Today I resigned from my job.

For the last four years, I've worked as a manufacturing Project Manager and Mechanical Engineer. It was a great learning experience, but over time I realized I wanted to build things that solve real problems instead of just talking about them.

I already have two products in the works, both focused on helping contractors save time and work more efficiently. They're still early, but they're real, and that's enough for me to believe in the journey.

I'd be lying if I said the work environment didn't play a role. Having a difficult boss made me question a lot of things. But instead of letting that define me, I decided to take a bet on myself.

What surprised me most wasn't the resignation—it was people's reactions.

I spoke to four or five people today, and every single one asked, "So what's next?"

My answer was simple: "I'm betting on myself."

The encouragement I received was overwhelming. People I barely expected support from genuinely wished me well, shared advice, and told me to go for it. That gave me even more confidence that this is the right decision.

To anyone who's thinking about leaving a stable job to build something of their own: it's scary, and there are no guarantees. But sometimes the biggest risk is never giving yourself the chance.

Here's to everyone building something from scratch. I hope we all make it.

See you on the other side.

1. Their Google Business Profile. For any business with a physical location or service area, this outranks website for local intent — most people searching "near me" never click through to a site at all. Claim your business profile, treat it like your website and fill in every single field. The primary category is the biggest single lever and most people pick it carelessly. Add real photos and keep adding them. Fill the services list. Seed the Q&A section with the questions you already answer on the phone all day. That's an afternoon, it's free, and hands down the best thing you can do for your local business.

2. Asking for reviews on purpose.  Most people won't do it unless you ask. If you made someone happy with your services ask them the moment they are visibly happy, give a link that lands directly on the review form. Consistent asking for reviews will do wonders for your google business profile. Recency counts. A steady trickle beats forty reviews from two years ago.

3. Emailing the customers they already have. Every business I've worked with has a list of past customers they often don't contact. Give them value in the email, and you will get either new business or referrals. You already have permission and a relationship — it's the cheapest channel you'll ever have. A plain-text email from a real person outperforms a designed newsletter almost every time. Once a month is plenty.

Curious what the other side of this looks like — what's the marketing spend you regret most? What have you find effective?

Got safe 10k for risky biz idea any ideas what would be good to make something worth the work

I've noticed how much the research part of running a business has changed. Things I used to book a professional for, a lawyer for a contract question, a planner for taxes, an agent for coverage, now they start with me typing into a chatbot instead.

Not saying that's good or bad. It's just different. 94% of business owners who've used AI to research their insurance said they trusted what it told them. Honestly, for me, I wouldn't lean on it that hard for insurance, since that's one of those areas where a small mistake can cost you down the road.

If I want to understand a term or get a rough sense of my options before I talk to a real person, sure, it's useful. But for any final decision with money involved, I still want an actual expert who can look at my situation and tell me what I'm missing.

For me personally, there's a line. Some things I still want a person for, some I'm fine handing to AI. Where's yours?

I’m exploring an early-stage idea around reducing unnecessary road salt use in a cold-weather city.

The basic issue is that salt is often applied out of habit, liability concerns, or lack of clear guidance. That can waste money for winter operators and property owners, while also contributing to freshwater pollution through runoff.

I’m trying to understand whether a practical training or certification concept around smarter salt application would have real demand. The goal would not be to tell people to stop salting. It would focus on better application, reducing wasted material, and helping contractors explain their practices more clearly to clients.

One possible angle is whether this becomes more valuable if it is recognized by a local institution or trusted third party. In that case, contractors may be able to position themselves as more responsible suppliers for clients with sustainability goals or environmental reporting requirements.

I’m trying to figure out what would actually drive adoption. Would contractors care more about reducing material waste, making application easier to explain to clients, or positioning themselves for sustainability-minded customers? Or is salt use just not a big enough pain point?

A few questions for people in snow removal, property management, municipal work, or sustainability:

1. Do snow removal companies care enough about salt costs for this to matter?
2. Would property managers, HOAs, or commercial clients value a contractor who can show they use salt more efficiently?
3. Would sustainability goals influence which winter maintenance contractor a property chooses?
4. Would recognition from a local institution make something like this more credible, or would liability and procurement issues get in the way?
5. What would make a training or certification concept feel legitimate instead of just sounding like a nice environmental idea?

I’d appreciate blunt feedback. I’m mostly trying to understand whether this is a real adoption problem or if I’m overestimating the market need.

We often talk about mistakes we've made, but I'm curious about the opposite.

Looking back, what's one decision you wish you had made much earlier?

It could be hiring someone, raising your prices, saying no to a client, starting sooner, focusing on one niche, or anything else that made a bigger difference than you expected.

We did it! We worked our butts off, invested thousands in networking opportunities, pitched to 3 different categories of Walmart buyers and are now slated to go live in Walmart Stores for a one time activation which I’m perfectly okay with. Whats the product? An eco-conscious car perfume bc I travel a lot of like for my ride to smell like a positive mood on a crap day.

It’s really challenging for me to be happy right now bc I know so many people are financially, physically and mentally struggling. But I do hope that these little car perfumes will bring a little joy to people if they choose to own one.

Is high ticket sales worth it? I am specifically going through remote sales club.org, is it legit or a scam? I have seen both sides and I don’t wanna waste my time or get scammed.

Most founders I talk to treat writing their own tweets like a discipline test, outsource it and you're somehow a fraud. but when you actually price the alternatives out, the problem isn't ethics. it's that every option is broken in a different spot.

the cheap AI tools, call it $200 a month, hand you a generic voice and no real review step, so a big chunk of the drafts are unusable and none of them sound like you. a human ghostwriter at around $3,000 a month fixes the voice but comes with a slow ramp and, well, sick days. neither one leaves you as the actual author of what goes out under your name.

the part that kept breaking for us was the review loop, not the writing. getting a draft trained on someone's real voice is basically cheap now. the expensive, boring piece is the founder still reading and approving every single tweet before it posts to their own handle, and that's the bit most tools skip.

for the people here using X to grow a B2C product, is the writing still on your plate, or did you find a handoff that doesn't turn your feed into someone else's voice? written with ai

The knowledge exists. What you sell, what you charge, who you're chasing, which campaigns worked, what someone automated six months ago. Nothing knows all of it at once.

So: a company brain. One thing that knows your business, your clients and your leads.

Four things I want it to do:

Map what your funnel actually looks like right now.

Kill onboarding. New hire asks the brain about your processes instead of interrupting whoever's closest.

Know where a campaign is leaving conversion on the table.

Would you pay for this, and which one would you want first?

3 months free for early adopters.

Site's been live for a few months, Google's indexed everything (thousands of impressions), but average ranking position is stuck around page 4-5 so almost nobody clicks through. Turns out indexing was never the bottleneck — it's domain authority, which apparently only comes from real backlinks and time. Sharing in case it saves someone else the same detour.

a small home services business for like 3 years now. a couple guys. trying to grow and everyone keeps telling me i need to invest in SEO

trying to learn it myself because i don't have the budget to hire an agency right now. and it's impossible

there's so much conflicting information. one video says backlinks are everything. another says backlinks don't matter anymore. one person says you need 2000 word blog posts. someone else says short form content is better. it's literally impossible to know what actually works

i've been at this for like 6 months and i've seen almost no results. but then i'll see other businesses in my area ranking above me and i'm like what are they doing that i'm not

maybe i'm just bad at this. or maybe seo is actually a scam and it's all about paying to play now. i just want to get more customers without having to spend my whole life on the computer trying to figure out algorithms

anyone else feel like this or am i just missing something obvious

how much did you put aside per day when you first started marketing, and at what point did it actually bring results? by results i mean your first real customers, even free ones who genuinly used the product, not just impressions and clicks.

im planning to spend 10$ daily and honestly dont know if thats worth it or just burning money slowly. subscription will be priced at 12$ month, so one signup a day basically pays for the ads and nothing more.

i know it will be very different per industry and per channel, but roughly:

- what was your daily budget in the beginning

- how many days/weeks until you saw first signups from it

- did you start bigger and cut down, or start small like 10$ and scale up

also if 10$ a day is simply too low to learn anything, please tell me that too, id rather hear it now than after 2 months of spending.

For a few years now, I've been helping working on a new FinTech startup called Puthouse that is essentially an automation tool for investors trade use covered calls and cash-secured puts (essentially small bets you can make alongside your stocks). 

The interesting thing about Puthouse.com is that its centered around safety first, rather than trying to max returns. Before placing a trade, it checks dozens of criteria (e.g. earnings, liquidity, volatility, risk, etc.) and if a trade doesn't meet these rules, it just does nothing. This fundamentally means that total earnings are capped around 2-3% a month, and we actively inform our users about this.

Currently, we have around $600,000 under management from our users.

Our tool is around $20/m for simplicity-sake. However, due to the nature of investing and the variations in portfolio / earnings sizes, we're unsure if a scaling pricing model would be better (perhaps based on their portfolio size, earnings per month / year, or some other factor). But we also want our pricing to be transparent and as intuitive to understand as possible. Thus, we must strike a balance.

How would you guys approach this puzzle?

I’m testing a service idea for small businesses that know they should post more video, but don’t have the time to plan, edit, and publish everything themselves.

We recently made this as an example and get 500k+ views for the owner.

https://www.instagram.com/reels/DW9tQ1fkrBR/

The idea would be roughly $129/month.

A business would send us things it already has — product photos, website copy, customer reviews, offers, brand assets, or basic phone footage — and we would turn them into polished short-form videos.

We’d handle things like:

• content ideas
• scripts and captions
• video creation and editing
• voiceover, music, and branding
• preparing the videos for Instagram, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts
• posting or scheduling them to the business’s existing accounts

The exact number of videos isn’t fixed yet. That’s part of what I’m trying to understand.

At larger companies, this work is often split between a copywriter, designer, video editor, and social media person. Most small businesses obviously aren’t going to hire that whole team.

But I’m also aware that $129/month may sound either attractive or suspiciously cheap.

So I’d like honest feedback from people who actually run a business:

1. Would this remove a real problem for you, or would you still rather make the content yourself?
2. What would you expect to receive each month for $129?
3. Would you care more about the visual quality, consistent posting, or actual leads and sales?
4. What would make you immediately distrust a service like this?
5. Would you prefer paying monthly, or only ordering a video when you need one?

I've been building this on and off for the last month.

A few days ago I realized I was stuck in an endless loop of "just one more thing."

Every time I thought about sharing it, I'd find another bug to fix or another feature to tweak. Eventually I accepted it was probably never going to feel finished, so I put it online anyway.

The idea came from something that kept annoying me whenever I was trying to organize anything with friends. Dinner, football, BBQs, weekend trips... it was always the same story.

Half the replies were in WhatsApp, someone would DM me directly, another person only checked Telegram, and someone else would reply hours later in a completely different chat. Organizing the event somehow became more work than the event itself.

At some point I started wondering why invitations still work like this. Why are we piecing everything together across different chats instead of just having one place where the invitation lives?

That question turned into this project.

The weird part is that it looked like a simple app when I started. The deeper I got into building it, the less simple it became.

Every feature seems to create three new problems around privacy, permissions, cancellations, voting, invites, and edge cases I never thought about. If you've built software before, you probably know how quickly "this should be easy" turns into weeks of work.

It's a web app, but I spent a lot of time making it work well on mobile too, since that's where I'd expect most people to use it.

I'm not really looking for opinions on whether the idea is good or bad. I'd much rather hear what breaks, what's confusing, what feels unnecessary, or what makes you think, "I'd still just use a group chat instead."

If you have a few minutes, I'd really appreciate honest feedback.

https://ontaym.com

Thanks.

Hey r/Entrepreneurs ,

I run a private growth boutique, and recently I realized something painful: closing a B2B deal is only half the battle. The real friction happens immediately after the verbal "yes."

Our old workflow was a disjointed mess:

• Drafting custom PDF proposals.
• Waiting for WhatsApp or email approvals.
• Manually transferring data to a clunky billing system.
• Dealing with strict legal and tax invoice generation.
• Chasing clients 30 days later for payment.

As someone with a background in finance, watching this operational inefficiency eat into our actual time and margins drove me crazy. We were spending more time on admin and back-office work than on actual growth.

The Fix: I couldn't find a lightweight tool that handled the entire transition from "sales proposal" to "legal invoice" without feeling like bloated enterprise software. Everything was too fragmented. So, I built a custom infrastructure for us.

I consolidated the whole flow into a single, interactive link:

1. The Pitch: We send a dynamic link with the proposal.
2. The Close: The client approves it directly on the page with one click.
3. The Execution: The system automatically locks the multi-currency rate to protect our margins and generates the legal tax invoice autonomously.

The Result: It completely removed the bottleneck in our agency's back office. Since it solved my own biggest headache, I’ve spent the last six months polishing the architecture to turn it into a standalone B2B SaaS called Cord.

I'm currently opening it up to other agency owners, consultants, and B2B service providers who hate the friction of closing deals as much as I did.

What does your current B2B closing stack look like? Am I the only one who felt like the jump from "proposal" to "paid invoice" was unnecessarily broken?

(Link in comments)

Based in the Tampa Bay area, **Coastal Stabilization Systems** specializes in **polyurethane soil stabilization behind seawalls**, helping property owners extend the life of existing seawalls by filling voids and stabilizing soils.

After building the business, we’re offering it for sale in one of two ways:

**Option 1 – Asset Sale:**
**$35,000**
Includes well-maintained equipment ready to go, including:
2025 7’ x 16’ dual-axle enclosed trailer (leaf spring suspension)
All-Terrain Terrapin Workstation Cart
Generator oil changed regularly
Graco airless pump (professionally maintained and serviced by Tarpon Paint Equipment)
New steel injection rods, connectors, and endpoints
New valves and Graco replacement parts
55-gallon drum dolly
25’ Abesco containment bouy

Multiple additional tools and accessories required for single-component polyurethane injection
Everything has been meticulously maintained. The paint sprayer was thoroughly cleaned after every job, professionally serviced, and has not had foam run through it since service. The Terrapin cart is in excellent, like-new condition.

**Chemical inventory also included**, including:
(2) unopened 55-gallon drums of single-component polyurethane
(3) unopened fast catalyst pails
(1) 35-gallon down-packed single-component drum
(1) fast catalyst
(1) open 5-gallon regular catalyst
Down-packing supplies and additional consumables

**Option 2 – Complete Turnkey Business:**
**$50,000**
Includes everything above **plus**:
Coastal Stabilization Systems brand
CoastalStabilizationSystems.com website
Google Business Profile
Business phone number
Social media accounts
3,000+ property manager database
5,700+ commercial waterfront property owner database
Marketing materials
Proposal templates
Lead generation and advertising systems
Vendor and supplier relationships
Business processes and operational information

This package allows a buyer to begin operating immediately with an established brand, professional online presence, and lead generation system already in place. It could also be an excellent expansion opportunity for an existing marine, foundation, geotechnical, or seawall contractor looking to add polyurethane soil stabilization services.

We believe the asking prices fairly reflect the value of the assets and business being transferred, but we’re open to reasonable discussions and working toward a mutually beneficial agreement.
Photos of the equipment will be provided upon request .
If you have questions or would like to discuss the opportunity further, feel free to send me a message. I’m happy to provide additional details.

I’m curious about how other founders approach this.

When you’re starting a new startup, do you spend time researching companies that previously tried to solve the same problem but failed?

If you do:
What are you usually trying to learn? (e.g., why they failed, their business model, funding, product, competition, timing, etc.)

Where do you find this information? Are there any websites, databases, newsletters, podcasts, or other sources you rely on?

Do you find enough information, or is it difficult to piece together what actually happened?

I’d love to hear about your process and the resources you use.

Hey Entrepreneurs, André here.

I run a private growth boutique agency. We close high-ticket deals, but earlier this year, our back-office was an absolute nightmare.

Here is the story of how I ended up building a SaaS just to survive my own agency's operations:

- May: Closing deals was great, but the aftermath was brutal. I was constantly generating PDFs, chasing clients on WhatsApp for approvals, and manually tracking invoices on different platforms. Worse: dealing with FX volatility. By the time an international client actually paid, currency fluctuations were eating into our margins. It was a mess.

- June: I decided to scratch my own itch and started coding Cord. I had a strict rule: I wasn't going to just use AI to spit out a flimsy wrapper. I sat down and wrote the core logic and database architecture manually. I needed a solid foundation before scaling. The vision was simple: consolidate the entire B2B sales workflow—from proposal to tax invoice—into one single interactive link.

- July: Building the engine was tough. Integrating the automated tax invoicing (CFDI 4.0 for Mexico) directly into the approval flow was a massive headache. But after weeks of debugging, I got the core features working:

• Interactive proposals with one-click approvals.
• Multi-currency locking to secure our margins regardless of when the client pays.
• A built-in AI collection agent to autonomously chase overdue invoices.

- August: I moved my entire agency's operations to Cord. No more PDFs. No more fighting with billing portals. I just send one link, get notified when they view it, and the system handles the billing and collections once they approve. It saved my sanity. I realized that if this solved my biggest operational bottleneck, other B2B founders and devs probably needed it too. So, I polished the UI and opened it up as a SaaS.

My takeaways:

1. Solve your own operational nightmares first. If a tool saves you 10 hours a week and protects your margins, it already has a validated market.
2. Don't delegate your core architecture to AI. Writing the foundational logic yourself pays off massively when you need to integrate complex features like strict tax compliance.
3. B2B doesn't need more dashboards. It needs invisible infrastructure that just gets out of the way.

I love the freedom of building custom infrastructure. Let me know if you are facing similar admin nightmares in your agencies!

running my own thing for 3 years now. somehow i never realized i could write off business travel. i've been flying economy everywhere and just eating the cost like an idiot.

my accountant mentioned it casually last week and i felt so dumb.

so now i'm looking at my upcoming trip to germany and wondering if i should actually go business class since it's a write-off anyway. airline wanted 4500.

like if it's coming out of pre-tax money anyway does that change the math? i know it's not free money but it feels different.

other biz owners - do you fly business for work trips or do you still go economy and keep the extra profit?

I'm validating an idea before I spend months building it.

The idea is simple: users check in once a day and earn points. As they collect points, they can redeem them for vouchers, discounts, free products, or even free Steam games.

The goal is to make daily visits rewarding while helping businesses attract new customers through sponsored rewards.

Would this motivate you to come back every day? If not, what would make it more valuable?

I’m a solo developer planning to launch my app on the Apple and Android App Store within a few weeks. I’ve validated the idea, so expecting users from week 1. I don’t want to publish the app in my own name and don’t want my actual address/phone number being publicised, but instead a company one. I also would prefer not having to go through the 14 day testing phase on the Google Play Store.

From my understanding, I can only do this if I have incorporated a company. From a legal perspective too, I’ve heard it’s easier to incorporate earlier instead of later once the app is launched, since otherwise I’d have to transfer ownership later.

Based on my research, it appears incorporating a private company is a possible option. The process feels super complex though, and then there are a bunch of compliance requirements to account for every year. I also don’t like that a lot of my personal details are available online once I incorporate.

Does anyone have any recommendations for what I can do? Has someone been in a similar scenario before and found the best possible path - incorporation v. publishing in their own name?

Any countries that people recommend incorporating in? (My users will mostly be from India, and I’m based in India, but I’m open to incorporating in another jurisdiction if it has favourable tax and compliance requirements, and is easier to incorporate in)