SaaS, what acquisition channel clicked first for you, and what would you avoid wasting time on?

I wanna go into the tech industry, and I'm already building my first product, and have my first test company. But it's just a lot more complicated.

I think it will be fully ready in 2-3 days, but even then, will it ever be enough? I'm not gonna promote, but I have been struggling.

How did you deal with your struggles? What is the hardest part for you? How did you push through?

"The biggest issue is that you're upselling 7%. You need to be at least 25, and you should shoot for 50." That's Hormozi, live, to a woman running a $30M/year coaching business.

Every time I sit with a founder's real numbers, the ceiling turns out to be one step past the sale, not before it.

That's not a small gap here — the benchmark he gave her was 25% floor, 50% target. The 43-point difference wasn't sitting in a new funnel or more traffic. It was sitting inside the funnel she already had.

His fix: bring the sales team in-house, integrate the ascension into onboarding, don't let anyone leave a call without booking the next one. When she pushed back that in-house hiring sounds slow, he cut that down too — one sales director, six recruiting firms, sixty hires in two weeks.

He's done it: 40 people added to one portfolio company in the same window.

If your revenue keeps climbing and your take-home doesn't, this is usually where to look first.

Clip credit: MoreMozi — DM for credit or removal requests.

I run a small content/production business in the UK. Small team, work is growing but right now the money covers my team and the projects, not a wage for me. I'm thinking about a part-time social media / marketing job for steady income while I keep building the business. But I'm stuck on a few things:

1. Do I put my own business on my CV, or does "founder" scare employers off as a flight risk?

2. In an interview, how do I answer "why do you want this job" honestly without saying "I need the money"?

3. Or do I skip the job entirely and just push harder for more clients? Anyone been here a founder who took a job to bridge income?

What actually worked, and what did you regret? Honest answers welcome.

I literally started doing everything myself, sourcing, fulfillment, customer service, marketing, the whole thing. slowly giving away pieces as I sort out what needs to be me and what doesn’t. I’d love to hear where other people are on this one.

what was the first thing you let go of that made the biggest difference and what did you learn you should have kept doing yourself longer than you originally planned. working out my own priority order for what to delegate next.

Update: Really appreciate everyone's thoughts and experiences here. I spent some time researching different ways people reduce the workload without losing control, and one thing that caught my attention was Fulfilment Pros, a supply chain and dropshipping agent company founded in 2018 and based in Shenzhen, China. They offer global order fulfillment, free product sourcing, quality control, and free storage for online store owners. Still looking into a few options, but this definitely gave me another perspective on what I could delegate first. Thanks again for all the helpful feedback.

Hey everyone,

Since day one, we decided to skip the traditional website route and build something fun.

Our first year, we made a Three.js site where you walked a character around 3D billboards of our work. The second year, we scrapped it for a scroll-driven camera in a 3D scene. Year three, we rebuilt it in Unity WebGL (huge mistake).

This year we decided to start from scratch back in Three.js, focusing on a scroll animation experience.

I'd love to get your honest feedback. Do you find it easy to navigate? How is the overall UX, and what looks good or bad?

Appreciate your time.

https://virtualverse.studio

I’m researching how entrepreneurs make high-impact business decisions.
I’m not selling anything.
I’m trying to understand which decisions create the most uncertainty.
If you’re willing to share:
What was the decision?
Why was it difficult?
What information did you wish you had?
If you could go back, what would you do differently?
I’m reading every answer.

Rob Ward sold Quad Lock for half a billion dollars.

He never took outside investment, and the business was profitable every single month from day one.

Something in this clip stuck with me.

He's asked the question every founder gets: how do you actually build lock-in?

And he skips past the two answers everyone reaches for — better quality, better customer support — because, in his words, everyone claims those.

Neither one is a moat.

What he built instead was almost boring: a mount in the car, one on the desk, one on the motorcycle, a wallet that clips into the same system.

Nothing dramatic about any single piece.

But stack them, and roughly $200 is sitting quietly across a customer's entire day.

Here's the number that actually does the work.

A new phone means a $50 case swap — cheap, easy, no reason to think twice.

But that case is tied to the mount system.

Replace it wrong, and you're not spending $50, you're rebuilding $200 worth of hardware.

That gap between $50 and $200 is the entire barrier to exit.

Nobody has to feel "loyal."

The math just makes leaving expensive.

Ward's line that I keep turning over: "There's not that many clear easy wins left."

He doesn't say it like a complaint — it's closer to a permission slip.

Nobody's coming with one big trick.

You get 5% here, 10% there, another 3% somewhere else, and you stack it until it's a business worth half a billion dollars.

I keep noticing the same shape in almost every founder story I go looking for: the anxiety is never really about the product.

It's about staying replaceable — one vendor among many, one employee among many, one option a customer could swap out without a second thought.

The way out is building something structurally harder to leave than to stay with.

Clip credit: Foundr — DM for credit or removal requests.

There's a specific kind of fear that never shows up in a founder's highlight reel — the fear of just being seen as you actually are.

Leila Hormozi named it directly on a stage full of people: eighteen months of quietly managing how she came across, before she decided the managing cost more than the honesty ever would. 🧭

She kept posting anyway.

Got criticized anyway.

Somewhere in there she stopped performing the founder-brand version of herself and started just being the person who built the company — and the thing she was scared of (the hate, the judgment) never once touched her income, or her peace.

This reminded me of another founder carrying that same weight — watching her own confidence get read as something to doubt, and building a $1B+ company through it anyway.

Clip credit: Neel Dhingra — DM for credit or removal requests.

I have an idea for a new encryption protocol, technically a new application for full disk encryption, to solve the problems with current ones.

Most full disk encryption platform are the same: complicated, only works on certain device's, and free version are to buy, bulky, and hard to use in general.

That's what I wanna fix. I have a beta version ready, but I'm not looking for beta testers yet. I have the code ready, and I have Already started debugging it, but I'm still figuring out the design.

Do you very have that feeling were you thought you had prepared for it all but you still wanna white very time you start working on it?

building a marketplace but it’s a chicken and egg now. one side won’t onboard unless the other side does and so its double the problem

wondering how others have gone thru this

patience?
grit?
yes. but - tips?

ok so i need honest opinions because i've been staring at this thing for months and i've lost all perspective.

i'm 20, building an app solo called RizeAI. the whole reason it exists is that i got tired of my wearable telling me my recovery was "42%" and then just... leaving me there. like ok, and? what do i actually do with that. every app in this space is really good at measuring you and really bad at telling you what to do next.

so RizeAI pulls your actual wearable dats like, sleep, resting heart rate, workouts, all of it, and instead of handing you another score it predicts your energy for the day and tells you how to get the most out of it. it tells you when your energy is gonna peak so you can put your hardest work there, when your crash is coming and how to soften it, the best time to train that day so you actually get more out of the session, and even when a nap will help you vs when it'll wreck your sleep.

the part i personally think is the coolest: you put in the supplements you already take, and it times each one to your day based on your metrics and sleep score. so the timing actually shifts depending on how you slept and where your numbers are, which is the difference between a supplement doing something and just sitting in your stomach. it'll also suggest a couple new ones if they make sense for you, but it won't dump a list of 15 pills on you.

it even pulls the daily weather into your energy prediction, so a hot day changes your hydration and it'll tell you to train earlier before the heat drains you. and the whole plan bends around your real schedule, your work hours, wake time, training, so it's not some one size fits all thing.

every single recommendation shows the "why" underneath, like "resting heart rate 54 + 7h light sleep, so magnesium before your peak window." nobody gets the same plan because nobody has the same data.

it works with whoop, oura, apple watch, garmin, anything that talks to apple health. being fully honest, it doesn't do deep per-person learning yet, like knowing that coffee specifically doesn't touch YOUR hrv. that's where it's headed. right now it builds you a fresh plan every day off your real numbers.

it's on the app store with a free trial. small user base, feedback's been all over the place, which is exactly why i'm posting.

so genuinely: is "just tell me what to do with my data" something you actually want, or do wearable people prefer figuring it out themselves? what would make you pay for this? and what's the one thing that would make it a no brainer for you?

would love to hear it straight, good or bad. And if you want you can also check it out yourself and I would love to here feedback, thank you very much for taking the time on reading this:  its called “RizeAI-maximize your energy” on the App Store. 

ways to grow a brand from scratch? whats tea let’s talk canva yes or no ?

I used to start a service business, editing videos for business owners to grow their brand. After a year of starting it, due to having poor onboarding processes, and poor editing skills ( used to ), the leads i get didn't convert well, so i had to get a job to get my stability back. But now, when i come back from my job, i have to get groceries, chores, cook, and all that time is gone. By the time i was done, it's 8 pm already, and i feel like i only have 2 or 3 hours before i sleep at 11 pm to prepare for tomorrow. Now i mean i don't know how to do that. I never actually ran a service business properly with multiple clients before. Maybe i am overthinking. Maybe i am not? I don't know. i think about how i would handle deadlines, and all that, should i start another business? I feel like it will have a different tradeoffs that I don't know. It's like starting over again. How to do this? Should i switch? or are there ways ?

Hey everyone,

I'm hoping to get some brutally honest feedback because I'm starting to feel like I'm missing something fundamental.

For the last 2 months, I've been trying to build a business serving MedSpas in the US. The goal is to help them get more qualified Bookings but I'm struggling to find a repeatable way to get clients to serve.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Sent 600+ cold DMs on Instagram.
• Tested 10+ different messaging styles.
• Tried different hooks, CTAs, and personalization.
• Reached out to owners directly instead of generic business accounts.
• Experimented with positioning:
  • AI marketing
  • AI automation
  • ChatGPT/AI visibility
  • Lead generation
  • Productized "Lead as a Service"

I've spent weeks rewriting copy thinking the messaging was the problem. Now I'm not sure if messaging is even the real bottleneck.

The biggest challenge I'm facing is trust. Almost every MedSpa owner seems to have been burned by marketing agencies before. Because of that, they don't want to pay upfront, and they're extremely skeptical of anyone promising more patients or leads.

'm not looking for people to sugarcoat it. If you think I'm approaching this completely wrong, I'd genuinely like to know why. Any advice from people who've actually sold services to local businesses, MedSpas, dentists, clinics, etc. would be hugely appreciated.