Hey everyone.

I'm 25, and since I was 19, I ran a web design / SEO business. It changed a few times from being a general digital marketing agency, to a trades focused web design agency... etc.

I focused on generating leads for clients through their sites, automations and SEO and it worked quite well.

Long story short, the clients I helped can now and are actively switching over to AI models for their sites to be built, and this has led to a massive decline. The market is also extremely saturated, with people building sites for FREE, and I'm basically fed up with this business, and want to build something long-term.

I don't want to pivot this business, I want to shut it down completely. With AI only getting better, it won't be long until founders have full marketing tools that can do everything I do.

BUT

I have gained so many skills from this, which is excellent. Both business and marketing skills. I'm just struggling to find any service or business to apply it to.

I think as I've been in this business for 6 years now I almost have tunnel vision on any new opportunities.

I'm tempted to go and start a home service business, and apply all of these skills to that and hopefully grow that.

Does anyone have any advice on how to find new opportunities. Based in the UK by the way!

As the title says - does anybody know any good youtube channels or podcasts aimed at, or about, solo founders?

When we first started selling internationally, I assumed finding customers would be the hard part.

What I didn’t expect was how annoying the money side would get.

Customers paying from one country, suppliers in another, contractors somewhere else, then different currencies and accounts on top of that. None of it is individually that complicated, but once you’re dealing with all of it at the same time, it gets messy pretty fast.

I’ve been trying to simplify some of that lately instead of using our bank for absolutely everything. I’ve been testing a few different tools and setups, mostly because I wanted fewer separate places to deal with payments and money moving around.

Still too early for me to say I’d move everything away from the bank, though. I’m actually still figuring out which parts make sense to keep with a regular bank and which ones are easier to handle elsewhere.

I noticed smthng interesting recently. Price changes are usually the easy part to notice. A competitor lowers their price, launches a cheaper option or changes their offer.
The harder part is understanding why. The obvious reaction is usually “they’re trying to compete harder.” But sometimes there’s more behind it
Maybe their costs changed. Maybe they found a different way to source things. Maybe they’re testing a new market. Or maybe it’s just a short term move
the difficult part is that from the outside, you usually only see the result, not what caused it
For anyone running a business or keeping an eye on competitors, how do u usually look at this??  do u mostly watch market changes, talk to people in the industry or look for other clues?

New to entrepreneurship or just starting out? This is your space. Ask the questions you're afraid to ask elsewhere.

Experienced folks, jump in and share what you wish someone had told you early on.

The answer is probably very industry-dependent but overall, maybe sales? Design and marketing?

My background is in design & marketing, then went on to work on tech UX strategy, and I feel like it’s given me a huge advantage as the founder of a CPG company. I do wish I had more of a sales skillset.

What do you think?

I run a hotel consulting agency in Thailand, and 12 months ago I launched a sub-brand organizing corporate retreats for international, remotely distributed tech teams hosting their offsites here.

The backend synergy is great, we can feed to our hospitality partners and can command really attractive rates for our retreats because of it. But the frontend is messy. We have separate LinkedIn and Facebook pages for both brands, but knowing how to brand between the two is confusing. Example, last week we finished a 50 pax retreat and I’m unsure whether to share this on my main business page or specifically on the corporate retreats page or both.

Should I keep the socials completely separate and treat the consulting firm as a hidden engine, or is there a better way to structure two brands like this?

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.

Putting in my two weeks notice on Tuesday. May end up being a bad decision, but I’m ready to either succeed or fail with the only person to blame being myself. I need to know what it’s like to hold my own fate in my own hands and be ultimately accountable for whatever happens.

I’ve followed this sub for years. Tried several business ideas while working my day job which didn’t pan out. The business I’m running now has given me enough proof of market fit for me to finally feel like it’s time to give it everything I’ve got.

No real point to this post besides shouting into the void. Exciting and scary at the same time. Here we go!

I've seen on Instagram recently about Ai making market research easier. Back in the day you had to hold focus groups, and go through months of customer research before releasing your product or service ? Or are you guys still skeptical about it or not? I was thinking of hiring a market research agency or no need to? Just pay a Chatgpt subscription and it's on the Go? Or am I just overthinking?

Over the last 5 years, I built out a full turnkey operational package for a global mobility & residency advisory. I handled every piece of the supply side, tech stack, and brand infrastructure, but as an product person, I never picked up the phone to do high-touch HNW sales.

What is fully built & ready:

Supply-Side Provider Agreements: Direct relationships and signed agreements with established program providers across key jurisdictions (EU, Caribbean, UAE).

Proprietary Interactive Tool: Custom-built quote generator/calculator for HNW prospects to compare program costs, investment thresholds, and timelines in real time.

Luxury Brand & Marketing Suite: Complete brand identity, pitch decks, client intake collaterals, and high-converting landing pages tailored to HNWIs and family offices.

5-Year Digital Footprint: Custom client management portal, intake vault, aged domain, and structured CRM backend.

The Strategy Dilemma:

This isn't just a code repo, it's a turnkey business ready to take client deposits on day one. A wealth manager, immigration lawyer, or high-ticket sales agency could plug this into their existing audience immediately.

Since there is $0 historical cash flow, I'm trying to figure out the best valuation and deal structure strategy.

Questions for the community:

How do buyers value time to market savings when signed supplier contracts and custom interactive tools are included?

Is an upfront asset sale better, or a lower upfront price paired with a commission revenue-share on the first 10 closed deals?

What is the most effective way to pitch a turnkey asset like this to established wealth management practices or family offices?

TLDR: 5-year build with signed provider contracts, custom quote engine, and luxury marketing asset. Looking for advice on valuing turnkey operational packages.

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.

Outbound usually gets planned around who to contact and what to say, with timing treated as a scheduling detail that gets sorted out later. Based on the numbers I’ve gone through and the performance of the campaigns that prioritize signals over cold messaging, I’d say that order is backwards and timing should be the number one priority.

Across roughly 70,000 campaigns I've been able to look at (as the Director of Marketing & Sales, I have access to all Expandi’s data, including the campaigns our clients run, their performances, etc.), the campaigns that are build around reacting to something a person did outperformed cold list-based outreach by a wide margin. Messaging people you are already connected with has an average reply rate of 16.86%. Contacting people who attended the same LinkedIn event lands at 14.21%, and reaching out to someone shortly after they viewed your profile comes in at 13.4%. Cold campaigns, on the other hand, tend to sit somewhere in the 5 to 9% range.

Even if we take out the 16.86% reply rate when reaching out to people you’re already connected with (considering you’ll have to connect at some point anyway, regardless of whether the campaign is cold or signal-based), the reply rates are:

• 14.21% with the people who attended the same LI event
• 13.4% with the people who viewed your profile

vs

• 5%-9% from cold outreach

The difference is 4.4% to 9.21%, that’s approximately double the performance of cold outreach campaigns, which means that even the “simplest” singal-based outreach campaigns get 2x the replies of cold ones. And this only goes higher as you set up more steps and filters - for example, reaching out to people who reacted to a certain topic your product/service covers; targeting people who show interest in a product/service like yours through a comment or reaction, etc. With the right optimization and precise targeting, signal-based outreach can outperform cold outreach 3-4x, and this is just the baseline. Add well-performing copy on top of that, and a well-designed follow-up sequence, and you’ll have a goldmine campaign.

The signals worth building around are:

• Someone views your profile, especially more than once in a short window
• Someone engages with a post, yours or a competitor's, on a topic close to what you sell
• Someone attends an event in your space, which is a public list of people who set aside an hour for the subject
• Someone visits your company page without filling in anything
• Someone changes jobs into a role that owns the problem you solve

The main reason timer-based sequences underperform against this is that a timer cannot tell the difference between a person who is not interested at all, a person who is not interested at the moment, and a person who is not interested this month. 2 out of 3 here could be interested at some point in the future, and the best way to know that is by tracking their signals.

The only limitation is volume. Signal-based campaigns do not scale to fill a pipeline if you’re looking to sell a lot. The number of people who visit your profile or turn up to an event in a given week is small, and you do not control it. Anyone claiming they fully replaced cold outreach entirely with signal-based is either selling large-ticket deals that depend on quality>quantity, or just has a very wide pipeline build with dozens of active accounts, all pulling in new leads through signals. But this is extremely hard to build because it requires consistent activity on all accounts, and can be demanding to the point that the ROI isn't there.

The realistic version is that signals become the highest-converting slice of a mix that still contains cold outreach, and they are worth building first because that slice is cheap to serve and usually sitting untouched. Plus, it continues generating leads because, once you build a consistent presence and converting activity, new prospects will inevitably come. So think of it as a long-term investment as well, that also has some serious short-term benefits.

anybody want to bounce some ideas around?

love building things and helping where i can.

currently transitioning my buisness into a lean side hustle in the asphalt and civil industry

why i left it behind? i lost my drive and purpose but have now got it back working for a not for profit managing 50 poeple 60% have disabilites

would love a discussion with like minded individuals

The whole story is kinda long, so I'm gonna try and simplify it.

I tried hiring a cold call booking agent. I did, they made no conversions, only a bit some conversations saying "send me info". Did that for about a month due to troubleshooting -- maybe it was the leads, maybe it was the agent. I was also in between deciding a new niche and a major surgery.

Got rid of the first agent. The next one charged less and also offered faster turnaround time, excellent. Once again though, only produced signal.

"Fuck it" I say, "I'm going to do it myself". Slightly better results ("call me in x months"), still no bookings though. I also realize this is unsustainable.

Finally, through some unconventional networking, I hire a new agent. Within the first week, he's booked me six meetings, and we don't even have his software properly set up for him yet. It's only his first week!

My business has been in limbo for the past several months due to wrong hires, or to myself taking on tasks which should've been delegated. The only reason I came across my current employee was dumb luck.

Long story short: save yourself a headache and go through a hiring process.

Hello,

I feel like im a pretty smart person and open minded, but when it comes to profits I feel somewhat depressed when I see others that have less or same amount of experience do much better than I do.

I'm in multiple fields with enormous amounts of money around me, but I don't make as much. People around me often make 30 - 100K$ a day on average while for me that's very far away.

Don't get me wrong I'm doing well, but not as well as they whom spend less time than I did.

I find myself in a situation of feeling miserable and like a loser since I technically should be where they are since I have more effort put into all of it.

I know this isn't doing me any good, that's why im trying to find the right thoughts/mindset to stop myself from going down the rabbit hole with these emotions.

If there's some advice you could suggest that helped you overcome similar/this exact feeling i'd highly appreciate it.

Hey everyone,
I’m still in school doing my Abitur, but I’ve already registered my own business for online services.

My current idea is to work with a White Label company that already has clients. They would basically buy my service and sell it to their clients under their own name.

I would then find a freelancer who can actually do the work. I would basically be the middle man and keep the margin.

I like the idea because I can start this while finishing school without having to spend a huge amount of time finding clients. If it works, I’d like to scale it after my Abitur and hopefully make enough money to support myself during university, or potentially even make university unnecessary if the business grows enough.

What do you guys think about this?
Is this model actually realistic?
Are there any major problems I’m overlooking?

And if you were in my position, still in school with limited time and relatively little starting capital, would you do something completely different?

Would be really interested in hearing any ideas or experiences from people who have done something similar.

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 have a decent amount of experience shipping both large and small goods from China for some of my clients. Since the tariffs from the current administration have resulted in restrictions on various goods and caused shipping delays from China I'm curious if anyone is looking to Vietnam.

Another thing that often confuses my clients:
Oftentimes the D2D (door to door) and port retrieval process is a bit confusing, and can result in additional costs.

Has anyone shipped directly from Vietnam? It seems like they are trying to solve some of the key issues related to D2D shipping for small business owners looking to import goods.

I saw recently a new logistics service called Viahart Logistics.

Here are the key features they are claiming:

1. Requires no broker negotiation.

2. Instant pricing.

3. The firm claims they will price match.

4. Compensation for late shipments (10% on their site is the claim)

5. Delivery is to your door.

I'm considering advising clients to diversify their supply chain, wondering if anyone has experience with Viahart Logistics or Vietnam in general. Thank you!

I first started a cold calling agency at the end of january of this year, which is also when i got my first client.

After client 1 figuring out how to get a steady flow of meetings was extremely hard, but I eventually figured it out around July.

So you can imagine for a period of about 6 months we just had a lot of nothing meetings and my time was spent wondering if there was a market for my service and if this is worth doing.

Now, I get 1-2 meetings a day pretty consistently but since I have been at that point operations and delivery have been the main bottle neck.

I ended up making the decision to make a reddit post, luckily I did, got connected with a few people, got connected with more people FROM those people, found someone 3x bigger than me or so, ended up getting coaching from him and I am much happier with where my operations are not now.

They're still not perfect, but I wouldn't feel comfortable trying to take on more clients if I didn't think they we're perfect or near perfect, but, there's people who just where I am at now 6 months ago doing, 80, 100, 120k a month now, so, I feel as though I am right at the treshold, even though theres thing with the business I am not happy about, I feel like I am smart enough to eventually figure them out and build the business I have been wanting to build for a very long time now.

At once I am at that point I will feel comfortable trying to acquire a substantial amount of new clients.

Has anyone else had this feeling before? was your instinct right?

I’ve been thinking about how different entrepreneurship looks from the outside compared to when you're actually in it. Before starting, most people focus on the big things-getting customers, making money, building a brand, and growing. But once you're actually working on a business, you realise that a lot of the difficult parts are things nobody really talks about. For me, one of the biggest lessons has been that you don’t need to have everything figured out before you start. You learn a lot by actually doing the work, making mistakes, adjusting, and trying again. So I'm curious: What is one thing you wish you had known before starting your business? Could be about money, customers, marketing, hiring, mistakes, or anything else. I’d genuinely like to hear what other entrepreneurs have learned along the way. Important: Don’t add your website link in the main post. First, get genuine discussion and participate in the comments.

I do interview coaching and it’s going remarkably well. Our review has doubled every quarter this year and last month we did $50k, which practically all of it is profit. I do about 80% of the coaching, have 1 associate who does 20%, just got another, and have a 3rd who we are onboarding now. I am in talks with a company to develop CRM software that integrates into our site.

My biggest problem today is scheduling - once a client is assigned we do everything via text all manually. This is tough as I can’t see what my associates are doing and I have had a very hard time limiting how much work I’ve been doing.

I think the two easiest options are either Calendly or similar scheduling software, or a PA (probably from abroad) who does it all for us.

What scheduling programs have people used? Any issues with clients needs and you availability not lining up? How are PAs?

One thing I’ve found surprisingly difficult in international business is deciding what not to pursue
u can look at a few countries and find reasons to go after each one. One has a bigger market, another is growing faster, another has less competition
on paper, they can all look pretty good. But most teams don’t have the time or money to seriously test all of them
so at some point you have to pick a direction, and that’s where it gets tricky. A market can look great in a report and still turn out to be a bad fit once you actually start working on it
for anyone who’s expanded into new markets, how do u usually narrow things down?? do u go with the biggest market, the fastest growing one or is there smthng else you look at before putting real resources into it?