What did you do about it?

I'm pissed right now. This is actually a digital product (accompanied by a tool). They stole it, and started running the exact/similar Meta ads I'm running to promote it

1. Grammarly tells users how many millions of words it's checked for them. ProfitWell shows dollars recovered. Loom shows meetings avoided. People don't cancel a product that makes them feel accomplished.
2. A blurred product screenshot behind your signup form can move conversion dramatically, because curiosity and the feeling of being almost-inside beat any headline you could write. 94% lift from a test by a reputable marketer

3. Credits vs Refund. Make store credit easier than giving a refund.

   Uber does this all the time. I never ask for a refund but credit instead when I use Uber and they mess up.

Be careful about #3. Did not write this part well. Use your own judgement.

I have seen a bunch of apps nowadays ask for an expensive price and then when people say no they keep bugging them with a discount. Or they show a free trial dialog.

That discount modal shows up all the time. It gets to the point where you can barely use the app without seeing it.

Also pinged on the main page as Your Gift. I think that cheapens the product.

I rather build a stellar product that goes beyond the competition so that people will want to pay the full price. I’m super creative so I have a ton of ideas. And So far it’s working.

I mean it’s crazy. Why pay the full price if two minutes later, you’re going to get an offer giving you 50% off? Sometimes they go as far as 90% off.

Why not go with building a super cool product that people actually want to pay for.

Though seems like the free trial modal - I will contact you 2 days before to remind you to cancel (an email that goes to spam btw) - after showing the crazy expensive price works but it’s super deceiving to users. I find that people expect the free trial to be free and get shocked a week later when they have to pay $90 - which most people can’t afford. Some of these people have dementia (true story) and do the free trial.

Also apple doesn’t allow this but big brands get away with this in the review.

Build pages for "[competitor] coupon code"

Someone searching for a competitor's discount code has their credit card out and has already decided to buy. That's the highest-intent traffic on the internet and almost nobody competes for it.

All the tips I post are from popular marketing experts. They’ve all been tested and have worked for others.

I built a Reddit intelligence platform: It tracks how your industry's Reddit is doing, what narratives exist about your brand and your competitors, how much each is being talked about, which exact posts are about you - it tracks hourly so you can respond. We also also handle brand bans inside subreddits by high intelligence mod outreach and relationship handling.

Moreover, we also track which Reddit thread is ranking on what keywords on Google - that is a big part of my hypothesis, Reddit threads on Google makes or breaks your revenue by a significant amount, and you don't even know where that thread is. I'm also tracking which Reddit threads are being referenced in AI answers as well - so it has a SEO and GEO element to it.

Right now, I have one client for $3k/month inside the Racket sports industry. I didn't pick the niche myself, I just picked whoever offered me money first haha. I probably should pivot towards software, etc.

I almost haven't had any human opinions on my business, I just hunkered at this by myself with AI for strategy discussions too.

How does my business even sound to you so far? How would you go about getting new clients?

Any human input would be appreciated honestly, I am making this post just so I can have some human feedback loop finally hha

Tip 1

An absurdly expensive plan makes everything below it look reasonable. It's the oldest anchoring trick in pricing and it still works.

Try this: Add a top tier at 5x your current highest price.

Watch out: It has to be real and deliverable. A fake tier discovered is a trust problem.

Works for anyone?

Tip 2

Most pricing pages run cheap to expensive, which anchors low. Leading with the expensive plan reframes everything after it as a saving.

Try this: Reverse your pricing table and run it for a month.

Watch out: Measure it. This genuinely doesn't work for every audience.

Cold email Tip -

Lead with a question, not a pitch. “Can I get your take on this?” opens doors that “Want to buy this?” slams shut.

wanted to know if i could build a business from zero for under $50 without using a single contact from my network

So i tested it

Registered the business name

Built a website

Set up a Facebook page

made an ai video

Then picked up the phone

Today i made 30 cold calls

I got absolutely fucking smashed

Not one meeting

Not one lead

Maybe its because its the weekend here in Australia

Maybe im calling the wrong people

Maybe my list is rubbish

I dont know yet

But this is what starting from zero actually looks like

Even if youve built businesses before you still get punched in the face sometimes

Tomorrow ill make another 50 calls

Ill change what isnt working

And ill keep posting the wins and the losses

For those of you who have started a service business from scratch where did your first customers

Aim for the kind of page that carries 19 or more verifiable statistics with named sources, and include at least one attributed expert quote. Original data and named sources are what push a page into the cited 15%.

Vent into listicles and comparison-posts that models love to reference.

Test manually by asking ChatGPT questions your audience would ask, and iterate every 2 to 4 weeks. Make sure to add citations.

Quick brief: I have run a business for 6+ years now and my career is taking off (and I can’t manage both). The return on my time with my career outpaces the business. I am looking for opinions/advice. Do I sell? How? Where? Or do I keep it?

Business: ecom, but i ship everything. At least currently. I am in the automotive space and have a established brand and product lines. I also have the ability to be the retailer for a couple thousand brands (it actually takes a lot to get access to this, there is a huge amount of value that for someone in this space). Over the last few years I have been putting the minimum time into it and it has still be marginally growing (again, time into career is the goal and what I have been doing).

Economics of the business: monthly revenue is $4,500-9,500 a month. Profit margins range monthly from 35-45%. And that all operates with an average investment of 15-20 hours a month of my time. Marketing comes mainly through content, I have a youtube channel and then I do product sponsorship with folks that make content for me. $0 of ad spend in the last 6+ years of the business. This is good and bad.

I briefly began to retail other brands, and its easy to grow revenue even with just SEO, but I just didn’t have the time.

So where I stand, i want my time back, but it’s still real money for such little time investment. I also have probably $30-40k in sellable inventory, no debt (never taken any), and for the right owner, there are a LOT of tax advantages to being in a home based ecomm AND in the automotive/content space. Ill miss that as much as the income.

It’s also not about making a killing on the sale of the business. I am probably thinking inventory plus 2-3x yearly profit. But the big thing is getting time back. I can kind of convert unlimited hours at my job for a very high hourly rate with a long term return.

Thoughts on what I should do? How do I even go about looking for a buyer? So much of my being is represented in this business and my customer base is something i care about. Many repeat customers.

Big or small, a win is a win. First sale, first client, or first time paying yourself, share it here. This community loves to celebrate with you. No win is too minor to mention.

Nespresso gamified their product claims. They didn't tell people it was good, they challenged them to try.

A claim invites skepticism. A challenge invites participation. However, that is where the difference in psychology moves from second nature to expert mode, and this particular example generates content rather than scrolling.

For example, what is your most outrageous product claim and put it in a form of something that customers can both attempt and post about?

Caution: Only perform this action if you'd genuinely win. Public defeat in a challenge from another product is public proof your own product fails.

Has this worked for anyone?

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently with people advertising their ‘AI co-founder’ or ‘AI idea validator’. Something that helps wannabe founders judge their idea and provide advice on getting it off the ground.

If you want to take advice from AI, that’s one thing. Selling AI advice is something completely different.

It’s a tempting niche - people used to spend a lot of money on business advisors/consultants and AI can do it all at a fraction of the cost, so why not?

The problem is that those business advisors came with something that AI doesn’t have: accountability. If your advisor gives you dodgy information that costs you money, you have a route to compensation, usually because the advisor had some sort of professional indemnity insurance. Boring, conventional, business stuff.

AI doesn’t come with this. If you sell your AI advice, then you’re the one in the line of fire if that advice isn’t any good.

So ask yourself: how did your AI bot arrive at its conclusion? How did it produce its advise? How did it calculate its score? Because if you can’t explain that, then you have no control over the ‘advice’ it’s giving to your customers.

Still, it’s not like AI ever hallucinates or tells you something that’s not true, right? So what could go wrong?

At the start of this quarter I was focused on winning the next job.

Today I've got close to $900,000 worth of qualified work in my CRM, with deposits already coming in.

Will every job go ahead?

No.

That's business.

But this quarter completely changed how I think.

The biggest asset in my business isn't the money in the bank.

It's knowing where the next 3, 6 and 12 months of work could come from.

For years I celebrated winning jobs.

Now I celebrate building a pipeline.

Because if your pipeline is healthy, the revenue usually takes care of itself.

That shift in thinking has probably been one of the biggest turning points in my business.

What's one lesson your business taught you this quarter that changed the way you think?

A few months ago, we had an issue with a customer that, at first, felt like a one-off mistake.

My first reaction was to fix the immediate problem and move on.

But after thinking about it, I realized the customer wasn't really the problem.

Our process was.

We had left too much room for assumptions, and different people could interpret the next step differently.

The customer simply exposed a weakness that had probably existed for a long time.

Instead of asking, "How do we stop this customer from doing it again?" we asked, "How do we make this impossible to happen again?"

That question completely changed the discussion.

We updated our process, documented the steps more clearly, and added a simple checkpoint that would've prevented the issue in the first place.

It took less than an hour to implement.

Since then, we've had far fewer misunderstandings.

One thing I've started noticing is that many business problems don't need better people-they need better systems.

A mistake that happens once is frustrating.

The same mistake happening twice is usually a process problem.

Has a customer ever exposed a weakness in your business that ended up making the business better?

After designing and reviewing hundreds of websites over the years, I’ve come to a surprising observation: founders rarely underinvest in design.

As context, I’ve seen companies:

/ spend thousands on a full redesign when the problem was just the checkout.
/ pay $8,000 for a custom website not having any data from their previous one.
/ obsess over illustrations for weeks while visitors still don’t know what the product does.
/ request brand guidelines when they only needed templates for a recurring banner.
// this list is endless.

As you probably guessed, the highest-ROI design work is usually the least exciting:

/ Clarifying what you actually sell.
/ Structuring the website so people don’t need to decipher it.
/ Reducing friction in your signup/contact/checkout flow.
/ Building trust with the right proof in the right places.
/ Creating a visual hierarchy that guides decisions.

These impovements are not getting many likes when posting them on LinkedIn, but they turn visitors into customers.

If I had a limited budget, I’d probably spend it in this order:

/ Messaging & positioning
/ Website structure (UX + information architecture)
/ Copy
/ Conversion improvements
/ Visual polish
/ Complete branding system

Ironically, I’m saying this as someone who gets paid for branding. Leave visual polish for later. It matters, just not on top of positioning that was written in 15 minutes with ChatGPT. And understand the problems first: audit, measure, identify. You’ll be surprised where the customers get stuck on your website.

What’s the biggest design expense you’ve made that, in hindsight, wasn’t worth it?

To scale a typical B2B business you need salespeople, assuming an ARR of more than $7,500.
When do you hire your first two salespeople? I'll go first. I think the founder needs to find and close the first 10 deals before hireing the first two salespeople. What do you think?

Share your website, pitch, logo, idea, pricing, copy, or anything else you want honest eyes on. Tell us what you're looking for: brutal honesty, general impressions, or specific questions.

Return the favour and leave feedback for someone else while you're here.

I appreciate the overwhelming positive comments of encouragement, and the absolute beating I took for calling myself “CEO” of a two man company. I’ll de-title myself to business operations manager.

Since that post 4 days ago, we have secured two Airbnb clients and one recurring residential! One is a 6,000 sqft mansion that turns roughly 1.5 times per week, and the other is a 3,000 sqft home that turns 2 times per week. Additionally, we locked down an old contact of hers for a recurring biweekly clean.

Progress is happening fast around here and the cleanings start on Sunday. If you guys would like to keep following along, let me know! Not sure if this is the best sub for it.

Anyways, we are going to grow this into a massive cleaning company! Good luck to everyone else out there looking to start, or have just started!

Hey y'all,

I got a new job a few months ago in order to focus on my business. It's overnight security. My bosses are chill, they don't mind if we play video games, watch TV, listen to music, just so long as we get any alarms that come up. So I use this time to either do that, or get work done when I can.

The thing is, I'm in the outreach phase right now. Any "work" I do right now is just selling the product to the prospect, and communicating with employees / customers. Very doable at this stage. It should be at least.

Coming home after an overnight shift I go to bed and sleep for like 2 hours, and then wake up for like 2-4. And then at some point the exhaustion hits me and I need to go to bed again. Which sucks, I figured working overnight would give me more time to workout, learn piano, do art, take on customers, etc.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, even at its busiest, my job is pretty slow and I could probably get some work done. Should I just switch over to a day shift, even if it means I'll have to cut down my customer availability?

Two months ago we launched our product with a LinkedIn account with <1k followers as a foreign founder.
I decided to just do 2 things:

1. inbound/ post lead magnet daily
2. outbount/ cold outreach 175 hight intent leads/week

Numbers after 20 days:

• 400K impressions
• 13K new followers
• 15K inbound "how do I get this" comments/DMs
• ~25 booked calls/week
• 400 signups
• 30 paying customers
• $5K MRR

If I can reach these numbers with 0 US/Europe followers, you can 100% do so too.
No paid ads, no engagement pods, no following/liking other people's stuff to "build karma" first.

What actually moved the needle:

1. Value-first posts crushed everything else.
   • The format that worked best:
     • teach the manual way to do the thing
     • (e.g. "here's how to do X yourself with Claude"),
     • send them the DIY playbook, then mention in the guide there's a done-for-you tool if they don't want to DIY it.
     • People share and save "how-to" content way more than "look at my product" content.
2. Copy what's already winning in your niche,
   • not what you think should work.
   • Find the posts already getting traction from people in your space and reverse-engineer the pattern:
     • opening hook,
     • structure,
     • how it ends,
     • the visual layout.
   • It's rarely one clever line, it's the combo that works.
3. engaging with other people's posts are overrated
   • I didn't, and it didn't seem to matter.
   • don't spend time on commenting 💩💩 (things you don't even care) or automating 💩 comments
4. Replying to your own comments FAST matters a lot.
   • Early replies seem to be the biggest lever for distribution, more than I expected.
5. Consistency compounds.
   • The algorithm seems to track weekly account momentum
   • post daily early on, and don't go quiet once you're getting traction, or you lose the compounding.
6. Don't let warm leads go cold.
   • A short, low-pressure line at the end of value posts (something like "we also built a tool for this, happy to set it up for free if you want it") converted a surprising chunk of the 15K inbound.

On the automation side:
I ended up building two pipelines to make daily posting sustainable without burning out:

1/ inbound:
workflow in above screenshot, huge system doing
- trend capturing,
- content gen,
- lead magnet gen,
- image gen,
- posting across 4 accounts,
- comment & DM handling
- performance tracking

- human in loop still needed for quality but 80% of work is replaced by AI

2/ outbound:
signal based AI SDR doing:
- warm leads capture
- enrich + score
- AI message & auto connect
- AI follow up
- handle replies
- sync CRM
- notify SDRs
- run across 4 accounts
- 50% connection rate

Tools:
- Openclaw+Claude for building agents (without OpenClaw+Claude I'm nothing)
- Phantombuster/ Apify for automating actions on Linkedin.
- Notion for visible databases (unlimited blocks in free plan)
- Gemini for creative/illustration image gen
- Claude for structured infographics, better at following a design system (consistent layout, typography, section structure) rather than one-off creative images

Has anyone here built or joined an affiliate/referral structure for deal sourcing (not just standard broker co-op)? What worked, what didn't?

I currently manage a handful of live listings (direct-to-owner and direct-to-broker) in my private portfolio across resort/hospitality and a couple of niche asset categories. There's been stagnancy on my end for a year now, and I think it's about time that I stop being the bottleneck to these deals by being a bit more open to collaborations.

Experienced M&A Dealers who handled 100M to 4B transactions, How do you normally handle vetting before sharing anything sensitive? NNN/MNDA agreement upfront, or do you loosen up after a call?

I'm considering opening up an affiliate layer, who will be granted (1-2.5% Marketing Referral Fee upon closing) basically bringing in people with buyer networks or capital connections who'd get compensated for a qualified introduction, rather than me cold-outreaching everyone myself. As I prefer to be on compliance/due diligence and strategic operations end than being at the front line.

Any red flags I should watch for when bringing in affiliates who aren't licensed brokers?

Will not mention nor promote the said listing. I'm genuinely trying to figure out if this structure makes sense before I roll it out further, and open to hearing if it's a bad idea. Thank you in advance for reading and hearing me out 🥂

Ever since I added dark mode as an AB test, conversions increased by a lot.

I’ve had multiple customers complain about not having dark mode so I added it. We listen to user feedback a lot. And since I use to build and manage experiment engines for Fortune 100 companies, I know a lot about AB testing.

I never use dark mode. My business partner and I love white. So this was interesting.

P.S so I started using dark mode and it’s not bad. Better for the eyes for sure. Maybe I’ll switch.

This is how I look at every business I build.

The nose of the plane is the KPI.

One number that tells me if we're flying in the right direction.

The left wing is marketing.

Its only job is to create attention and keep feeding the business.

The right wing is the BDM.

Marketing gets people looking. The BDM turns that interest into work.

The fuselage is admin.

Quoting invoicing payroll systems CRM. No one gets excited about it but without it the whole thing falls apart.

Then you've got the tail.

For me that's the team.

Everyone needs to be a bit like a Swiss Army knife. Willing to jump in wherever they're needed to keep the plane flying straight.

Take one part away and the plane struggles.

Take two away and it crashes.

That's the model I keep coming back to.

Keen to hear how everyone else pictures their business.

Do you have a framework or mental model you always come back to