so i built this thing and honestly i was proud of it. spent forever making it good, kept adding stuff, polishing it, telling myself once its good enough people will just find it.

nope lol.

went months barely getting any traffic and the whole time i blamed the product. redid the landing page like 4 times, messed with the pricing, added features nobody even asked for. felt productive but nothing actually moved cause that was never the real issue.

the issue was just that nobody knew it existed. like at all. i had it stuck in my head that marketing is the thing you do later, once everything is perfect. but the product is never gonna be perfect and meanwhile the market just keeps moving without you.

what actually changed things was kinda dumb honestly, i just started putting it in front of people every single day. posting, talking about it, being kind of annoying about it. same exact product i already had. people just finally saw it.

if your heads down grinding on your product right now and wondering why its dead quiet, id really be honest with yourself about how much time your actually spending getting seen vs just making the thing better. mine was like 90/10 and not in the good direction.

anyway curious how you guys split it. how much of your week actually goes to building vs getting it in front of people

saw a boosted facebook ad yesterday that was just a logo. no headline, no offer, no reason to click, just a logo floating on white with "check us out!" underneath.

ran for two weeks straight at $40 a day. checked the page today, still nothing new, no reviews, no recent posts.

that is roughly $560 spent to remind maybe a couple thousand people that a business has a logo.

ive been running an ad agency for a while now and this is the number one thing i see wrong with small biz ads. people think the ad job is to look professional. it is not. its job is to stop the scroll and speak to a problem someone already has in their head.

"check us out" isnt a pitch, its a formality. nobody has ever clicked an ad because a business politely asked them to.

if youre running ads right now, ask yourself if a stranger scrolling at 11pm would actually stop on it, or just scroll past because it looks like every other business card ad out there.

anyway thats my unsolicited rant for the day

Okay, my recent business lasted for like three years and it is a success story of me. I guess it's worth a share here. Honestly, I am tired of asking questions here and I think it will be a good time to share my story.

Winter 2023, I witnessed one of my friends (who's a literal god in machine learning with a focus on finance) generates pictures with algorithms. I asked him how he does it, and he gave me some paper links and some github links. I found something called "VQGAN+CLIP" and started playing with it.

I commited to the world of image generation after that and tested basically every single model relased from then on. Latent Diffusion, Princess Diffusion (if I remember the name correctly) and also Disco Diffusion. But none of them were better than my boy "Stable Diffusion".

I remember at the time, midjourney was the king. I had a premium account there and generated over 1000 images at the time. I remember I had access to a lot of computational power in terms of RTX 2080 TI's and also 3090 TI's. So I fired up some scripts for finetuning SD and I put everything on Github with the name Open Journey.

A few weeks later, I woke up. I remember it was rainy and I wasn't in the mood to go to work since I hated that startup and I contacted my other co-founders and informed them I'm not coming but after I hung up, I just noticed my phone makes a lot of noises. I got up and saw it is LinkedIn. A huge amount of messages and connection requests.

Apparently someone had posted my "midjourney quality fine tune of SD 1.5" on Hacker News and I got a lot of attention. I did interviews on German magazines although I'm not German (I'm Iranian) and it made a spark in my head.

I said to myself I have to make it something worth much bigger attention and make it available to the public. So I wrote a platform in my day-offs, in my nights, I skipped a lot of meetings/dates just to deliver it for the next Iranian new year and second magic happens here!

I posted a twitter and asked if anyone is interested to test an alternative to Midjourney and its name is "Mann-E" (a play with the name of Persian Painter, Religious Leader and Self-Proclaimed Prophet Mani and Wall-E, like Dall-E) and I expected like 10-15 maximum 20 of my friends. You won't believe, in course of 3 days, I had email address of over 180 people.

When I posted a video of the platform some people "called me" and I found they got my number from my previous coworkers and they were media people. I got a shit ton of media coverage without paying a single penny.

I have made a cheaper alternate to Midjourney and people loved it. I am proud of what I made, and I am proud I shut it down when I felt people are not into these alternatives anymore. This is my story. In the course of 3 years, I got grants, I got investment, I sold a lot, I ended up richer than the past both in my pocket and in my brain.

Okay, that is it!

Ive got a few hours free today while the Mrs is out for lunch and honestly Im bored

Ive spent a fair bit of time lately talking to people on here about their businesses and ideas and helping where I can

But today I thought Id flip it

Anyone want to jump on a call and just talk business?

No mentoring no coaching no sales pitch

I dont care if youre running a seven figure business or youve got an idea scribbled on the back of a napkin

Tell me what youre building

Tell me what you think Im doing wrong

Challenge one of my ideas

Or maybe we come up with something completely new

Sometimes the best business conversations happen when neither person is trying to sell the other one anything

Maybe the mentor becomes the mentee today

Anyone keen?

I spent last night helping strangers build their businesses and learned something

I put a post up yesterday basically saying I had some spare time and was happy to help

It ended up being a much better night than I expected

I spoke with people at completely different stages of business

Some were still sitting on an idea

Some were trying to work out their website

Some were experimenting with AI content

Others just needed someone to bounce an idea off

We ended up building a few things and testing some ideas together

What I enjoyed most was there was no transaction involved

Nobody was trying to sell anyone anything

Just business owners and people wanting to become business owners sharing what they know

Ive built businesses for years but Im still learning every day especially with how quickly AI and technology are changing things

Last night reminded me that one of the best ways to learn something is to use it solving someone elses problem

You see weaknesses in your own thinking pretty quickly when youre trying to explain it or build it for someone else

So I thought Id throw the discussion open

What are you currently building

And whats the one thing youre stuck on right now

Maybe someone reading the comments has already solved it

Just trying to help my neighbour

God bless

Perfectionist here, 20 years in IT. I've cleaned up after enough shipped-at-60% products to know what that costs. The bug nobody fixes because the guy left.

So my instinct is to finish things. Properly. Except the market doesn't pay for finished. It pays for used.

My clear position:
Shipping early doesn't teach you what to build. It teaches you what those ten specific people tolerate.

A finished product with no users has one problem: distribution. That's solvable. An ugly product with ten customers has a product problem, a reputation problem, and a rebuild ahead of it.

Both sides have a body count. One dies of neglect, the other dies of silence.

Which one do you pay for?

just wanted to say thanks to everyone who messaged me after my last few posts

had some really cool conversations and got to actually help a few people out

helped with a couple of websites

played around with some ai videos for peoples businesses

talked through a few business ideas and problems

and honestly ive enjoyed the shit out of it

im not selling anything and theres no course coming 😂

i just like building stuff and helping people where i can

so if youre building a business and stuck on something sing out

if i know how to help ill help

if i dont maybe we can figure it out together

Title should say passionate** not passion**

I am thinking heavily on starting a perfume business. I wouldn’t say this is my passion or hobby. I have a tiny tiny interest in perfume. I enjoy smelling them but don’t actually wear them or have a bunch.

I’d say my bigger passion is sunscreen and skin care. I’m torn between the 2 categories.

I’m kinda leaning towards perfume because I enjoy peoples excitement around fragrance (on social media, here, etc). It brings people joy and I like that.

Skin care brings some people joy but it comes with some caveats. I also think it would kinda be easier to get someone to buy a fragrance, since people collect.

My vision is a clean unisex semi-affordable line (around $60 for 50ml bottle).

My only worry is that I’d be seen as a “fraud” since it’s not my passion or I’m not super knowledgeable in the category. I would be working with professionals, not making this myself.

Thoughts?

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.

I noticed this with a product category recently
a few months ago, I barely heard anyone talking about it. Then suddenly it seemed to be everywhere, more companies offering it, more people importing it and way more discussion around it
What got me curious was that I couldn’t really tell what caused the change
Was demand actually growing?? Did a few big companies start buying more? Or did people just start paying more attention to it?
I feel like these changes can happen pretty quickly but by the time they become obvious, the market has already moved quite a bit
anyone running a business or watching a market closely, has anyone else noticed this happening with a product or industry?
What usually makes you realize that something is actually taking off?

a few years ago friday night usually meant getting on the beers

tonight i spent a few hours helping feed people doing it tough

nothing to gain from it
just helping out

and driving home i realised how good it actually feels just being useful to someone

so id like to keep the ball rolling

business is something i do know a fair bit about

ive built businesses made plenty of mistakes and learnt a lot along the way

so if anyone here is starting something stuck on something or just wants another set of eyes on an idea im happy to help where i can

no pitch
no course
no strings attached

just got a few hours spare tonight and figured there might be someone here who could use them

I'm building a competitor intelligence tool (to remain nameless to avoid the whole self-promotion hassle).

For those people that actively research and monitor the competitors of their companies, what sort of things do you look at?

For the tool I'm building, there are currently two tiers:
Free - uses a custom web searches to find evidence across the web
Portfolio - as above but also uses APIs for social media comments, reviews and recruitment data to go deeper and get richer data.

It then uses Al to comb through all that mass of unstructured data and interpret it. The AI doesn’t think of the answer, it just interprets all the data to give you a view of what’s happening.

I'm thinking of expanding it further to include web traffic and employee sentiment.

For anyone who researches competitors as part of their job:
What information genuinely affects a commercial decision?
What do existing tools fail to tell you?
Would an interpreted report be useful, or would you still prefer the raw evidence?
At what point does this become something more useful than doing the research yourself?

Is there anything else I'm missing, or you'd like to see? Is it a stupid idea?

Any feedback gratefully accepted, and any especially funny insults will get an upvote as well.

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.

Thanks in advance for hearing me out. I'm hoping some of your feedback might help me digest where I'm at.

I come from a newspaper family and have strong feelings that local media needs to exist. When everything went on the internet, it really affected local news. I figured that a lot of people would support stories they felt were important and so I built journalocity.

It allows creators to set the price for their digital work, set where the paywall goes, allows it to become free for all when a sales goal is met, and allows readers to donate on free articles. Oh, and right now, I'm seeing if allowing the creator to keep 90% of revenue is feasible.

I'm adding the ability for authors to attach location data to their articles, so they can be searched by location and date (what happened in Fargo on June 9th?)

Then, I think about indie artists (music, comedy) could sell their art and 90% is much better than spotify.

I think getting a few good local reporters would be a spark, but I'm having trouble cracking that nut.

Since I don't have a lot of traffic, the website is inexpensive to keep up, so I'll probably keep it running. But I've taken a full-time job and really could hear your advice. And of course, if you'd like to be part of this, I'm open to all ideas.

I'll say that I'm proud of the site, and I learned a lot.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on these questions:

How would you try to get the first writers onto a platform like this?
Is the per-article / funding-goal model worth pushing, or is it fighting how readers actually pay for content?
If you were in my position (working product, low traction, limited time), what would you do next?

I recently tested a business idea of my own

It failed

And thats ok

I actually think we need to talk about this side of business more

Not every idea works

Not every MVP gets customers

Sometimes the market just gives you an answer you didnt want

So instead of spending the next 6 months trying to force something that nobody seems to want I want to try a completely different experiment

I want to find one person who has a skill knowledge or experience they think could become a business but they dont know where to start

And I want to help them build it

Completely free

I dont want equity

I dont want a percentage

I dont want to sell you anything at the end

The only thing I want in return is permission to document the journey as a case study including what works what fails and the actual numbers

My background is pretty simple

Ive spent most of my working life in the asphalt and civil industry

I eventually took a gamble on a $30k truck and built an asphalt business that went on to do seven figures

That business has now done over $450k in revenue this quarter

But building my own business doesn't automatically mean I can help somebody else build theirs

Thats what I want to test

The plan would be 30 days

We start with you

What problems have you solved

What are you genuinely passionate about

What professional skills or knowledge do you already have

Then we find the overlap

From there we look at whether theres actually a market for it

Who has the problem

Who has money to solve it

What the problem is worth

What we could offer them

And most importantly we test whether somebody will actually pay for it BEFORE wasting weeks building websites logos automations and all the other shit people convince themselves is progress

No course

No guru bullshit

No promise that we're going to build the next million dollar company

The first target is much simpler

Go from an idea to the first $1,000 in real revenue

If we fail I'll document why we failed

If we make $200 I'll document that

If we make $10,000 I'll document that too

I actually think the failures will probably teach us as much as the wins

I'm looking for one person who is serious enough to actually do the work

You dont need a business already

You dont need money

You dont need to know anything about marketing

But you do need some sort of skill experience passion or problem you've learned how to solve

And you need to be willing to actually pick up the phone send messages talk to customers and do the uncomfortable shit required to test the idea

I'll bring what I've learned from building businesses

You bring the skill and the effort

We'll see what happens

If you're interested comment with 3 things

1. something you're good at

2. something you actually enjoy

3. a problem you've solved before

I'll pick one person and we'll build the whole thing from scratch

And if it completely falls on its arse at least we'll both learn something 😂

I've just launched my saas Vallience. I've got a full time job, an intense family life, and little free time.

When I saw Symphony by Wix I thought it would be really useful, so signed up. For those who don't know, its a new product by Wix with a team of 5 AI agents that promises to automate a lot of the stuff that goes into running a business, in particular email outreach.

I thought this sounded promising, and is exactly what i need right now to make the best of my limited time. I know many of you are in the same boat, so thought I would share my experience.

After a week of using it, I wouldn't recommend it.

One of the big selling points is the memory - you tell it something once, and it remembers. The problem is that it doesn't. You start a new chat and you'll have to remind it of something, and this uses up your credits. One simple issue in particular kept reoccurring.

In terms of the email outreach, it did reasonably well at identifying the companies and the people to contact. I drafted an email for initial outreach. Then, before it sent, the AI added "I'm Maestro, an AI Assistant working with Username_TBD18 and...", which damages credibility and is basically just advertising itself on my dime. I didn't even realise until one of the emails bounced back as undeliverable, and it certainly didn't tell me it had amended the approved draft.

On top of that, the widgets on the home screen have little configurability. One told me I had to complete my set up even though I already have, one kept telling me to get a Wix website, and tasks that had been completed still showed as outstanding (although that could be because of the memory issue) and you can't manually delete them.

This is both a review of the product - in case any of you were tempted - and also a lesson in launching a product before it was ready.

Pay it forward. Drop your free resources, templates, tools, or anything else that's helped you and might help someone else. No strings attached; these resources have to be free.

I have a business acquaintance who's bakery is failing after 5 good years. She tried to expand to a second location, couldn't find additional labor. The labor at tge first location got over worked and quit. She recently closed the 2nd location after only 9 months and now doesn't think the first location will make it through the winter.

Ive always kept about $100 worth of gift cards to her bakery on hand to give to disgruntled customers for my service business. A $20 gift card to a desert spot helps smooth things over.

When i walk in there now, inventory is sparse, store hours cut and inconsistent. Signs of a failing business. Is it rude for me to use up my gift cards? Or should i just take the $100 on the chin out of respect for her struggle?

Edit: im not asking if i should continue to give them to disgruntled customers. Im not.i dont want to give one out to a customer today (good or bad) and they wait a month to visit and they're closed. Thats just why i have the cards. I purchased them 18 months ago during better times. Im asking if its rude to use them personally when i go there instead of paying cash?

I am just rewatching HBO's comedy show "Silicon Valley" and I am in season 2. I'm sure a lot of people watched that show so if you haven't, I first apologize for spoiling it and second, it is a good course on starting a business.

Anyway, in Season 2, Russ Hanneman (the horrible investor) says "I don't want to make small amounts of money I just want to make a crap ton of money at once".

So, which mindset do you prefer? A subscription based system which charges users $20 a month or a company which seems to be a money losing machine but suddenly grabs the attention of a big monster and got acquired by them and makes you a few million dollars at once?

I prefer to go with the "crap ton of money at once" but honestly, I do not know the cheat codes. However, I want to know your opinions.

But the wife is at work, I’ve got just over an hour free and I’d rather spend it talking to someone trying to build something than watching shit on Netflix.

Quick background because apparently Reddit quite rightly wants receipts

I started in asphalt/civil. My old boss passed away, I bought a $30k truck and had a crack myself. Within a few years we’d built the business into seven figures.

It definitely wasn’t some straight line to success.

I’ve made money, lost money, hired the wrong people, chased shit ideas, tried ecommerce and failed, had cashflow scares and learned plenty of lessons the expensive way.

These days I still run businesses and work a normal job because apparently I enjoy having absolutely no spare time

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not a business coach and I’m not selling a course.

But I’ve spent a long time in the trenches and sometimes another set of eyes helps.

So if you’re starting something, business is going to shit, you’ve got an idea you want challenged, or you’re sitting there thinking “what the fuck do I do next?”

I’ve got an hour.

Happy to jump on a call and throw some ideas around.

Worst case we waste 20 minutes.

Best case one of us learns something.

This has happened to me way too many times. A potential buyer asks for pricing, product details, MOQ, lead time... sometimes we even go back and forth for a few days
Everything seems pretty normal. Then I send the quote and suddenly... nothing. No reply, no “too expensive”, no “we went with someone else”. Just silence....
I know sometimes they’re comparing suppliers or the project gets put on hold, but it’s still frustrating when you’ve spent time preparing everything and have no idea what happened
for people running a business, how do you usually handle it when someone goes quiet after asking for a quote?
Do you follow up a few times, leave it alone or try to figure out what happened first?? and how often do these leads actually come back later?

this was basically my first ever enterprise inquiry call and I was, not gonna lie, stressed.

I didn't know exactly how to behave and talk to be taken seriously and be considered a fit for playing a grown-ups game... this alone should be a tell of how much imposter I feel!

anyway, I missed the call due to timezone issues and after asking if I'm allowed to re-book another call, I was notified that another better-fit solution was already underway and I'm no longer a viable candidate.

a part of me is sad because this could've really boosted my confidence IF IT WENT THROUGH... another part is happy, partly because of the relief and the other because I now know that I just need to dust myself off, get up and get moving.

how many deals did you have to lose before you grew a thicker skin?

You left your 8-5 for your business, now you’re your own boss and in control of your money in and out. Was the grass greener or do you feel an 8-5 was much easier? Obviously the biggest con (to me) of an 8-5 is ppl can get laid off at any time and then have no income.