I was 21 when I graduated college in 2018. Five years later, I had built and lost a $7.5M ARR marketing company. Here's the uncensored story of what actually happens when you scale too fast and reality hits hard.

The Beginning ($0 to $15K MRR)

Fresh out of college, my best friend and I started a creator network after he was interning at a fast growing app company and dealing with creators daily. Found a client within 3 weeks, had no creators on our books. No fancy tech, just Google Sheets and hustle. Launched the campaign... First week: $3K. Second week: $5K. First month: $15K. We were running Instagram and Snapchat campaigns and killing it.

The Lucky Break ($15K to $200K MRR)

A client asked about TikTok. Ran a few campaigns here and there. Margin was good but it was way too early for TikTok. Started building relationships with creators and adde it as a separate offering. Then TikTok released a feature that changed everything. It basically allowed us to combine these 1 off campaigns with all the tech we'd built and the main part of our business. We moved fast – really fast. Hit $40K in a single week. Monthly revenue 5x'd. We thought we were geniuses. We were just lucky.

The High ($200K to $400K MRR)

• Team grew to 20 people
• Built networks of creators
• Launched a creator house
• Started working with major apps
• Helped customers raise millions

I was 23. Working 12 hrs a day. Everything worked. Success is a dangerous drug when you're young enough to think it's normal.

The First Cracks

Then Apple killed app tracking and TikTok started to throttle organic reach. We had to pivot or die. We gave ourselves 6 weeks to turn things around across the whole company. Had to rebuild the entire business model, cut off whole projects and departments that weren't returning enough $$$, while making payroll for 20 people. We survived. Then thrived. Then...

The Pivot paid off!

We managed to grow even faster than before and things were going well. Retention was better than ever and things were compounding.

The Slow Death (2022)

• Key clients started to get hit by recession and began mass layoffs
• Sales cycles got longer
• Top sales performer got arrested (yes, really - long story)
• Tried to pivot again to a lower cost but high margin product - impossible to scale
• Started missing revenue targets

The End (2023) The hardest part wasn't losing money. It was:

• Laying off loyal team members who'd been with us for years
• The self doubt in your abilities
• Realizing we couldn't fight the market forever
• Knowing when to stop throwing good money after bad

The Real Impact

In 5 years we:

• Helped 2 startups raise $20M
• Paid $3M to creators
• Funded a creator's dad's heart surgery
• Watched 3 of our former employees go onto start their own thriving businesses
• Changed lives

Yet we still couldn't save ourselves.

Key Lessons

1. Luck is definitely a factor but you also have to be prepared and ready, we got lucky so many times
2. Focus on the money maker - the core part of the business making $$$ and then diversify out
3. Understand the volatility of your market - ours changed so fast, we should done number 2 and then diversified quicker
4. You have to keep innovating - times change and what you do may be hot today but tomorrow can easily not be - choose wisely and act accordingly
5. Separate your identity from the business - the businesses success and failures are not a reflection of you - don't get too high and don't get too low.
6. Don't make it easy to join the team, especially when scaling and things are going well - you need to scrutinise hiring decisions. Everyone needs to be a top performer and not just a great person. You can find both
7. Make decisions early, with conviction - we could have taken certain actions or decisions earlier that could have changed our outcome or extended runway. It was our first time and we were slow to move - maybe it was naivety, maybe hope.
8. Not everyone will like you - of course, when laying off people it's never easy and it's expected that some people won't take it well or may question decisions but you can't help this and you're not there to be liked.

Starting Over

I'm 28 now. Starting again in the TikTok/short form space - this time with:

• Battle scars from a $7.5M business
• Real experience, not just enthusiasm
• Understanding of risk and market dynamics
• Knowledge of what actually matters
• A healthier relationship with success

For those building right now: The graphs don't always go up and right. Sometimes they crash. And that's okay. Building something that fails doesn't make you a failure.

Happy to answer any more questions or if you want to ask TikTok/influencer related questions just drop me a message.

EDIT: thank you for all the kind messages and support!! I’ll keep sharing updates - more info in my bio if you’re interested 🙏

I've always dreamt of making money online. I would constantly obsess over new ways to do it, but nothing felt right to me. I was always into tech and coding, but didn't realize I could use it to make money as side hustle online. This was until I discovered agent development.

I recently learned how to code in JavaScript, and was able to use it to help my friend's dad. He was trying to get this rare collector's item from a website called popmart, but wasn't able to due to the high demand. I tried to use my coding skills to build him an agent that could auto-click, and purchase the item automatedly. It didn't work the first few times. I kept amending my code, and I was able to make it work. It ended up being a fast automation agent, that could beat anybody trying to get something at the same time. He paid me $300 for it, and that first online payment definitely felt different.

P.S This probably took about 15 hours to make, which I do think is a lot. But, for my first taste of making money online, I can't complain. :)

Nvidia’s CEO Jensen recently said ““Humans not using AI will be replaced by someone who uses AI”

That got me thinking and a 2025 goal for me personally is to make sure I am getting myself exposed to all the cutting edge AI tools out there that help me be more productive! Irrespective of the fact that if this statement comes true or not, I think it might be a good investment of my time!

So curious, what AI tools have you all been using to be more productivity?

Like this is an actual question I’m not just ranting. I have a desk job in front of the screen all day, nothing crazy tiring and I go home at 6pm everyday absolutely hammered with no energy to focus on anything just an urge to rot in bed? I been working on a web design side hustle and I have ideas for a clothing brand, Yet absolutely no energy for it, I do have free time I know that but still? How do you actually stick up? I have this urge to quit and go all in? But I know that’s not rational.

Hey Reddit 👋,

I wanted to share a bit about some side projects I’ve been working on lately. Quick background for context: I’m the CEO of a mid-to-large-scale eCommerce company pulling in €10M+ annually in net turnover. We even built our own internal tracking software that’s now a SaaS (in early review stages on Shopify), competing with platforms like Lifetimely and TrueROAS.

But! That’s not really the point of this post — there’s another journey I’ve been on that I’m super excited to share (and maybe get your feedback on!).

AI Transformed My Role (and My Ideas List)

I’m not a developer by trade — never properly learned how to code, and to be honest, I don’t intend to. But, I’ve always been the kind of guy who jots down ideas in a notes app and dreams about execution. My dev team calls me their “4th developer” (they’re a team of three) because I have solid theoretical knowledge and can kinda read code.

And then AI happened. 🛠️

It basically turned my random ideas app into an MVP generation machine. I thought it’d be fun to share one of the apps I’m especially proud of. I am also planning to build this in public and therefore I am planning to post my progress on X and every project will have /stats page where live stats of the app will be available.

Tackling My Task Management Problem 🚀

I’ve sucked at task management for YEARS, I still do! I’ve tried literally everything — Sheets, Todoist, Asana, ClickUp, Notion — you name it. I’d start… and then quit after a few weeks - always.

What I struggle with the most is delegating tasks. As a CEO, I delegate a ton, and it’s super hard to track everything I’ve handed off to the team. Take this example: A few days ago, I emailed an employee about checking potential collaboration opportunities with a courier company. Just one of 10s of tasks like this I delegate daily.

Suddenly, I thought: “Wouldn’t it be AMAZING if just typing out this email automatically created a task for me to track?” 💡

So… I jumped in. With the power of AI and a few intense days of work, I built a task manager that does just that. But of course, I couldn’t stop there.

Research & Leveling It Up 📈

I looked at similar tools like TickTick and Todoist, scraped their G2 reviews (totally legally, promise! 😅), and ran them through AI for a deep SWOT analysis. I wanted to understand what their users liked/didn’t like and what gaps my app could fill.

Some of the features people said they were missing didn’t align with the vision for my app (keeping it simple and personal), but I found some gold nuggets:

• Integration with calendars (Google)
• Reminders
• Customizable UX (themes)

So, I started implementing what made sense and am keeping others on the roadmap for the future.

And I’ve even built for that to, it still doesn’t have a name, however the point is you select on how many reviews of a specific app you want to make a SWOT analysis on and it will do it for you. Example for Todoist in comments. But more on that, some other time, maybe other post ...

Key Features So Far:

Here’s what’s live right now:

✅ Email to Task: Add an email as to, cc, or bcc — and it automatically creates a task with context, due dates, labels, etc.

✅ WhatsApp Reminders: Get nudged to handle your tasks via WhatsApp.

✅ WhatsApp to Task: Send a message like /task buy groceries — bam, it’s added with full context etc..

✅ Chrome Extension (work-in-progress): Highlight text on any page, right-click, and send it straight to your task list.

Next Steps: Build WITH the Community 👥

Right now, the app is 100% free while still in the early stages. But hey, API calls and server costs aren’t cheap, so pricing is something I’ll figure out with you as we grow. For now, my goal is to hit 100 users and iterate from there. My first pricing idea is, without monthly subscription, I don’t want to charge someone for something he didn’t use. So I am planning on charging "per task", what do you think?

Here’s what I have planned:

📍 End of Year Goal: 100 users (starting from… 1 🥲).

💸 Revenue Roadmap: When we establish pricing, we’ll talk about that.

🛠️ Milestones:

• Post on Product Hunt when we hit 100 users.
• Clean up my self-written spaghetti code (hire a pro dev for review 🙃).
• Hire a part-time dev once we hit MRR that can cover its costs.

You can check how are we doing on thisisatask.me/stats

Other Side Projects I’m Working On:

Because… what’s life without taking on too much, right? 😂 Full list of things I’m building:

1. Internal HRM: Not public, tried and tested in-house.
2. Android TV App: Syncs with HRM to post announcements to office TVs (streamlined and simple).
3. Stats Tracker App: Connects to our internal software and gives me real-time company insights.
4. Review Analyzer: Scrapes SaaS reviews (e.g., G2) and runs deep analysis via AI. This was originally for my Shopify SaaS but is quickly turning into something standalone. Coming soon!
5. Mobile app game: secret for now.

Let’s Build This Together!

Would love it if you guys checked out thisisatask.me and gave it a spin! Still super early, super raw, but I’m pumped to hear your thoughts.

Also, what’s a must-have task manager feature for you? Anything that frustrates you with current tools? I want to keep evolving this in public, so your feedback is gold. 🌟

Let me know, Reddit! Are you with me? 🙌

I got my bachelor's in computer sci and started working in tech. I hate it so much. Corporate sucks, god; the office politics make me wanna die (and I get that office politics is a norm).

I hate staring at the screen the whole day. I only liked being remote, but every place has a return to the office now. I quit my job, and now I’m thinking of starting a SaaS company for invoicing and financial management.

Maybe I can get two developers to build with me. Does anyone have anything to share or help to give on this?

I just launched my 4th start-up of the year and was looking for product exposure.

Then decided to try posting on HackerNews for a first time and the results were all over the roof... I stayed on the front page for a couple of days and got crazy engagement.

A quick disclaimer: the product isn't flashy as it generated 11k visitors with only a few conversions.

HackerNews has been by far the highest ROI for my time and you should use it to your advantage to generate more eyeballs for your product.

Keep in mind that the majority of people there are tech people, so it should interest them as well.

I mean how does this stuff get soooo much attention on social media? Its obvious that it ISNT so easy and its obvious that when everybody does dropshipping, smma or whatever currently the trend is, you wont stick out just by doing nothing.
Im just so sick of this type of media being displayed everywhere and seeing so many people loose their minds over this. When you go into the comment section of posts like these you will spot sooo many having high expectations and they will go ahead and seriously believe that you can sell a tshirt you designed on canva for 20$ on etsy and wake up to 5 million and a new car the next day.
If you really put your mind to stuff like this you can probably have success with it but thats not what they are promising. All these false promises get them insane amounts of followers too? I mean why do so many people follow them? Have they tried the stuff they praise? probably not, otherwise they wouldve found out that it sucks and stopped following. With a person over 2k followers its already unlikely that even 200 persons have success with the stuff (assuming they even tried). But consuming this media even if you dont try it, is horrible content to consume? Youre basically getting told that "i got this and that, you dont, and thats your fault" like wtf is this. This isnt inspiring, motivational or supportive in any way. It only puts down the effort you put in the stuff you currently do without having equal financial success.
Im currently working on a startup but ive been dumb too and when that whole dropshipping stuff was at its peak, it all looked like a money glitch.
Now when i see posts like these and all the people still falling for this type of stuff, it just makes me sad. Has nothing positive about it. Only for the original creators of course. And i guess thats why its not going to stop anytime soon i guess.
Would love to hear your opinions on this topic

Entrepreneurship is hard... but why is this?

For the strong majority of us, what we want to achieve is accomplished by simply sitting in front of a computer, reading and typing words and clicking buttons

This isn’t hard, in fact it is extremely easy

It's not the physical attributes of these activities that generate difficulty

It's always the human being that generates the resistance doing the activities.

So why and how does our brain make it so hard?

i learned why this happens, and it has helped me immensely.

Here it is:

The reason why entrepreneurship is hard: is because your brain wants to keep you safe.

I’ll explain the science behind why this happens, and what you can do to make productivity significantly easier.

The difficulty of productivity is decided by how you view yourself.

How you view yourself in relation to your work to be specific: If you view yourself as very productive, then productivity will be significantly easier for you than if you didn’t.

This happens because your brain does not like change. This is also why our personalities and values remain relatively the same throughout our lives. When we do something atypical of ourselves, our brain dislikes this and you feel negative emotions. Our brains want us to remain as we are, and this is because we have proven to be able to survive in our current state.

And this happens because your brain is only concerned about your survival, and your “current self” is surviving just fine, you are surviving well in your current state right now.

So your brain doesn’t see the need to change, it wants you to remain as the person that you are right now, because you’ve established that you can survive in your current state.

So how does this make working and being productive difficult?

This is because, when you do things like work, and other tasks where more is expected of you than what you currently are, these situations cause you to improve, and therefore change.

Your brain doesn’t like change, even when you’re improving, because your brain is solely focused on your survival, and it doesn’t want the risk of you changing, because you are surviving just fine in your current situation now

Entrepreneurship cause you to become a better version of yourself, and to become a better version of yourself, your current self has to die, for the new and improved you, to take its place.

And your brain doesn’t want that, your brain sees changing, even improving, as risky, because you are surviving just fine in your current state, your brain doesn’t want you to change, your brain wants you to stay who you are.

So how can you make entrepreneurship easier? You can make this significantly easier by viewing yourself as a hard worker, because then hard work becomes typical of you, so you are no longer changing as much, so your brain produces less negative emotion when you are being productive.

But this is much harder than it sounds, because the only way to view yourself as a hard worker, is by working hard, and you know deep down if you are trying as hard as you can.

But if you are working very hard, very diligently, and you are genuinely trying your best, then this will become easy for you.

This post is based on Neuroproductivity, which is NO-BS productivity (productivity using science) if you are interested I got this from moretimeoffline+com they only use productivity based on science for entrepreneurs, they have great free stuff there.

Hope this helps! cheers :)

Thinking of freeing up some equity and want to put it to work immediately. I have an extensive background in sales but I love working with my hands. I have experience driving large vehicles and hauling trailers. I'm really thinking about buying some equipment (skid steer, mini excavator, etc) or a 26' box truck. But I'm incredibly open to other ideas. So if it was you, what would you do, or what do you see a need for. For reference I am located near a major city in the South East.

Hey all- fellow entrepreneur here! I am currently re-exploring the marketing strategy of my business and I would love to know, what is the most underrated marketing in your personal opinion?

Lets go!

Let's do a Spotify style wrapped 2024. Let me know in the comments below, your favorites startups you discovered and loved in 2024.

As for me, it's probably ChatGPT! I use ChatGPT daily for recipes, brainstorming etc haha

If you had to start from zero and generate $1,000 revenue in one month what would you do?

So we have an employee who is a really good kid, does so many things great, but will not for the life of him pick up on instruction, it’s getting to the point where he is almost making more work for me than I would have without him.

A couple examples:

1. We are a small company and are pretty chill. He started taking his shoes off and working in just his socks. I told him he’s gotta wear shoes at work. I had to remind him nearly 10 times before he finally stopped taking his shoes off.
2. When working his main job we had a specific order in which we need things done. Despite how much I tell him he just would not do the correct order. It got to the point where I finally made a document with the order and made it the background on his laptop. 4 projects later, still not doing the correct order.

Now the thing that’s hard is he’s not doing it on purpose he genuinely is just a space cadet and it’s like his mind can’t retain information until you tell him 10 times. We’ve had employees casually ask him about some things he did wrong and you could tell he just generally had no clue he even did it wrong.

When this happens the first 4-5 months it didn’t bother me cause he’s new but now it’s getting to the point where it’s wearing me down and I don’t know how to get the point across to him that helps motivate him without tearing him down.

Hi everyone, I wanted to share my journey of building an app for personal use, releasing it to the world, and earning my first $366 as an indie developer. It might not sound like much, but for someone just starting out, it feels like a massive win. Here’s how it all started:

The Problem

A few months ago, as a fresh graduate hunting for jobs, I spent a lot of time scrolling through social media and forums during my train commutes. I kept coming across great posts about DSA, interview tips, and app design inspiration. But saving them was always a hassle—existing apps either disrupted my flow, needed an account, or were too feature-heavy for my liking.

I wanted something simple. An app that let me save content in one tap without logging in. Being a developer myself, I decided to create exactly what I needed.

The Solution

I built a no-frills app with a share extension for easy saving, local storage for privacy, and iCloud sync for convenience. Initially, it was just for me. But after using it for a while, I realized it could help others, too.

Since I already had a few apps on the App Store, I decided to polish it and release it publicly.

Monetizing the App

I wanted to keep the app free but also explore ways to earn some income. Here’s the approach I took: 1. Ads with a Twist: Instead of bombarding users, I gave them 5 free saves and then let them refresh their limit by watching an ad. This way, the app remained useful without forcing ads unnecessarily. 2. Subscriptions: To my surprise, users requested an option to avoid ads altogether. This feedback motivated me to add a subscription model after participating in a RevenueCat hackathon.

The First Dollar

I launched the app on October 16, 2024, and added subscriptions in early November. On November 6, I got my first paying customer. That feeling was incredible—knowing that something I built for myself was valuable enough for someone else to pay for.

Building in Public

Since then, I’ve been sharing my journey on LinkedIn and Bluesky, connecting with indie developers, learning about App Store Optimization (ASO), and even reaching out to journalists to feature my app. It’s been an exciting journey of growth and collaboration.

The Results - Downloads: ~1200 - Earnings: $366

The revenue may be modest, but as a small indie developer, it’s a huge motivation to keep going. I’m now working on my next app and can’t wait to share more with this amazing community.

Final Thoughts

To anyone out there with an idea, don’t be afraid to build and monetize your app. Just try once, and you’ll see—people are willing to pay for your product. You might surprise yourself with what you can achieve. 😊

We’re all chasing that sweet, sweet search traffic, right? And how couldn’t we.

It’s probably the most “passive” customer acquisition channel out there. Once you rank, it’s basically just free traffic that’s coming in every day.

Ranking for intent-based queries is particularly lucrative (e.g., “best credit card”) since the lead is already warm and in purchasing mood.

However, in recent years, partly due to the onslaught of AI-generated (rubbish) content and the subsequent reputational risks for Google, it’s become harder and takes much longer to rank.

I’ve seen the change first hand. When I first started blogging in 2017, it was as easy as “publish great content, interlink properly, and watch traffic trickle in almost instantly.”

If you’re not investing thousands of dollars into link building, it’ll probably take at least 6 months or longer to get some Google love (sandbox) – granted you do everything right and then some.

That said, if you as impatient as me, there are still a great way to get search traffic early on, which is Microsoft’s Bing.

Here are the stats from my Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools to illustrate the point (from my newest project called terrific.tools, which I launched 3 weeks ago):

· Google: 48 clicks, 110 impressions, ranking for 4 queries/keywords

· Bing: 132 clicks, 6k impressions, already ranking for 205 keywords

So, almost 3x the traffic despite supposedly being the much smaller search engine.

Bing offers a bunch of other benefits as well.

First, ChatGPT utilizes the Bing index for its own Search product and the main chat, so if you rank on Bing, you’ll also get traffic from ChatGPT (I got around 13 visitors from ChatGPT in the last 3 weeks!).

Second, Bing is quite popular in tier 1 countries like the US. So, the traffic you get is likelier to be of higher quality / purchasing power.

Third, Bing offers a bunch of free tools within its webmaster tools, which help you to improve pages from an SEO perspective (which will inevitably also help you with ranking on Google). Also worth it to check out IndexNow, which will speed up indexing across other search engines (except Google).

It’s super easy to get started with optimizing for Bing. Just set up an account and connect your Google Search Console account.

I expect Bing to continue being a great traffic source. Microsoft’s financial success doesn’t hinge on Bing (unlike Google).

In fact, because Google is entrenching itself into Microsoft’s money-making categories (the whole Google Office products like Sheets or Google’s Cloud product), I expect Microsoft to continue doubling down on making Bing better for both users and creators alike.

So, tldr, eff Google, check out Bing.

Hey everyone,

I run a small 2-person agency that focuses on web design and SEO, mainly for local businesses (solar companies have been our niche lately). I wanted to share a case study of how we helped a solar installation company go from barely getting leads to generating 40+ per month with some pretty straightforward changes.

Not trying to sell anything—just thought this might be helpful for others who are in the same boat or working with small businesses that need a boost.

The Starting Point:

When this solar company came to us, their website was averaging around 120 visitors a month and converting at 0.5%. That’s about 1-2 leads a month… which, as you can guess, isn’t enough to sustain growth.

They weren’t ranking well for local searches, and their lead flow was almost entirely word of mouth. No paid ads, no SEO traction—just kind of existing online without much happening.

What We Noticed:

• Website Design – Outdated, cluttered, and hard to navigate. There were no clear CTAs or forms to request a quote.
• SEO – They were targeting generic keywords like “solar panels” and “solar energy,” competing against huge national companies.
• Lead Gen – There wasn’t an obvious way for visitors to get in touch or request services. No forms, no chat, nothing.

It was basically a digital ghost town.

What We Did (Step by Step):

1. Website Overhaul – Simplifying the User Journey

• We scrapped the old design and rebuilt the site with a clean, simple layout.
• Added bright, bold CTAs on every key page – stuff like “Get a Free Quote” and “See Solar Incentives in Your Area.”
• Optimized for mobile since 70%+ of their traffic was coming from phones. (Their old site was nearly unusable on mobile).
• Focused on speed – slow sites kill conversions.

2. SEO Shift – Going Local

• We stopped going after broad terms like “solar energy” and focused on local SEO – things like “solar installation in [City Name]” or “best solar company near me.”
• Wrote blog posts answering local-specific questions like “What solar incentives are available in [City]?”
• Reworked meta titles, descriptions, and headers to include location-based keywords + CTAs.

3. Lead Generation – Make It Easy to Get in Touch

• Added contact forms to every major page – kept them short (just name, phone, and service area).
• Installed a live chat widget so visitors could ask quick questions without committing to a full quote.
• For paid ads, we built dedicated landing pages with testimonials, trust signals, and limited-time offers.

The Results (60 Days Later):

• Traffic – 120 visitors/month ➝ 800 visitors/month
• Conversion Rate – 0.5% ➝ 5%
• Leads – 1-2 per month ➝ 40+ leads per month

Honestly, I wasn’t expecting results this fast, but I think it really came down to fixing basic things that were holding them back. Once the site was easier to use and we targeted the right audience, things clicked.

Key Takeaways:

• Simple works. You don’t need flashy stuff—just a clean, user-friendly site.
• Focus local. Competing with national players is tough. Local SEO gives small businesses a fighting chance.
• Make the next step obvious. People need to know exactly what to do next—whether that’s filling out a form, calling, or using live chat.

If you’re working on similar projects (or if you run a local biz yourself), I hope this helps. Happy to answer any questions or dive deeper into any part of the process!

I am a 22yo West African student trying to make some capital. >95% of online opportunities are not available in our geography. I also have only a mobile phone currently.

I estimate what I need to gain stability and take on something with more of a long-term focus is around $300. I am looking for any niche opportunities or ideas and suggestions you may have on how I could go about this. Ideally, it should be online and legitimate and wouldn't mind if it would take up to a month or two or longer.

Thanks in advance for any help. All replies are appreciated and my chats are open too!

PS: I have some experience in mobile video editing and growing social media (mainly tiktok) accounts to over 900k. If that skill capital matters to you and could be employed in one way or another, we could work together!

Hi everyone, Aleksa here.

3 years ago, together with a co-founder, we founded a tech startup. Today we're filing for liquidation. In between we raised a VC round, hired people, fired people, had 3 big iterations, got paying customers, and tried to raise again from the current investors as our results were not good enough for an external round, they were reluctant and finally, we decided to file for liquidation.

It may sound stupid given our situation, but I've never been more confident and content with myself.

I'll share the post-mortem.

Biggest learnings:

• Build only for people whose speed/values/motivation/curiosity you align with (in my case marketing, sales, devs)
• Build only stuff where you (or a co-founder) would be the first paying customer, eat your own dog food
• Build based on revenue, not feedback
• Initially don't focus on MVP, focus on MSS (Minimum Sellable Setup), just worry about how to get the first $1
• If the product is not easy to set up and easy to use, it won't fly (unless enterprise, which I don't recommend in the early stage)
• In the beginning use small service providers (lawyers, accountants) and vendors, big ones won't give a damn about you when you're small

Iterations

When we started in 2021, as you can all remember, everyone was working from home, corona's 2nd wave was surging and everyone was talking about the future of work. Whenever we spoke with people from our circles, everyone was pointing in one direction - onboarding of their new talent. We explored and got excited about it, got verbal commitments from companies, and started building and fundraising.

We successfully raised a $600k pre-seed round with nothing more than a deck (2021 was a crazy year for funding). Once we launched our v1, all companies from before were very excited to talk with us and see how we could help them solve the problem. We started to notice a pattern that was killing us - the HRs were excited about it, the managers were excited about it, but nobody wanted to take ownership of the process. HRs were directing us to managers, managers were directing us to HRs, like a ping pong. In the meantime, it was the beginning of 2022 and people were going back to office and then the layoff tsunami started all over the world. We knew that the game was over for this product.

1st Iteration - Onboarding the supply side of the marketplace

We got a pull toward marketplaces, particularly the ones with more complex onboarding processes of their supply side (think hosts for Airbnb, and drivers for Uber, where is included KYC, signing, training, etc.). We built something that they could finish in 2min, which was taking them 2-3 weeks. However, there wasn't a big interest from operations/product to integrate us in this process, as they saw it as too important for their operations. One Uber executive told me directly they'd never buy from us for that reason.

2nd iteration - People compliance onboarding

We got this more specific pull, from one big marketplace that was dealing with blue-collar recruitment, and they needed to verify the right to work, payroll and agreement signing. We were close to signing a big deal with them, however selling to a large company bit our ass - within the period of 4 months, 10 different contact persons left the company or were fired and we were always starting from 0. Ultimately, the last person who took over was a product person who wanted to have this internally as his baby project.

However we continued drilling in this direction, particularly with the rise of international employment through Employer of Record - long story short, nobody gives a damn about compliance they just needed to tick the box that they were doing something. I will take a liberty and say that 80%+ providers are non-compliant.

3rd iteration - User analytics for PLG SaaS (self-service; small ticket big volume businesses)

We pivoted to this one entirely different. Before we were building based on feedback, now we decided to build based on revenue. Our MVP was a Google Sheet. Our customers wanted to enrich their user records (they had only emails) and get insights from us who are closest to conversion based on usage numbers. We've built algorithms inside Sheets and we're moving ultra-fast, our turnaround times were 2-3 days and sending back fine-processed data inside Sheets. We have 10 companies paying, some even up to $1k per processing. That's when we started building a product for recurring services. In the first month we got 2 companies and $500 MRR. We grew it to 6 paying customers but hit the ceiling as we needed more resources to build better products and acquire more customers. My co-founders were the only ones doing development, I was the only one doing sales.

Investors

Being in Europe, where the most common thing is to check what is successful in the US and just copy-paste it, we were lucky that our investors gave us all the freedom we needed to innovate. We got VCs from Germany, the UK, and the US. All of them were helpful and supportive. Out of them, only one was ex-founder, which we felt during the tipping points.

For future:

• I wouldn't raise money with 0 revenue unless I don't have any other way to build a company and finance myself
• Either raise big or don't raise at all (we raised but operated like a bootstrapped business, which doesn't work for the VC game)
• One VC had some very specific conditions about needing to have an employee in 1 jurisdiction, which forced us to have a person there all the time, which was a limiting factor. Never again agreeing to any kind of limiting factors

Co-Founder

I was lucky I had a great co-founder and the best colleague in this journey. We were complementary in skill set, with personal values somewhere identical somewhere opposite where we had quite harmonic and diverse perspectives. In my opinion, in every situation helped us pick the best alternative according to our knowledge. What helped tremendously in the beginning was using 50 co-founder questions, which allowed us to see that we were almost fully aligned on the things important to us individually.

The source of my confidence and what's next?

In this journey, I learned these things:

What's the exact level of innovation you need to bring to the market, not too low not too high

Sales approach for 0 → 1

Marketing machine (borderline agency) you need to build to win with SaaS

Product characteristics for 0 → 1

In the meantime, I got very excited about micro SaaS and I plan to launch at least 1 monthly, where for each of them I will be the first user.

Guys, i want to start a business but i have a fear.. How do you get over this?

Thank you all you so much for your comments ❤️

Hi everyone, I’m 17 years old and I have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur, past few months I have been working tirelessly to design and plan our everything for my product, with the help of my father and some friends. I would like to seek any mentors or people here who could give me advice or insight on this journey as I keep working to make my dreams a reality. Anything is appreciated. Feel free to dm me too

I’ve been building something alongside my 9-5 job, and today, I hit a huge milestone—I signed my first $3,400 client for my MVP-building agency.

This journey started with an idea and countless late nights. There were moments I doubted myself, proposals that went unanswered, and pitches that fell flat. But this win? It’s proof that persistence works.

Here’s the truth they don’t always tell you: success is rarely about a perfect plan. It’s about showing up, improving with every setback, and staying in the game when it feels like no one’s paying attention.

To anyone grinding in silence, building something from nothing: your breakthrough might be closer than you think.

Today, it’s $3,400. Tomorrow? Who knows. But if this post reaches even one person who needed a sign to keep going—consider this it.

Hello all!

I started my refurbished laptop business 11 days ago and just got my first sale!

I bought a cheap HP laptop off FB marketplace on a whim knowing I'd be able to flip it, in one way it was a mistake because it doesn't align with my brand but I sold it for a 20% profit margin.

I've learnt a lot so far in 11 days in terms of advertising and marketing and now that i've made a sale I feel more confident in spending more money sourcing more laptops and paying for more advertising

Just thought I'd share my first money made online, especially so close to christmas!

EDIT: Made another sale today!

If you had $100,000 to put down on a business venture, what would be the most profitable path forward? What type of business, investment ideas, etc?

What business would you run? How would grow the hell out of that money?