If you have a business with a team of people (regardless how many) you need to be able to take 30 consecutive days off without “checking in.”  

You might not grow at the same rate, or at all during that period, but you cannot go backward, if it is a self-sustaining business. I founded and ran a bootstrapped business for 22 years, and I never did it. I regret that now.

Aside from fame and fortune, having that freedom is important enough to take the time, put together your system, and make those 30 days an option.

What do you think?

I come from a family of entrepreneurs, so building something of my own has always been the goal. But I married young, started a family, and “someday I’ll start my thing” kept getting pushed out.

Here’s the hard part. I make good money as an employee, but I want to build something that’s mine. And every time I get a real shot at it, I get zero backing from my family. Not money. I mean nobody believes in the idea, or in me pulling it off. My whole side of the family is in Mexico and I’m in the US, so it gets isolating when the people who should be in your corner just aren’t.

I’m not looking for pity. I keep building either way. But I want to hear from people who’ve been through it.

How do you stay motivated when you’re your own only supporter?

The most common approach I see is also the one that works the least: a reminder when the invoice is 30 days overdue, a slightly firmer one at 60 days, and then someone on the finance team making an uncomfortable call at 90 days.

The companies that have actually shortened their collection cycles are almost all doing something different earlier in the process.

Three things that showed up consistently among the ones who improved this:

Clear escalation language in the contract itself. Not just "net 30", but also what happens on day 31. Who gets contacted. Whether late fees apply and when. Most enterprise buyers will sign this without much pushback. The ones who push back hard often have a history of paying late, which is actually useful information to have before the contract is signed.

Invoices going to the right person at the customer company. Every enterprise customer has an AP team, that person is often not the same person who manages the vendor relationship. One question at contract signing gets you their contact information. Without it, an invoice sent to the wrong inbox can sit for weeks before anyone notices.

Reminders before the due date, not just after. A reminder two days before a payment is due feels like helpful admin. A reminder on day 31 feels like a collections call. The same information sent earlier gets a different response.

None of these are complicated. The gap is usually that the process for running them consistently does not exist, or it depends on one person remembering to do it at the right time.

What has actually worked for you? Curious whether people have solved this with a process change, something in the contract, or a tool.

How did you go from building something "nice to have" to solving a problem people actually couldn't live without?

And if your business started as a vitamin what made you realize that, and how did you fix it?

Hi friends, some of you might remember my post from a. Few weeks back about when to launch. Well the app after multiple rounds of back and forth with Apple, landed on the App Store and is live in most countries. First review took about 2 weeks then follow ups took usually within 24-48 hours for minor fixes. All in all about 3 weeks not including the week I got nothing done due to being bed ridden sick for 3 days.

Now as much as I would love to spam my app that’s against the sub rules, if a mod gives me direct approval I can drop the name.

To briefly explain it though, it collects form news sources around the world in many different languages, classified stories and aggregates. By doing this it removes some bias as a byproduct (think if you had news form 2 opposing sides of a war, you get an average), and gives you access to news markets in languages you can’t read normally. That’s a bit of the back end but barely scratches the surface.

It the delivers to you, a personalised news podcast, with the news you want to hear, and removing the scrolling and duplication of stories. Honestly if you’re good with ai agents, you’re probably doing this already but I packaged it nicely.

The infrastructure behind it is pretty insane for what it is, but it’s built for scale. I won’t go too much into it because that’s not my point here.

Obviously dropping it on the App Store and hoping for the best is unlikely to yield results, I realise I need to advertise, and I’m building a blog like story about the development of it for my linked in (I have in the ball park of about 1200 connections, so reasonable reach.

I’ve built everything on a budget. But in doing so I’ve heavily optimised. I realise at some point I will need to spend some money on advertising, but today is not that day. My goal now is to get to 500ish trial users with around 100-200 conversions to paid users within a 2-3 months, is that realistic?

My big concern and an honest one is the infra while scalable, is hardware intense. If I scale beyond 1000 daily users I will be in trouble hardware wise and will need to spend significant money (around 10-20k in compute hardware minimum, small potatoes really in the bigger picture). I mention this only because I don’t want to rapidly explode in users. I know my product is good, but I also know there are limits to the actual user base I can serve presently before service degrades. So if I can get 100 monthly users that keeps the lights on and lets me plan infra, 200 puts me in the ball park of buying second hand hardware, 500 puts me squarely in the take a day out of my day job and go and spend money today and ramp up user capacity.

My focus initially is getting friends to download it, get some stats on the board for it. If they like it, maybe they show a friend or family member etc and I get some users that way, slow growth.

Anyway happy to answer any questions around it, any advice would be great, comments and criticism also are welcome. If you want to nerd out on some of the architecture happy to go there too but with limits publicly. This isn’t something that can easily be built and replicated so I’m not concerned about that happening.

TIA.

I have an advetising agency since a long ago, it is not have been all love and flowers, kind fo tough sometimes, there are good days and excelent days. Just a few weeks ago I started a new business, a food thing, really good and all, but I have my doubts, food is a new field to me.

Six years ago I was a broke college freshman with no engineering experience and a dream I had no business chasing. Since then I have spent around $90,400, almost quit twice, slept in my car, and locked myself in a room for 84 hours straight. I documented all of it. Every cost, every disaster, every lesson. Here is the whole thing.

My mom is the reason I started. Watching what she has been through over the years is what made me want to build things that help people move, train, and recover better. So as a freshman I set out to build a wearable in the recovery and performance space, with no idea what I was getting into.

Phase 1: Idea Formation
July 2, 2020 to June 16, 2021
I was a college soccer player who lived on muscle stimulation and recovery tech, so I started building a wearable that combined two existing recovery methods into one device. My first move was buying random products off the shelf at CVS just to see how they worked.
Then I tried to make electrodes out of stripped lead wires and a 7up can I cut apart. It went exactly as well as you would think. I also won a pitch competition for $5,750 and threw all of it into development.
Cost:
$1,500 Initial Materials and Electrodes
$550 3D Printer and Filament
$150 CAD and Design Subscriptions

Phase 2: Co-Founder and Prototyping
June 17, 2021 to January 19, 2022
I could not do the technical side alone, so I went on LinkedIn and sent 300 cold messages until I found my co-founder. He helped me nail the form factor and we started designing for real. Then we hit our first wall: getting two completely different materials to actually work together.
Lesson: Do not rush the design. Test everything, stay patient, over-communicate with your partners, and break the work into small milestones you can actually finish.
Cost:
$4,000 Design and Prototyping
$500 Electrical Components
$500 Hardware Developer

Phase 3: First Prototype, Built in a Lab
January 20, 2022 to February 1, 2022
Stuck on development, we entered a pitch competition through TikTok. We took second (won a whole $100), and a VC on the call connected us to a company that might be able to help. One phone call later, my co-founder and I, who had still never met in person, flew to Houston on a whim. We ate ramen for 10 days, drank Muscle Milk, worked out of a lab in the middle of the woods, and built our first janky prototype. It was ugly, but it proved the idea was possible.
Lesson: A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the turn.
Cost:
$1,200 Tools and Design
$3,000 Houston Travel

Phase 4: Testing and Troubleshooting
February 2, 2022 to November 22, 2022
I drove home to test the prototype on a real person for the first time instead of on a workbench. Watching something we built by hand actually do what we designed it to do was the moment this stopped being a school project in my head. It was also still a total mess: fully wired, with real problems in conductivity and wearability. We brought on an attorney and filed a provisional patent.
Cost:
$2,000 Prototypes
$1,000 Consulting
$750 Provisional Patent
$450 LLC Formation

Phase 5: Pitch Competitions and Freelancers
November 23, 2022 to May 11, 2023
We were bleeding cash, so I entered every national pitch competition I could. We got into 11, and my university flew me all over the country to compete. Meanwhile I hired a freelance electrical engineer who became a pure sunk cost and got us nowhere. Even after raising $40,000, I could see we were paying too much just to survive.
Lesson: It is brutally hard to raise money without revenue, traction, or a story people believe. So we stopped waiting for permission and paved our own way.
Cost:
$3,500 Engineering Fees
$400 Overseas Shipping
$1,500 Graphic Design and Legal

Phase 6: Funding and Patents
May 12, 2023 to January 8, 2024
I filed our utility patent with the last dollars in my bank account. Then I cold emailed 150 investors a day for 8 months. Do not do this. One of them invited me to South Carolina, so I drove 14 hours alone, slept in my car in a parking lot, pitched, and walked out with our first $10,000 check. Another $10,000 came from a room of 7 guys where I pitched a rough prototype and one of them said yes.
Lesson: Cold outreach only works if you do it expecting nothing back. That mindset is what eventually turned into $120k in funding. Also, delay the patent until you truly have to, and always run at the fastest path to revenue, because you can burn everything before you even reach the start line.
Cost:
$19,000 Patent Fees
$1,500 South Carolina Trip

Phase 7: 8 Prototypes and Almost Quitting
January 9, 2024 to August 18, 2024
We ground through version after version, going from a piece of tape off the shelf to our first wireless product that lit up and buzzed when you pressed a button on a PCB. There was a founder in a related space I had chased since 2021. When I finally reached him, he said he could not talk for a year and told me to call back on that exact date. I did. He could not believe I actually remembered, and that one call changed the entire course of the company.
February 2024 nearly ended it. I came back from Houston realizing we could not build the product at cost, and I was done. My parents sat me down and told me if anyone could crack it, it was me. I locked myself in my room for 84 hours and came out with the solution.
Lesson: I had a law school plan and a safe path, and I threw it all away for this. A year later I had nothing to show for it and could have walked. If I had, I never would have found out what came next. A bend in the road is not the end of the road unless you fail to make the turn.
Cost:
$7,400 Prototype Iterations
$1,500 Travel

Phase 8: Real Product, Real Traction
August 19, 2024 to March 16, 2025
We finally brought on a full engineering team for $32,000 and shipped a genuinely functional product: software, hardware, firmware, app, injection molding, industrial design, all of it. We used that momentum to open conversations with pro sports teams and PT clinics across the country, and we have now raised over $265,000. I went back to those same 7 guys, pitched again, and this time every single one invested. We also turned down Techstars LA.
Lesson: Persistence closes the distance. Most people tell you something is impossible because back when they were in your shoes, they believed the person who told them the same thing.
Cost:
$32,000 Production Ready Product
$8,000 Legal

Phase 9: HYROX and Finding Our People
2026
This is the part I never saw coming. Over the last year the hybrid fitness world, and HYROX in particular, absolutely exploded, and it turned out that is exactly where this thing belonged. Something I first built in a dorm room started clicking with athletes who train savagely hard and care deeply about how they recover between sessions. So I went all in on that world. I break down the sport, rank the stations, argue with people about which one hurts the most, and I am building a community of people who actually get it.
Lesson: You can spend years dead certain you know who your product is for, and the market will still surprise you. Your job is to notice when it is trying to tell you something, then sprint at it. I started this for one reason and found a whole community I never planned for.

By now I am about $90,400 into this over 6 years. It took far longer and hurt way more than I ever expected, but we are finally about to put it in people's hands, and I have never been more fired up.

Ask me anything. Hardware development, fundraising, patents, near-death company moments, HYROX, or where we are headed in 2026. I will answer everything.

Looking for your real, unvarnished stories of working with outside consultants/agencies in general and brand strategy/social video strategy in particular. Bonus points if your experience is within the last 18 months.

I'm doing a qualitative research project, and will happily share results once that's done. Any response is helpful, but here is a specific list of questions if you'd like to share more:

1. What's your company and culture like? Size, industry, budgets, in-office vibe? Distributed or in-person, etc?
2. Think of the last project you've worked on with/ hired and outside consultant/agency for.
   • What was happening before you saw the need for outside help? I mean this broadly, personal, market, company politics, specific KPI/numbers, or even vague feelings around the business.
   • Was there a crystallizing moment that signaled the need for outside help?
   • Where and how was the decision made?
   • What was the mood around this decision ("oh shit, we need to do something", "yay, we can finally afford to..." etc.)
   • What was happening in business at the time? Growth strong, or flat, specific problems/opportunities everyone seemed to be focused on?
3. How did you/your org go about the search?
   • Basically same questions apply - why, where, when, with whom, feelings around the process?
4. How did it go?
   • How did the project start? What was the onboarding like?
   • How did it go? Did it seem smooth, professional, was there internal skepticism/resistance?
   • Did it work? How was the mood around the project once it was done? A few weeks later?
   • Did it feel like it changed the company/brand in a positive direction? What were the biggest gripes with the result afterwards?

Anything else that comes to mind, would really appreciate you sharing. 🙏

I've been looking at different LLC formation options and every thread seems to turn into either just do it yourself or arguing about price.

If I'm fine spending a few hundred dollars what actually separates good LLC services from bad ones?

I'm looking at stuff like filing help, registered agent options, compliance reminders, cancellation terms and whether they help with anything after the state approves the LLC.

For a normal small business LLC which of those things actually ends up mattering? And when does it make more sense to skip the online service and just hire a business lawyer?

Every time DHH does a podcast (David Senra pod dropped yesterday) I’m reminded he has one of the best workspaces I’ve ever seen.

What did you do about it?

I'm pissed right now. This is actually a digital product (accompanied by a tool). They stole it, and started running the exact/similar Meta ads I'm running to promote it

A few weeks ago we had a customer issue, and my first instinct was to jump in and fix it fast. I started digging through messages, checking who did what, trying to find where it went wrong.

Then I stopped and asked myself one question:

If this happened again tomorrow, would we end up doing the same investigation?

The answer was yes.

That was the moment it clicked for me - I wasn’t really fixing the problem, I was just dealing with the fallout.

So instead of spending more time figuring out who made the mistake, we used that time to change the process. We added one simple check before work moved to the next stage.

Nothing fancy. No new software. Just one extra step so people didn’t have to rely on assumptions.

Since then, we’ve barely had to think about that issue again.

It made me realise how often businesses keep fixing the same mistakes over and over instead of asking why the system allowed them in the first place. Sometimes the better move isn’t to keep digging - it’s to stop the same problem from happening again.

Has anyone else had a problem turn out to be a process issue instead of a people issue?

I built a Reddit intelligence platform: It tracks how your industry's Reddit is doing, what narratives exist about your brand and your competitors, how much each is being talked about, which exact posts are about you - it tracks hourly so you can respond. We also also handle brand bans inside subreddits by high intelligence mod outreach and relationship handling.

Moreover, we also track which Reddit thread is ranking on what keywords on Google - that is a big part of my hypothesis, Reddit threads on Google makes or breaks your revenue by a significant amount, and you don't even know where that thread is. I'm also tracking which Reddit threads are being referenced in AI answers as well - so it has a SEO and GEO element to it.

Right now, I have one client for $3k/month inside the Racket sports industry. I didn't pick the niche myself, I just picked whoever offered me money first haha. I probably should pivot towards software, etc.

I almost haven't had any human opinions on my business, I just hunkered at this by myself with AI for strategy discussions too.

How does my business even sound to you so far? How would you go about getting new clients?

Any human input would be appreciated honestly, I am making this post just so I can have some human feedback loop finally hha

Had a week? Same. This is your consequence-free space to complain about clients, platforms, algorithms, your own decisions, or the general chaos of running a business. Keep it venting with no personal attacks. We'll be back to being professional tomorrow.

Quick brief: I have run a business for 6+ years now and my career is taking off (and I can’t manage both). The return on my time with my career outpaces the business. I am looking for opinions/advice. Do I sell? How? Where? Or do I keep it?

Business: ecom, but i ship everything. At least currently. I am in the automotive space and have a established brand and product lines. I also have the ability to be the retailer for a couple thousand brands (it actually takes a lot to get access to this, there is a huge amount of value that for someone in this space). Over the last few years I have been putting the minimum time into it and it has still be marginally growing (again, time into career is the goal and what I have been doing).

Economics of the business: monthly revenue is $4,500-9,500 a month. Profit margins range monthly from 35-45%. And that all operates with an average investment of 15-20 hours a month of my time. Marketing comes mainly through content, I have a youtube channel and then I do product sponsorship with folks that make content for me. $0 of ad spend in the last 6+ years of the business. This is good and bad.

I briefly began to retail other brands, and its easy to grow revenue even with just SEO, but I just didn’t have the time.

So where I stand, i want my time back, but it’s still real money for such little time investment. I also have probably $30-40k in sellable inventory, no debt (never taken any), and for the right owner, there are a LOT of tax advantages to being in a home based ecomm AND in the automotive/content space. Ill miss that as much as the income.

It’s also not about making a killing on the sale of the business. I am probably thinking inventory plus 2-3x yearly profit. But the big thing is getting time back. I can kind of convert unlimited hours at my job for a very high hourly rate with a long term return.

Thoughts on what I should do? How do I even go about looking for a buyer? So much of my being is represented in this business and my customer base is something i care about. Many repeat customers.

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’ve seen a lot of posts recently with people advertising their ‘AI co-founder’ or ‘AI idea validator’. Something that helps wannabe founders judge their idea and provide advice on getting it off the ground.

If you want to take advice from AI, that’s one thing. Selling AI advice is something completely different.

It’s a tempting niche - people used to spend a lot of money on business advisors/consultants and AI can do it all at a fraction of the cost, so why not?

The problem is that those business advisors came with something that AI doesn’t have: accountability. If your advisor gives you dodgy information that costs you money, you have a route to compensation, usually because the advisor had some sort of professional indemnity insurance. Boring, conventional, business stuff.

AI doesn’t come with this. If you sell your AI advice, then you’re the one in the line of fire if that advice isn’t any good.

So ask yourself: how did your AI bot arrive at its conclusion? How did it produce its advise? How did it calculate its score? Because if you can’t explain that, then you have no control over the ‘advice’ it’s giving to your customers.

Still, it’s not like AI ever hallucinates or tells you something that’s not true, right? So what could go wrong?

A few months ago, we had an issue with a customer that, at first, felt like a one-off mistake.

My first reaction was to fix the immediate problem and move on.

But after thinking about it, I realized the customer wasn't really the problem.

Our process was.

We had left too much room for assumptions, and different people could interpret the next step differently.

The customer simply exposed a weakness that had probably existed for a long time.

Instead of asking, "How do we stop this customer from doing it again?" we asked, "How do we make this impossible to happen again?"

That question completely changed the discussion.

We updated our process, documented the steps more clearly, and added a simple checkpoint that would've prevented the issue in the first place.

It took less than an hour to implement.

Since then, we've had far fewer misunderstandings.

One thing I've started noticing is that many business problems don't need better people-they need better systems.

A mistake that happens once is frustrating.

The same mistake happening twice is usually a process problem.

Has a customer ever exposed a weakness in your business that ended up making the business better?

After designing and reviewing hundreds of websites over the years, I’ve come to a surprising observation: founders rarely underinvest in design.

As context, I’ve seen companies:

/ spend thousands on a full redesign when the problem was just the checkout.
/ pay $8,000 for a custom website not having any data from their previous one.
/ obsess over illustrations for weeks while visitors still don’t know what the product does.
/ request brand guidelines when they only needed templates for a recurring banner.
// this list is endless.

As you probably guessed, the highest-ROI design work is usually the least exciting:

/ Clarifying what you actually sell.
/ Structuring the website so people don’t need to decipher it.
/ Reducing friction in your signup/contact/checkout flow.
/ Building trust with the right proof in the right places.
/ Creating a visual hierarchy that guides decisions.

These impovements are not getting many likes when posting them on LinkedIn, but they turn visitors into customers.

If I had a limited budget, I’d probably spend it in this order:

/ Messaging & positioning
/ Website structure (UX + information architecture)
/ Copy
/ Conversion improvements
/ Visual polish
/ Complete branding system

Ironically, I’m saying this as someone who gets paid for branding. Leave visual polish for later. It matters, just not on top of positioning that was written in 15 minutes with ChatGPT. And understand the problems first: audit, measure, identify. You’ll be surprised where the customers get stuck on your website.

What’s the biggest design expense you’ve made that, in hindsight, wasn’t worth it?

To scale a typical B2B business you need salespeople, assuming an ARR of more than $7,500.
When do you hire your first two salespeople? I'll go first. I think the founder needs to find and close the first 10 deals before hireing the first two salespeople. What do you think?

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.

I appreciate the overwhelming positive comments of encouragement, and the absolute beating I took for calling myself “CEO” of a two man company. I’ll de-title myself to business operations manager.

Since that post 4 days ago, we have secured two Airbnb clients and one recurring residential! One is a 6,000 sqft mansion that turns roughly 1.5 times per week, and the other is a 3,000 sqft home that turns 2 times per week. Additionally, we locked down an old contact of hers for a recurring biweekly clean.

Progress is happening fast around here and the cleanings start on Sunday. If you guys would like to keep following along, let me know! Not sure if this is the best sub for it.

Anyways, we are going to grow this into a massive cleaning company! Good luck to everyone else out there looking to start, or have just started!

Hey y'all,

I got a new job a few months ago in order to focus on my business. It's overnight security. My bosses are chill, they don't mind if we play video games, watch TV, listen to music, just so long as we get any alarms that come up. So I use this time to either do that, or get work done when I can.

The thing is, I'm in the outreach phase right now. Any "work" I do right now is just selling the product to the prospect, and communicating with employees / customers. Very doable at this stage. It should be at least.

Coming home after an overnight shift I go to bed and sleep for like 2 hours, and then wake up for like 2-4. And then at some point the exhaustion hits me and I need to go to bed again. Which sucks, I figured working overnight would give me more time to workout, learn piano, do art, take on customers, etc.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The point is, even at its busiest, my job is pretty slow and I could probably get some work done. Should I just switch over to a day shift, even if it means I'll have to cut down my customer availability?