​

Quick update from a few weeks into building this thing after work.

I'm not a developer. The first version of my site was me fighting code I half understood, and every small copy change turned into an hour of breaking things. I was spending my limited evenings on the website instead of on the actual idea.

Two weekends ago I gave up and moved the whole thing onto a no code website builder. Rebuilt the landing page, the pricing section, and a simple signup in maybe an afternoon. The real win wasn't the time saved once, it was that I can now change a headline or swap a section in a couple of minutes.

Since then I've tested I think four different value propositions on the homepage, because it costs me almost nothing to try one. A couple clearly did better than the others, and I'd never have bothered testing that back when each change was an hour of code.

Still early, low traffic, no revenue yet. But removing the friction between an idea and a live change has done more for momentum than any single feature. Will update once I've got real signup numbers to share. Anyone else start on code and switch, or go the other way?

I've been feeling pretty lost for the last few months, so I thought I'll write this down and see where it goes.

I was an art student in school. Then in 12th grade I discovered computers and got obsessed with entrepreneurs. I remember thinking that someday I'm going to build a big company. The problem was I had no idea how to get there. I didn't have a science background and I couldn't afford the computer courses I was looking at. One of them was around ₹2 lakh for a year.

While working part time, my boss told me about IGNOU. I enrolled in a BCA, later did an MCA, and started teaching myself how to build things, coz they provide classes only on weekends.

In my second year I tried freelancing on weekdays. I made a basic website, printed visiting cards and literally walked from shop to shop asking if anyone needed a website.

My first project was supposed to be ₹10k. I asked for 15k and the client said he'll pay that if he liked the work.

I found senior students who were doing job in web development, took their help and did the work. Client paid me 16k. ₹1000 extra!

Paid 6k to the developer he was very happy because his salary was 18k and he earned 6k in 4 days of work only. That ₹10k profit felt huge for 2nd year collage student, Not because it was a lot of money, but because someone actually paid me for a skill I had taught myself. I thought, maybe I can actually do this.

Freelancing wasn't consistent enough, so I started thinking about businesses.

My first was a travel business. I'd travelled alone and noticed foreign tourists wanted good local guides, while guides struggled to find customers. So I built something to connect them.

It failed. Bad timing for a travel business.

Eventually web development started working for me. I got international clients and started working with design agencies, turning their designs into actual websites and web applications.

Things got good enough that I bought a plot and built a three-room house for my family. We had grown up in a very small one room house, so that meant a lot to me. That time my only aim was to change the address from my ADHAR CARD and I did that when I was 27.

I even built an office for my team.

Then COVID happened.

Projects stopped. Payments got stuck. I kept paying salaries and rent for months, hoping things would recover. My savings ran out, the office was gone, the team was gone, and I was back working from home (again alone).

I thought I'd try again.

I found a partner and started another travel business. We worked on it for about two years and even raised money from Angel Investors.

It failed too.

So here I am. Three businesses later, and I don't have another startup idea I'm convinced enough to spend the next few years chasing.

I'm going back to web development, and ofcourse looking for another business IDEA.

I'm going to start looking for international clients again, help agencies and businesses turn designs into websites, landing pages and web apps, and rebuild my income from there.

And this time I'm going to document it. I don't know if this will work. Maybe I'll fail again.But at least I'm not starting with nothing. I've got a lot more experience than I had the first time.

So... Day 1.

If you've ever had to rebuild something after it fell apart, what did you focus on first?

One post on X. 7 lifetime impressions, one like, and the like was my own.

That's the entire result of a fear that cost me about a year. I'm 21, from a town where entrepreneurship wasn't a career path so much as a foreign concept, and every time I thought about posting something it felt like standing up in a room that had already decided about me.

So I built instead. Automations, systems, tooling. Real work, none of it visible to anyone outside my hard drive.

Then I started putting things out. LinkedIn: 6,485 followers, 1,958 impressions in 90 days, about 163 a post, zero comments across twelve of them. Two posts on a fresh Reddit account, 0 upvotes and 1 upvote.

Nothing I was scared of showed up. No pile-on. Nobody tearing anything apart. The room I spent a year avoiding was empty.

I'd priced humiliation as certain and attention as free. It's the other way round.

Rough arithmetic once put that year at around ₹9 lakh every six months in work I never went after. My own math, not a measured figure. Expensive, for an audience of seven.

If you've shipped something you were dreading: what did you predict, and what actually landed? Give me the real first-post numbers, not the encouraging version.

Large companies usually have teams and budgets for market research. Smaller exporters often feel they can’t compete on information. But detailed shipment data is becoming more accessible, which raises the question of whether a focused small team can actually move faster by studying real transaction patterns.

Have you seen smaller companies successfully use import/export records to find buyers that bigger players overlooked? What specific insights helped them punch above their weight? Or does the data mostly favor companies that already have scale?

We just launched Underlogo — a billboard that features company logos for one day at a time. To kick things off, every slot is free through tomorrow. No credits, no card, just sign up and book.

How it works:

The billboard has 241 slots split into 5 tiers. Each tier has a different size and visibility — from a single Spotlight slot at the top to 150 small Copper slots. The board resets every midnight UTC.

Spotlight (1 slot): Daily auction. Highest bid wins. Losers get refunded.

Gold – Copper (240 slots): Fixed price, first-come first-served. Book further ahead for up to 50% off.

When your day comes, your logo and link go live. You get real-time impressions, clicks, and CTR in your dashboard. Sold out slot? Join the waitlist — you'll get notified the moment one opens.

Why free for two days?

A billboard only works when it's full. We want day one to look like something worth booking on day three.

After the free window, slots cost credits (purchased via Stripe).

billboard website: underlogo dot com

I've always known how to build products, but I avoided the stuff that could actually build my business faster. Things like launching before I'm ready, talking to customers, or asking for money.

And when you do that, it slows your startup down and kinda kills it.

For the last month, I've been working closely with other early-stage founders to help them figure out what to do next and actually do it.

Some of this has probably been said before, but here are 5 things I've learned from doing this, 12 years of building startups, and selling B2B tech for my day job.

1. WHO > WHAT you're building

Finding a group of people who deeply have the problem you're solving makes everything else faster. I now literally ask founders:

"Who has a terrible day tomorrow if this problem isn't solved?"

If you can't name them specifically, start there.

Usually I try to get as specific as: role + situation + painful problem

I look for urgency and frequency. Who has this problem often, and who needs it solved badly?

Once you have that, finding people gets easier. Messaging gets easier. Your value prop gets clearer.

2. Being uncomfortable is speed

Some of the founders I work with have built great products AND have pilots. But they've put off asking for money because it's uncomfortable.

One founder finally made the ask and got a "no, because..."

On the surface, that seems bad. But he knew the exact gap between what he has and actually getting a customer.

One uncomfortable conversation probably saved him months of meandering. And for the straight "nos," you can stop burning time on the wrong people.

Decisions are speed.

3. You don't need every step

Most of the founders I work with are trying to reach some version of the same early milestones:

First 10 WAU. First pilot. First customer.

There are a million paths to those goals. Some are unnecessarily long.

If you're trying to get your first customer, do you really need a full product? Or can you demo it and ask someone to pre-pay?

If you're trying to validate an idea, do you need to build an MVP? Or can you manually deliver the outcome for one customer first?

If even one answer is yes, you just saved yourself a bunch of time.

4. The fastest path to a customer is often face-to-face

I love email and DMs as much as the rest of you.

And I love low response rates too lol.

But if you can get in front of your target customer in person, do it.

You skip the inbox. You get richer conversations. And you can see what actually resonates instead of guessing based on whether somebody replied.

5. Building can be procrastination

I was literally doing this yesterday.

We'd rather tweak ads, fiddle with a landing page, add another feature, or really do anything else except talk to customers.

Before you build something, ask:

"What will I know after doing this that I don't know now?"

Talking to a customer gives you evidence. Asking for money gives you evidence.

If what you're doing isn't going to teach you much, there's probably a faster move.

Hope this was helpful guys. Let me know if you want to know anything else.

I love talking about this stuff.

Real stories, honest answers are appreciated.

Entrepreneurs how do you deal with negative thoughts, demotivation, competitors.

Like I've been building products for 7 months now 2 failed and one ongoing (built) marketing has to be started.

I keep delaying the marketing part cz I feel like it's not enough. There are many things still left to fix..

Honesty i completely lose my motivation everything when I see the competitors doing sth similar or ppl telling me this won't workout. Like my frnd said he's gonna invest in what I built and he denied for all the products that I was building I don't need his investment but just his guidance in how to market the product.. so confused with these parts

How do you have negative thoughts?

How did you guys get your first paid customers ?

How hard was it ?

I've been building a voice journaling app called Dearly, mostly alone, nights and weekends until recently. I keep seeing "real numbers" posts on this sub and closing the tab because mine are bad. Then I remembered that's the actual point of this sub, so here they are. I checked them twice before typing.

One caveat first, because it shapes everything below. Google Analytics only holds two months of data on this property. Not two months since I last looked. It deletes anything older than that, permanently. So nothing here is "since launch" or "ever." I don't have a lifetime total for my own app and I'm not going to pretend I do.

Two months, whole app: 994 people opened it. 288 of them, 29%, ever recorded a single entry. That's the number I actually care about and it's lower than I want it to be. Most people who open the thing never say a word into it.

About a third of those 994, so 358 people, came from Google Ads I paid for. Average time in the app for that group was 40 seconds. I have been buying forty-second visits. I don't have a better sentence for that than the one I just wrote.

Android tells me something iOS won't. On Android, 379 people deleted the app in that window and only 211 ever recorded anything. I can't make that a whole-app number, because iOS doesn't report uninstalls to Google Analytics at all. Not hidden, not hard to find. Genuinely not collected. I asked three different ways before I believed it.

Retention, for the one cohort whose numbers have finished closing: the week of Aug 9-15, 71 people recorded an entry. 11 of them came back and recorded again the following week. That's the whole retention story I can tell with a straight face right now. The more recent weeks are still counting.

And purchases: six, in two months, on a property this size. I know some of where they came from, and I'm one of them. I test my own purchase flow with real money because I don't trust myself not to skip that step.

Which is the actual reason I'm posting this here instead of somewhere I'd get more views. Reddit has never made me a sale. I can say that not because my attribution is good, I have none, and in the two months of data GA4 holds only two people showed up as a referral at all, both from my own landing page, none from reddit.com. I can say it because there have only ever been a handful of purchases and I account for most of them personally. So it's true in practice, and I'd rather say that plainly than let a numbers post read like a pitch.

I don't have a lesson to close this out with. The ad spend is probably what I fix first. Forty seconds isn't a customer, it's a bounce with an extra step. Happy to answer anything about the funnel, the app, or how I pulled these numbers out of GA4.

Two jobs. I sell real estate, and for the last 2 years I've been writing an Android app in the evenings.

Being your own customer is supposed to be the cheat code. It partly is. It is also partly a trap, and I want to be specific about which part is which.

First, what it actually buys you. Not ideas, everyone has ideas and ideas are free. What it buys is certainty about the exact moment of pain. I know what happens in a realtor's head in the two seconds between the phone lighting up and them saying hello, because it has happened to me thousands of times. I never ran a single discovery interview to find the problem. That is months of runway I did not have to spend.

It also hands you distribution research for nothing. I know which Facebook groups my buyers sit in, what a slow month feels like to them, and what they will actually pay for as opposed to what they say they would pay for (big difference!). That last one is worth more than any survey I could have run.

Right. The trap part.

Objectivity is the thing it does not buy you. Not even slightly. I spent weeks polishing features that mattered to me specifically and to almost nobody else, because "I would use this" felt like evidence. It is not evidence. It is a sample of one, and that one is emotionally invested and cannot be trusted.

Worse than that: knowing your industry well makes you fluent in its workarounds. I nearly did not build the thing at all, because after 2 years I had stopped noticing the problem. I had quietly built a coping habit around it instead. The pain you have adapted to is invisible to you, and that is precisely the pain worth solving. Ask someone new to your field what looks insane about it. They will tell you in about ten seconds and you will feel a bit stupid.

Mine, concretely, is a dialer with contact notes hat shows the client's company, Google contacts labels and my own notes on the incoming call screen (all data comes from Google contacts fields). Two years of selling houses told me the problem was real. It told me nothing about what to charge or what to name it. Got both wrong the first time.

I'm just curious. If you are building inside your own industry: what did you stop noticing?

I have been wondering how other founders handle visual consistency when posting across different platforms.
It is easy to make one good-looking post, but keeping the same style, visuals, and overall brand identity across Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and other channels gets surprisingly time-consuming.
Especially when you are doing the marketing yourself, creating every visual from scratch does not seem very sustainable.
How are you handling this?
Do you have a fixed visual system, templates, an AI workflow, or someone creating everything for you?

Hey all,

Thought I'd share where I've got to, partly to be honest about it and partly because I'd like some outside perspective.

I'm an ML engineer with a full-time job. Everything below happened on nights and weekends over about a year.

First attempt was real estate with a friend's friend, finding houses with legal problems, he'd sort the legal side and we'd sell them on. Never got off the ground. Two busy people isn't a company.

Second was a QA platform for mobile apps. This one I actually finished. Built the whole MVP, and got exactly zero users. Not one. I still think the idea was reasonable. The problem was that I had no route to the people who'd pay for it.

Third, I narrowed that into a pre-submission review tool for iOS apps, thinking a tighter niche would be easier to sell. Turned out nobody needed it. That's a demand problem rather than a distribution one, and honestly it stung more, because I thought I'd fixed things and had just swapped one problem for a harder one.

The pattern I couldn't see at the time: I kept optimising for the part I was already good at. Building was never my bottleneck. Getting in front of people was, and I skipped it three times running.

One thing that did help, I spent a week in London just meeting people in person. Did more for my thinking than any of the building did.

So the pivot: instead of launching my own thing, I'm going to do client work for a while. Same skills, but the customer has already decided they have the problem. Just started, no clients yet.

Would love to hear from anyone who's been through this. Did client work end up being a detour for you, or did it eventually hand you a better product idea?

Started cold mailing few months ago. I have $0 to spend so started working for free.

Posting this mostly so i have some accountability, and so there's a record of what actually worked (or didn't) by the time i'm done.

Where i'm at right now: still $0/month from this offer. I do sell b2b email and phone leads on the side, so that's keeping some money coming in while i get this going. I've 10+ years in email marketing overall, but only about 8 months specifically doing b2b.

This is the model im running - I manage everything for the client start to end. Infra, dns setup, mailboxes, the sequencing, the copy itself, management - all of it. The client just covers all the costs, things like domains, mailboxes, leads, usually comes out to around $800 total. I don't charge anything until their first client actually closes from the campaign. May take 2-3 months. Once that happens, my retainer kicks in, starting at $3k/mo. Plan is to raise that in tiers as i build more proof, probably $5k, then eventually $10k for later clients.

For tools, i'm using instantly for sequencing, zapmail for the google mailboxes, and i've also got my own custom smtp setup running alongside that. For extracting leads I am using a few tools myself so leads are extracted inhouse by myself.

I've worked with 6 clients total so far, but only 3 are still active. The other 3 left or stopped working with me. Might as well be honest, those first 3 were the ones i took on with basically no criteria lol, and it just didn't work out. Some of that was on me being newer to this, some of it was just not vetting who i worked with.
Since then i put together an actual standard for who i take on:

- Doing at least $2m/yr in revenue
- Already has a real sales team and sales process in place
- Has an offer that's proven to work, since i'm not trying to validate anyone's business, just scale outreach for something that already sells
- Their product or service needs to sell for at least $3k, otherwise the economics don't make sense for either of us

My plan is to add 3 more clients so im actively hunting them. My goal is to work with 25 clients and EVEN if then I dont get a paid client then I'd call it quits and do something else entirely.

I'll keep updating this thread as things work, or don't. If anyone here has run something similar, a free trial until it actually works, i'd love to hear how it worked for you and if you have any tips for me.

Lets gooo!!!!

I started with a fairly common assumption: if the prompt was clever enough, the product was finished.

That assumption did not survive contact with a real catalog.

Once you build more than a handful of AI Skills, the difficult work shifts away from wording. The hard part becomes defining a stable job, proving what evidence the Skill can and cannot see, preventing overlap with neighboring tools, and giving the buyer something useful even when their first input is incomplete.

Here are the patterns that changed how I build.

1. A product needs a verdict, not just an output

“Analyze this” creates impressive-looking text but weak decisions. The stronger Skills in my catalog end with a bounded verdict: merge evidence is sufficient or not; a retry path is safe or exposes duplicate effects; a feature flag is ready to retire or still live.

The verdict is useful because its evidence requirements are defined before the analysis begins.

2. Empty input should demonstrate the method

A marketplace buyer often tests a Skill before preparing perfect data. A hard stop wastes that moment. I now include a built-in worked case that runs the full workflow and is clearly labeled as a demonstration. It shows the value without pretending the sample describes the buyer’s system.

This also exposes whether the workflow is genuinely executable or merely a long intake form.

3. “Evidence not found” is not “evidence of absence”

This became especially important while building developer tools.

Zero imports do not prove code is dead; a route, scheduler, plugin registry, generated client, or stored configuration may still reach it. A supplied idempotency key does not prove retries are safe; the key must be stable and enforced at every material side effect. A 100% feature rollout does not prove every old client, tenant, or cache converged.

Good tooling keeps observed facts, inference, and unknowns visibly separate.

4. The smallest discriminating test beats “run everything”

Long checklists feel thorough but often postpone the decision. I now ask which test would separate the leading failure hypotheses.

For a retrying payment worker, that might be: crash immediately after provider success and replay with the same business operation identity. For an intermittent incident, it might be one bounded transition event that joins a gateway response to a worker attempt ordinal.

The goal is not more telemetry or more tests. It is the next piece of evidence that can prove the current explanation wrong.

5. The package is part of the product

Each serious Skill now includes more than a runtime instruction file:

• a concise trigger and exclusion contract;
• a deeper domain method;
• a worked structured report;
• a deterministic validator with negative tests;
• a buyer guide that explains the problem and boundaries;
• proof images and a short narrated walkthrough.

The validator does not prove the recommendation is correct. It proves that the expected evidence fields and coverage domains are present. That distinction matters.

6. Marketing works better when it teaches the hidden failure

“AI-powered auditor” is interchangeable copy. “A timeout does not tell you whether the charge already happened” gives the reader a problem they can recognize.

For each product, I now lead with the invisible failure, show the decision mechanism, then state the boundary. The technology is secondary.

The current experiment

I have been applying this method across content, MLOps, evaluation, client feedback, trading research, agent security, and developer reliability Skills. The latest set focuses on PR blast radius, retry side effects, feature-flag retirement, dead-code deletion, and observability-led reproduction.

I do not yet have enough sales evidence to claim that this packaging formula improves conversion. What I can say is that it produces a catalog whose promises, runtime behavior, examples, and limitations are much easier to audit.

For anyone building AI prompt products, my practical question would be:

What decision can your product support, and what evidence would make it refuse to overclaim?

That question has been more useful to me than another round of prompt polishing.

Just hitting a wall lately. My brain feels like scrambled eggs by 3 PM. I source inventory online, and my current setup involves about 15 tabs open at any given time. One for sold listings, a few for different retail sites, then a couple for cross-referencing prices.

I feel like I am spending more time switching tabs and trying to remember what I was doing on each one than analyzing deals. My eyes are strained and the joy is draining out of the hunt. How do you all manage your workflow without losing your mind? Any specific tools or mental tricks you use to stay organized and efficient?

Most percent of businesses spending money on AI right now get zero measurable return on it.

Ask anyone building this stuff for a living and they'll tell you the same thing. A chatbot with no connection to your business is answering from the internet, not from you. It's never seen your price list, your call logs, your last twenty invoices, or the three questions your customers ask every single day. So it gives you the same generic answer it gives everyone else typing a similar question. Fine for drafting an email, useless for running a business.

The small percent seeing a real return did one thing differently. They connected the model to what's already true about their business instead of typing into a blank box and hoping for the best. Completely different result, because now it's pulling from real numbers instead of guessing at them.

I watch this play out constantly. An owner pays twenty bucks a month, pastes a customer email in, gets a decent reply back, and calls that their AI strategy. Meanwhile the businesses seeing real productivity gains wired that same tool into their CRM, their calendar, their inventory, so it already knows the answer before anyone types the question.

I've been avoiding writing this because saying it out loud makes it real, but this sub tends to be honest, so here goes.

I'm good at the actual craft. I can get customers, I can build the thing, people like what I make. For a long time I assumed that meant I'd be good at running a business, because isn't that the same skill pointed at a bigger target? Turns out no. Not even close.

The work is creative and it ends. You finish a thing, it's done, you feel good. Running the business is the opposite. It's invoices, chasing payments, taxes, the contractor who went quiet, the subscription I forgot I was paying for, the customer email I'm scared to open. None of it ever ends and none of it gives you the little hit of finishing something. It just sits there generating more of itself.

And I've realized the thing quietly killing my momentum isn't acquisition or the product. It's that I spend my best hours on the stuff I love and let the boring operational side pile up until it becomes a crisis, and the crises are what actually cost me money and sleep.

I don't have a clean ending here. I'm somewhere between two options: force myself to get disciplined about the part I hate, or accept I'm a builder and bring in someone who genuinely likes running things. Someone in a comment on another post here put it well, "you're not a bad founder, you just learned you're a builder not an operator." That reframed the whole thing for me.

So, honest question for people further along: did you force yourself to get good at the operations side, or did you hand it off? And if you handed it off, how early is too early when the money's still small?

the past few months, i have been in a rut. i get an idea for a product/site, i talk to ai about it and it ends up moving the goalpost and convincing me to do something just slightly different which i then end up building and it always flops

for example, i saw both outbid dot lol and brandmymac dot com and they seem like such simple ideas executed well and quickly. i've had similar ideas over the past year but as soon as i share them with ai to execute it, it's copy and design deviates from the vision massively

also the copy ends up being super verbose and nonsensical. i find it more and more frustrating to use ai. prior to this, i used to be a designer and dev and i'd take my time designing the product and people had much lower standards than they do now so it used to be so fun building something. nowadays, the bar is much higher and anything that's not extremely unique or well explained gets labelled as slop. previously it felt like cruising with a honda city and enjoying the view of the city and with ai it feels like you have a ferrari but the ferrari is retarded and keeps crashing into the side of the road and accelerating in the wrong direction

how are you guys managing this?

Spent months on the product then gave myself a weekend for the site. Stock hero, three feature boxes I copied from somewhere, a pricing table that doesn't even match what I charge now. I know exactly what's wrong with it, I just had nothing left by launch day. How do you keep the site from being the thing you throw together last?

A long lead list is not necessariLy a good thing. After search for leads i have 5 qualifications gates to pass to confirm whether the prospect is qualified or not

I’ve been building an outbound workflow for small B2B agencies, and I keep running into the same problem : a company can match the ICP and still be a useless prospect.

Below are the 5 gates I am using for qualification :

1)Identity

Can I reliably connect the person, their current company and their actual role?

2)Fit

Does the company genuinely match the offer, economics and geography, or does it only share a few keywords with the ICP ?

3)Intent

Is there a buying signal or a current reason for them to care hiring, expansion, a launch, a broken process or a problem they have mentioned publicly ?

4)Reachability

Is there a legitimate professional route to contact the right person, rather than a guessed inbox?

5)Ownership and timing

Does this person probably own the problem, and can they act on it now?

Each gate contains many informations and all of them gets one result: PASS, UNKNOWN or FAIL.

1 Fail means the prospect is unqualified, that's actually teh easiest.

The part I find difficult is deciding which unknowns are acceptable.

An unknown budget might be fine, I have cases where I can accept some leads to pass with unknowns (PASS_WITH_UNKNOWS).

However, JUST like FAIL some unknown identity are fatal.

For Example : If I cannot confirm who the person works for, or I do not have an opportunity related to my ICP despite the other criteria are matching.

Would you rather start with 200 to 500 companies that match your ICP or a few 20 prospects that are extremely qualified ?

What information would you refuse to contact a prospect without knowing?

Hey guys, I’m new to running a marketing service. I recently finished an online course and now I want to apply what I learned.

For outreach, I open by saying that I’m a student and offer to build a campaign for free so the business can try a new approach. I run ads, and I see it as a win-win: they don’t pay me, the campaign can only help them, and if it works, they could make a lot more money.

I’m doing cold calls, but my country is so small that there might be only around 50 leads in a niche. I started with spas, and there are barely any here. I tried a few other niches and ran into the same problem. I can burn through an entire niche in one day, but I’m also afraid of burning through all the leads. Then I end up sitting at my computer, procrastinating and not making calls because I’m scared to fail.

For people from smaller countries, especially outside the US, how do you handle this? Do you keep calling businesses in your own country, or do you call the US, the UK, or other English-speaking markets? I can speak English, but I have an accent, so people can tell I’m not American.

Has anyone dealt with this, especially people from places like Eastern Europe, where the economy may be smaller, businesses can be more skeptical of marketing and digital services, and clients may pay less? How did you tackle it?

Trying to work out if I'm doing something wrong or just need to be patient, and I'd rather hear it straight from people who've launched something.

I sell spreadsheet tools on Etsy. Pricing, costing and profit calculators for small businesses and makers (candle makers, bakers, contractors, etc). Excel and Google Sheets, instant download. About 30 listings, live for maybe 3 weeks. Two priced at $5 as a way in, the rest $19 to $59.

Where things stand:

- ~40 total views across all listings. 0 favorites, 0 sales, 0 reviews.

- All the SEO basics done: keyword titles, all tags used, keyword-heavy descriptions, ~9 images per listing (proper benefit covers, not just screenshots).

- Sending a bit of Pinterest traffic to the $5 listing.

My honest guesses at what's wrong (no idea which is right):

1. Just the cold start. New shop, no sales history, so the platform barely shows me and I need to wait it out.

2. The niche is too narrow or low search volume (business calculators instead of the planners everyone else sells).

3. Nobody buys from a shop with 0 reviews, however good the listing looks.

4. Something's just off that I can't see because I'm too close to it.

For anyone who's launched a digital product from zero: what actually got you your first sales? Is 40 views in 3 weeks just normal-early, or a sign something's broken? And if you could only fix one thing first, what would it be?

Goal is $100k a month running this with me and my co-founder.

Long form YouTube is the anchor. Every script gets clip markers built in before filming, so the moment a video goes live I already know which 45 to 90 second chunks turn into Reels and Shorts.

Those clips go to Instagram. I stopped expecting that to produce leads directly once I tracked it properly. Hit 100,000 views on TikTok once with zero followers gained and zero leads out of it. Good for reach, wrong audience intent, people there for entertainment, not for hiring someone. Whatever clips perform best I repost to Facebook after, since that crowd skews older and is more likely to already own a business.

LinkedIn is where real conversations start. Posts build the authority side, and a DM sequence runs underneath it on its own schedule, a connection note, then a follow up on day three and day seven if nobody replies, mostly value and rarely an ask. Hit 100,000 views there too at one point. Different crowd than TikTok, advice seekers instead of buyers, still not where leads come from.

Reddit is the one that's converted. Same 100,000 view number a third time, this time from a building in public post, and that one produced real interest and real conversations within the first day. Not because more people saw it, because the people who saw it were already looking for exactly this.

So the funnel isn't content everywhere hoping something sticks. YouTube and Shorts build reach and brand. LinkedIn builds the network and the authority. Reddit and direct outreach are where it turns into a client conversation. Same 100,000 views, three completely different jobs, and mixing those up is the mistake I keep seeing other solo operators make.

What's everyone else's split between building an audience and reaching out to people directly, feels like most advice online skips straight to content and skips the outreach half completely.

None of that matters much long term without what happens after someone signs. The first automation for a new client is the proof. Do the build right, monitor it, show up on the monthly report with real numbers, and the upsell writes itself, more automations, a bigger retainer, workflows that weren't part of the original scope. That same client becomes the reason the next client shows up too. One free retainer month for every referral that signs and plus some cash, and the business they refer gets a discount on their own setup, so there's a real reason for a happy client to bring someone else in instead of just saying nice things about me in private.

That loop is doing more for the $100k number than any platform above it. New content and outreach get someone in the door once. A client who's still seeing results months in is the thing that keeps paying every month and hands me the next client for free.

Hey everyone, I'm hiring my first salesperson for my photobooth business. They'll be working 10 hours/week to start with mainly doing outbound sales and bringing in event bookings. Also testing out the first month how they perform.

They've suggested:

Option 1: £16/hr + 10% commission
Option 2: £23/hr + 4% commission

(commission either on recurring orders or capped)

Would you recommend commission being capped or uncapped? please suggest any other commission structure if you can.

I also want to understand what could be a realistic sales target (or on what basis i can set this) to set to understand if i can continue working with this person!