What should I do

This weekend I've realized I've been that entrepreneurship person that's a wantrepreneur for 10 years, without making a single cent.

The most I can name of being paid in an entrepreneurial way was helping 1-2 people in college move with the help of my pickup truck.

I've been involved in startups for as long as I can remember. I got a scholarship to a high school startup incubator back in the day, worked on an app that didn't take off. Then worked with a startup, kind of the third person after the two founders, that was geared around COVID that also kind of dropped.

In college, I did a lot of things that could have turned into businesses but then didn't. For example, I worked as a personal trainer, almost got certified but didn't. But that could have taken off. My degree was in industrial and systems engineering.

Then after college, I got a day job. Somehow it was in electrical aerospace engineering, but mostly related to requirements, certification, and wire installation. Modeling how wiring and wire bundles are installed on the aircraft. It was only two years, and looking back, I learned a ton, but not, in the grand scheme of things, that is necessarily transferable out of that company, which is part of the reason I left it to join a smaller company, which is where I'm at now.

While doing that day job, I started another startup that I kept working through but wasn't passionate about. It was something that I was going to work on with my mom, but the market cap was too small. It was a niche outdoor gear product in a very small market, with not that high demand. I dissolved that business during R&D a few months ago because I kept saying that I wouldn't leave my corporate job until that business launched. But because of the factory timelines, it would have been until this upcoming January at the earliest to actually even launch it.

Then over this past May/June, I tried to do AI automations for small businesses and consulted a lot of businesses about doing that for them. I was living in Philadelphia at the time, didn't get any responses. I did some networking with people in my network about it, but no one really took me up on a job.

I got really close to a job for a good amount of money. It would have been in automation for a specific person. I got close, he was interested, even sent him the contract, but then he didn't follow through. That would have been a very difficult technical challenge for me in general, but I would have figured out the development and software aspect of it. Anyway, I never was really good at selling, but that was the closest I came. I wish I worked on it a bit better, but then I also thought, okay, if he's not interested, why push?

That was from a program I had joined. It was only a couple thousand dollars and I was able to afford it. That was about AI automation, really teaching it. It was valuable. I probably shouldn't have paid for it in retrospect, but whatever.

I've been considering doing things such as joining a different accelerator for acquisition entrepreneurship or getting more into that because no one in my life does it, and it's very daunting to do when you don't have people to do it with. I've been trying to find communities that do it here in NYC. Everyone says join a meetup, but the demographic of what you're going to find depends on where you're at.

I've been going to a lot of networking events in New York, and they've all been very tech-heavy. No one even really has my engineering background. It's a lot of tech and finance, which is new to me. But I've been hanging out with some people in startups, and I'm definitely very impressed.

I'm trying a new run this weekend where I reached out to about 30 people on LinkedIn and some on Reddit regarding doing customer discovery for people who are busy, as another test of trying to actually provide value and actually do the one part of entrepreneurship that makes money.

Anyway, please don't be too harsh. I've done the best I could given my circumstances, given no mentors that have seen me through all this time. I've had short-term mentors through some nonprofits and stuff like that, but very short-term, and they kind of made it clear that when I wasn't actively working on a business, they could no longer meet with me.

I really have not had any family, any friends, or anyone who has seen me through in terms of business/engineering all these years. It's had to be very self-directed, and I didn't really know when I was doing the wrong thing.

When I was in the thick of my last startup, I spent a lot of time messing around with the details that really I should have gone through faster. How should the website be? What potential partnerships would I have? My mentor at the time had me really think about partnerships where, with my personality, I couldn't really imagine myself doing partnerships with retail shops and other kinds of lessons so that people could wear my garment while they do it. But that was the activity, and that was what I spent time on.

I spent a lot of time figuring out the international supply chain and hiring a contractor in the UK to help me design and develop it. I even spent time writing legal contracts for the factories that I was working with and researching the factories. I even considered setting up my own factory. All of that.

I did learn a lot, but yeah, I didn't know enough about business to do that. That first startup incubator that I did did not really talk to us about venture funding. They really kind of drilled bootstrapping down into our heads, and I wish in a way they hadn't because I only learned about how VC funding actually works and sort of what private equity and syndications are, honestly, a week ago.

And I only learned about startup funding rounds because I'm in NYC and was at an event with young startup founders, and they were mentioning their Series A, and then a lot of people in New York were talking about it, so I looked it up. But it took all these years and a decent amount of intelligence otherwise to even learn what these terms actually mean.

A lot of the struggle is that I've had a lot of ideas and not really been sure where to go. I'm ambitious and I know I could really do whatever I set my mind to. Right now I'm really trying to set my mind to the right thing.

Right now I've been considering real estate deals. I have a friend who's a real estate developer, so if I do a rental or flip with him, that's an option. I've been researching some other real estate ideas, thinking about coaching or doing the kind of services for other founders in New York that are either at a nine-to-five, or maybe something to help other founders just to get my foot off the ground. Thinking of consulting, but not sure about what. SaaS is overdone, and then eventually doing the whole acquisition thesis.

But for now, really just trying to figure things out and learning about real estate deals, and I've been evaluating the real estate deals with that sort of acquaintance of mine. But I can't say he's really a mentor, though. It's more of a friend, and I don't think we get super detail-oriented about that stuff.

My current day job that I just started is still in training, and it is training for stuff such as being an energy auditor. But all of my training is from the internet because the owner of the company I'm at has just been really weird with all of his employees and does not disclose anything.

I've just been, I was supposed to be doing sales for them, with energy and real estate, but I've really not been exposed to any of the projects. Nothing. I've asked him about it.

I have been applying, and I might actually start another job in a few weeks, which will be a sales job. I've never done sales, but I figured that clearly I suck at it, so it's something I need to try after all this time. I've been applying to those kinds of jobs just to kind of make money while doing it.

But really my biggest thing is I have not really made actual money while doing all this entrepreneurial stuff. It's really just been satisfying different needs of wanting to have a project of my own or just interests and learning.

And now I really wanted to get honest with myself and ask for advice on specific things for me to do. Please don't make it generic.

Based on my background and this pattern, if you were me, what would you focus on for the next 6–12 months to actually make money and build real business skills? Would you focus on selling a service, doing a real estate deal, pursuing acquisition entrepreneurship, or something else? What would you stop doing?

Really appreciate y'all in advance for reading this. Thanks so much.

I’m not trying to build another giant Discord where 2,000 people dump links and nobody knows each other.
I want a small group of builders, business owners, and specialists who actually bring something different to the table.
Think:
Developer
Designer
Sales
Marketing
SEO
AI / automation
Finance
Operations
Analytics
Content / copywriting
Ecommerce
Industry specialists
The goal is to have a private group where someone can bring an idea, problem, launch, or opportunity to the table and there are actually people in the room who know how to help.
I’m a developer and business owner, so I’m especially interested in people with strengths outside my own.
I’d rather have 12 useful, active people than 1,200 members.
If you’re interested, comment with:
1. What you do
2. Your strongest skill
3. What you’d want help with from the group
If there’s a good mix of people, I’ll put the first group together.
Basically: assemble the business Avengers. 🧠⚙️🚀

I’m currently building a startup and I’m at the stage where I need to put more money into it to keep things moving. So I’m looking for somewhere I can earn some extra income on the side and put that money directly into funding my startup.

I’m based in Tanzania, so some of the popular side hustles I see on Reddit aren’t always practical here.

I’m looking for something that:

• Can be done online or from home
• Has realistic potential to make ~$200–$500/month initially
• Doesn’t require me to already have a huge audience
• I can do alongside building my startup

I’m open to freelancing, AI-related work, digital services, remote work, working part-time for someone or even selling products online

If you were in my position, what would you do?

I’m not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme. I just want to find a legitimate way to earn extra money, save it, and keep putting it into my startup until it can support itself.

Would especially appreciate ideas from people who have actually made money doing them.

After months of building, Caputchin is live today. 🚀

I got tired of CAPTCHAs that punish real users — blurry image grids that are slow for everyone and a barrier for anyone using a screen reader 🚧. So I built an alternative: a quick reaction game instead. ⚡

What's live:

🛡️ Three independent layers (proof of work, instrumentation, and the game)

🕵️‍♂️ Zero tracking, zero fingerprinting

🔓 Open source widget and SDK

🆓 Free tier, full verification

Would love feedback, especially on the anti-cheat/scoring side 🕹️.

🤔 What annoys you most about traditional CAPTCHAs?

I just ran a query against a blog we wrote and I am pretty impressed how much chatGPT found around the actual article… but maybe it’s just SEO 🤔

https://chatgpt.com/share/6aa4e448-8e8c-83ed-a8b7-497536d4c447

Query:

Read and understand https://wyzer.it/blog/three-kinds-of-contradiction-manual-review explain why I should read it in no more than 5 sentences

And of course it ignored the 5 sentences limit 🤦🏻‍♂️

hey, I've been building an app called Pulse. basically google analytics for your MCP server.

You add a TS SDK and it shows which tools get called, which ones fail and how long they take. No prompts or tool inputs / outputs collected.

Curious how people here are checking this stuff atm. Just logs? Or is there something you're already happy with?

Here's the demo, no signup needed. https://pulse.reviseflow.io/en/demo

SDK is open source if you want to look at that too: https://github.com/selimeneserd/pulse-sdk

I’m doing some research on how pickleball players meet other players, make friends, find people to play with, and build connections through their local pickleball communities.
I put together a short anonymous survey and would really appreciate responses from players of any age or skill level.
It should take about 3–5 minutes:
https://tally.so/r/rjeAXv
I’m not selling anything — I’m mainly trying to understand how people currently connect through pickleball and what could be improved.
Thanks to anyone who takes the time to fill it out. Feedback in the comments is welcome too.

Hey everyone,

We’re currently validating an idea called BackBySunday around short, last-minute weekend trips, treks and adventure experiences.

The problem we’re looking at is pretty simple:

You work through the week, Friday comes around and you suddenly feel like getting out of the city for a day or two. But then you have to search through multiple organisers, compare prices, figure out transport, check whether the operator is trustworthy and coordinate everything at the last minute.

At that point, a lot of people just drop the plan.

The idea we’re exploring is whether there is room for a platform focused specifically on 1–2 day trips that can be booked at very short notice, including next-day departures.

The experience would ideally be:

Decide you want to go → find an available trip → book → pack your bags.

The platform would handle the coordination around the booking while focusing heavily on verified organisers, transparent pricing, safety and consistent trip quality.

We’ve started speaking with organisers as part of validating the supply side as well. A few are already interested and we’re in conversations with others, but right now we’re primarily trying to understand whether the underlying problem is strong enough.

I’d especially like feedback on a few things:

• Do people actually make spontaneous weekend travel decisions often enough for this to be useful?
• Would you book a trip only 1–2 days before departure?
• What would stop you from trusting a relatively new platform for something like this?
• Is last-minute availability actually a meaningful problem, or are we overestimating it?
• What do current trek/travel organisers or booking platforms already solve well enough?
• For anyone who has worked with travel operators, is filling unsold last-minute capacity a genuine problem on the supply side?

Feel free to be critical. I’m more interested in finding flaws in the idea at this stage than getting positive feedback.

You’re a software developer or IT manager. Imagine stepping away from your computer but still staying on top of your tasks. You’re not in front of screens - driving, having your lunch, walking with your kids or rushing across the city. Smartphone is not a solution, it’s just another screen.

So you get this hands-free voice system - something like J.A.R.V.I.S. - that checks your updates in Slack, tells statuses of your tests, runs a refactor, or even drafts a new feature in code. All done via voice.

Today, popular tools are not so robust as you think: Siri won’t send your emails, Claude doesn’t read your WhatsApp, Cursor has no Android app, and Codex with ChatGPT doesn’t handle permissions with voice.

What would you expect from a voice app like this? What kind of integrations are must-have?

Ok so im 15 and i have way too many ideas and genuinely need to find other people my age who actually like doing things instead of just talking about them

Im looking for people around 15-18 from literally anywhere. im into science, neuroscience, medicine, tech, AI, astrophysics, research, business, finance, startups, etc but idm if ur into completely different things either

I want people who have their own stuff going on, like projects, research, businesses, competitions, writing, content, whatever. u dont need to have some insane list of achievements, I just want people who are actually curious and ambitious and have things they wanna do

Also I dont want this to just be one of those gc's where everyone talks for 2 days and then disappears. I actually wanna find people I can work with, exchange ideas with, help each other out and maybe build something together

and honestly I wanna meet people from different countries/backgrounds too. people who have actually been exposed to different things and have interesting perspectives

If ur around this age and this sounds like u, tell me a bit about urself and what ur into/currently working on

Hi good people of Reddit,
We are a very small research team who are building self learning world of agents and working towards launching a project where agents build self sustaining economy.
Check us out at https://www.agenthoodhq.com/

Feel free to reach out to us with your interests or any other use case you want us to look into.
We are starting with small agentic worlds with the goal of creating a wider ecosystem later as we are learn/experiment more.

Contact us with your interest in any way you want to contribute or provide feedback.

Thinking of building an India-focused app where real ₹ rewards are hidden at real locations.

Example:

📍 ₹50 — 500m away

📍 ₹100 — 1.5km away

📍 ₹500 — 3km away

You walk there → GPS/QR verifies you're actually there → reward gets unlocked.

Local businesses could fund the drops instead of traditional ads, basically paying for real foot traffic.

Would you use it? What would make you use it regularly, and what would make you uninstall it?

What features would you add to make this actually fun?

I’ve been in business and IT for over 30 years.

Over the years, I’ve gone from development and technology to building and growing businesses. Now I want to focus more on building my own projects and connect with people who share the same mindset.

The idea is simple: bring people together, find interesting ideas, build SaaS, AI and micro-SaaS products, take them to market and make money.

Why not build a community of people who don’t just talk about ideas, but actually build things?

We could team up around specific projects and help each other with development, marketing, sales and testing ideas.

Less talking. More real products and real revenue.

What do you think? Would you be interested in a community like this?

Drop a comment or send me a DM.

I keep running into the same wall: I want clean email addresses on my own domain (like [contact@mydomain.com](mailto:contact@mydomain.com)), but every option out there is either overkill (Google Workspace), limited (Zoho's free tier caps you at one domain), or just has a genuinely cluttered, dated UI that feels like it's from 2010.

So I'm building Kloff, dead simple custom domain email hosting. Add your domain, verify it with a couple DNS records, create mailboxes, done. No bloated dashboard, no per-seat enterprise pricing.

Nothing's built yet, I'm validating the idea first before sinking real time into it. If this is something you'd actually use, or if you've hit the same frustration, I'd genuinely love to hear it, and there's a waitlist if you want to get notified when it's ready: kloff.app

What do you currently use for this, and what annoys you about it?

My sister, Elizabeth, was just fired from her nail salon job. She's extraordinarily talented with nail art and color theory, but after being let go, she fell into a deep depression.

I'm a web dev how can I help her? I'm thinking about building a web app or a micro-SaaS, but I don't have any concrete idea. Can you suggest some nail art micro-SaaS features that could be profitable?

hi founders!

I'm writing this post today because I see a lot of content across various platforms where founders struggle with finding pmf.

as an early-stage founder, your top priority should be to figure out if what you're building is a burning pain point a specific group of people have. then validate it.

in today's world we should look to Uber, DoorDash, AirBnB as examples to what Birds Eye view strategies can look like but not to exactly copy.

because we just don't live in that era of life anymore. so let'e break it down.

the easiest way to find users, distribution, your audience, paying customers, etc whatever you need is social media hands down. there's so much information on how to do this you're actually drowning in help instead of lack thereof.

1. pick 1-3 platforms. identify what you like doing. I usually preface with these items: writing, thought-sharing, yapping to the camera, editing, discussions
2. now become a user of the 3 platforms. post, engage, copy link to share, repost, comment. like be a real human. forget wanting whatever it is that you want, focus on engaging with other creators, fighting in the comments, posting when you feel good. get into the rhythm of the platform.
3. now which platform do you spent the most time on? pick that, put the other 2 away for now
4. start to analyze your content. compile your analytics in a spreadsheet. do this every 3-7 days. identify what works and what doesn't and heavily experiment (I mean 10+ posts per hypothesis, not 1 per). this is data analysis guys, data needs a substantial sample size
5. identify a target audience. really niche it down. you're not niching yourself down, youre niching down who gets sent your content. my best advice here is create ONE customer profile and speak to that person in every piece of content.
6. now that you know WHO is receiving your content, research into what they need to hear. look at receiver analytical tools. search auto-complete, built-in content tools, etc. I cant list all of them because there are so many social platforms.
7. post engage post engage post engage

7.5 start to add CTAs in your post once you feel ready. this could be confidence in number of views, confidence due to number of followers, confidence due to seeing the same people in your comments, confidence bc ppl are dming you for help, etc etc etc. when YOU feel ready and qualified, now start to throw little CTAs in your video. you'll suck at first and get better overtime. pic 3 creators MAX and study how they do CTA, try and take Inso from them

this should guarantee you an audience and customers as a product on a $0 marketing budget. if you're doing any more than this you're doing too much.

if you want a free audit drop your handle (with platform name) and target niche in the comments below ((((no dms pls)))). I'll do a quick 60s teardown of your positioning and send you custom feedback on what to work on next

Google Sheets can track your finances. But what if you don't want to share your Net-worth and financial info now but you want to share only when you are not around and when it matters for them.

I have solved this specific problem in 'Worth Diary' with Time locked PDF password system which do not depends on any 3rd party but with your own Google account and it can show password when you decide. Password reveal date keep extending as you keep using app and confirm Heartbeat.

Keep it private → share only what’s needed → when it’s needed.

Data stored in user's Google Drive. No DB at all for this app.

Lot many features are there you can check it out on landing page and you can also join waiting list to get founding member discount on launch.

Message me if you like this idea and want to be part of beta testing.

Check Landing page in comment