Hi guys, first time founder, seeking feedback on my landing page.

Its a non-traditional layout, essentially a "Why us" section right after the CTA (as opposed to social proof, etc.).

Not sure if that makes sense, but my thinking is since its a relatively new type of app (AI language app....not that there aren't a bunch of similar ones), its important to explain the benefits up front.

just for context, basic idea is an app for intermediate/advanced language learners (already know some of the language) who have trouble booking online tutor appointments (due to time differences, etc.). Solution is AI language tutors. Basically trying to solve my own problem.

Big thanks in advance for any feedback

link to landing page: https://www.linguachat.ai/

Hi everyone! I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between passion projects and startups, and I’ve realized they’re totally different worlds. Passion projects are all about personal interest and creativity—things I work on because they’re fun and exciting. If I lose interest or it stops being enjoyable, I can just walk away, no big deal. But a startup? That’s a whole different ballgame. It’s a serious commitment that sticks around even when things get hard or stop feeling fun.

In the past, I’ve had some great success with passion projects. They’ve gotten media attention and even opened up some cool opportunities for me. But here’s the thing: none of that really prepares you for running a startup. A business requires so much more—patience, consistency, and the ability to push through challenges, even when you’re over it.

That’s why I’ve decided to go all in with my startup, Typogram.

I know if I tried to treat it like a side hustle, it wouldn’t stand a chance. A startup needs focus and dedication, not just when it’s exciting, but all the time. It’s about the bigger picture and building something that lasts. Passion projects will always have a place in my life, but when it comes to my product, I’m all in, ready to see it through no matter what.

What are your thoughts regarding Side projects vs Startup? I love to hear it.

As it always happens when I try to do something, I end up saying, ‘Hmm, I could definitely improve this, I absolutely need two more weeks to work on it, then it’ll be ready.’ And those two weeks turn into four, then six, then eight, and by the time I’ve worked on it so much and added so many things, I think, ‘What the hell, this is all wrong, I should just start from scratch, so I can have a clean slate.’

This happened when I was trying to write my book, it happened when I was perfecting my workout routine, it happened when I was about to release my first developer project (which, by the way, I still haven’t published), and it’s happening now as I’m about to release my app (not the one I was talking about earlier).

I told myself there are too many things I still need to improve, bugs to fix, tests to implement, so I’ve delayed it from the 1st of January, which was the release date I set for myself, to February 2st (aka In two days). And today, I’ve spent the whole day thinking about doing it, delaying it once again. I still have so many thoughts spinning in my head telling me that design isn’t perfect, I have no idea how to launch on ProductHunt, I don’t know how to write an email to the users already on the waitlist, and all that crap.

Honestly? I’m not ready, I don’t know anything, absolutely nothing, but you know what? Fuck it, Sunday I’m launching my app. Let the sky fall if it has to. It won’t be perfect, it won’t be the prettiest, it won’t have a launch that’ll attract thousands of users, but fuck it, it’s an idea I’ve put time and sweat into, and once and for all, I want to make it public. As for the rest…well, along the way, I’ll figure out how to move in this insanely complicated world.

Hello everyone, so I blew up on TikTok in 2022 currently have close to 800k followers. I had an awesome product and sold it over the last couple of years. Probably sold about 15-20k orders. Originally I was dropshipping the item, found the manufacture bought the inventory and then shipped my self.

Entrepreneurs caught on and started to sell the same thing. People started selling my product and it just kinda faded out. I’m at the point where I have run out of product, don’t really sell it anymore. Either i shut down the business due to no sales or find something new.

I was younger right out of college, didn’t know anything about e-commerce at the time and I didn’t have any guidance. I definitely could have made this product sell for the rest of my lifetime but just didn’t have the knowledge that I know now. For example I didn’t create my website the same thing as my product name. Someone took it and is set up for life.

Also, I really haven’t posted any videos for the past year

Not too sure what to do at this point.

I feel like I need to maximize on my TikTok followers and start selling something else, just not sure what.

Forget to mention:

Not only did these entrepreneurs take my product, Walmart, target and a few other companies started selling it as well ughhhhhh

Like most people, aside from my normal 9-5 job l have no idea where to start making money through a side business. The internet is full of cliche suggestions, but a lot them don't really apply to life in 2025 - dropshipping for example. Are there any grounded recommendations to help spur some inspiration?

Hi,

I recently launched my website - StarterSky - which shares stories of young founders doing some amazing work. We specifically are looking for someone who is :

1. Between 13-30 years old

2. Building something incredible

3. Wants free publicity through our website

4.Candid and wants others to learn from their journey.

If you tick these boxes, we are happy to work with you!

DM me or check our website. Thanks.

A few months ago, I bought a $120 "smart" toaster. Thought I was getting a deal. Three days later, my friend sent me a link of the same toaster but $50 cheaper**.** I felt violated.

Turns out, this happens to everyone. My friend overpaid $200 for a camera lens. My sister bought a dress for full price, even though she had the sale price open in another tab.

So I snapped. Instead of accepting my toaster tax, I spent 4 months rage-coding a Chrome extension.

It’s called Savr, and it does one thing:
💰 Instantly compares prices while you shop**.**
No copy-pasting, no opening 15 tabs. Just click the extension, and boom cheaper options pop up right there.

Why I’m hyped about this:
🔥 Beta users saved an average of $17 per purchase.
🛠 Stupid simple: Install → Shop → Click Savr → Find out if you’re getting ripped off.

But I need your help:
1 Would YOU use this? Be brutally honest.
2 How would you pitch this to e-commerce sites? (Still fighting for API access… it’s a nightmare.)
3 Any growth hacks for Chrome extensions? Paid ads give me hives.

Launching in 2 weeks. Join the waitlist if you want to test it (or just mock my toaster trauma).

Point to recognise - my english communication is not great, I make mistakes often.

Congrats to you for having a business that has been running for quite some time!

I have come to realise that business growth is all about solidifying existing opportunities so that they take least amount of energy, time and mind share.

To do this, you need others running your opportunity.

You need great people.

But you need to train them and they need to become so good so as to train their hires.

This is the only way to find time to grow your business into an organisation.

I am completely new to creating training material, but I really understand it's significance (shared above). I have an idea about what needs to be a good training material. And I can imagine certain problems in implementing training.

The last two I can share in chat. If you are someone who can benefit from help in creating this material, do hit me up! Let's start doing something about growing your business to reach bigger impact.

Sales Talk:
1st month complementary if you leave a comment! About any query, idea, suggestion. 1 month is enough to judge work significance and further requirements. Very low entropy work.

i can help you setup a local llm or ai bot to automate basic tasks in your business and even custom train it on your data and specific purpose consultations are free for fellow redditors

Hi u/EntreprenurRideAlong,

My flatmate (23) and I (24) decided to build a company, so I quit my job, and my flatmate dropped out of his master's program at TUM.

We met during the first year of university while studying in prep class. After prep, we decided to live together, so we rented a house near the university. The financial storm in our country wasn’t sunny, so we started selling second-hand items through our university’s FB group to earn money. We made $5k in two months. (2019)

Jumping to 2025, we’re building lookfor. It’s an omni-channel CX platform that automates support, sales, and marketing processes for Shopify merchants. We launched on October 14th and currently have 100+ Shopify merchants.

Why are we building this?

Understanding the end user’s behavior at each step of the eCommerce journey is a critical part of how most small businesses operate. These steps include the first interaction with the site, the support received, the questions asked, and how users return to the store through meaningful messages.

All the steps are connected to each other. If you miss one, the following ones won’t be aligned → resulting in a broken shopping experience.

There were no tools on Shopify that did this, so we decided to build one that automates support, sales, and marketing.

What’s included in our offering?

• A personalized AI shopping expert who helps users throughout their shopping journey

• Live chat ticketing if a user wants to connect with a human

• Auto-email notifications when there’s a ticket

• Collection-based quizzes and proactive messages to increase engagement

• Customer journey analysis to understand how shoppers interact with your store

• An intent score algorithm to sell the right item to the right person

• Knowledge base creation on a custom URL so you can guide shoppers to your help desk

• Simple pricing: four tiers, with a free plan limited to 100 chats/month

I’d love to get your feedback on what we offer:

1. What tools are you using for your customer experience, and how happy are you with them?
2. Does the value we provide at Lookfor resonate with you? Would you try it out?

Thanks in advance!

I'm curious about others. No matter what your product/service is.

For me, I wrote my learnings here: https://www.faststartup.dev/blog/get-first-paying-user-saas

I'm currently working on a simplified reporting template for Google Analytics that will provide actionable insights. This is for Small / Medium Business owners / Startup entrepreneurs. I would like to understand more about how you use your Google Analytics data currently. What kind of decisions do you make with the data? What challenges do you face in using data from Google Analytics?

Hey guys, just wrote something for those of you unsure whether your idea has some potential to be a great business.

I founded two profitable SaaS companies without VC money (I won't tell you which one. because this post is not about that). In building those, I used four rules to evaluate their potential to succeed.

Basically, I created a little framework to minimize the risk of failure.

The statistic that 90% of startups fail has been around for decades, but I don't think it's entirely true.

It may be true for VC-backed startups that must turn into a Billion dollar company or die. But fuck that!

The Silicon Valley way is not the only game in town.

The framework:

I called it "The most unambitious way to build a startup" because you will not change the world. The returns won't be as outlandish.

But if you're looking to build a business that changes your own world, this might be an interesting read.

Here are my four rules:

1. Is it B2B? This is where the money is
2. Is there a competitor making bank? Good! There is a market
3. Is there one angle to outcompete your competitor? This could be support, pricing, or features.
4. Are there SEO opportunities? People need to find out about you. For me, this is SEO, but it could be sales, partnerships, etc., or whatever your jam for growth is.

I wrote more in-depth about how I applied it to my businesses before I started in my newsletter today.

I'm not sure if I can link here, so we'll see how this plays out: https://1millionarr.substack.com/p/the-most-unambitious-way-to-build

Hope you get something out of it!

Cheers,
Iron

Background:

• got first client from Reddit

• the top post on Reddit - 447K

• banned several times on Reddit

• Top 1% Poster on Reddit

• Top 1% Commenter On Reddit

• found friends from Reddit

• found partner from Reddit

• found cool ideas from Reddit

• learned a lot of information from Reddit

What problem do you have ? I want to help you.

In today’s digital landscape, having the right strategy is key to success. I specialize in creating high-converting Google and Meta Ads campaigns that drive targeted traffic and measurable results. Whether you're looking to boost brand awareness or increase sales, I can help. Let’s work together!

Hey guys, if you are interested in sharing your expertise on AI advancement and AI agents, then we invite you for writing a guest blog. You can DM me for details. Thank you.

Hi, I’ve been working on Rocktangle for last few weeks, an AI tool that scrapes and analyzes 1000s of data points from platforms like G2, Reddit, Twitter, and SEMrush to solve a major growth bottleneck: manual market research.

The goal is to help marketers, startups, and product teams save time by automating competitive analysis, sentiment trends, and growth opportunity discovery. Instead of spending hours manually researching, you can get actionable insights in seconds.

Why I built this:
As a founder, I found myself spending way too much time manually scraping data and analyzing trends. I built Rocktangle to solve this problem for myself and others like me.

What it does:

• Scrapes and analyzes data from multiple platforms (G2, Reddit, Twitter, SEMrush, etc.).
• Delivers insights like competitive intel, pain points, strengths, threats, growth rate, and more.
• Saves 10+ hours/week on manual research.

Where I’m at:
I just launched on Product Hunt and would love your feedback! If you’re into market research, competitive analysis, or just love trying out new tools, I’d really appreciate it if you could check it out and let me know what you think:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/rocktangle

Free Trial

You can sign up and generate 1 Free report. If you have any feedback about the product you can submit it in the reports or DM me. Your feedback is extremely valuable to me.

I wanna share some tips for everyone looking to expand his business but is struggling soo hard on stuff like email outreach. The irony of the story is that we are actually a German Lead Generation and Marketing Agency ourselves. So I really can imagine how people feel that don't specialize in Marketing like an Agency would. We now exist for almost 6 years but let me tell you that while having super happy clients right now this definitely wasn't always the case. I got a TON of informations partly out of this community sub and this is my way of giving back.

Tip Nr.1: Collect THAT Data about your targets

Every one says "Knowledge is power". Well in Email Marketing you can take this sentence by the word. If you face very low open rates, and even fewer responses... This probably is one of the reasons. It wasn’t until we revamped our entire approach — focusing on high-quality data collection and personalized messaging—that we saw results.
Let me give you an example...
A very big client of us is in the logistics industry, selling security devices. Well when we targeted logistics companies, we didn't just wrote them a boring letter. Our software was able to find out about the companies history, find out about incidents that the company had and use that as a pitch to gain traction. Use whatever you can to make the most out of your words! A simple "we noticed that your company is facing security difficulties in the last year, just like the incident that happened 2019..." is extremely difficult for a company executive than just a boring "do you wanna buy this...". Use the power of knowledge about a company to gain a step that others don't. It makes you just spammy.

Tip Nr.2: Don't send bulk email... PLEASE

I know there are people selling email lists for cheap money. And I always get the question why not buy them? Whats wrong with them? And here is the deal. Its not even about the email lists. Some are fine, honestly. The problem is most people don't get the emails they truly need. The reason is simple, the word for it is ICP (Ideal Customer Profile). Lets say you have a have a cleaning product to sell. Your ICP could be supermarket-chains, distributors for cleaning products, small businesses or also even the end customers directly. As we are in B2B lets just stay with the first two options. Who would you target? All of them? No ofc not. But thats what most people do and its the worst mistake you can do because its a waste of money. Because in reality your true ICP is only a part of your theoretical ICP that you brainstormed. Try target small groups of a selected niche and see how things go, then document and move to the next target group. A couple hundred mails a week are enough to get all info.

Tip Nr.3: Personalization is NOT just changing the Name in the header!!!

Having variables in an email that change dynamically is not personalized by my standards. I know tools like instantly offer this but coming from point 2, you can't combine good research with a simple email. The best thing that worked for us is to have one small paragraph that is personalized and easy to change. Our software actually writes that automatically for us, but this is something that everyone can do! Even manually. Keeping your emails simple and short also makes this easier, while keeping them easy to read.

There is so much that I took with me over the years and I would love to to keep this discussion going, so feel free to DM me or drop a comment if you have something to add.

You know that moment when you’re rewatching The Office for the 37th time, and Michael Scott drops a line so stupidly profound you have to screenshot it? Fast-forward three weeks: you’re knee-deep in 4,000 photos of memes, and that one screenshot you SWORE you’d turn into a tattoo. Spoiler: You’ll never find it again.

I’ve lived this hell for years. So I did the only rational thing: I spent a month coding in my pajamas and built KnowledgeSaved.

Here’s the deal:

• Snap a photo of text (books, screens) → app magically steals the words for you.
• Save it to your private vault (for stuff you’re not ready to admit you care about) or toss it to the wolves in the public feed.
• Share to X/Instagram in one tap to trick people into thinking you read books.

Is it perfect? Absolutely not. This is a result of 30 days of coding.

The public feed’s quieter than a Zoom meeting on mute. Go and make some noise!

But it’s free, no ads! If you’ve ever rage-quit your Notes app or cried over a lost quote, give it a shot. Or don’t. But if you do, roast my app.

Google Play link:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mobinakhter123.KnowledgeSaved

So some of you guys know me from around here from my big case studies like here and here and here (and they are more) where I peel back the layers on how we start and grow businesses.

Since my case studies I get a lot of folks from reddit contacting me for advise and such. Cool beans I help out where I can. Almost daily. But from those messages I've kinda figured out a few things about the folks that reach out to me. Here goes:

This is my message to the aspiring entrepreneur in you.

You’ve been wanting to become an entrepreneur for the longest. You’re fascinated with the startup world, and you’ve read all you can about scalability, minimal viable product, customer acquisition...blah blah blah, you know all the buzzwords I’m talking about. This is the life you want, and you’re going after it.

I mean look:

• You’re on a gazillion subreddits
• You’ve bought damn near every Udemy course known to man.
• You’ve read every high profile startup book ever released...TWICE
• You read Techcrunch, Hacker News (insert business forum here)
• You’re on Neil Patel’s email list, and SumoMe, and ___
• You watch Mixergy religiously for business ideas (I enjoy this too)
• Your Facebook timeline is a stream of shared Gary V videos…
• Your calendar has more webinars on it than real-life meetings with people

You’re in the mix baby!

Yet with all of this content consumption, you haven't figured out how to launch a thing...and my guess, is that this is partially BECAUSE of all of this content consumption.

None of this matters until you actually get out there and put something up for sale!

BUT QUITE A FEW OF YOU PLAY THESE MENTAL GAMES

1.“I WANT TO START BUT I HAVE A FEW MORE THINGS TO SOLVE”

What many of you have done to date is research everything before you start, get overwhelmed and never start. How do you handle credit cards? What if your workers break something? How to handle lost products? All questions that are important in running a business but you have to work in a systematic way or you’ll get overwhelmed. How we build businesses? We take action. Day one, solve a problem. Day two, solve a problem. By Day 30 we should have gotten our first paying customer. If you try to pre-solve everything you'll never get started

2.“BUT I HAVE NOTHING TO SELL”

Check your bank account for something you’ve spent money on in the last 12 months. AND GO SELL THAT! Bonus points if it’s a recurring service of some sort (Your customer lifetime value is instantly boosted, and you can thrive even with a high customer acquisition cost). Either way, you know it’s something that people already spend money on. This simple rule eliminates fantasy ideas: “If I get enough members I’ll figure out how to monetize it later.” Later never comes, so ideas like these don’t get a minute of my time.

3.“I’M TRYING TO RAISE CAPITAL!”

Look man, there are a gazillion businesses you can start with LESS than a month’s salary. There’s no reason to delay life waiting for some savior to drop a million dollars in your lap. Right now, to start a business, you need a well designed website (wordpress themes are solid) and something to sell. If you’re selling a product, you’ll then have to find someone that will let you re-sell his or her product. If it’s a service, you simply have to find someone that already provides that service and set up an arrangement with them. There is no magic involved and no reason to sit on the sidelines forever.

4.“BUT WHAT ABOUT SCALABILITY?”

This, along with the need to raise capital, is the two stories that startup types like to tell the most. I’m running a multi-million dollar company in one tiny city and have zero intentions to scale. Scalability isn’t the end-all be-all to any of this. Go out and get good at selling things, and leave the startup buzzword stuff for investors that have to worry about that stuff. This is about taking action and building something!

5.“I DON’T HAVE THE TIME RIGHT THIS SECOND, BUT…”

If I had a penny for every message I got from people telling me about the wonderful business they plan to launch "next summer" or "when classes are over" or "when I move to ", or "when my wife blah blah blah..." or insert a gazillion other reasons, I'd have a duffel bag of pennies! I've learned that the fastest way for me to wrap up conversations like that is to say "Hit me up when you start!" I don't think I've heard from a single one of those people again. As far as I'm concerned if it ain't now, it ain't happening. And now, you have time. There is always time, you just have to give up some of the dumb shit you waste your time on right now.

6.“BUT I NEED TO VALIDATE!”

Validation in my opinion is for fantasy ideas. If you stay away from having to come up with an awesome idea, you won’t need validation in the first place. There are plenty of things you can do that other companies have already validated for you. And when you find that thing, stop worrying about competition. Competition IS the validation.

7.“The MARKET IS SATURATED”

This is meaningless, yet this single phrase has stopped more potential entrepreneurs in their tracks than…well I honestly can’t think of anything that beats this. Start looking at the quality of the competition instead, and you’ll often find that the market is saturated with a LOT of bad players, and they’re making a LOT of money despite being so bad. This is the perfect situation. My take: The market is NEVER saturated!

8.“OKAY COOL LET ME GET STARTED ON MY BUSINESS PLAN”

This often ends up being a way to push action further down the road. If It’s longer than one page you’re wasting your time. Download something like this, fill that bad boy out, and get to work.

9.“LLC/CORP/WHAT STATE TO FILE IN”

Unless the company can make enough money to pay for it, for me it’s not happening. So this only happens AFTER the company is making money. Don't take this as advice though, take it as how I do it. I go from zero to first revenue in 30 days. By day 30 if there is no revenue, there is no business, and I can spend a few more weeks max or move on. None of that "I've been working on this project for 3 years with no revenue" b.s I see. By day 30 if there is revenue I then have a business and I can spend the $350 on LLC/INC on smallbiz. Just take it as how I do it. One more excuse and stalling tactic...GONE!

10.“OKAY BUT I NEED TO RESEARCH”

Demographic data, market analysis, the economic outlook... blah blah blah. More ways to kick the can down the road and to feel that you’re doing something when you’re really not. I just get to work. If a lot of people are making money doing this thing, the startup cost is low, and there is no sorcery involved, it can be done!

11.“BUT SHOULDN’T I FIND SOMETHING TO BE PASSIONATE ABOUT?”

Nah son. Find something that is viable. I’m passionate about table tennis, but I’m not looking to turn that passion into a business. When it comes to business, I’m far more passionate about providing a good product/service that has good margins, than about being able to marry that business to any hobby or other exciting pursuit I may have in my regular life. This way, I’m free to work on the best opportunity that arises without limitation. And honestly, quite often the least sexy industries are where the big money is being made. So while most of the brainpower is busy chasing sexy mobile apps and such, you can make bank by selling ugly widgets or providing basic services. It’s tough to pay bills with app downloads.

12.“I DO PLAN TO LAUNCH BUT I WANT TO GET THE TECH RIGHT”

Resist the urge to complicate things. For technical folks, it seems like the inclination to complicate things is overwhelming. So a problem like “find people that need lawn service and connect them with people that provide lawn service” becomes, “well how about we use Zillow’s APi to pull a picture of the lawn, and the customer confirms it by drawing an outline of the area to be serviced and we tie that into Google maps and feed everything into a pricing algorithm”.... and on and on. Unfortunately, many of these guys do not make it. More often than not simplicity wins. Get out of the customer’s way. I was doing $60K per month on google calendar and spreadsheets.

13.“OKAY SO WHAT DO YOU RECOMMEND?”

Stop soaking up content for content sake. It gives you the illusion that you’re actually doing something when you’re not. Trust me, I’ve been there. Instead look at business content like you would a cooking recipe. **If you want to cook a steak, do you spend 5 days reading all you can about Gordon Ramsey’s life story? ** No.

You look up “how to cook a perfect steak” on youtube (Gordon Ramsey has an awesome video tutorial btw), bring your laptop to the kitchen and get to work (medium please).

And that’s the takeaway from all of this.

Not that reading is bad, or that gathering information is bad. But that if your end result is a thriving business, at some point you have to kill the webinars, blogs, courses, etc. and look for actionable content WHILE you are cooking up that steak. While you’re actually building your business!

Cool beans. Seriously, get to work!

And if you're down to get serious about buildingsomething in the next 30 days join us. We build real world companies that we can launch in 30 days.

Home services

Home cleaning

Lawncare

Moving services

Painting

Auto detailing...those types of things. That's how I made my first million dollars as an entrepreneur and hundreds of other redditors I've helped as well.

If you're finallyyyyy tired playing games, join us here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/625289293230050

Over the past two years, we’ve worked on multiple projects and noticed a recurring pattern—many features require the same foundational work. To solve this, we built a Knowledge Base at OpenGig and integrated it with LLMs to reduce overall development time by up to 10x.

This is how It Works:

We’ve compiled insights from past projects into structured modules, essentially creating a “How-to” instruction manual for development. Now, when prompted, the LLM retrieves and assembles the needed components in just minutes instead of days.

Example:
A payment integration that used to take roughly 2 days can now be implemented in just 2 minutes by pulling the right code snippets from our system! This approach has drastically improved productivity, allowing us to complete projects that once took months in just days.

For those building an MVP, what’s been your biggest challenge in speeding up development? Would love to hear how others are approaching this!

Last week, I launched my first ever product. I have so many almost-finished projects sitting in my GitHub, but I never actually put something live before. But this time, I did. And it works. It even has payment integration.

It's a knowledge base software, meant to be easy to use and help product owners reduce customer support requests while giving them useful data. It has all the basic features, so I don't plan to add more right now. The real challenge now is getting users and feedback.

But honestly, I have no idea what I'm doing. Right now, I'm just trying different things—submitting to directories, posting on Reddit & X, working on SEO, and seeing what sticks. I guess this is part of the journey. Even though I don't really know what the next step is, I love it.

I'm sure many of you have been in the same situation. What should I do now? Any advice?

PS: If you're curious, here's the link: https://knowlace.com

Hey Reddit, I've been reflecting a lot on the idea that success often comes with its fair share of setbacks, failures, and losses along the way. It feels like every step forward is accompanied by a stumble or two, and while I know that's part of the process, it's still tough to accept sometimes. For those of you who've experienced this, how do you cope with the losses or failures that come with the journey toward success? Whether it's missed opportunities, failed projects, or personal sacrifices, l'd love to hear your thoughts or any lessons you've learned. Do you have any tips for staying motivated and not letting these setbacks derail your progress? Does it ever get easier to bounce back after a loss? Looking forward to hearing your insights!

Hi everyone,

A few years ago I switched careers as a business student and found my true passion helping clients create a memorable brand both online and offline

As an overall creative person and the job market being tough, I decided to become a freelancer instead and have found great success with this

Having had done freelancing for a while, I'm kind of tired of the hustle and worrying about where my next client comes from

I dream of having something stable to support my family while at the same time get to enjoy what I love to do

Are there any entrepreneurs here in need of ongoing support?

It can be scary to release a product into the world. Especially if you go the “Minimum Viable Product” route.

“What if nobody buys it?” “What if people hate it?”, etc.

Today, though, I want to reach past all of that to what’s really driving your deepest, darkest fears as you’re bringing a product to market.

(And no, it’s not “finding a copperhead in the basement” or “Holy $#*^ I’m way high up here!” or “mayonnaise”)

The biggest fear most people face when releasing a product into the world is simple:

Embarrassment.

Especially in the world of Minimum Viable Products, “embarrassment” is what’s behind all kinds of problems, including:

-Not shipping what you’re working on

-Procrastinating

-Focusing on lower-leverage tasks instead of bigger tasks that might move the needle more

-Fear of failure comes down to embarrassment at the end of the day too.

Now, I’m quickly becoming an old fart. 

I care less and less about what other people think about me by the year.

So when it comes to embarrassing myself, I am qualified to tell you, “It’s not so bad.”

The world doesn’t end if your MVP ends up not “hitting it big.”

However, there are a few things you can do to prevent any embarrassment you might have from your MVP.

Not only that, but this article will show you some of the best things you can do to make your MVP more successful, and ensure that you end up in a better place once it’s launched.

At the very least, by the end of this article, you’ll view your MVP as a “starting point.” 

Best case, it rocks, people love it, and you only make it better.

Worst case, it’s an expensive lesson that propels you “on to the next one.”

So let’s dig in…

Creating Your MVP - Hiring a Tech Co-Founder?

If your product is anything having to do with coding, software, an app, a game, anything “tech-related,” odds are you’re going to need someone else to build it.

You’re going to need to spend either money or equity (and sometimes both) to bring someone technical on board to complete the build.

Both paths are “fine” but come with their issues.

If you spend money, you better have a good amount of it available. You’re going to want to:

• Get at least 5 quotes from devs or dev houses
• Add 10-20% to each quote
• Add probably $5k - $10k for marketing spend (bare minimum–quite a lot more depending on the market)
• Make sure that you have more money lined up for future builds and iterations

Of course, one of the ways to get money to use for all of this is to… sell equity in your company, oddly enough.

But saving up, finding a co-founder to be the financier (which sounds like a lot of attending wine parties at art galleries in Europe), getting a loan from family or the bank–all of these can work.

If you spend equity, it gets a little more complex.

More than anything else, you want to ensure that a technical partner you bring on has a vision/skillset that aligns with the company's long-term vision.

Let’s say you’re looking at 3 potential paths: a web app, a mobile app, or a mobile game. Let’s say you pick one path to begin with–a web app. You’re 40% certain that you’re going to stick to that route.

While you definitely want someone who can build a web app… if there’s a 60% chance you’re going to end up on another path…

It becomes very tough to give that person equity in the company if they potentially can’t help you down the road.

Not only that, but for an early-stage startup, often devs will want more equity because they have leverage.

Either consciously or not, they know they can do something you can’t.

And if you need potential flexibility, like in the “path” scenario above, a true “full-stack” dev or engineer knows how in demand that skillset is, and will want to “get their value.”

That’s 100% correct from their point of view…

But that doesn’t mean you have to jump in right away if it’s not a good long-term fit.

Once you settle on a technical partner, the next thing you’re going to do is:

Maybe the “V” Should Stand for “Validating”

This is essentially what you’re doing here.

You’re validating:

-Is there interest in my idea?

-Do people enjoy the product? Even at an early stage?

-Can I market this?

-Will people keep coming back?

-Are there any changes I have to make?

That’s it.

Now, I’m a marketing guy, so the above may be a little skewed…

But overall, you are using this MVP to answer questions.

You’re gathering data.

The more data you can gather, the more “paths” from above you close off… and the closer you get to the “one true path”...(though that sounds oddly cult-like now that I see it on the screen)…

At the end of the day, your goal here is to get eyeballs on your product and get users to try it out.

Now here’s where our old friend, Embarrassment, often rears his big, bloated red face.

“But what if people don’t like it?!”

“What if I get laughed at?”

“What if I can’t market it?”

“What if the Easter Bunny calls me a $%&@#?!?”

A lot of “what ifs!”

So this is one of the most important steps in the process:

Ship the Damn Thing!

Just ship it!

You probably should get it out into the world once you think it’s about 60-80% where it “should” be.

Start getting users, start getting feedback.

Oftentimes, their feedback will guide your future iterations more than anything else (more on that in a minute).

Unfortunately, you’ll never know until you get something out there and either hire a carnival barker-type to get some folks into the tent to see the goat boy… 

(Mugs for the camera like Jim in The Office)

…or do some carnival barking yourself.

So here’s my advice:

Make something that you’re proud of putting some marketing spend behind. 

Even if it’s not anywhere near what you see as “the final product,” you should be able to release it, put your name on it, get it out in the world, pick up the megaphone, and start barking.

Or, better yet, if you bring on a carnival barker-type, make sure their skillset and long-term vision aligns with yours as well.

When I started working with our founders, I think it was a really good fit for a few reasons:

• Good personality fit
• Good skill fit–I’m pretty “full stack” as marketers go
• I was happy to “prove my skills” up-front
• Even on my first call with Beard, I saw the vision, saw what this could be, and kind of started obsessing over it right then and there.

Make sure they’ve “bought in” and…

Create Some Benchmark Metrics to Hit

This can be a little tricky depending on if you’ve been in the space or not.

If you’ve been in the space before, it can be easy. You should know your numbers pretty well coming in.

If you haven’t though, this means plenty of research.

Good places to research:

Pitch Book has some really good resources, including pitch decks.

Business Insider also has a deck library from people in the industry.

Asking people in the industry or formerly in the industry is ideal if you can.

Even using our good friend ChatGPT is better than “nothing.” Just try to validate what it says after the fact.

By the end, you should have metrics for (at the very least):

• Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)

• Lifetime Value (if monetized)

• User Engagement (DAU, WAU, MAU)

• Frequent “choke points” or “stop points” where people stop engaging.

For example, in our web-based MVP, we were able to determine that we had a pretty darned good CAC running good old-fashioned Facebook ads.

That now becomes the “benchmark” moving forward–we’re pretty sure we can acquire a customer for at least $X, and potentially less if we hone in and a different campaign hits.

We also found out that people stop engaging without regular push notifications–some users said pushes reminding them to make picks would be a huge help.

You can use metrics, user behavior and the like to figure out some of your next action steps. It also helps to…

Talk With Your Users (Especially Power Users)

These folks are the ones who really like what you’re doing, and are actually engaging with your product on a (near) daily basis.

Figure out what they like about your product, any changes they want to see, even things like where they want to see your product in a year, three years, etc.

Oftentimes, a lot of powerful data will come from these power users.

And they’re usually “flattered” that you reach out, especially if you’ve built any personality into your brand.

We discovered some interesting data from reaching out to our top power users, including:

• We were forcing people to pick sports in web app that they had no interest in
• We had TOO MANY choices for a different game in-app
• People wanted to "just" pick their favorite team every day

This definitely helped us "sharpen the axe" and hone in on our next iteration of the game.

Once you’ve launched it, the toughest part is still yet to come:

Be Brutally Honest With Yourself: Improve, Iterate, or Pivot?

So you’re product is launched…

You’re getting users…

You’re getting feedback…

You’re hitting (or not hitting) your numbers…

What’s next?

You’ve got a big decision to make:

You need to take a good, long, hard look at the data…

And decide:

Do I Improve What I Have? In other words, “Is this the foundation I want to build on moving forward?”

Do I Iterate? This is a bigger change–maybe you know you still want a house, but it’s a different layout than what you originally planned. So, you might need to “rip out the foundation” and start fresh.

Do I Pivot Entirely? “I want to build boats, not houses.”

This is a big decision. And there are a host of issues with each question.

For example, sunk costs are a real thing. 

If you’re under-capitalized or think you’ve “completely tapped” your sources of funding, it can be scary to tear everything down and start over.

I guess my tip there would be, “It’s always possible to raise more money” if you can show progress, a solid team, and some kind of validation.

If you’re pivoting entirely to something else, you probably don’t have much to validate it?

But to the extent that you can pull any kind of validation or learnings from an abandoned project, you want to do that for your next venture.

You want to look at this one from the longest possible view possible–get as far away from the project as possible…

And honestly, it helps to have a great team you can lean on here too.

It helps to be able to bounce ideas off other like-minded, bright folks who want to get to the same destination you do.

Like I said, there’s no “one way” to get to any given destination.

There are definitely ways to get there with more money in your pocket, and less money in your pocket though.

Key Takeaways:

• To get your MVP, you’re either going to have to pay money or equity (or both).
• If you’re trading equity for a technical co-founder or partner, make sure their vision of the business aligns with yours long-term.
• Maybe the “V” should stand for “Validating” since that’s what you’re really doing here.
• Make something that you’re proud of putting some marketing spend behind. Even if it’s not anywhere near what you see as “the final product,” you should be able to at least get some users at a decent CAC.
• Create Benchmark metrics, like CAC, DAUs, WAUs, MAUs, and churn metrics.
• Talk with your power users.
• Be brutally honest with yourself: Improve, Iterate, or Pivot? There are multiple ways to get to your destination, but there are definitely ways to get there with more and less money in your pocket.
• It can be scary to release a product into the world. Especially if you go the “Minimum Viable Product” route.

Happy to answer any questions in the comments--thanks for reading!

Is anyone interested in connecting and supporting each other? I'm looking for people who are actively working on themselves and building their own businesses. Not just dreaming about it, but actually putting in the effort every day. I want to create a small group of like-minded individuals where we can support and push each other forward.

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As a solo founder building HeyEcho (a tool to help create and repurpose blog posts with AI), I’ve been thinking a lot about one big challenge: trust.

AI-generated content can be powerful, but let’s be real—sometimes you read something and wonder, “Where’s this info even coming from?” That’s why I just shipped a feature I’m really proud of:

👉 For every reference in the generated blog post, you’ll now see:

1. The source of the information
2. A relevant excerpt so you can double-check it yourself

The idea is to make AI content not just good, but credible—because no one wants to second-guess their blog post after it’s live. Whether you’re writing for SEO, building authority, or just want to avoid sleepless nights worrying about accuracy, I hope this feature helps.

HeyEcho is currently in private beta, but it’ll be going public soon. If you’re curious about how it works or want early access, feel free to reach out—I’d love to get your thoughts and feedback. 🙌

Check it out here! https://youtu.be/aboHQLV2Plo

I'm curious to know what you think about this! Do you think this is useful? Have you used other AI writers to give you this level of factuality check?

I’ve been experimenting with ultra-fast development cycles lately—building and launching features in just 24 hours. It’s been eye-opening to see how quickly an idea can go from concept to something real!

Curious if anyone here has tried something similar? What’s the fastest you’ve ever shipped something, and what was the biggest challenge you faced?

looking for a little feedback to help validate an idea..

If you're anything like me, I would presume your inbox is flooded with newsletters from various people, organizations etc. all of which show up and various times throughout the week and often get missed

Thoughts on a service that aggregates these newsletters into one weekly digest with the goal of abstracting nuggets out of it that provide value to you based on what you're engaged in (ie. entrepreneurship, ai etc)

Would you use this service?

What would you want it to do?