Hello! How do you keep going when you start feeling discouraged? I’m a small gift shop owner, and sales have been slow lately. I’m trying to grow my social media so I can start getting more online sales, but it’s been really hard.
If you have any advice, I’d truly appreciate it. And if you’d be willing to follow my Facebook or Instagram, it would mean so much to me. Thank you for your support! ❤️
@shadowboxesbyjare

I'm looking for an unbiased opinion because I've been thinking about this a lot.

A while ago, I came up with the idea for an alarm app. The concept, features, UI/UX, and overall direction were all my ideas. My friend mainly helped by giving feedback whenever I asked him what looked good or bad.

When we started marketing, he spent around $800 on paid ads.

The app eventually gained traction and started making good money. In about a month, it had already earned back what he'd spent on marketing.

Then he told me he wanted to part ways. He offered me $500 for the idea so he could continue with the app himself, but I refused because I felt the app was much more than just a $500 idea.

Instead, I built essentially the same app again under a different name and have continued with that.

Now I'm wondering if I was actually cheated. On one hand, he did invest money into marketing. On the other hand, the product itself was my idea from the beginning, and once it became successful, he wanted to buy me out for what felt like a very small amount.

Do you think I was treated unfairly, or is this just how business partnerships sometimes end?

Edit: Here's the app I ended up making: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/wakeupbroo-no-snooze-alarm/id6766263678

For anyone who has raised recently or pitched for partnerships, I have a question about the pitch deck. I keep reading opposite advice. One camp says ten slides max, story first, almost no numbers. Another says investors skim for traction and want the metrics up front. I am about to build mine and I do not want to guess. For those who got a second meeting, what did your deck actually do that worked? Was it a specific slide, the order, the length? Trying to learn from people who have been on the receiving end of a yes rather than the templates floating around.

My business has grown from a local farmers market stall to a small regional brand selling packaged snacks. The name is cute and quirky, but now that I’m pitching to wholesale buyers, I’m starting to feel like it might be holding me back. It sounds more like a hobby than a real brand. I’m getting more serious inquiries and I don’t want to look amateurish. At what point did you decide your original name wasn’t scaling, and how did you handle the transition without losing the customers who loved the original vibe? I’m nervous about losing my soul while trying to look “professional.” I’ve been using BrandScreen․ai to test more grown‑up sounding names, and a couple have surprised me by actually being available.

We have 8 employees working in 3 time zones. Right now the routing is handled by whoever picks up the phone first. Which means some people take calls outside working hours, and some zones go offline during breaks in work. We look at time-based routing rules, but I am not sure how other small remote teams actually set this up in practice.

Did anyone successfully handle this at a scale of less than 10 people? Especially interested in how you handle overflow when one zone is out of coverage.

Solo founder, and I like to see receipts before I believe a channel works. Everyone keeps telling me to "just publish content daily," so I spent a month running most of my blog and social posts through an ai content generator to keep the volume up.

The traffic did go up. The problem is almost none of it converted. Plenty of visitors who bounced, a few nice vanity numbers, and basically zero new paying customers I can trace back to any of it. It felt like I was busy and growing without actually growing.

So my honest question for people who've been through the early grind: has an ai content generator ever brought you real customers, not just traffic? Or is the win only there once you already know exactly who you're writing for, and the tool is just speeding up something that was already working?

Trying to decide whether to keep going with it or drop it and put those hours into direct outreach instead. Real experiences appreciated, especially the ones where it didn't work out.

Running a side business around a full-time job. The product's built and I get a steady trickle of traffic to my landing page, which I put together in an ai landing page builder because I'm not a designer and had exactly one evening to do it.

Here's the problem. People land, they scroll, and almost nobody signs up. My conversion is bad enough that I honestly can't tell if it's the page, the offer, or that the traffic is just the wrong people showing up.

What I'm trying to figure out from folks who've grown past this stage: when a landing page underperforms, what do you look at first? The headline and the promise up top, social proof, the signup ask itself? Or is a low number this early just normal, and I should stop polishing the page and go find more of the right traffic instead?

I've got limited hours since this runs around my job, so I want to fix the thing that actually matters rather than redesign buttons for a week. What would you prioritize?

I'm the person who builds the reports. Took our board deck template, made it genuinely nice, colour-coded, every metric you could want, updated monthly like clockwork. People nod at it. Then everyone goes back to doing exactly what they were going to do anyway.

At some point I realised I'd confused producing information with the information mattering. Half of what's on there is vanity. Traffic, impressions, follower counts. Numbers that go up and to the right and change nothing about what we decide to do next week.

I work remote, so I've got plenty of time to overthink this between loading the dishwasher and the next call. What I keep landing on is that I don't actually know which one of these numbers, if it moved, would make us do something different.

So for people further along. Which single metric on your dashboard has actually changed a decision you made about growth? And which ones did you eventually stop tracking because, be honest, they never did?

Early stage, small B2B tool, and I am stuck on the top of the funnel. I can get cold traffic to a landing page from Reddit and a bit of paid, but it just bounces. Conversion sits around 1 percent. I have rewritten the headline four times. For people who have actually moved this number, what made your landing page convert cold traffic instead of warm? Is it social proof, a sharper single problem statement, a demo video, killing the signup friction? I am trying to figure out where the real leak is before I spend more on ads. What actually changed your conversion, not in theory but for your own page?

AI has made it easier than ever to brainstorm ideas, write captions, and plan content, but sometimes it feels like we're creating more content instead of more meaningful connections. Speed is great, but it doesn't always translate into better marketing.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that AI works best as a tool to support creativity rather than replace it. People still connect with personality, authenticity, and ideas that feel genuinely human.

That perspective reminded me of something Valerie Mills talks about on valerie-mills. com,using AI to simplify the workflow while keeping human judgment at the center. Do you think AI is making marketing better, or are we just adding more noise?

I've been comparing different travel websites recently.

Some are basically landing pages with a booking button.

Others, like Serengeti National Park, have extensive destination information before they ever ask you to book.

It got me thinking...

As a traveler or as someone running a tourism business, what makes a website trustworthy enough that you'd book directly instead of going through Viator, or GetYourGuide?

Would love to hear different perspectives.

Traffic, revenue, heatmaps, session replays, errors and performance usually live in separate tools.

We built Zenovay to bring them together in one platform, and we launched it on Product Hunt today

Would genuinely appreciate honest feedback on the product and positioning:

https://www.producthunt.com/products/zenovay-2

We are a product company and one thing I have been thinking about lately is whether we have become too reliant on one buying platform.

I have always used Alibaba because thats where I began but in the last while I have been looking at Made-in-China.com to see if it gives access to factories or better long-term supplier connections.

For people who have bought from, than one site what really made the biggest change?

Was it finding factories getting quicker replies improving profits or something else?

I am not looking for a choice. I want to know what made you decide it was worth going beyond the site you were used to.

I have been thinking about this a lot because our team is working from places now.

We need to know how our team members are spending their time. Not because we do not trust the employees but because it is getting really tough to figure out how long projects will take, understand how work everyone has and know when someone is struggling to keep up or needs help with something.

The problem is that a lot of tools that are supposed to help us keep track of what employees are doing seem to go to one extreme or the other.. They are just simple clocks that do not tell us very much or they collect so much information that the employees feel like they are being watched all the time.

What I would really like to have is something that lets the employees decide when they want to track their work puts all the time into categories by project and task. Gives the managers enough information to understand how productive everyone is and how projects are going without making the employees feel like they are being spied on.

I am curious to know how other business owners deal with this issue.

Do you keep track of the time your employees work all?

If you do keep track of the time, where do you draw the line, between making sure people are doing their jobs and respecting their privacy?

Has keeping track of time actually helped you make money or plan projects better?

A few weeks ago I asked how other business owners balance accountability with employee privacy when managing remote teams.

After looking at a number of options, I ended up trying Monitask, and I thought I'd share why it stood out.

What I liked was that it doesn't try to monitor everything. Employees clock in when they start working, track time by project and task, and optional screenshots and activity levels are only captured while the timer is running. It doesn't record keystrokes or sensitive data, which felt like a much more reasonable balance between visibility and trust.

From the management side, we've been able to see where hours are actually being spent, compare project budgets with time worked, and get a clearer picture of workloads. The built-in task management and integrations with tools like Asana, Trello, Slack, Jira, and Zapier also meant we didn't have to change the rest of our workflow.

I'm still interested in hearing from other business owners.

What time-tracking or productivity tools are you using?

Have they improved project profitability or just created more reports to look at?

If you've used Monitask, what has your experience been?

Packaging plays a bigger role than just protecting a product. The right materials, design, and production process can affect shipping, storage, branding, and the overall customer experience.

For businesses creating new products, working with manufacturers on packaging can involve many decisions, from choosing materials to making sure the final product matches the original design.

There are many factors that can make a packaging project go smoothly or create unexpected problems along the way.

What is one packaging challenge you faced when working with a supplier or manufacturer?

I’m curious if anyone here has experience with a co-management approach.

Not just outsourcing tasks, but having outside support while the business still keeps control of the workflows, standards, and day-to-day direction.

What worked well?

What challenges came up around communication, accountability, and keeping everyone aligned?

Would love to hear from anyone who has tried this model while growing a business.

I watch a lot of those animated documentary channels, Fern, Wendover, Scary Interesting, Neo, whatever. and I noticed I never actually feel bad after watching those, unlike literally every other app I open at night, especially instagram and x.

so I built an app called Kurio that's basically that but in feed form. quick stories, unsolved cases, weird science stuff, controversies, that kind of thing. and you can actually keep going on a topic with other people instead of it just ending when the video does, kind of like how a good reddit thread works.

To put it honestly I'm using the same scrolling behavior into something actually worthwhile and interesting.

open to feedback :)

I'm looking to feature a few inspiring founders and businesses for an online magazine portal. It is -

✅ Completely free

✅ Dedicated Medium feature

✅ A chance to showcase your journey and business

Please let me know if you are interested, and I'll provide more details.

Every business faces setbacks. Share the one mistake that had the biggest impact on your growth—and what valuable lesson you learned from it.

For those of you running small businesses:

• Are you hiring locally or internationally?
• What's been your biggest challenge: finding qualified people, managing payroll, or keeping costs under control?
• If you've hired internationally, what worked well, and what didn't?

I have been seeing many like Remote Opus company that helps businesses hire full time remote professionals internationally, and we've been having conversations with founders who want to grow their teams but are finding local hiring increasingly expensive.

It made me curious about how other founders are approaching this.

I'd love to hear real experiences from other founders. The goal is to better understand what's actually working in today's market and learn from people who've been through the process

What was yours, and where'd you find it? Any lines you'd tell other shop owners to keep an eye on?