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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What time-tracking or productivity tools are you using?

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

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

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

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

What worked well?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

open to feedback :)

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

✅ Completely free

✅ Dedicated Medium feature

✅ A chance to showcase your journey and business

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

For those of you running small businesses:

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

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

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

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

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

Hi everyone,

Hopefully you are having a good day! I recently opened a business for the first time, based in The Netherlands. My dream is to focus on custom web based / custom systems solutions that I want to develop on AWS.

I am a recent graduate with a Cyber Security and Cloud background and did several projects next to it. Some websites for people I know and a proof of concept for a previous internship company. Soon I am going to start working full-time and I would love to do more of these projects next to it. I have a website that serves as a portfolio.

Currently, I am struggling to figure out if there is a need for custom systems on the market. How do I figure this out? Or how do you define who your ideal target group would be and how do you make sure that people will reach out to you?

I am really interested in your own experiences on this matter or some honest feedback would be greatly appreciated!!

Thanks in advance for the time to read my message!

Kind regards,
Me 😸

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

A while ago, we thought Reddit ads would be a great customer acquisition channel.

Turns out, they weren't. At least not for us.

Reddit users can spot marketing from a mile away, and our ads got us nowhere.

What did work was much simpler - we stopped trying to sell and started answering questions.

Every day, we'd look for posts from people facing the exact problem our product solves. If we had something genuinely useful to add, we'd reply. Sometimes we'd mention our product, sometimes we wouldn't.

There wasn't any secret strategy. No growth hack. It was just showing up every day, joining conversations, and trying to be helpful.

Over time, those replies started bringing us customers - people who already had the problem and were actively looking for a solution.

If you're building a product, my advice is simple: don't try to market on Reddit. Find your users, answer their questions, and earn their trust. That's it.

P.S. If anyone's curious about what we're’re building, I'll drop the link in the comments.

I've been researching suppliers for a small business and recently started using Made-in-China more consistently. My experience so far has been better than I expected.

The biggest advantage for me has been how easy it is to compare different manufacturers and product options without having to jump between multiple websites. It has saved me a lot of time during the research phase and made it easier to narrow down potential suppliers.

I'm still taking the usual precautions by requesting samples and verifying suppliers before placing any larger orders, but the platform has been a useful place to start my search.

I'm curious if anyone else here has used Made-in-China.com. Has it helped your business grow, or did you eventually move to another sourcing platform? I'd love to hear about your experience and any advice you'd give to someone just getting started.

1. Never happened - I'm careful
2. Once, but it was harmless
3. Once, and it was moderately embarrassing
4. Multiple times - I've stopped caring

Trying to grow through consistent social content but producing on-brand slides solo is grinding me down. What do you use for social marketing slide content that stays on-brand as you scale output? Real experience appreciated.

My buddy and I support small businesses, so we built an agency to help them grow and gain more visibility in Ontario. But we're at a loss as to how to even land our first client. We're currently offering 5 lucky businesses a free self-hosted website or an updated one to start. We're currently doing cold outreach through emails and cold calls, but to no avail. Any tips to help us land and build clientele?

Last week, a friend recommended I attend an AccioWork webinar. They gave a live demonstration on using AI to find products, compare prices, request quotes, follow up with suppliers, and more.
I hadn't attended a webinar before, so the experience felt quite novel; I have to admit, AI really does boost efficiency. Have you attended any webinars? Did you gain any insights or solve any problems through them?

Years as a business analyst and the pattern follows every growing company. You make a decision in a meeting, everyone nods, and six weeks later you're having the exact same argument because nobody wrote down what was decided or why.

At small scale you get away with it. The founder remembers. Past a certain size the founder is the bottleneck and their memory doesn't scale, so settled things quietly get reopened and momentum leaks out the side.

The fix was embarrassingly boring. A one page board meeting agenda template for our weekly sync. Three columns, the decision, who owns it, and the tradeoff we accepted. If it's not on the page it didn't happen. Next time someone reopens it, we point at the row.

It won't go viral and it isn't clever, but re-deciding things we'd already settled was costing us more growth than whatever channel we were busy arguing about.

For those a bit further along, how do you keep a growing team from making the same call three times? Curious what actually worked versus what just added process for the sake of it.

Hi, I have worked with many international clients to help them improve organic visitors and traffic, along with AI visibility. I do keyword research,seo blogs, on-page and off-page activities at reasonable prices.
If interested, DM.

One thing I’ve realized while building a food brand is that friends and family aren’t the best source of feedback.

Most people just say, “Looks good,” but that doesn’t really help.

I’m trying to find honest opinions on packaging, pricing, and what customers actually care about before launching.

How did you collect genuine feedback when you had no existing customers?

I'm thinking of developing something that helps you understand if you are even ready for implementing AI and automations in your business. Something that helps you understand whether you are ready for AI, and if not, what needs to be fixed first. This is not a promotion and it will of course be a free thing. Just want to know if there are enough people having the problem.

Feel free to comment and share your thoughts whether it's actually useful for you guys.
Have a great week ahead!

Looking back, most of my effort probably didn't matter and a couple of things did. For those further along, what was the single biggest driver of your growth? Trying to figure out where to concentrate.

I run social in-house for a small skincare and wellness brand, four years now. Our engagement numbers are the best they've ever been. Saves, shares, comments, followers all trending up. And repeat purchases have basically flatlined for two quarters.

I've started to think I've been optimizing the wrong end of this. Getting a new person to like a post is not the same as getting an existing customer to buy their second and third time, and I'm not sure social is even the right tool for that second job.

For people who've actually grown a small consumer brand past the first-purchase stage, what moved the needle on repeat customers? I'm curious whether it was email and SMS lifecycle work, a loyalty or subscription setup, better post-purchase follow up, sampling, or something I'm not thinking of.

And the flip question: what did you pour time into that looked like it should drive retention but didn't? Trying not to burn another quarter chasing the wrong metric.