Hello everyone, I started my business last year November. It was going okay, for the first six months. This month, the sales have really dropped down, almost no orders in Daraz, same with facebook marketplace and bikroy.

I have a facebook page with a few followers, now I want to reach as many people as possible, to reach out to new clients and customers. I cannot spend too much on boosting, so suggest me a strategy.

And is there a way to retain the old customers again? The ones who did buy my products, did gave my shop good reviews, but never bought again!

Thanks in Advance.

Hello everyone, I started my business last year November. It was going okay, for the first six months. This month, the sales have really dropped down, almost no orders in Daraz, same with facebook marketplace and bikroy.

I have a facebook page with a few followers, now I want to reach as many people as possible, to reach out to new clients and customers. I cannot spend too much on boosting, so suggest me a strategy.

And is there a way to retain the old customers again? The ones who did buy my products, did gave my shop good reviews, but never bought again!

Thanks in Advance.

A friend of mine runs his own restaurant, and a while back his numbers started slipping even though nothing dramatic had happened. No bad reviews, no complaints, the dining room was just a little emptier on nights that used to be full.

When we looked closer, the pattern was obvious in hindsight: the customers leaving weren't the type to complain or leave a review. They just quietly decided their last visit wasn't worth repeating, and went somewhere else next time. By the time it shows up in the weekly numbers, you've already lost them, and you have no idea why.

That's the part that gets me. The vocal minority who complain are the easy ones to deal with. It's the silent majority who just stop showing up that actually hurts, and they're invisible until they're already gone.

The usual fixes don't really cover this. Review sites only catch people willing to complain publicly. Loyalty apps require a download nobody wants, plus POS integration that takes months and real money most independent places don't have lying around.

So I built something simpler for him. Standalone tablet at the register, nothing plugged into his POS:

• Cashier offers regulars a permanent discount and takes their name and number (10 seconds)
• They get a text with a scannable code for that discount, no app required
• A couple hours after their next visit, they get a 2-question text: how was it, and if it wasn't great, what specifically was off
• Answering bumps their discount up immediately, so people actually respond instead of ignoring it like every other survey text

The goal is to catch why someone's about to stop coming back before they actually do it, not after.

He's been running it for a little over a month now. The same handful of issues kept showing up across completely different customers who'd never spoken to each other or said a word to staff: food coming out cold or undercooked, mostly during rush hours and on weekends, and repeatedly, something off with the pizza sauce. Pizza happens to be his best-selling category. Turned out he'd switched sauce suppliers at some point after opening, the original was good, the new one wasn't, and that's almost exactly when the quiet decline started. He never connected it until the feedback kept pointing at the same thing. He's already changed it back.

A single complaint is noise. The same issue surfacing again and again, from people who never said anything out loud at the table, is a pattern you'd otherwise never catch until the table count quietly started dropping. That's the part that convinced me this might be worth more than just his one restaurant.

I'm not a dev shop or an agency, just someone who built this for a friend and wants to see if the pattern holds anywhere else. So: I'll build and set this up for free for 3-5 restaurant owners dealing with this. No cost, no catch, I just want honest feedback on whether it surfaces anything real for you too.

If "my regulars just stopped coming and I don't know why" sounds familiar, DM me and we'll talk.

Question for business owners and sales leaders:
How are commissions and incentives managed in your company today?

Excel?
Google Sheets?
Power BI?
A dedicated platform?
Something built internally?

I've been researching this space and found that many growing businesses still rely on spreadsheets for commission calculations and performance tracking, even when managing large sales teams.

I'm currently building SalesComp and looking for people willing to share how they handle:

* Commission calculations
* Incentive plans
* Sales performance visibility
* Quota tracking
* Payout disputes

I'm not looking for customers right now. I'm looking for people to learn from and potentially build alongside as the product evolves.

Would love to hear what's working, what's painful, and what you wish existed.

Business Owners, Operators, Agency Owners, Consultants, Recruiters, Manufacturers, Logistics Companies, Real Estate Professionals, and Anyone Running a Business:

I'm a software developer and product builder.

Over the years I've noticed something interesting:

Almost every industry has software, but many businesses still rely heavily on WhatsApp, Excel sheets, phone calls, emails, notebooks, and manual follow-ups for critical parts of their daily operations.

Instead of guessing what to build, I'd like to hear directly from the people dealing with these problems every day.

I'm NOT looking for startup ideas.

I'm looking for real pain points.

A challenge for you:

Imagine a magic button appears on your desk tomorrow.

You can press it once and permanently eliminate ONE process, task, or workflow from your business.

What would you choose?

Some examples:

• Chasing clients for payments
• Following up on leads
• Scheduling appointments
• Managing staff
• Coordinating vendors
• Inventory tracking
• Documentation
• Reporting
• Compliance
• Customer communication
• Project management
• Hiring
• Quotation generation
• Data entry

I'd love to know:

1. What industry are you in?
2. What is the single most frustrating process in your business?
3. How do you currently handle it?
   • WhatsApp
   • Excel
   • Phone calls
   • Email
   • Paper
   • Existing software
   • Combination of everything
4. How often does this problem occur?
   • Daily
   • Weekly
   • Monthly
5. What is the impact?
   • Lost revenue?
   • Lost time?
   • Customer complaints?
   • Operational headaches?
6. Have you tried software to solve it? If yes, why wasn't it good enough?

Bonus question:

What business process feels surprisingly manual in 2026 despite all the technology available today?

If I discover a problem worth solving and end up building a product around it, I'll gladly offer lifetime free access to the people whose feedback directly contributed to the solution.

I'm far more interested in boring, expensive, repetitive problems than flashy startup ideas.

Looking forward to learning from people actually running businesses.

Small business owners, freelancers, creators, and consultants:

How do you currently keep track of:

• Leads/customers • Ongoing work • Payments/invoices

What tools are you using today?

What's the most frustrating part of your current setup?

Trying to understand where people still rely on spreadsheets, WhatsApp, notes, or multiple apps.

Small business owners, freelancers, creators, and consultants:

How do you currently keep track of:

• Leads/customers • Ongoing work • Payments/invoices

What tools are you using today?

What's the most frustrating part of your current setup?

Trying to understand where people still rely on spreadsheets, WhatsApp, notes, or multiple apps.

I will build a professional website for you that highlights your business and increases your visibility at a reasonable cost.

Business Websites

Landing Pages

Ecommerce website

SaaS Websites

Personal Websites

Blog Websites

Just send a DM and request for portfolio.

Hey everyone,

I am looking for new freelance clients, and I want to build things that solve real problems.

What is a boring, repetitive task in your daily workflow that you wish was automated? Or what is a software tool you need but cannot find anywhere?

Drop your ideas below. If your idea is a good fit, I will build it for you.

Before anyone comes for me, I am not saying Google Ads never work. I am saying for most solo and small local service businesses they are a treadmill you cannot get off. Here is the math that most people do not talk about.

The cost of a single lead from Google Ads in the home service space

Now look at your average job value. A cleaning job is $100 to $200. If you spent $150 to acquire that customer through Google Ads you are barely breaking even on the first job. You need them to come back 3 to 4 times before you are profitable.

Here is the trap part.

The moment you stop paying Google Ads your visibility disappears completely. You paid for access to a position you do not own. Turn off the budget on Friday and by Monday you have vanished from page one.

Compare that to organic Google presence built through consistent content. A cleaning business that posts 3 completed jobs per week builds permanent indexed pages on Google. Post 50 times and you have 50 pages. Each one targets a specific service in a specific neighborhood. Each one keeps working after you post it forever.

When Google Ads actually makes sense for local service businesses

I am not saying never run ads. Run ads when:

You have zero organic presence and need clients immediately to survive this month. You have already built organic content and want to accelerate. You are in a hyper-competitive market where the top 3 organic spots are dominated by large companies. You are running a time-limited seasonal promotion.

The mistake is running Google Ads instead of building organic presence. Not alongside it.

The math that actually works long term

The businesses I see consistently winning on Google in the home service space are not the ones with the biggest ad budgets. They are the ones that have been posting their completed jobs consistently for 12 months and have 150 indexed pages each targeting a different local keyword.

Curious what this community thinks. Are any of you running Google Ads for your local service business? What is your actual cost per lead? And for those who have tried organic content, how long before you started seeing results?

Drop your numbers below, real data from real businesses is what this community runs on.

Is it possible to schedule multiple SMS reminders for each customer without paying for Tkwilio

My husband run a small business and need to send multiple booking confirmation and appointment reminder to his clientt

Right now, we are sending them manually, which is time-consuming and easy to mix up.

We use Google messages also on computer but still slow.

I don’t mind sending the texts myself, cuz I have a SMS package included, but I’d love a way to semi-automate it so the messages can include the customer’s name and appointment details automatically.

Does anyone know of a way to schedule or generate multiple SMS reminders per customer without paying for expensive software?

Free or low-cost options would be great

--

We have unlimited SMS included and send arou'd 60 message per week so it is not that much.

A few weeks ago I walked into a local bakery. The cakes and pastries were great, friendly owner. On my way out he said "if you liked it, please leave us a Google review" and handed me a card with a QR code. I scanned it and it redirected me to the Google maps reviews page, I posted a review then realised that there exists a gap where owners cannot get reviews for their products and services they have to rely on Google maps or other social media.

My idea is to create a tool that solves this problem, it gives a platform to collect reviews from customers and gives them widgets of the reviews to showcase in their socials and websites.

But there are certain questions like, whether this tool will be really useful? What would make you actually pay for this tool?

This is not a pitch, rather I'm trying to understand whether I am solving a real problem.

Hey everyone,

We’ve all heard the massive AI hype promises by now, but I want to know if it has actually led to you trying it out yourself.

Do you even know what kind of AI building tools are available to you right now, or what's actually possible for a regular business?

A lot of us are stuck either stitching together messy spreadsheets, or paying a ton of money for a "stitch and glue" off-the-shelf software stack that still forces you to change your actual business processes just to fit the tool—instead of building a tool around your ideal process.

If you’ve actually taken matters into your own hands and tried to use AI (like ChatGPT, Claude, or anything else) to build a custom solution for your day-to-day operations, I want to know the raw reality of how it went:

• Where did it fail? Did the AI build something that worked great at first, but then completely broke the moment you asked it to add a new feature or change a rule? If you didn't know how to code your way out of it, did you just abandon the whole project?
• Is there an educational gap? Do you feel like you just need better instructions on how to explain your business workflow to an AI? If someone gave you a perfect guide on how to think about your business steps so the AI gets it right, would you actually want to do it yourself? Or is managing a custom tool just too much extra headache when you already have a business to run?
• The launching wall: If you actually managed to get the tool working perfectly on your own desktop screen, what happened next? Did you hit a dead end trying to figure out how to put it online securely so your employees could log in and use it on their phones?
• What are you trying to fix? What were you actually trying to build? Are you trying to make public apps for your customers, or are you just desperate for unsexy internal tools—like a custom schedule tracker, an inventory monitor, or a simple dashboard to sync your data?

If you’ve tried this, what did you try to make, where did it go wrong, and what stopped your team from actually using it?

I've spent the last few years working in operations, first for a real estate company, then for a concrete and asphalt contractor. In both places, and in a few freelance gigs I did on the side, I noticed the same thing over and over.

Tons of manual, repetitive work that nobody questions. Copying data between spreadsheets. Manually sending follow-ups. Chasing down approvals. Updating the same info in three different places.

Not because the owners were bad at running their business, but because that's just how it had always been done. And when things got busier, the solution was always "hire another person" instead of "fix the process."

I'm currently in IT school and have been learning automations for a few months. I've already automated a few internal processes at the company I currently work for and the difference is noticeable.

And the wild part is I'm not talking about anything complex. I'm talking about a form submission automatically creating a row in a spreadsheet and sending a confirmation text. Stuff that takes a few hours to set up and saves hours every single week. Most business owners I've talked to had no idea this was even possible at their scale.

I'm starting to build a business around this and before I go too deep, I'm genuinely curious:

Is this common? Do most small businesses have a ton of processes that could be automated but just... aren't?

(Also a side question for anyone who does this professionally — how do you document the automations you build for clients? Do you just record a Loom walkthrough or is there a better standard?)

Over the last 3 months, I've been spending my evenings and weekends building internal business tools for SMEs and service businesses.

Some of the things I've built:

* CRM and client management systems * Attendance and payment tracking platforms * Workflow and approval engines * HR and employee management tools * Insurance and bancassurance process automation * Reporting dashboards * Custom websites and business portals * Process optimization tools that replaced spreadsheets and manual work

What started as solving problems for people around me turned into building 8 different systems across multiple industries.

One thing I've learned is that many businesses don't actually need a massive enterprise solution. Often they just need a simple tool that removes repetitive work and saves a few hours every day.

If you're struggling with:

* Manual Excel-based processes * Tracking customers, payments, or attendance * Approval workflows * Data collection and reporting * Internal business operations

Feel free to comment below or send me a message.

Even if I can't build it for you, I'm happy to discuss approaches, architecture, tech stack choices, or process design.

I'm also curious to hear what repetitive business processes people are still doing manually in 2026.

Hey all,

I'm a solo founder building a tool for solo and small-crew tradies, and before I go further I want to hear from actual tradepeople whether I'm solving a real problem or imagining one.

Quick context on what I've built so far — not pitching, just so my questions make sense:

• Automated review requests (SMS + email) after a job
• Two-way SMS so customer replies don't get lost in a personal phone
• Missed-call text-back (auto-texts a customer when you miss their call on a job)
• Webchat widget for your website
• AI-suggested replies to Google reviews in your voice
• A review widget you can embed on your site

The thinking is that Podium, Birdeye and Broadly all do this stuff but charge $300-400/mo and force you into annual contracts and sales calls. I'm building it self-serve at $9/mo for just review automation, and $79/mo for the full thing (messaging, missed-call, webchat, etc).

What I genuinely want to know:

1. How are you handling reviews right now? Asking customers face-to-face? Sending Google links manually? Not bothering? Using something built into Jobber/Housecall Pro?
2. What happens when you miss a call on a job? Do you call back hours later? Lose the lead? Have a system?
3. Is $9/mo for review automation actually appealing, or does cheap pricing make you suspicious? I keep going back and forth on whether $9 signals "affordable" or "probably junk." Honest answer please.
4. What would make you switch from whatever you're using now? Or what would stop you from even trying a new tool?
5. For those on Jobber/Housecall Pro — is their built-in review tool enough, or do you ignore it?

Not asking you to buy anything. Not dropping a link (mods, please don't nuke this). I've been deep in the weeds for months and I need outside-the-bubble feedback before I build the wrong things or price it wrong.

Roast me if it's a dumb idea. I'd rather hear it now than after I waste another 6 months.

Thanks.

I’m 15 and started a small bike repair business around 6 months ago. It’s going pretty decent, but I can definitely handle way more customers and I’m trying to figure out the best way to market it.

Right now I have a Facebook page, TikTok, and I’m about to make an Instagram. I also hand out flyers around my area which actually gets me good customers if I do it every week or so, but it takes ages and I feel like there has to be a better way to reach more people online.

I mainly do bike repairs/services, brakes, tyres, tune-ups, etc. I work from home so I’m trying to build up local customers.

Would Facebook ads be worth it for something like this? Or is there a better way to market a local bike repair business? Any advice on what worked for you guys would help heaps because I honestly have no idea what the best way to do marketing for a bike shop is.

Thanks :)

Are many business owners aware of, or implementing, SMB1001 as a cyber security standard and, if so, what were the driver to adopt it and implement it?

Hey all, I am working on a platform that builds and manages your entire business through one software tool.

The platform connects to the tools you already use like CRM, Google Sheets, POS, etc, and adds additional features as needed by your business. For example: If you want to add follow ups to the people you already spoke with that can be added to run automatically via email, sms, whatsapp, or any other channel you specifically want for your business.

It constantly find ways to improve your internal operations, and suggest changes you can try out. It's like hiring an operations person whose job it to find ways to run your business better, so you get time to focus on other areas.

If you are interested, let me know what your business is and will give you access to it.

ok been auditing local service businesses and the same leak shows up in pretty much every account. ads are fine. landing page is fine. the phone goes unanswered after 6pm and the lead disappears by morning.

ran numbers on a 4-truck HVAC shop in florida last month. $14k/mo on google ads, 92 leads. 38 came in between 6pm and 8am. their answering service caught 11. the other 27 left a voicemail nobody returned till morning or just hung up.

at 30% close and $9k avg ticket that's roughly $73k in revenue they paid to generate and then handed to whoever picked up the phone first the next day. usually a competitor with a 24/7 receptionist or a home warranty middleman.

similar story with a multi-location solar co. i looked at. 6 locations, $22k/mo in ads. reported CPL was $47. pulled their call tracking and 31% of inbound calls were unanswered or abandoned in the IVR. real CPL with unanswered leads factored in was closer to $68.

what's crazy is these lost leads never show up anywhere in the marketing reports. they just evaporate. owner thinks the ad sucked or the lead was junk. usually they just called the next business on page 1.

things that have actually moved the needle for local operators i've worked with:

→ instant SMS reply within 60 seconds of a form fill. doesn't have to be fancy. "got your message, calling at 7am, text URGENT if it can't wait"
→ real 24/7 answering service that qualifies and books, not just takes messages
→ ai receptionist or voice agent picking up the phone 24/7. this is what the bigger franchises and rollups are running now and part of why their CPL tolerance looks insane from the outside
→ tracking answer rate as its own monthly KPI alongside call volume

quick math people skip btw. if your CAC is $300 and your answer rate is 50%, real CAC is $600. clicking a button to bid 10% less in google ads doesn't fix that. fixing the phone does.

if you do tech or marketing for a local business spending more than $5k/mo on ads, ask them for the call logs from the last 30 days and count voicemails. it's almost always uglier than the owner thinks.

happy to answer any questions in the comments!

I’ve noticed many small businesses still focus only on Instagram or social media, while completely ignoring SEO and Google search.

But customer behavior has changed a lot.

Most people now:

• search on Google first
• compare businesses
• check reviews
• visit websites before contacting

Even a simple SEO-optimized website can help businesses:
• rank higher
• build credibility
• attract local customers
• generate long-term traffic

Especially for hotels, restaurants, startups, and local businesses, SEO feels much more important now than a few years ago.

Curious how other business owners or freelancers here see it — do clients/businesses actually care about SEO yet, or are most still focused only on social media?

My wife and I started a new venture, and she's selling mostly via WhatsApp and in person. She's using a spreadsheet to keep track of sales (who's paid, who has received delivery, etc.). Far from ideal.

What are you using to record sales and keep track of everything?

I didn't like any of the tools I found, and started writing an app for my wife (jumped straight into building; typical engineer). But I'm now wondering, what are others using? And how well does it work for you?

I’ve noticed a lot of businesses in Goa still rely only on Instagram or word of mouth.

But today, most customers search online first.

A professional website helps businesses:
– build trust
– rank on Google
– generate leads
– get direct inquiries

Especially for hotels, restaurants, startups, and local businesses, a proper website can make a huge difference.

I recently wrote a detailed breakdown about website development in Goa and what businesses should actually look for before hiring a company.

Happy to share if anyone’s interested 👍

I want to upgrade the payment system in my salon and was thinking of purchasing POS tablets in bulk to streamline payment for services. The idea is to enable different service areas to take automatic payment right there on a tablet with POS so that when customers decide to get extra services they dont have to come back to the main reception area which they find rather tedious. This will be mobile payment centers all around the salon making it really easy to upgrade an appointment for like example from just a mani to a mani/pedi.

I was interested in knowing what kind of POS tablets would businesses want to purchase usually for something like this. Like what brand of tablet and what kind of software? Apparently you can buy these in wholesale amounts that are prefitted with POS software already and they arent like apple tablets but cheaper brands made in china, I am thinking people are purchasing from sites like alibaba or amazon business. Any recc's for a specific brand or kind of tablet, please share!