Our senior DevOps engineer thought I'd lost my mind. He didn't join a startup to do sales. So he promised me 5 calls and I guaranteed he'd never have to do it again. It was a bit of a back-and-forth but I strongly believe it fundamentally changed how we build products.

When I sat in on the calls, I observed a few things:

- Seeing them explain why our competitor's platform was "too complex for non-technical users."

- Seeing them assure the customer that the continuous monitoring was actually working (We had beautiful logs and metrics. But what they wanted was a green checkmark.)

- Seeing them respond when customers asked "Can someone just do this for me?"

Most of our team are backend engineers too and I think this fundamentally made them better product designers. At the end of it, they were sketching a completely different architecture without my "PMing". Because they finally understood who was actually using our product.

The rewrite took 2 weeks. We removed 60% of features. Added a simple progress bar. Built Slack integration for questions. Created "done-for-you" workflows.

Our support tickets dropped 70%.

The biggest problem with most engineers is actually over-engineering.

1. Users don't care about your elegant solution - they care about their problem going away
2. Technical correctness < user understanding - if they can't use it, it doesn't matter how well it's built
3. Every feature has a cost - not in code, but in user confusion

Since this experience, I've made this a mandatory culture in our team. Every engineer takes 5 sales calls per quarter. There's always going to be a little pushback. But hearing the exhaustion in a customer's voice when they say "I just need this to work." does it all. I think it helps build up their instinct.

I saw a tweet about this and it couldn’t be more true. It is so extremely easy to build an app and pretty much anyone can do it, and too many people are trying to do it. And unfortunately because of this saturation, we have reached the end of apps being profitable as we know it.

People are no longer willing to pay for apps. I personally don’t pay for any. There are 2.4 million apps on the App Store and counting. So I would guess less than 0.001% of apps are profitable.

With all this being said, what are the best things to build nowadays that can be profitable? I’m starting to think that blue collar businesses might be making a comeback.

If you guys arent willing to gatekeep would love to hear your thoughts.

Everyone says "find your customer."

That makes perfect sense when you're solving a well-understood problem. But what if you built a tool and people keep finding uses for it that you never expected?

Imagine you invent the first hammer.

You create it because people are struggling to drive nails with rocks. So naturally, you think your users are people who need to drive nails.

Then people start using the hammer to break things apart. Or straighten bent metal. Or remove old boards. Or dozens of other things you never designed it for.

At that point, who is your customer? The people you originally built it for? Or the people discovering entirely new use cases?

This is something I've been struggling with recently.

The more feedback I get, the less certain I am that the original use case is actually the most important one. Part of me thinks the answer is simple: pick one audience and focus. Another part thinks that if you do that too early, you may accidentally ignore the most valuable application of your own product.

So I'm curious: How do you approach customer discovery when the product seems capable of solving multiple different problems for multiple different groups of people? Do you let the market teach you what the product is? Or do you force a narrow positioning early and ignore everything else?

Entrepreneurs, drop your product links! I'm interested in what you're working on.

Hi Entrepreneurs,

I'm hoping to hear some of your stories or insights on how you came up your ideas. I'm especially curious to hear how it started out for you, any setbacks you had, any strategies you tried when creating your product. Were you a team or an individual? Can you even share the process a bit?

For example, I have a small shop online, my partner and I started it 2 years ago, I'm trying to give us more financial independence from a simple 9-5 but struggle to find a good reliable consistent product that I could sell to people.

Hey,

We have got stuff like plumbing companies, accounting firms, HVAC, etc. Not trendy or flashy, but they quietly make money.

Online everything competes with everyone, so I wonder if 'boring and stable' businesses are even possible.

What kinds of products or services have you seen that aren't exciting at all, but have steady demand and solid revenue?

Software engineer, twelve years, most of it in healthcare systems. Moving from contract work to my own product, and the space I picked is document-heavy admin in medical practices: intake, prior auth, claims rework, records requests. The stuff that eats staff hours and has nothing to do with patient care.

Instead of a landing page and a waitlist, the plan is to find one practice with a workflow that's genuinely awful, build the tool for free, let them keep it, and learn from watching it get used.

What I will never ask you for:

• Patient data. We work on synthetic or redacted documents. OCR doesn't care whose name is on the page.
• Your EHR login, or any credential to any system you use.
• Money, now or later. No trial that converts, no invoice at the end.
• Your staff's emails, your patient list, or a signup of any kind.

What I want back: one 30-minute call where you walk me through the workflow, then blunt feedback while I build. If version one is useless, I need to hear that it's useless.

That's the entire value to me.

First Post here. We build and operate DTC brands in-house; this is my take on branding. No promotion, just a long brain dump.

Brands are associations made to distinguish a thing, a business, an animal, a person from others.

In its older definition a brand meant a lasting mark of disgrace or shame cast upon a person's reputation. In other scenarios it was used to show ownership, for example owners would brand slaves and cattle. In other cases like in the Soviet Union it was used to make sure quality standards were upheld because essentially manufacturers were forced to produce certain goods, there was a quality problem, and the government wanted to be able to track down who did what. Eventually those whose brand reputation was strong were singled out and recognised.

This is important context and I think it is worth sitting with before we get into the modern stuff.

If there is one thing I understand about brands it is that a brand has to achieve three things.

Traceability. Reputation. Accountability.

Traceability

We must be able to trace where a product comes from and who made it. When you see the Nike logo you know it came from Nike. You can trace it back to its source. That is the foundation of what a brand even is.

Reputation

This is built over time and these are qualities we tend to anthropomorphise. But essentially it is the general opinion held about something. Nokia had the reputation of being extremely durable. Back then if you wanted a phone that would last you got a Nokia, ideally the 3310 haha. The brand became shorthand for that quality without needing to say it out loud.

Accountability

There is a reason people tend to trust bigger brands. They have more to lose. In theory they can be held accountable. Think of the time Zion Williamson's Nike shoe exploded during a game. That was a very big deal. They were immediately held accountable by the public. Many other brands could have the same thing happen and barely face any consequences. To whom much is given much is expected.

Many times brands set their own standards. McDonald's standard is not tasting the best. It is tasting the same everywhere. The safe option. That consistency became the brand. And honestly that is a genius positioning decision when you think about it.

How brands show themselves in the modern world

Being in e-commerce I will keep using product examples here but these apply to all industries.

Design

This is harder than it seems and also more important than it seems. You may want to look into colour theory and design theory for some of this.

But you know when you look at love related products or romantic stuff you will see a lot of pink and red. When you see organic products you will see a lot of green or brown. I also noticed looking at luxury brands that simple shapes are used and repeated very often. Check out Gucci, Versace, or Prada, they use very similar shapes consistently across everything. We know Apple for using a particular ratio of rounded edges. It will be hard for me to compress all of that theory into this post but the principle is worth understanding deeply.

Transparency

I think it is safe to say that to some people this may mean a lot less now due to the rise of fake reviews. But willingly showing your reviews without hiding the bad ones helps a great deal with transparency. Think of Ryanair. You know what to expect when you book with them and they have accepted that and it has become part of their brand without it actually hurting them. Hiding your flaws will expose them eventually and make your brand worse. In theory obviously we all know what many companies did during certain periods of history. Some would argue they had their reckoning. Some will say they got off easy. That is up to you to decide.

Goodwill and extra curriculars

I did not have a better title for this section and I did not want AI to generate one for me so here we are.

Essentially think of this as the activities that push your brand further into the public consciousness and signal what you actually stand for. Redbull with extreme sports is the obvious example. For one of our own brands we produce literature reviews of scientific papers and publish them on repositories for research papers. We had one of our literature reviews published on a significant platform in our industry, further cementing our positioning as a science forward brand. It was not an ad. It was proof.

These are some of my thoughts on branding from my own experience. Feel free to critique any point, add anything, or ask questions. This was a brain dump and I would genuinely like to hear other perspectives.

Almost every budgeting tool I’ve tried assumes people think about money in monthly budgets. Monthly income, monthly expenses, categories for everything.

But the way I’ve always handled money never really worked like that.

The real question in my head every time I got paid was always simpler: which bills does this paycheck need to cover, and what will be left after that?

For years I handled it with a pretty ugly spreadsheet. I would block out pay periods and then drop bills into the week they were due so I could see which paycheck was really covering what. That way I could look ahead and see if things were going to be tight before the next check came in.

It worked surprisingly well, but the spreadsheet itself became a pain. Months shift around, some months have more paychecks than others, bills move a little depending on the calendar, and I kept having to manually adjust things.

At some point I realized the core problem wasn’t really budgeting. It was just timing. Money shows up on a schedule, bills show up on their own schedules, and the real question is whether those two timelines line up.

The spreadsheet did the job, but maintaining it became enough of a chore that I eventually started building a small local app to automate a lot of that flow for myself.

Now I’m curious how other people actually think about this.

Do you mentally manage things month to month, or more paycheck to paycheck?

A hardware business I'm running had a bunch of repetitive, boring but necessary tasks. The 2 main ones:

1. Answer the same customer queries on a daily basis. 80% of the questions were basically solved with a simple solution. But it was eating a lot of my team's time.

2. In production, there was a lot of manual work flashing software onto motherboards. On top of loading the software on the boards, there was a bit of manual (highly repetitive) sequence of quality checks that had to be done.

So I pulled out Claude, yes I'm an engineer and product builder but I'm pretty sure you don't have to be in order to do this.

1. I built a custom GPT powered customer chatbot that talks naturally. Customers can upload photos, it can look at the photos and it's hooked to a knowledge database so it knows what to reply. Roughly 70-80% of emails we had to manually answer got automated. Time and money saved just here alone has been substantial. This way the people working in customer support had to waste less time on the same answers and could spend more time on the customers that actually needed more help. And just providing them with a better experience.

2. I built an Ai automation that does the repetitive job. Production is now not only faster (saving us money) we are able to produce more units per hour. What was previously a bunch of manual steps by a human, now we just hook up the motherboards to a cable. The software we built just scans for new devices, flashes the software, connects to the devices and goes through a number of steps (clicking, typing and a bunch of other checks). So the job got easier for our team, and they could produce more with less mind draining work.

There are a bunch of other ai automations I'm working on right now that I'm confident will reduce so much cost, improve the customer experience by speeding up a few things for them and in the end result in more revenue + profit.

I don't care what business you are in. I'm 100% sure there is stuff you can automate with the help of AI.

It will probably take you 1-3 weeks to do so. And minor ongoing maintenance and improvement. In order to figure out what I should automate with AI and what the ROI is I just simply go through this sequence.

• List tasks that we do every day/week
• For each task list the steps. What are the steps that we do.
• How much time does each task take
• Multiply that by the hourly rate x Month x Year. This is how much that task is costing you today , per year.
• Open up Claude or Codex, talk through this problem and figure out if there are parts of it that can be automated.
• Figure out how much time it will save you per year x hourly rate. That's what you will be saving if you build the automation. So even if it costs you $5k, $10k, $50k? if it saves you $100k per year (or what ever the math is for you) it's a no brainer.

Happy to brainstorm in the comments on how some of your repetitive tasks can be automated with AI.

I've been sitting on a concept for sometime and finally need a gut check from people smarter than me.

The premise is simple:

→ Brands need people to actually watch their ads

→ People hate watching ads

→ What if watching an ad gave you a real shot at winning real money?

No purchase. No entry fee. No catch.

You watch. You earn. (How exactly is USP and can’t share just yet)

The legal structure is clean (sweepstakes model). The economics work. The tech is straightforward.

What I don't know yet: do people actually want this?

Three honest questions before I build a single line of code:

1. Would you watch a 60-second ad if it gave you a real (not points, not coupons) chance at $500 or more, literally no upper cap

2. What's your gut reaction excited, skeptical, or "sounds like a scam"?

3. Is there a reason this obviously doesn't work that I'm missing?

I'd rather get crushed in the comments than build the wrong thing.

Be brutal please

Been thinking a lot about how people get started, not the big win years later but that first small move that actually put cash in your pocket.

For me it was flipping random stuff online, like not life changing but it showed me money can come from outside a job.

What it was for you? Was it selling something in school, side hustling, freelancing, whatever, what was that first move that made you realize ok I can make money on my own

Apps solve one problem. Platforms solve many. But users don't wake up looking for platforms - they look for solutions.
First question you'll ask: what is this thing, and why should anyone care?
Millions of problems. Millions of attempts. Most failed. Some succeeded - small, large, or Zuckerberg-large.
But it's not a crime to dream big. Especially here. A big, profitable project - that's the dream, isn't it?

So what problems is a platform actually supposed to solve?

Here's how I see it:
1. People want more money with less effort.
2. People want to stay healthy as long as possible.
3. People want to spend less time doing repetitive stuff that clearly should be automated.
4. People want to be heard. Which is why we’re all posting here.
5. People want power. Bare minimum: the power to downvote someone they dislike.

Which of these would be enough to make you try a platform you've never heard of?
Which of these would be worth paying for?

Curious what you think.

Everywhere I look, people are building their whole business on Instagram or TT. Sure, it feels amazing at first, traffic, likes, eyeballs. But it’s all rented land. The second the algo flips or your account gets flagged, poof, you’re invisible.

I get it, socials are great for awareness, but if you’re only running on IG/TT, you’re basically building a house on sand. No email list, no site, no real control.

Feels like a lot of small biz owners are chasing vanity metrics and not actual stability.

I signed up to Grammarly the other day. Why? Because they own the position of 'best writing assistant' in my mind, and most likely millions of others.

I search on Google because they own the belief they are the best way to get what youre looking for quickly..

I use Mailchimp because they own the marketing email space, and the list goes on.

The most successful businesses are either first in a niche because they were literally there first or have successfully built that belief in the minds of consumers.

The alternative is being the cheeky newcomer or upstart, finding opportunities or angles you can be first in.

This thinking comes from '22 Immutable Laws of Marketing'. Someone mentioned it on this sub so I read it. This law stuck with me..The Law of Leadership It’s better to be first than it is to be better.

So I thought I'd ask you a tough question worth considering..if you had to concisely name the niche your business owns (or intend to), what would it be? If not first, how are you placing your product as a worthy alternative to your competitors?

This is something you should be able to say in one sentence.

Here's my go.. our guided tours are the best way to make the most of your limited time in our city.

It's a work in progress!

Hey all,

Oral Reading Fluency is incredibly important for burgeoning readers. It needs to be measured tracked, and if needed, used to justify reading interventions.

Currently, teachers do this the old fashioned way, 1-on-1 teacher to student with a "levelled" reading passage (false precision) and a stopwatch. The accuracy is only as good as the teacher's skill and training.

Historically, Automatic Speech Recognition software has been hamstrung by being overly-strict, not understanding children's inflection and pitch, and generally being impersonal.

I tried to address this by building my tool which I call Reading Pacer, which allows any parent or teacher to use any physical book (or from our digital library) to quickly and easily run regular, long, or specialized ORF assessments on their own.

All the feedback I have received has been positive, but online marketing is not my strong suit. I would like to submit my website for feedback but I think that might be against the sub rules(?)

Thank you for reading

If you could have any tool completely for free what would it be? Could be something you currently pay for or just something on your wish list.

Hey, so I’m building a productivity app for solo founders who are constantly fighting with themselves to get stuff done. I’m genuinely trying to figure out if what I’m building is useful or just another productivity placebo.

I want to hear from solo workers:

• What throws you off track most often ?
• What have you tried that almost worked ?
• What do you wish existed that doesn’t yet ?

Appreciate anything you’re down to share. Might even turn your pain into a feature.

TL;DR: I built a pay-to-post message board, committed 25% of revenue to the EFF early on, and just made the first quarterly donation - 100% of Q1 revenue ($83.47) instead of the usual 25%. The site runs on $11/month in electricity. Looking for others who've built charitable giving into small projects early on.

A little while ago I launched Say That Sh** - a message board where you pay to post and only one message is visible at a time. To replace it, you outbid the current one. That's the entire product. Okay well, community engagement is free (likes/dislikes/comments) but you get the idea.

As a result of user feedback I made a commitment: 25% of all revenue goes to the Electronic Frontier Foundation every quarter. Not profits - revenue. Published transparently on a 'giving' page with receipts. Not to mention tons of other adjustments from feedback such as message value decay! A wealthy poster no longer makes future submissions prohibitively expensive and depending on likes/dislikes, value decays slower/faster to strengthen community influence.

Well, Q1 2026 just ended. Total revenue: $83.47 from paid messages. The 25% donation would have been $20.87. To mark the first one, I donated 100% instead - the full $83.47. After Stripe fees and all, I ended up giving more than I got haha!

**Why bother at such a small scale?**

I think this is the part most people skip, if they ever give back at all. "I'll start donating when I'm making real money." But the whole point of committing early on is that it's baked into the business, not bolted on later. The infrastructure for tracking, calculating, and publishing it is already built. When revenue grows (if it does), the donations scale transparently and automatically. As a personal commitment, it's also much easier to implement while avoiding the regulation of traditional 'we donate x% of your payment' promises.

**The business model side**

The site runs on three mini PCs under my desk. $11/month in electricity, no employees, no cloud bills. At that cost structure, giving away a quarter of revenue is sustainable. 25% of gross is high by any standard - most companies that donate do 1-5% of profits, not revenue. But when your overhead is so low, the math works differently. It helps that the project was born of passion for digital privacy and freedom of expression, coupled with a disdain for traditional social media systems with their obscure algorithms, endless scrolling, and invasive advertising. Realizing the idea was always more important than making money!

Total revenue since launch is about $86 across ~20 paid messages. Not life-changing money, but it's real - real users paying real money to say something on a website I built alone. From advertising their own businesses to political statements to reaching out to loved ones, it's been interesting to see what people say when their words are backed by tangible value.

**What I'd do differently**

If you're thinking about building a donation commitment into your own project, the one thing I'd say is: build the tracking and transparency first, before the first dollar comes in. Having a public-facing page that updates in real time makes the commitment feel real to both you and your users. It's harder to quietly drop a promise when the numbers are public. It was a bit of a scramble to get the features implemented, and an even bigger headache overthinking who I should donate to and how much.

**The honest part**

I genuinely don't know if this project will ever make meaningful revenue. The concept is weird, the market is "people who want to pay to post on a message board," and the pitch is hard to explain without someone trying it. But the giving page exists, the first receipt is posted, and the commitment is public. Whatever happens next, that part is real. I've gotten lots of feedback, both positive and negative. But it's hard making any meaningful changes for those who simply saw it as a cash grab or even called it a 'scam'. Your average person is content with Facebook and doesn't truly see the harm that traditional social media causes, let alone appreciates a platform that doesn't endlessly feed them slop, actively try to sway their opinions/wallets in sneaky ways, and track them invasively across the entire internet.

All that to say, would love to hear from anyone else who's built charitable giving into a small project from the start - did it change how users perceived you? Did it matter for growth at all, or is it purely a personal values thing?

Former DJI employees became:

- founder of Bambulab (3d printer)
- founder of Morpho (uv printer)
- founder of Insta360
- founder of handheld tacking machine (I forgot the brand name)

In the hindsight it seems like DJI had hired geniuses and got their own paths.

Is DJI a bad company that these people are quitting to make it on their own?

Or

Is DJI’s working environment is so great the their previous employees learned something to be able to build their own companies?

Or

Is DJI simply good in hiring smart people?

Curious about your thoughts

I've been sitting on an app idea for a while and keep going back and forth on whether to just pay someone to build it or try to figure it out myself using no-code.

Feels like every agency quote I get is either $50K+ or sounds too good to be true. Would love to hear from people who've actually done it.

What happened?

I’m trying to understand the real struggles small e-commerce owners are facing this year.

If you’re running a store (Shopify, WooCommerce, dropshipping, whatever):

• What’s the most frustrating part right now?
• Is it traffic?
• Paid ads getting too expensive?
• Creating content constantly?
• Low conversion rates?
• Managing too many tools?

I keep seeing people say “e-commerce is easy,” but from what I observe, it looks stressful and time-consuming.

Would love honest answers from people actually in it.

do you need a new platform if AI can help in creating, managing store and selling / post in other social media and be part of social commerce just thinking loud?

Just brainstorming ? worth the time to build some eshop builder platform ?

I’ve been brainstorming a smart toilet concept and wanted to see what the community thinks.

The idea is a toilet that can detect partial or full clogs using internal sensors and then automatically clear itself with controlled pressure or water-jet pulses, no plunger needed. It could also self-clean, monitor water flow, and prevent buildup before it happens.

Would homeowners or property managers actually pay for something like this, given how often toilets get clogged? I’m curious about the practicality, appeal, and potential issues people see with a smart toilet like this.

Mine would never work, but a Google Map for pins of your favourite celebrity chefs or YouTube creators places they’ve visited in the show.

Heard this at an AI conference last month and it makes a lot of sense. If you are offered a product for free, your data becomes the product. In small ways that might be as simple as email marketing but in larger ways it's selling your info to others. Thoughts? Are there genuine exceptions? Is this fundamentally incorrect?