So my startup is doing like $100k revenue a month, with $100k expenses.

But I've spent a lot of time getting great cashback credit cards (Mercury IO, Amazon AMEX, AMEX gold for paid ads) and now I'm making $2k-$3k in profit per month because of it 🤣

It feels weird because it's like I just created this massive operation that lets me spend enough money to get loads of cashback lol.

Are you guys doing anything similar?

True wealth will often come from creating value for others.

Instead of trying to chase after quick money, focus on building products or services that make other people richer.

This approach works because:

• When you help others become more successful, they're willing to pay a anything for what you offer
• It creates a win-win situation where your success is directly related to your customers success

Examples:

• Shopify: Gives businesses a platform to easily set up an online store, which helps them make money online
• Stripe: Simplifies online payments, which makes it easier for businesses to accept money from customers worldwide, helping them become more successful
• Coursera: Offers courses and certifications helping people get more skills to advance in their careers

When you can demonstrate a clear return on investment, pricing becomes less of an issue.

Do you agree with this approach?

Hey everyone.

I won’t bore you with too many details. I’m a recent USMC veteran and I want to get serious about multiplying my wealth and eventually become a low-tier millionaire within 5 years.

I’m in my early thirties, have three income streams amounting to $7k per month with no kids and low cost of living, and have a moderate level of financial literacy after having worked in the financial industry. I want to know where you personally started expanding your portfolio, how to meet mentors, where you invested your money and why, and what your ROI was.

I know gratitude doesn’t pay the bills, but I want to say thanks ahead of time.

Update 1: Keep'em coming, incredible stories. I'm reading every single post and eating all of it up. I'm sure I'm not the only one.

Update 2: Lol.

Title basically. Wasted my preteen years playing Fortnite and calling everyone "bruh." I dunno, feel like I've fallen behind - all my friends are posting 7-figure job changes in r/salary and selling courses. I think I need a mentor..

Let’s talk about how to make your brain WANT to work.

Our brain centers our decision making around dopamine, this means that our brain is constantly scanning our environment for higher dopamine-inducing activities that you can do instead of what you are currently doing.

So when you are working, and you are trying to focus on something, your brain constantly scans your environment for other higher dopamine inducing activities you can do instead of work

And when your brain recognizes an activity that provides more dopamine than work, your brain wants to do that instead.

This is why your environment is so important, because the more dopamine that your environment provides, the more willpower that is necessary for you to continue working.

And when you have less dopamine inducing objects in your environment, it is easier to continue working, and the less willpower is needed.

But, you can take this to another level. The reason why your environment is so powerful is because: if there’s nothing else that surrounds you, if there is no other activity that provides you with more dopamine than work, then your brain will gravitate towards working.

When you don’t have your phone, or any of your devices, and your environment is clear of heavy dopamine inducing objects, your brain will gravitate towards work. You don’t want any other stimulating activity to even be an option.

Essentially, you want to make working the most dopamine inducing activity available in your environment. In this scenario, you’re not constantly using your willpower to avoid another activity, because work becomes the activity that provides the most dopamine, so instead of constantly resisting something else, your brain will gravitate towards work.

And I can’t tell you enough about how powerful and life changing that utilizing this can be, this can really make work easy.

So while we can use our willpower to resist higher dopamine inducing things, we can also structure our environment, so that working and being productive is the highest dopamine inducing activity at our disposal, and we will gravitate towards work.

Hope this helps! cheers :)

I had a silly idea a year ago: A website to tell people you're having sex.

After all, what's better than having sex? Telling people you're having sex.

The idea: submit your name, and it gets displayed for 24 hours. Pay a small fee and it stays for a week.

On a flight from Greece to the UK, I decided enough was enough and whipped out the MVP.

3 hours flew by (pun intended). 72 hours later, the app was finished. I posted it to a few sub reddits yesterday and posted it on my x account thinking it would get ignored.

75k reddit views, 2500+ site visits, and £12 later, I'd gone through an emotional whirlwind! All on the back of this terrible idea.

My takeaways from this experience were that silly polarising ideas can work, but realistically, a 0.16% site conversion rate, with a small cost of product, after payment provider fees (30 cents + 1.x%), I'll need to go massively viral in order to make any real money. Still, a fun experience I thought worth sharing.

In 2016, while working a corporate job, I came across an opportunity on BizBuySell to purchase a commercial cleaning "business" that consisted of just three contracts, grossing about $7K per month. Over the next three years, I grew that to $9K per month by the end of 2019. That’s when I made the decision to leave my corporate job and focus on the business full-time.

As of last month, we invoiced $415,000 and now have 126 facilities under contract, growing at about $10K per month. Our average contract is around $2,850 per month, though we have some larger ones—several over $10K/mo, one over $20K/mo, and one close to $30K/mo.

Along with a hard working management team, sales team, and hundreds of hard working cleaners, we've built an operational structure that’s driving our fast-paced success, and I believe it will support our growth for the foreseeable future. My next big step is opening a new location out of state.

I am also very proud to say that we made the INC 5000 list this year and were near the top, not only in the country but one of the very top in our own state.

I hope this post becomes helpful to those looking to start or grow a current business!

AMA

Just needed a place to vent a bit. I come from very humble beginnings, grew up with a single mom etc. Never had much money, but we had the basics. The first time I flew on an airplane was when I was 21.

I started my company when I was 19, I’m 34 now. Doing well.

I noticed that many people are struggling with finding jobs / complaining about the job market. I suggested to look into starting their own company instead (simple one-person service / contracting company) and try to offer services in the same field they’re looking for jobs in, because it will likely expand their options a lot in the long term.

The overwhelming response has been something like: I’m delusional, I must come from money to have succeeded, I don’t understand the struggles of the ”ordinary person”, etc. But I’m that same person. I came from nothing. I just want people to realize that there are more options in life than just being stuck in the ”someone give me a job” phase.

It’s like the same people who shout for equality and assumably want disadvantaged people to succeed in life, will immediately turn against the same people as soon as they’ve found some success.

I just don’t get it.

I have come to learn that this holds true. Every successful person I know took on a substantial amount of risk at some point in their life. The reason why this remains true is because there is at least some level of unknown when pursuing new opportunities. You are risking something in your life right now whether you know it or not. If you are working the 9-5 that you dislike and not pursuing your passion, you are risking the opportunity to live the life that you dream of. However, if you decide to take on that new venture that you are passionate about, you risk the security and visibility of the stable income you might be making at your 9-5. So the question is: what is a bigger risk to you? Complacency or regret?

What is your business and what’s the total revenue?

How long did it take you to get to this point?

What’s your work/life balance?

Was it worth it?

So Mark Cuban recently said this -

"If Zuck wasn't at Harvard and he was at Miami of Ohio University or he was at Richland Community College, same idea, same person, same execution, and nothing would have happened."

Do you all agree with this ? What are your views on this ? How true is Cuban while making this statement ?

Also this brings me down to another question of mine. Does going to a top most school matter so much that even if you have the best and best execution your idea might fail because you didn't have a Harvard or Stanford tag on yourself ? Is this really true in today's time ?

I just watched this video called how to sell businesses to private equity for millions

The guy in the video talks about buying up small businesses like laundromats and accounting firms, spotting inefficiencies, and then packaging them up to sell to private equity firms, all without using any of your own money. It sounds like a pretty solid biz idea

Has anyone done anything like this or know if it’s even legit/legal?

Any advice or insights would be appreciated

Hey guys,

Little bit of a long post. But any advice would be appreciated.

So, the income I earn from my side hustle (not an online business) has surpassed my full time job's income. It has been for quite a while. Around 6 months.

Recently I've taken a paid leave for 3.5 weeks. And a couple of days before coming back to work, I decided to tell my manager and let him know that I've decided to resign. And I've sent an email to HR as well.

My last day of work will be on 18th October.

This week I came back from my leave and my team leader suggested that I can still recede my resignation and maybe consider going part time (3 days per week; 2 days in office, 1 day work from home).

One of the reasons I didn't ask for anyone else's opinion prior to making my decision to resign is that I didn't want anyone else to influence my decisions.

Now here are the numbers:

Side hustle income: just under 8k take home Time spent on side hustle per week: close to 0 hours most week and 2 hours at most in some weeks. Full time job income: 5k take home Time spent on full time job including commute times: 40 hrs per week + 5 hrs commute time (5 days a fortnight in the office, 5 days work from home) If I recede my resignation and go part time: around 3k take home Time spent on part time job including commute times: 24 hrs per week + 3 hrs commute time (2 days in office, 1 day WFH)

My plan after resigning was to double the income I get for my side hustle and at the same time start an online business (for scalability).

I've asked 3 of my closest friends about what happened today (about my team leader's suggestion on receding my resignation and going part time). And all 3 said that's not a bad idea.

I've had this job for almost 2 years and I love the company, the work environment and the people that I work with + love the social aspect of it all.

What would you do if you're in this situation and why?

Hi, I recently read the following statistics from the book “The E-Myth: Why most small businesses Don’t Work and What to do about it” by Michael E. Gerber:

• 40% of businesses fail within the first year
• 80% fail within 5 years
• Of 20% that make it to year 5, 80% will fail by Year 10. That means only 4% of businesses make it.
• Overall, only 2% of businesses make more than 1M dollars a year.

So, let me clear: I knew the odds of sucess were low, but not like this. This makes me think: what is the purpose of starting a business? The Odds of success at 10 Years are completely negligible!

It makes no sense for a rational being (and besides beijg an entrepreneur, one must be also a manager and have a cold head analysing odds), knowing about these statistics, to start. Specially, knowing only 2 in 100 will surprass the 1M dollars mark per year.

Am I reading this correctly? Thanks!

EDIT: so now I am getting downvotes for asking a genuine question? This is incredible!

I wanted to share a small win that’s been motivating me lately! I recently started a community focused on the 12 Week Year—a method that helps you accomplish goals in 12-week bursts instead of dragging them out for a full year.

At the moment, it’s still a small, growing group, but I decided to charge a simple $1/month for access. Honestly, I wasn’t sure how it would go, but someone joined, paid the $1, and it felt incredible! It’s a small amount, sure, but that first $1 felt like a major milestone—it showed me that there’s real value in what I’m building.

It’s been a great reminder that even when things start small, you never know how they’ll grow over time. I’m excited to keep pushing forward and see where this goes.

Also I'm posting here asking your suggestion about the pricing and promotion strategy about the community and what else can i add in it and keep the community growing
I'll put the link to the community in the comments so alteast tell me what do you think.

If you had a 30-minute introduction call with an exited tech billionaire, what would you ask them?

Why? I cold emailed a fella many of us are familiar with a little while back when I was in the pits of hell at work asking if he’d be willing to spare some time to chat…sure enough, he responded and we have a call early next week.

I’m a SWE and have an MVP for an app—I’d love to share it with him, but I don’t want to seem like I’m asking for money—I’m not, I just want to have a connection and learn from this beast. But now that it’s getting down to it, I worry I’ll waste his time.

What would y’all talk about?

For the last 2.5 years, I’ve been working on software automation projects and have made $250,000 doing so. I've made more through this side hustle than my full time software engineering job. In this post, I am going to share some key insights into my journey. First and foremost, these agents i made are programs that buy hard-to-get items before they sell out, scrape websites, book hotel shifts, and chatbots that convert website traffic. Essentially, if it’s on the internet, it can be automated.

Also mods, agents are just web automation, so im not promoting anything negative. Just offering some insight. In fact, it's a Reddit agent that monitors a lot of posts haha.

I’ve posted almost a dozen YouTube videos on these projects, and my work has gathered over 400,000 views. And through this WILD journey (even got on Times Square thanks to a client who i made golf agent for), I've learned some key insights I'd like to share with you all!

1. Agents are just web automation. Please do not automatically think this is some BAD thing
2. There's been times where I'd sell simple scripts of code (<100 lines) for $2000+, all because the script automated a high-value task for a client.
3. YOU can learn to create agents after just a couple of Youtube videos. It's not as hard as you think.
4. Web automation is the FUTURE especially with rise of AI!
5. Start with AI chatbots if you cannot code, easy to make, and easy to sell

Feel free to ask questions and I will do my best to answer every single one! But yes, look int web automation as much as you can. It might be something that excites you, and brings you a lot of income doing so. It's my go-to side hustle.

Not selling anything here as you can see, just raising some awareness.

I’m still figuring out this whole entrepreneurship thing, but here are some hard-learned lessons that could help anyone trying to launch something new:

Launch Quickly and Cut the Extra Fat

Perfectionism kills more ideas than failure. I’ve seen people waste years building something only to find out no one cared. Focus on launching quickly and stripping down to the essentials. Most of the "features" you think are critical aren’t. Get feedback and then iterate. Oh, and if anyone wants me to review their ideas or projects, I’m happy to help!

Don’t Be Afraid to Quit… But Know When to Push

This one’s tricky. People love saying "never give up," but the truth is, some ideas are just duds. It’s okay to quit when the numbers aren’t there or if you’re burning out without traction. But, don’t give up too early just because it’s hard. There’s a fine line between persistence and stubbornness, and knowing when to pivot is key.

Be Thorough With Developers

When working with developers, always assume that they’ll build exactly what you ask for, no more, no less. If you’re not 100% clear about every detail, you’ll end up wasting time and money on revisions. Communicate like crazy, and don’t assume they can read your mind.

Remember these lessons but try these things now

Good luck, and keep going. Not quitting is how you’ll succeed. A couple of little things that helped me in the beginning were listening to podcasts like My First Million and Business Made Simple, watching YouTube videos (a lot of Alex Hormozi's old stuff)(but not the new stuff), doing FoundrComps, talking to other entrepreneurs, and helping them with their businesses. Being open-minded and always saying "Yes" to trying new things will open doors you didn’t even know existed. Best of luck!

What is the ultimate game plan to go from broke to rich in 4 and a half years? I have my reasons, but it’s all I got.

Always looking to improve my setup and I think it's great to get a variety of inputs. As for me, here's what I rely on:

Telegram for quick and casual communication, especially since it handles big files
Canva for all my graphics needs—it’s pretty straightforward and offers a lot of flexibility
BoostApp Social has been solid for optimizing my social media presence—helps a ton with crafting captions and drumming up content ideas
Curb Hero has been a boon for my real estate dealings, making digital open house sign-ins and listing microsites super easy to manage
QuickBooks for keeping the financials clear and transparent
Mailchimp for managing newsletters and keeping in touch with my potential clients
Google Maps to check out property lines when I'm scouting new locations

What you all use?

I'm writing this because I feel like in this sub, many people are chasing the dream of a rich and free lifestyle simply because they've seen someone (or many) living that way on Instagram, TikTok / social media.

It’s easy to get swept up by the images of people selling courses (sometimes not as obviously as you’d think) or dropshipping, flaunting luxury cars, exotic vacations, and endless freedom.

But here’s the harsh reality: that “easy” lifestyle of selling stuff online and driving a Lamborghini simply doesn’t exist — at least not in the way it’s portrayed.

Most of these influencers (I’m talking 95% of the ones I see on Instagram) don’t make their money from the successful businesses they claim. Instead, they make their money by selling the dream of easy success to others, usually through overpriced courses or coaching. Heck, most of their proclaimed companies (not the course-selling ones, but the trading or e-commerce businesses they say made them rich) are complete trash and never made any serious money at all. Do your research. The lifestyle they’re showing off is rented, exaggerated, or outright fake.

True success in business — especially in entrepreneurship — doesn’t come from quick sales or simple tricks. It comes from hard work, persistence, and constant learning. That’s true even for the course sellers, but it’s not what they’re showing you. Who would buy a course for a business idea that requires insane work and offers only a 10% chance of making you rich in 5-10 years?

The idea that you can just set up an online store or sell a course and effortlessly get rich (or even get rich at all) is a fantasy. The people pushing this narrative are using their platforms to profit off those who want to believe in shortcuts.

Don’t let these people fool you. Building a real business takes time and effort. There are no easy paths to wealth, and the glamorous lifestyle you see on social media is just a facade designed to sell you something.

I know many people already know this, but once you actually realize that the lifestyle they’re showing you simply doesn’t exist, it takes a lot of FOMO off your chest. You can smile at the fact that they’ll probably regret it one day. Making money and delivering real value to people are not directly connected, but making money without giving value won’t make you happy.

Don‘t get me wrong - there are people flexing online who actually run a legit business. But that‘s like 1% of those people you‘re seeing.

What do you think is the best business to start for an introvert with 20k and why?

Those who scaled profitable 7 figure+ businesses? Was the initial investment regarding time and effort worth it to you? I just recently got into an accident that left me bed ridden for a week and i spiraled down the social media rabbit hole. Seeing people my age out living worldly lives. I won’t lie. Although I’m seeing progress it kinda makes me a bit sad depriving myself for futures sake. Guess it’s more of a vent but wanted to hear others opinion on the matter.

Although it can be hard to accept in the beginning, offering an immense amount of free value upfront is actually the quickest way to wealth. You have to provide an offer with so much free value that it makes your customers decision to work with you a "no brainer". After you have built up your network and shown your customers how much value you provide, they will have no problem paying you. This will naturally lead to high customer retention because you have built a business relationship based on trust and transparency rather than it being purely transactional. Oh, and also, providing a service for free also means you get to have a high volume of practice early on which allows you to rapidly master your craft.

I mean, how many entrepreneurs, especially tech, saas, agencies, etc, do NOT love the human interaction that is involved with a zoom call, regular call, or in person sale?

What is it about sales that you don't love?

What is it about sales that you DO love?

How many of you have a sales process? Is it something you came up with? Is it something you've revised and improved upon?