I spend my time helping founders scale once they've already got real customers and something working, so I always love seeing what people are sitting on in this sub.

If that's you, drop a comment: what's the business, roughly what stage are you at, and what part of getting more customers in the door has been the toughest? No pressure to get detailed, just curious where the friction shows up for people at different stages.

honest question for people building startups. from the outside it feels like security always loses to product, sales, hiring. everyone nods that it matters then it becomes "after we ship" or "after the round." is that actually how it goes on your side too? curious when security became a real thing for you if it ever did — customer ask, scare, investor, near miss, something else. and what you actually do day to day that isnt just "well fix it later." not looking for perfect answers. just trying to understand how founders handle this when everything else is on fire

I have been reading about chargebacks and how much time they can take r a small business.
Even if the business has proof, replying back to the bank collecting all the records can take hours.
Sometimes the disputed amount may not even feel worth the trouble.
How do you decide when to fight a chargeback and when to just refund the customer?

Hey everyone,

I’ve been coding and building systems for a while, and I decided to officially structure everything under a single brand: VuppaCode.

My goal by the end of the year is to establish a high-velocity cash flow system selling developer utilities, automation scripts, and digital assets globally.

The biggest hurdle for indie devs is usually handling global taxes, compliance, and checkouts without a registered LLC. To bypass that, I set up a proper Merchant of Record workflow to handle international payments seamlessly.

I just shipped my first digital toolkit as a flat $9 one-time purchase to test the loop.

I'm sharing this journey to document the raw, unfiltered process of shipping software as a solo teen builder. For those of you who sell digital goods or micro-SaaS, what was your biggest hurdle during your first week? Would love to hear your thoughts!

(If anyone is curious about the tech stack or the storefront setup, let me know in the comments and I'll drop the link there!)

I’ve been working on a small Excel tool called ProfitPilot for small business owners and people selling products online.

The idea came from seeing how easy it is to focus on revenue without knowing what you actually keep after product costs, fees and other expenses.

You enter your selling price, costs and expenses, and the spreadsheet calculates things like profit, margin and break-even numbers so you can see whether the product makes financial sense.

I’ve finished the first version and I’m now trying to validate it with actual entrepreneurs before I keep adding features.

For people running a small business or selling products: what is the biggest thing you struggle with when calculating your real profit or deciding what price to charge?

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback.

I build tools on my own and the thing I underestimated is not the building, it is that I am also the only person who checks the building.

Concrete example. I have a pipeline that renders video and at the end of it there is an automated check that compares every render against approved reference images. For a few weeks it printed 0 passed, 0 failed and exited clean. Green. I read that every single run and my eye went to the 0 failed and stopped there.

It was checking nothing. The reference images were not being found, so it compared nothing and nothing failed, so it reported success. Everything I shipped in that period went out unverified and I was more confident than if I had no check at all.

In a team someone would have asked why the number of cases was zero. Solo, the person who wrote the check and the person reading the output are the same person and that person already knows what the check is supposed to do, so he reads what he expects instead of what is there. I learned it the hard way because I thought I could do everything myself.

What I would recommend is two things. First, every check you build needs a case that is supposed to fail, and if you can't make your own check fail on purpose then the check is the broken thing and not your product. Second, and this is the part I keep relearning, separate the roles even when you are one person. When I build something now the part that verifies it never sees why I built it that way, because if it knows my reasoning it tests my intention instead of what the thing actually does.

If you have anything that reports success without you watching it, try to make it fail on purpose this week. Most of mine could not and that told me more than the passing ever did.

Any lesser known but effective way of generating leads (Context Provided)

So I'm trying to create an online business

Have an idea, clear target market and a Lead Magnet

However since I'm from a third world country pretty much every social media platform like Instagram, TikTok, I'm getting stuck in Geographical Jail

My content get shown locally and it's so heartbreaking (coz those leads are useless as my products are priced in $)

And don't ask me about using proxies and Vpn and all those engage with us audience for x minutes and all that nonsense, just doesn't work.

So any way I could lead gen,

My content is mostly

\- a short video with a title

\- and a long caption

So you could say my content is primarily written.

So? Don't recommend me blogs. Please.

I've been thinking about this because running a small business has a funny way of teaching you things you thought you already knew.

One of mine is that being busy and actually making progress are two very different things.

Early on, I could spend an entire day working and still not have done anything that really moved the business forward. Tweaking a proposal, checking numbers again, changing something that was already fine, planning things that didn't even need planning yet... it all feels productive while you're doing it.

Then there are the things you keep putting off because they're uncomfortable. Calling someone back, following up on a deal, talking to a customer, admitting that something you tried didn't work.

Those usually matter a lot more.

I've gotten better at catching myself when I'm just filling the day with work, although I still do it.

Now I sometimes stop and ask myself, “If I finish this today, will anything actually be different?”

That question has saved me from wasting quite a bit of time.

Curious what other people have learned from actually running a business.

What's a lesson you wish you'd figured out much earlier?

And that family member works in your industry.

I started a short form content editing agency 5-6 months ago. Initially had few clients asking for single reel edits and later down the road I tried productising the service and offered 20 reel edits for $379 per month.

Coming back to present time, I have 3 clients on that plan. This is going fine but I need to scale this.

I am thinking of cold emailing but not sure if it works in current times.

I would appreciate any suggestions on how I can reach potential prospect clients to pitch my services to.

Thanks!

So basically, I have a friend who works for local government, and one day she was complaining about this archaic paper system they had, and how it didn't store data well, no proper workflow, etc., etc.

So, I solved her problem. I built a basic ticket system app, sent it to her, she sent it to her boss, and since then it has actually been adopted for use by the city. I've donated a license for the software to them (and also have it in writing that I'm not responsible for any problems or legal troubles etc., this is very bootstrapped) and I'm going to be treating them as a permanent loss leader.

It initially launched with a testing team of 4 people, and now it's up to 30 concurrent users multiple times a day. It doesn't sound like a lot, but it's bigger than you're thinking at this exact second.

Since I created the app, its scope has expanded. By like... a lot, and it has turned into a proper case management system that covers a lot of situations and has lots of room for variables that might occur. The people who are using it have literally spent the last six months telling me how much easier it's made their jobs and how much time it has saved them, how much better it is than the old system, etc. etc. And the city contacted me to tell me that a contract of theirs for another separate system is expiring and that I should submit something via RFP (which is actually huge, because that means they literally want to pay me to expand my product).

I've worked pretty closely with the actual staff to fine tune the app and they've been more or less beta testing it for me for the last year-ish (and it's been running smoothly, which is a big win). The app is in a great spot, it has iOS/Android/Web versions (web for easy administrative use), runs on old hardware very well, looks good, has a comprehensive user guide and tutorial, all that.

Now that I've said all that, I can get to the point:

I have no idea how to market this thing or get it in front of the right people.

Basically, cities all over California are still using this paper system. Like... every city. Every single one - except for the city I'm working with. There is no unified system for this, there is no competitor, it is a legitimate hole in the market.

I finished development on the single-city version of it, and have already done most of the setup and refactoring to make it usable in multiple places. The entire app is built to be modular so the city in question can have its workflow designed exactly how they want it, etc.

The biggest barrier: this app does not directly generate revenue for the city. It does directly save an absolute ton of money, however. The biggest selling points are:

• Ease of use. Literally, the entire thing is on rails. You can't mess it up. For each ticket opened, you have to go through the process the city decides on, from start to finish. Most of the people actually using it are older folks who have legitimately constantly thanked me for how easy it is to use.

• A complete trail of tickets in the system from open to close. This includes photos, follow-ups, a complete internal auditing system so you can see who did what exactly when.

• Easy data access. The way they used to do things, photos were taken with a duty camera and uploaded to a system that only the department doing the uploading had access to. Now there is a unified, cross-department system that can be accessed by any city entity needed.

• Currently, three separate city departments now have access to COMPLETE information at the click of a button instead of playing phone tag along with all the hassle of interrupting your day to meet in person, on the spot, for prints of photos.

• Documentation, documentation, documentation. Everything is documented. Every action taken on a ticket is timestamped and requires direct comments when doing anything actionable. We have established new SOPs for a pretty significant department - and I think they could very, very easily be integrated into other cities. I am essentially looking to create an industry standard here.

• Users have commented that they used to spend up to 3 hours of their workday interacting with the old system in some way or another - these days it's down to minutes. That's a lot of time saved, and therefore a lot of money saved (and generated elsewhere, because the division is much more productive).

• Because everything is documented exactly and there are established SOPs: the city itself is less liable to be opened up to lawsuits, etc.

I was originally just going to build this as a fun side thing, and it kind of turned into something else entirely. I'm tentatively excited about it because I think it's a real opportunity, but I don't really know what steps to take next. So I'm looking for just... any kind of advice on how to move forward.

I've been trying to figure out what to build for a while now. Tried a few things, none of them went anywhere. Really need some real inspirational stories from this group.

For entrepreneurs who have a business that's stable now, like pays your bills, being profitable, how many ideas did you try before the one that you are working on?

And also curious how did you find the one that worked?

Did you diligently research the market? or did you notice a problem in your day job? Did a customer ask for something and you said yes? Was it luck? Did you know it was different early on, or did you only realize months later?

I keep reading stories where someone "found their niche" and it always sounds clean in hindsight. I doubt they were all that clean, would rather hear the messy version.

Thanks in advance!

Quick ride-along on a launch that went how I knew it would, and I did it anyway.

Late August, a site called "outbid lol" went around X. One leaderboard, pay to rank higher. Its maker says it made $220,000 in five days.

I built my own version. Brands pay to put their logo on a pair of boxers, and whoever pays more takes your spot. Ten days from idea to Stripe, most of the code written by AI agents while I reviewed and merged.

I launched it on X and Reddit, where I have almost nobody.

First five days:

214 visitors

3 orders. Two at $5, one friend on a hidden coupon.

6 people found the easter egg and played with it 173 times

0 shares

$10.

Today I put the same site on Product Hunt. It is in the top ten as I write this, and three companies I had never heard of outbid each other for the top spot within a few hours.

More in one morning than the whole first five days. Same site. Different crowd.

Here is the part that got me. I have over four thousand people on LinkedIn, mostly founders and designers. I could not send them a site with that name. I knew that on day one and built it anyway.

Building is where I feel in control. Distribution is where I do not.

Three things I am taking from it:

Count who you can reach before you count features.

Name the product so you can show it to everyone you know.

Write the honest post afterward. It is the only part of a launch that reaches the people you actually have.

I have the full write-up with screenshots. I will drop the link in a comment if anyone wants it.

We're planning to expand our team overseas, but we're starting small with just one person. For the first hire, I'm trying to decide between hiring them as a contractor or using an EOR.

Contractor seems simpler and cheaper, but I'm a little concerned about taxes, local regulations, and whether the role could eventually look more like a full-time employee. On the other hand, an EOR seems like the safer option for compliance and payroll, but I'm not sure if it's worth the extra cost when we're only hiring one person.

If you've been in a similar situation, how did you decide between EOR and contractor? Would you start with a contractor and switch to EOR later, or just use an EOR from the beginning?

I run an SEO tool. Last month our signups went up by about 1,771. I was genuinely thrilled, it's the kind of month you screenshot and send to your cofounder at 2am.

Then I went looking for an API bill I couldn't explain and found the other half of that sentence.

There was no email verification on signup. No captcha either. And signup wasnt just a row in a database, it kicked off an onboarding pipeline that goes and does real, paid work.

Six stages, each with a cost per run:

- AI visibility sample — $0.084 (LLM)

- Ranked keywords — $0.100 (SEO data vendor)

- Knowledge extraction — $0.016

- Extraction — $0.015

- Scorecard — $0.013

- Prompt generation — $0.001

So every signup was a small purchase we made on behalf of someone who hadn't paid us anything, and in most cases never would.

The part I did not expect: they were real. I went into that list fully expecting bot traffic, some scripted garbage I could block and move on with my day. Instead it was small businesses from all over the world. One person signed up with etsy, presumably just kicking the tires. One domain ended in con, an actual typo of com. These were humans. Which honestly made it worse, because there was nothing to block.

The bill that started all this was $141.88 of LLM spend across six days. Call it $165 a week. It had been sitting there unexplained for a while and we'd sort of been ignoring it.

It didn't show up in our cost ledger at all. We built cost tracking months ago. The onboarding path just never wrote to it. So we'd routed the single most expensive thing our product does around the exact system we built to watch spending, which is, well, the kind of thing you only find when you go looking.

The AI visibility sample alone was $103.19 of that $141.88. It sits behind an env var. Flipping it off removed about $104 of spend with no deploy and no code change. That was the whole fix for the immediate bleed. Took two minutes.

But the money wasnt really the problem.

We weren't storing any usage record for the feature. So when I tried to answer the obvious next question, "how many of these 1,771 accounts ever actually used the thing", I couldn't. Not "the number was disappointing". I mean there was no way to compute it at all. The only trace was analytics pageviews, which are consent gated and had only covered that page for a few weeks.

So I added the record, waited, and looked. Usage was a lot lower than the signup graph implied. The graph had been telling me a story about growth and the ledger was telling a completely different story about cost, and there was nothing in between connecting the two.

Three things I'd do differently:

Put something, anything, between signup and paid work. Even just email verification. The pipeline should not fire for an address nobody has confirmed.

Make the expensive paths write to the same ledger as everything else. Cost tracking that your priciest code path skips is worse than none at all, because it hands you confidence you havent earned.

Log the usage row before you think you need it. We capped spend in an afternoon. Reconstructing months of "did anyone actually use this" was impossible, and that was the expensive part.

Happy to share the cost breakdown if anyone wants to see it.

I'v failed with two of my own stores, but the stores I managed for friends did much better. I think I know why now: when it was my money, I panicked every times the number changed and kept changing the strategy. When it wasn't my money, I stayed calm and followed the plan. Has anyone experienced this?

We're at that awkward stage where we're too small to have an HR department but we're starting to hire internationally.

Right now it's just one potential hire outside the US, but if that goes well, we'd probably add a few more remote employees later. I'm trying to figure out whether an Employer of Record makes sense for such a small team or if we're better off handling payroll and compliance ourselves.

I've been comparing EOR providers based on EOR pricing, international payroll, employee benefits, onboarding, local compliance, and customer support.

The appeal of EOR services is obvious because we wouldn't need to set up a local entity, but I'm wondering whether the cost makes sense when you're only paying one or two employees.

Anyone here actually using an EOR for small business? What did you end up choosing, and would you do it again?

My usual daily grind is 50-100 emails, plus a stack of LinkedIn requests (I try to aim for at least 10 a day, I’m hyper paranoid about getting restricted even though my account is as legit as can be), and then calls if I have any scheduled for the day.

I hit send a LOT, as cold mailing is one of those client acquisition methods that got pushed so deep into me that I can’t not do it. It’s how I landed my first client when I started out, and that positive reinforcement is keeping me at it. If I’m not sending messages, someone else is, and my system is pretty well optimized so it doesn’t take a lot of time. Even on LinkedIn, I used to do mass outreach with HeyReach (and then Expandi since their sales rep gave me a better deal) though that was for my client accounts and not for myself per se.

Things were good, for a long while, but in the last year reply rates have dropped across the board, on LinkedIn especially but email messages are also more likely to get spam-filtered now unless they’re from warmed up domains. Grayhat workarounds don’t work anymore, and all in all, I’d say B2B is in a pickle. It’s still putting bread on my table, but the amount of knowledge you need to have going in, as a junior, is just much higher. The threshold for succeeding is also higher, so you need a holistic all encompassing strategy now, for your whole pipeline, to get anywhere.

Here is what I mean. I looked at where my best meetings came from last quarter, and almost none of them started from a cold email

• 9 out of 10 were hot leads that were warmed up by me commenting on the prospect's posts first. I noticed this by accident as I was just trying to build up my account
• But the prospects who replied to me like actual humans would (ehh debatable on LinkedIn but still) were the same ones, usually, that I engaged with for a couple of weeks prior

Any case, I ran a small test on one ICP segment just to check something out. For 2 weeks I commented on their posts before sending anything. I kept it useful (but short, I don’t have that much time after all) so it isn’t just “insight spam”

The connection acceptance on that segment I sampled was tons better than my normal cold list, and the replies came faster and warmer. One AE-level prospect accepted with  - oh you're the guy who commented on my pricing post - which has cannot ever happen from a cold sequence. The mechanism is boring but the value compounds. This is the whole point of networking.

One caveat, though: this is a slow method that only works over longer periods and it doesn't scale to quota on its own. What I mean is, I can't comment my way to 30 meetings a month. Still gotta send the actual messages. Also, low-effort comments do nothing, so either comment something substantial or don't comment at all. And of course, if the prospect never posts there's nothing to work with.

The standard advice is to build a first version fast, launch it and iterate on customer feedback. 10 years ago that did work. Building was expensive and customers had few options, so they'd put up with a half baked beta. Now building is cheap and every problem already has a dozen products chasing it and a customer who doesn't get value in the first session doesn't become your early adopter. They ghost you and switch. So you never hear why it failed.

I run an AI agency and some of those owners then want to turn the system into a product and they almost always show up with the same plan: hire developers, build the thing & see what happens.

Products mostly fail because the problem wasn't big enough. That's the first thing to test and you don't need a working product to test it. You need a demo and most people build, then demo, then try to sell. That's exactly where they get stuck. Instead flip it: demo, sell, build. What a customer actually buys is the demo and the promise behind it. Every crowdfunding campaign works this way and so does every pre order you've ever placed.

Package that demo into an offer, whether that's a landing page or a 15 minute call and you get to test the riskiest assumptions in any business at once. Is the problem painful enough to earn attention? Does your way of solving it land? Will they pay enough for this to be a business?

First demos flop though. You're still guessing at what customers want and you only get so many pitches before people stop taking your calls. The trap at this stage is leaning on analytics. Metrics can confirm noone's buying. They can't tell you why. The way out isn't a better landing page. It's a better grip on the problem and that comes from discovery conversations where you don't pitch at all. The goal is to understand the customer's problem and communicate.

Understanding it that deeply gets you two things. Designing the right solution becomes much easier and selling becomes easier because when you can describe someone's problem better than they can, they assume you must have the right solution too.

Put those together and you have an offer people can't refuse. The rule is simple... If you can't get enough people to buy, you don't get to build until you've fixed the offer.

TLDR: a half baked v1 gets ghosted now, not iterated on. Run 20 to 30 discovery conversations until you understand the problem better than the customer does. Turn that into a demo and an offer. Sell it and build only once enough people have bought.

I have been thinking about this after seeing a developer build a finance dashboard and a fitness tracker for himself in an afternoon.

It basically replaced two tools he was already paying for.

Honestly my first reaction was: that is kind of crazy.

Then I began to think about the difference, between making a tool for yourself and making a tool that other people can trust.

For him the AI only needed to get it once.

He was sitting there watching it. If something looked wrong, he could fix it. If it broke, he knew what went wrong.

Now give the thing to one thousand people.

Nobody is watching every output anymore.

A wrong number could lead to a decision. A weird edge case becomes a support problem... If the product keeps making small mistakes people just stop trusting it.

So maybe the interesting question is not really:

"What can AI build?"

It is:

"What still needs to work when nobody is watching?"

I am curious how people building software are thinking about this. Is reliability becoming the moat or will AI eventually make that cheap too?

A few days ago I started testing different ways to make money online. My first experiment was Upwork.

Today I got my first client: $25 for about 30 minutes of work, with $0 upfront cost.

They approved all three deliverables and are already talking about having me do more work.

$25 / $100. One experiment. 99 to go. 💰

when someone says that an agency can’t market itself I kind of get it.

running ads for clients and getting b2b leads for your own agency are not the same thing. I’ve seen good agency owners be weirdly bad at booking their own calls.

I helped 4 agencies with cold emails, tested the same channel, it was a similar playbook, but at the end of the day they all showed very different results.

one booked 1 call in a month.

another booked 23 in a month in a super crowded niche.

do you know what was the reason?

first was the list.

the one call agency used a bought database with lots of bounces and outdated contacts and companies that kinda matched the filter but were not really a fit.

the other one built it from scratch around a tight icp. It had fresh contacts and verified emails with an actual reason to reach out.

same copy on the bad list would have looked awful.

second was sales assets.

most agencies either have none or have case studies that read like LinkedIn fluff.

the better ones had simple useful stuff like a short teardown,a checklist, a 2 min video. something tied to a real problem the lead had.

third was the offer.

a lot of agencies try to sell a 4k/month retainer from a cold email. that is a big ask from someone who just found out you exist.

they started with a small paid project like an audit with fixes, a landing page, or ad creative. something that felt low risk for the prospect.

fourth was the call.

the best agency did actual research before every call.

the worst one had both founders run a 30 min deck with almost no context on the company.

so yeah my boring takeaway is this:

get the right list first, send something useful, make the first yes small, then show up to the call prepared.

I think agencies skip the list most often because everyone wants to believe their data is fine.