I’m not kidding when she literally looked at me like:

👁️👄👁️

Why do managers suck at communicating and then look at you and think you’re the dumbest person ever if you ask them to clarify something?

I know. It’s mind boggling that an entry-level associate has questions and knows less than a senior manager.

EDIT: for context, the reason why I went to this manager for clarification was because I was told, by her, to just come to her for any questions because it was her project/client.

My husband owns a small business with around 50 employees, and I’m helping him figure out Christmas gifts for the team this year. He’s not really a Reddit person, so I figured I’d ask here since I know there are a lot of small business owners here. We’ve never done anything like this before, so honestly I have no idea where to start. Do you usually order some kind of branded merch in bulk, or just get everyone the same gift?

The budget isn’t huge, so we’re trying to keep it reasonably affordable. I’d also prefer to get something people would actually use instead of another random mug that ends up in a cupboard somewhere. For those of you who run small businesses, what have you done for your employees for Christmas? And how did you go about ordering everything for a group of around 50 people?

Thank you in advance!

I’m going to be starting a CPG business (selling online).

I want to make my first step into product development, but I always get kinda scared once it’s “done”, because then i’m like “now what”.

Should I start posting on instagram (but not the actual product, since I don’t have it, I can’t)

I basically want some practice that won’t cost me money or much money. Besides creating the website, what else can I do to have things kinda lined up?

I want to be ready and not scared.

I'm currently looking for software engineering and iOS engineering roles in the startup space, and I've been trying to reach founders directly.

I've tried cold email and LinkedIn, but my response rate has basically been zero.

I also try not to send the generic "Hi, I'm a software engineer looking for opportunities" message. Usually I'll spend some time looking through the product, find something I think could be improved or a technical/product issue I noticed, and reach out explaining the problem and how I'd approach fixing it.

Still, most of the time I don't hear anything back.

So for the founders here, I'm genuinely curious:

When an engineer reaches out to you directly, what actually makes you read and respond?

Would love to hear what has actually worked from the founder side.

Been running a small business for 3 months and trying to decide if I should invest in growth tools. The time it takes to grow organically is insane when you're also trying to run the business.

Looking at options some cost hundreds for so called organic growth strategies that might not even work. Then there are the direct engagement services that cost almost nothing but feel like cheating.

What's been your experience? Did you invest in growth and see returns?

Hey folks. I’m starting a new role as head of marketing at a startup. I’m no stranger to startups having spent years in one at my previous gig.

However, this is the first time I’ll be joining somewhere as a head of rather than working my way up. I’ll literally be a team of one, which is quite new territory as well.

My background is more content / creative / positioning / brand strategy, but through the help of AI, I’ve been able to pick up other marketing fundamentals - e.g. forecasting, unit economics, ramp up modelling, as well as the fundamentals of SEO etc.

Anyway, I’m feeling a bit of imposter syndrome as this is a great company doing great work and I don’t want to fuck it up. I’m reading loads and trying to brush up on areas that I feel aren’t my strongest.

Just wondering if anyone has any advice on how I should tackle my first few weeks? Any solo head of marketers out there in startup land? How have you used AI to help scale your output?

Sorry, probably a bit vague but just generally after some thoughts / advice etc. Thanks!

So, basically I have been making a product in the software space for some time now and i just realised i do not have any distribution and as a developer I will keep on working on it adding features but it would make this product more of a personal project than a product which can make me money and thus I wanted to know how do early stage founders or small projects get their first users and validate the market???

So I recently found a local fish and chip shop for sale. It’s listed for £300k which included the business, the location as well as a 3 bed flat above the business. The advert boasts a yearly profit of £133k without any social media presence, online ordering portal or delivery service. It clearly has space to scale.

I live in the UK, I’m 25 years old and I am sick of working for someone else. I want to buy this business with a long time friend as we can both put in the time and effort to make this work.

Does anyone have any ideas as to how we could get a loan to buy this business? What we would need to be able to secure a loan like this considering we have no previous history of running a business?

for example the latest 80s trend happening in social media. Who the hell started it even?

Logically, incorporation is done in Delaware, while the company’s operations should be based in a city like NYC. Once the legal and operational foundation is established, the next step is to build the company, acquire its initial users, and demonstrate early traction.

From there, how does begin looking for investors work? Is it just through network? Startup events? Direct outreach to venture capital firms?

I Co-run a small agency doing a specialized B2B service (video editing for coaches/founders posting educational content on YouTube. mentioning the niche only for context, not pitching).

My last cold email campaign had strong top-of-funnel numbers, but I can't get people over the finish line.

The numbers:

- 496 leads. manually sourced and qualified against our ICP
- 79% open rate (Instantly says this is the number of leads that have opened at least one email in the campaign)
- 7.1% reply rate, excluding auto-replies.
- Of those replies, 20% were positive (7 total)
- 1 conversion

What happened to the other 6 positive replies:
- 1 currently mid-trial
- 2 asked about pricing, one said it was outside their budget, then went quiet
- 2 asked to see our portfolio, then went quiet
- 1 asked general questions, then went quiet

Context that might matter:
- Our CTA is a trial project at 70% off (used to be free, but too many people took the free version and never converted, so we added a paywall to filter for intent)
- Our pricing is at or below the market average for this niche
- I know 500 leads/month is small scale, but this is a narrow niche and generic lead-gen tools don't find people who actually fit, so I'm stuck sourcing manually for now
- The positioning we used in the campaign is saving them time so they can focus on higher leverage tasks.
- No calls, everything happens through emails.

What I'm trying to figure out:
- Are these numbers actually fine and I'm just impatient?
- Where's the real leak? And what can I do to improve the conversion rate?
- Besides the discounted trial, what's a good alternative CTA to get someone from interested to committed without you having to convince them via back-and-forth email?

I'm confused so I'd appreciate any input.

Hi,

Just wanted to share my own personal experience as a senior full stack developer. Loads of experience across different stacks and architectures and here are my concerns with Supabase, having actually rewritten a commercial project to use it. Regretted it hard.

Supabase is a weak choice to build a clean codebase with proper separation of concerns and CI/CD.

Especially in this day and age with AI, there just aren't any reasons why one would use RLS and Edge functions to define critical business logic and not own the auth schema. An after insert trigger on auth.users and surfacing every failure as a vague 500? Never again am I buying into these awful anti-patterns.

Personally, found even a stack like PHP Symfony with Doctrine to be a way better developer experience in 2026, although my go-to these days is a monorepo using nestjs, ts-rest, nextjs and react native.

Expect a lot of hate for this, but Supabase is a massive marketing charade and SQL was never meant to go this far. PostgREST is an interesting experiment but c'mon any serious company will use Spring Boot or .NET. Literally anything but this.

There is no gain in velocity, you're building a house on weaker grounds for absolutely no reason other than a lack of experience and/or understanding the consequences.

I will get downvoted by supabase fanboys and people that don't understand what I'm saying and that's okay, but if I convince at least one founder not to use it, I've done my job.

Thanks for reading and happy coding.

I’m curious what other small business owners think. 👀

What’s something you didn’t expect when you first started your business?

Could be something funny, frustrating, expensive, or even something you’ve ended up loving.

I run a business with about 10 employees, and we’ll probably be growing pretty quickly over the next few months.

We currently use Microsoft Teams, but notifications have become a problem. Some users just don’t get them consistently. I’ve tried the usual fixes and checked all the settings, but it’s still hit or miss. I cant work with that. The outlook integration, and smooth video meetings are a plus, but not worth the issues.

I’m fine with self-hosting since we already have a VPS that I manage, but I’m also open to SaaS.

Here’s what I’ve looked at so far:

• Slack = Seems like the best product overall, but it’s too expensive as we grow. The free plan’s message retention and limited admin controls also won’t work for us long term.
• Mattermost = My concern is that the free self-hosted version uses Mattermost’s Test Push Notification Service, and I’ve seen mixed reports about notification reliability. I don’t want to leave Teams because of notifications and end up with the same problem.
• Rocket.Chat = Looks good, but the server requirements seem pretty heavy and I don’t want chat eating up resources needed by our other apps.
• Pumble = The free plan looks almost too good. My main concern is privacy/data handling since it’s hosted and free.
• Zulip = Looks interesting, but the 10-user push notification limit on the free self-hosted version would be a problem pretty quickly.

I’m open to anything, self-hosted or hosted. Mostly interested in hearing from people who actually use these for a business and how reliable they’ve been, especially with notifications.

If there’s another option I’m missing, I’d like to hear about that too.

Logically, incorporation is done in Delaware, while the company’s operations should be based in a city like NYC. Once the legal and operational foundation is established, the next step is to build the company, acquire its initial users, and demonstrate early traction.

From there, how does begin looking for investors work? Is it just through network? Startup events? Direct outreach to venture capital firms?

So I sent this CEO of a company a message telling him our communications will be limited to text and email only.

Despite saying that he's asked about 6 or 7 times afterwards "we must meet and discuss future plan"

Issue is:

- He's requesting amateur marketing strategies to be implemented from a person with zero knowledge about how things work

- He's demanding things that are least priority over What's important and asks "what happened to that thing we talked about"

- He's haggling his way into "spend less bring more leads" and when budget is low he says "we're struggling, we must meet and discuss the ""plan"""

- they're paying me peanuts

- man is crude, talking trash about his boss calling him a whore and crossing boundaries about my personal life me being single and my whereabouts traveling met with laughter and jokes

- inappropriate disgusting comments about stock photos I show him "look at those beautiful woman hands I'd like to kiss those"

- Paranoid and reactive to campaign performance and wants daily changes, won't let campaign learn naturally

- He's generally a slow talker and knows absolutely nothing about my line of work and I've reached a breaking point where I don't wanna hear his voice again it makes me sick to my stomach

The guys is basically a man with anxious narcissistic tendancies

Despite refusing to talk to him by phone or meet on Google he's insisting, this is the 7th time I said we will communicate in text and he's like "Please we must meet and talk and do weekly meetings online "

I think he looks at this as an authority challenge where he's doubling down "to show me he's the boss".

In any case what do you guys recommend in this situation, my payment is on hold and I might stop working with them for my refusal of calls.

In twenty twenty-two I grew this tiktok account to twenty thousand followers and one point five million likes posting clips from funny shows. Then the rules changed and reposted content stopped qualifying.

I've recently switched to cinematic travel content I shoot myself. It does well on Instagram, but on TikTok it gets almost no push, I guess the algorithm still reads the account as a comedy repost page. (My contents are now totally self made and well structured cinematic contents)

The catch:

every monetisation option is unlocked on it. Creator Rewards, the lot. A new account would mean earning all that back from scratch.

So, keep pushing this one until it recalibrates, or starts clean? Has anyone switched niches this hard on an aged account?

Random question for the group.

When someone fills out the contact form on your website, how fast do you usually get back to them?

Same day? Within an hour? Whenever you happen to see it?

Just curious what's normal for everyone.

I swear having 2-3 clients was so easy and I knew what was going on with everyone, remembered most of the conversations and could jus randomly note wherever. Now I am at 5 and checking all my mails,whatsapp, notes and spreadsheets just to remember what I told someone last week 😭😭.

The actual client work is fine but it's all the little admin work that's starting to get a lil annoying. who needs a followup or what's waiting on me, what project is at what stage and did I send that invoice? Etc. I feel like I need a CRM now but at the sake time I really don't wanna spend 3 days setting one up just to manage 5 clients.

I've obviously seen Hubspot everywhere but idk if I need something that big yet. So for people who've gone from like 4-5 clients to 10+ what were you using at this stage?? Would you just start with a basic CRM or get something proper from the start? Also anything you'd avoid?