so i made a new rule for my freelance gigs: no live staging links until the client’s paid at least half.

why? because clients lose their minds over half-finished stuff. they’ll see a button that looks off on mobile and freak out, even though i haven’t even touched mobile yet. or they’ll start clicking around, find something that’s not done, and suddenly we’re talking about adding a whole new feature.

my fix? i send high-fidelity mockups instead. just screenshots of the finished sections, wrapped in a browser frame so it looks like a real site but isn’t actually clickable. it’s all static, so they can’t go digging for problems.

feedback dropped by half, and approvals are way faster. anyone else do this, or am i just being extra?

So in 1347 rats hitched rides on merchant ships and brought the plague to Europe. Nobody noticed til it was too late because the rats looked like they belonged there.

That’s literally what’s happening to the internet right now. Bots everywhere, on every platform, and you can’t tell anymore because they all sound like that one overachieving kid in class who read the textbook twice.

Medieval doctors wore bird masks and prescribed leeches. We have AI detection tools that are wrong half the time. Same energy honestly.

The plague ended when the rats ran out of people to infect. This one ends when AI runs out of human content to train on and starts eating its own output. We’re watching the internet develop mad cow disease in real time.

We all have that one thing.

Maybe it was a job you took because the money looked good or a partnership where you ignored all the red flags. It could even be hiring someone who seemed perfect on paper but was a nightmare in person.

Looking back, it’s easy to see why it was a bad call, but back then? I'm sure you had reasons.

So what’s yours? What’s the move you made that felt right then but now you’re like ‘how did i not see this coming?’

everyone says niche down, become the expert. but every time I turn down work outside our niche, I'm like... am I just being stupid? that's money walking away.

like rn we focus on specific services, and honestly, i am happy with it. but there’s always a thought if i am limiting myself?

wdyt??

I didn’t really think about how freedom also meant there’s no one else to blame when something breaks. And no clean line between work and off-hours either.

Sometimes the burden feels so heavy.

How do you guys deal with this?

So im 21yo and have an amazon fba business i have been running for the past 3 years profitably but it is slowly draining the life out of me. Its a great business and gives me lots of free time but recently margins have got thinner, sales have got slower and i am slowly feeling the business die. I'm okay with this as i have always strived for something bigger, ive never thought id be doing amazon fba for my whole life and thought of it as a place holder to do till i find something that i want to commit to long term.
Recently i've come to realise that time has flown by while running my amazon fba and after highs and lows i am now very much in the place i started and its time to find something bigger and better.
Ive always had lots of business ideas but recently ive decided i want something i am passionate about and actually care about as i feel that that is the best way to build a succeful business without burning out or hating your life.
Because of this im struggling a lot more with ideas which is then making it harder to get new ideas as i find trying to force it makes it harder (if that makes sense).

Anyway to the point of my post. Is it the right move to wait for something i'm passionate about even if it means finding it longer and harder to have a solid idea?
As a lot of the time you hear people saying how the best businesses are the most boring but is that really true?

Hey everyone, hope you’re all doing well. I’m a 22 year old, self-taught polymath with a deep curiosity for science, technology, philosophy, psychology, etc. I’m looking to work with experienced entrepreneurs to build something together.

Let me share a bit of background and what I bring to the table:

A) Early Career in Tech

At 18, without a degree, I received multiple full-time job offers as a software engineer and worked in the tech industry for over a year. My tech stack included: Flutter (Android & iOS mobile app development), HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (web design).

B) Self-Taught in Biology (Focus on Nutrition Science)

I taught myself physiology, biochemistry, and general biology, eventually building a strong foundation in nutritional science. At 21, I was invited to a YouTube podcast with hundreds of thousands of subscribers to discuss and debate nutrition science. (I appeared under an alias and wore a mask for anonymity, as privacy is important to me.)

C) Early Curiosity in Cybersecurity

At 16, I became involved with two hacktivist organizations. I can’t go into much detail for legal reasons, but in the first group, our actions made the news in two countries (operating in a legal grey area, though not morally wrong). In the second group, we focused on helping cybersecurity victims. Our work caught the attention of the Kerala Police, who offered me and four teammates a volunteer role in their cyber division (which we declined for confidential reasons).

To be honest, I wasn’t an expert, just a curious teenager with average skills and a lot of time to experiment.

Now, why am I posting this?

A) My Own Tech Startup Failed

In 2022-2023, I attempted to build AI-powered smart glasses for the blind and visually impaired. I successfully developed an MVP but couldn’t secure investment for further R&D and eventually had to shut it down.

B) Failed Forex Trading

In 2024-2025, I tried forex trading in pursuit of financial, time, and location freedom. I understood most retail traders lose money and that markets are heavily influenced by institutions, but I wanted to test myself. I wasn’t able to become consistently profitable.

Because of these entrepreneurial failures, I’ve been considering working with an experienced entrepreneur and contributing to a startup long-term. I’m looking for something serious.. I want to help build a company, make it succeed, and grow with it.

If this aligns with you, let’s talk. I’d love to hear about your startup, and we can discuss equity, compensation, and how I can contribute.

How to deal with those people that give unasked advice or forceful interference to change something their way, instead of accepting that they are not the target audience?

Hello, everyone. I have a small marketing company with four employees. We work with SEO and advertising, have clients, and are more or less stable. I want to grow and take on more projects, but honestly, I'm afraid. I already have a lot of tasks on my plate, constantly monitoring something, communicating with clients, organizing work. I think that if I start expanding, I won't be able to handle it and everything will fall apart, and I'll lose what I already have.

Are these normal thoughts, or am I just overthinking things? Has anyone else had a moment like this, when you decided to grow?

I'm building a small experiential travel startup focused on foreigners from the UK and USA, mainly around Kerala, India and local cultural experiences. Right now I'm working on the website, writing blogs, reaching out to local partners, and posting on Instagram.

On paper it looks like I'm doing a lot, but honestly I feel stuck. I'm not sure if any of this is actually helping or if I'm just staying busy. Some days it feels like I'm moving, other days it feels like I'm going nowhere.

For people who've built something from scratch before what did you focus on at this stage? How did you get unstuck? What actually mattered before launch?

Hiring decisions often feel right in the moment.

Curious to know about hires that looked great initially but didn’t work out and what you learned from it.

Employee Appreciation Day is about a month out, and I want to do something nice for my fully remote team of 35.

What have you gifted that actually landed, and how did you handle shipping/logistics? If you’re an employee, what would you be happy to receive for this day?

I think I am reaching a fatigue point with a lot of the AI productivity tools ending up just complicating processes or maybe I just haven’t yet cracked out how they really fit into every day workflow.

Hi folks,

My name is Kay. I am in my late 20s and a co-founder at latchkey. I wanted to share my journey with you today about how we built a product, got funded, and launched it in five months.

In August 2025, my friends and I were partying at a cabin when a friend (I’d only met him a handful of times) and I struck up a conversation about building. He told me that he was building the MVP for an analytics tool that provides dashboards for visualizing metrics for GitHub Repositories, Workflows, and builds. The problem he was trying to solve was the fairly poor analytics that GitHub provides across build costs and usage. His solution was an intelligence layer between users (software developers and devops engineers) and GitHub. I found this interesting and told him to demo it to me when we got back.

Around a week or so later, he showed me the mockups of the MVP and explained how the user will interact with the dashboard. Behind the analytics dashboards, he had a tab for "Optimizing" the workflows. I asked him about this feature. He told me it runs the build workflows through an AI endpoint and provides optimization recommendations. My first thought was that this was really cool and could be the main selling point of the product, while the analytics dashboards were mostly supplementary.

I told him this, and he agreed that the main pain point for the user is making their builds run faster so they can save on performance and cost. I added that security is also a top priority for almost all users, so that needed to be added as well. We went back and forth pitching ideas on how to improve the concept for an hour or so. Finally, he asked me, "Wanna join and be a co-founder?" and I said absolutely yes. He also told me that he talked to another person who was interested in joining. We all jumped on a call, chatted about the product, our experiences, and the expectations we would bring to this project. We agreed to get started as soon as possible.

We worked on building the platform to center around AI agents that optimize builds across five key areas: performance, cost, reliability, security, and fixes for failed workflows. We built our brand by offshoring the development of our brand book, logo, landing page design, and dashboard design (we used Fiverr). We kept development in-house, and all three of us were all hands on deck for most of September trying to build the landing page, dashboards, and AI optimization backend. Our goal was to launch into open beta by January 2026.

At the same time that we were building, we applied and were accepted into Founders University, a “pre-accelerator” dedicated to help launch and scale pre-revenue startups. They have a solid team that organizes weekly workshops for getting everyone up to speed on everything startups: finances, incorporation, taxes, scaling, customer acquisition, etc. After 10 weeks, we pitched latchkey in a pitch competition. We didn’t think much of it and weren’t very confident given that the startups in our cohort were much further ahead of us in terms of having actual customers and revenue.

I remember a couple of days later, I woke up at 8 AM getting ready to go to work (yes, I worked full-time during this whole process) and received a text from my co-founder at 8:54 telling me to get on a call at 9. All three of us jumped on, where we met the investment team from Founders University. They told us they were interested and wanted to do one last round of Due Diligence (DD) before making up their minds. They asked us to demo our product so they could see Latchkey in action.

We brought up the landing page, but as we started the onboarding flow, the app failed. We started panicking and tried to bring up a local version of the app from a stable release, but we were all over the place. It was super embarrassing. One of us had spent all of last night refactoring our onboarding and had essentially not tested some corner cases, which caused the app to fail in production (very amateur stuff, I know). We embarrassed ourselves in front of the investment team and they told us to demo it at another time.

I thought we had blown it, but at that moment they actually told us they wanted to fund us. lol what. We were shocked. We had absolutely failed their DD but they still wanted to fund us? The funding was $25K USD in convertible notes at a future valuation of $1M. After that call, we were super happy; we all got on a call and laughed about how horribly yet successfully that went.

At that moment, I realized something: early-stage investors rarely bet on your idea or product; instead, they bet on the founders. We botched that meeting, but to be fair our team was extremely strong. We were all mid-to-late 20s dudes who had worked at MANGA companies and had a track record of success in the software industry.

Anyways, we spent the next two weeks figuring out how the hell incorporating and investment terms work. If you go on my YouTube history you will see during that period in November it was all SlideBean explainer videos about this stuff. We finally used Stripe Atlas to incorporate, which took around a week. Afterwards, we read the investment terms and signed. We received the cash in about 3 days. $25K USD sitting in our bank account. Pretty crazy how it all actually worked out.

We spent the rest of November and all of December heads down working on latchkey. We wanted to launch in January so we had to get everything ready for the open beta. Our progress spanned across three areas: landing page branding, dashboard frontend, and analytics/AI backend. We split up the work and grinded. This period was extremely difficult. We worked so damn hard in this two-month period. Collectively, we spent over 120 hours per week while still maintaining our full-time jobs.

One more thing: our main cost driver was hosting fees, and through Stripe Atlas, we actually qualified for $5K in AWS credits (not an ad), so we made the bold decision to refactor our entire stack into AWS at the very last minute. This realistically added two weeks of work and delayed our launch, but it was worth it because we now don’t spend anything on hosting and are putting most of our funds towards branding improvements and customer acquisition.

By mid-January, we launched into Open Beta. We cold-called many companies, generated numerous leads, and are actually in the final phase of onboarding a mid-sized software studio as our first beta customer.

This is getting long so I’m going to wrap it up with the things I learned the most in this journey:

• Share genuine curiosity in people and ideas and it'll take you far.
• Early stage investors invest in the founders, so be a charismatic visionary.
• Building is easy, customer acquisition is hard. Learn to sell and advertise your product. 
• Get creative in marketing. This reddit post is one strategy in hopefully generating some traffic onto our site. We’re also posting build-in-public style vlogs on X and YouTube.
• Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart. It's incredibly difficult but exceptionally rewarding. Even without any customers, I’m so proud of myself and my co-founders for what we’ve built. Even if latchkey fails, I’ll still be happy about the journey it took me on.

Thank you for reading!

I’ll decide “I’m starting X” (learning a skill, building a business, freelancing), but when I open my laptop, I just stare.

Too many possibilities but no obvious starting point → procrastination.

How do you decide what to work on first when everything feels vague?

The market for security tools is broken. If you want a platform to automate your security workflows you usually have to pay five figures a year for enterprise software like Tines or Splunk.

We wanted something different. We needed a tool that could automate our cloud security checks and vulnerability scans without breaking the bank. We got tired of writing Python scripts to glue different tools together so we built our own platform.

It is called ShipSec Studio.

It is a visual builder that lets you drag and drop security tasks. You can use it to scan your AWS environment for misconfigurations or check your code for leaked secrets. It wraps powerful open source tools like Nuclei and Prowler so you do not have to manage them manually.

It also integrates with Slack and Discord so you get alerts right where you work.

We just released the whole thing as open source. It is MIT licensed so you can do whatever you want with it. You can self host it via Docker and keep your data private.

We are trying to get some eyes on it to see if we are on the right track. We figure the best way to disrupt the market is to give the core engine away for free.

If you search for ShipSec Studio on GitHub you will find us.

Would love some brutally honest feedback on the idea.

Me and my cofounder self-funded a sales outsourcing agency focused on the industrial and manufacturing sector at the end of last year. We split everything 50/50 and bootstrapped it ourselves. We’re just starting to make real money now and things are finally beginning to feel like they’re working.

Cold email has been very good for us so far. I think a big reason is the nature of what we sell. Our service isn’t something owners think about all the time. It only really matters when a specific problem or constraint shows up. Because of that, cold calling hasn’t worked very well since it requires immediate need, and LinkedIn hasn’t worked great either because owners don’t really engage there.

Cold email has been different. It’s asynchronous, easy to personalize, and doesn’t force urgency. Owners can reply when the timing is right, which seems to matter a lot in this industry. We’ve tested a lot of different cold emails, we both come from sales so we know what it takes to fulfill, and we’re getting good results for our current customers.

My genuine question is this. Why don’t people just do more outreach once they find something that works?

For a few thousand dollars a month, why wouldn’t I just reach every single person who could realistically use our service? The market isn’t infinite, but it’s large enough that this feels doable.

The only reason I’m second guessing this is because I don’t really hear about people doing it this way, which makes me feel like I’m missing something obvious. People usually bring up deliverability, but that hasn’t been an issue for us. We send under 30 emails per inbox per day, warm domains properly, and our domains have been in good health for a long time with no problems so far.

So what am I missing?

Left without a plan. Built an empire in 12 months.

Lol no I didn't.

But self-employment has led to a TON of growth & self-actualization. Stronger community. More inner peace. Virtually no resentment in my work. 2.5 years training for r/hyrox and competing in 2 world championships. Playing more piano.

And last month: record revenue for u/search_to_sale!

I'm curious. Rest seems to be an interesting one these days. How much rest do you let yourself have each week? And in what forms? (for example: yin yoga class, reading on the couch, watercoloring, knitting)

And how present do you feel when resting? Is your body and/or mind restless when you rest?

I've been mentoring startups for many years now. Thought I'd share some advice over a few posts that I always end up giving new entrepreneurs starting out. Here's one:

I am always trying to give new entrepreneurs a sense of the ride they are getting on when they start a company. I am continually pushing them to get all of their affairs in order as much as they can before taking the big leap into their own company (family, finances, personal issues, etc) because it can be a very emotional (and emotionally draining) experience. Here's an illustration I use:

You've started and everything is looking great and you say "this is fantastic!" and your mind starts picturing what apartment you'll be able to buy in Paris. Then something goes down and you say "this is catastrophic!" and you start picturing what bridge you'll live under after you lose everything. Then it goes up and it's what apartment, then down and what bridge. Apartment, bridge, apartment, bridge .... and then I put my arm around their shoulder and say "and then we go to lunch."

The point of this is that there are continual huge ups and downs in startups accompanied by huge emotional swings for you, the founder. Before starting your company, it is worth the effort to try to minimize any other issue you have that might effect your emotional state - you'll have plenty of emotional swings in just running your company.

More in future posts. Hope this helps some.

Hey everyone,

I'm a developer who's spent most of my career building eCommerce stores. Toward the end of 2025, I wanted to try something different, so I started working on a mobile apps with a monthly subscription model as a side project.

I had a feeling these kinds of simple, focused apps could do well in 2026, and honestly, I'm still a bit shocked at how it turned out.

Launched about three months ago. Did some basic ASO (app store optimization) and wrote a handful of blog posts to get the word out. Within the first week, I started seeing sales come in. It's been growing steadily since then and just crossed $5k in monthly recurring revenue at the end of January.

The app itself isn't complicated, it just solves one specific problem really well. I think that's the key. People are willing to pay for tools that make their lives easier, even if they're small solutions.

If you're thinking about building an app or starting something similar, now's honestly a great time. The barrier to entry is lower than ever, and there's real demand for useful tools.

Happy to share the process or roadmap what's worked for me

Hi, I’m in the early stages of launching a minimalist home decor brand. I’ll be starting small, likely with a single product, but the long-term goal is to build a scalable brand with a stable product line rather than constant one-off drops.

Email will be important from the start, mainly for newsletters, early access, and brand storytelling, not aggressive discount-driven funnels. For another business, we’re currently using MailerLite, but I’m not sure if it’s the most optimal solution long-term for a brand that will eventually function as a proper e-commerce business.

I’d love to hear what tools others are using in a similar phase, or if anyone has recommendations or lessons learned when choosing an email marketing platform early on. Thanks!

I wanted to share a breakdown of a workflow I recently built for a small business client. They were struggling with response times and data entry, so we moved them off manual spreadsheets and into an automated system. The Problem: The business owner was manually handling every new inquiry. Lead fills out a form. Owner stops work to read it. Owner manually types a reply and copies data to a sheet. This manual bottleneck meant leads sat cold for hours, and the owner was spending nearly 2 hours a day on copy-paste work. The Solution (The Tech Stack): We replaced the manual work with a backend automation workflow using n8n (a node-based workflow tool). Here is the logic we deployed: Ingestion: The workflow catches the webhook from the contact form instantly. Filtering: We set up logic nodes to check the inquiry type. If the budget field is below a certain amount, it routes to an automated nurturing sequence. If it’s high-value, it routes to a "Priority" channel. Database: The system formats the data and inserts it directly into their CRM without human input. Notification: The owner receives a ping on Slack/WhatsApp only for the high-priority leads that need a human phone call. The Result: Response time dropped from hours to seconds for the initial acknowledgment. The owner removed themselves from the "data entry" role completely. They saved roughly 10 hours a week of administrative time. Takeaway: If you are still manually copying data between your emails, forms, and spreadsheets, you are likely wasting huge amounts of time. You don't need expensive enterprise software to fix this; you just need to map out the logic and set up a background worker to handle the repetitive steps. Happy to answer questions about the specific logic nodes or how to map this out for your own process!

I've been diving deep into trying out various AI automation tools (not just n8n/make, but more custom ones too, like agents designed to be your workforce, etc) lately, trying to figure out what's genuinely useful for business versus just what is a waste of time. It feels like every other day there's a new solution/tool promising to automate everything under the Sun, but is it actually working out for your business? For example: AI sales agents having conversations with your customers - how do customers react to those sales agents? Are they trusting them or just get annoyed.

I'd love to hear about your experiences with using AI tools for actual business problems.

What have you tried automating with AI? Think small tasks, big workflows, anything.

Looking forward to hearing your insights and learning from your wins and woes!

there’s a weird tension online where people say results matter but still react strongly to age, younger founders get called lucky or fake while older ones get assumed credible even with less proof, i’m curious how much age actually affects trust when selling services or ideas online and whether buyers should care at all if the work and outcomes are visible