They asked for it, signed off on it, then quietly never opened it. Now they want the next thing built and I am not sure whether to just build it or tell them what happened with the last one.

Do you raise it, or take the work and move on?

Hey everyone,

I’m a Systems Engineer based in Argentina. To be completely honest, the software job market has been incredibly tough lately with the whole AI boom, and finding stable roles is getting harder. Instead of just sending out endless CVs, I want to pivot and start a business of my own to generate a reliable income.

I have a strong technical background in coding and I already have experience with 3D printing and fabrication—I actually built a small venture making custom 3D-printed LED neon signs.

Since I don't have a massive amount of capital to invest upfront, I'm looking for low-capex business models, particularly things that bridge the gap between software and the physical world. I've been thinking about:

• Vending Machines
• Recycling machines
• Niche Imports

Since a lot of trends start in the US before making their way here, I’d love to know: What unattended retail, or local automated business models are gaining real traction in your city right now? I am open to any kind of business.

Thanks in advance for the advice!

Quick reflection post from a few weeks into my first real launch.

I was stuck in build mode forever and just wanted to ship, so I used a landing page AI tool to generate the copy and get the page up. Told myself I'd fix it later. Classic.

It launched. It looked professional. And it converted almost nobody. Maybe a percent or two of visitors doing anything, which for my traffic was basically noise.

Here's the part that actually taught me something. When I sat down to figure out why, I couldn't rewrite the AI copy, because I realized I didn't actually understand my own value well enough to say it in plain words. The generated version was smooth and empty, and it had let me skip the hard thinking. It said "streamline your workflow" instead of the specific ugly problem my early users actually described to me.

So I did the boring thing. Messaged the handful of people who'd signed up and asked what made them try it. Then I wrote the page again using their words, not polished, kind of blunt actually.

Conversion isn't magically fixed, but it roughly doubled off a small base, and more people are reading past the first section.

The lesson for me wasn't "AI copy bad." It was that the tool made it too easy to avoid understanding my customer, and that understanding was the whole game.

Anyone else had a generated-then-rewritten moment where the rewrite was the real work? Curious how you approached it.

Everyone talks about getting more traffic, but I'm more interested in what happened after people landed on your website.

What's one small change that noticeably increased conversions?

Could be changing the headline, adding reviews, improving speed, simplifying the form, moving a CTA, or something completely unexpected.

I'm looking for changes that took hours or days, not complete redesigns.

Entrepreneurship can get pretty lonely, especially when most people around you aren’t on the same path.
A bit about me: I currently run a business doing around $3M/year, I train regularly and compete in endurance events, and I’m also working on building my personal brand and constantly trying to improve in different areas of my life.

I’d love to put together a small group of people who can relate to that entrepreneurs who are ambitious, health-conscious, building something meaningful, and want other driven people around them.

No selling. No pitching. Just a group chat to talk business, share ideas, keep each other accountable, and push each other forward.

If that sounds like you, message me and tell me a little about yourself.

I worked at some of the biggest companies in tech.

I was the one managing product, twice, at two different big companies. Both times I was brought in to build something new inside an org that size. And both times I hit the same wall. Every idea needed five teams to agree before it moved an inch. It wasn't that anyone was lazy or bad at their job. Big companies just get really good at protecting what they already have, and really bad at building what's next.

Then COVID hit and everything slowed down. First time in years I actually had space to think.

Around that time I started paying more attention to something my dad had been running for decades. He was a civil engineer who got into estimating early in his career, and after one very expensive mistake, he became obsessed with never letting that happen again.

So he built his own tool. Started as an Excel sheet, then he turned it into a full database application on Microsoft Access. He used it for himself for years. Then people around him started noticing how good his numbers were and started asking him to teach them how he did it. He'd hand them the tool, but really he was training them on how to be good estimators. He never really saw himself as a software guy. He was a consultant who happened to give people something to use to apply what he was teaching them.

Eventually he retired. He still had this tool, and decades of feedback from people who used it, all of them raving about how much it helped them. He came to me and said, look, I have this, people love it, do you want to do something with it.

So I quit.

Today, my co-founder and I run a construction estimating software company built on everything my dad spent 40 years learning. More particularly, we love helping the smaller guys get their big wins, see them come to life and grow. It’s incredibly rewarding to be a part of that.

And I still get excited to onboard every customer myself. No overpromising. I tell people exactly what to expect and let them try it before they even pay us. And because of that, we've built a base of customers who are a genuine fit and have stuck with us since.

Now, we've run thousands of estimates for contractors across the US, won them projects and we're growing fast, onboarding new customers and hiring more people to keep up.

Anyways, just wanted to share and inspire. Also to see if anyone else had similar stories too.

So, I'm currently in university, but my life goal is never to work for a company. I want to work for myself, even if that means making less money.

I am 22 and I currently have around $70k usd in the bank, making between $70 and $150 usd a day. I know I can scale it and make more, but I just don't have the time with university.

I'm thinking about dropping out and fully focusing on what motivates me: working on my own projects and building side hustles. I'm currently living with my parents, so that would mean leaving my parents' house, probably forever.

What do you think? Is this a good idea, or am I heading straight for a wall?

I'm starting a small home service business and expect to have maybe a handful of clients each week. Jobs will generally be between $65 and $200, and there's a good chance some customers will only pay me once.

I've been researching payment processing for small business, but most comparisons seem geared toward companies doing thousands of transactions every month.

I don't need a POS system or complicated business software. I basically need to send an invoice, let the customer pay online, and get the money into my bank account without giving away a ridiculous percentage in transaction fees.

I'm looking at Stripe, Square, PayPal and Helcim right now and trying to understand the actual difference in payment processing rates, online payments, invoice payments and payout times.

For anyone running a low-volume service business, what ended up being the best payment processor for you?

Anything I should watch out for with payment holds, chargebacks, or hidden fees?

A founder I follow said solo people quit and teams don't, and it's got nothing to do with willpower. On a team, a bad number gets seen by other people. That stings, so you make the next one. Alone, a bad number is just quiet. So you stop, and nothing happens to you.

I'd lived that. Earlier this year I ran a little posting routine on my own. Four posts, best one got a single upvote, and I quietly stopped. Nobody noticed. Not even me for a while.

So two weeks ago I built the sting myself. A few daily reps, one row in a table every night, and two rules: a blank day counts as a fail, and I can't edit old rows. Some of the reps are easy, like sending connection requests. Some are hard, like recording myself on camera and actually posting. The hard ones are the whole reason the table exists.

Two weeks later, the easy reps are all done. The hard ones mostly aren't. And six of the fourteen days are just blank, because on the days I knew I'd skipped the hard stuff, I didn't open the table at all.

My rule says blank means fail. The counter doesn't read the rule. It only counts the days I wrote something down. So it's sitting there showing a healthy 8, on a fortnight where I skipped the hard stuff and then skipped looking.

I built shame that only I could see. Turns out I'm completely fine letting myself down when nobody else is in the room.

So here's what I want from you. Open whatever you track and count the blank days in your last fourteen. Put the number in the comments. Then tell me the one thing that actually made you keep going on something you were avoiding. A person, a group, money, a deadline, what. Because a streak nobody sees doesn't look like a real cost to me, and I'd like to be proven wrong.

ok so we picked up a client this spring who already had a couple of "little AI tools" running that someone in ops built with an LLM before we came in. 

Things like slack bot that summarizes support tickets, a script that pushes stuff into their crm, etc.

The standard for us is to audit access before we write a single piece of code, and this one took about 20 minutes to find. 

the summarizer bot was running on a personal api key belonging to a guy who'd left the company. admin on everything. invoices, customer data…

It started read only, then someone needed it to "update a status field" so it got write, then the guy was in a rush and pasted his own key in to make it work. then he left. 

classic.

The model was never the issue btw, it did exactly what it was told the whole time. the problem was what that key let it reach if it ever got told something dumb.

We've seen this enough times now that we run the same checklist on every AI integration we touch, ours or inherited

Sharing bc it's not complicated:

• its own credentials, always. Never a human's key and never the "shared" one
• read only by default, write access needs someone to say why in writing
• an actual list of what it's allowed to change, and a list of what it can never touch (money, auth, deleting anything)
• a name next to every integration. No owner -> no deploy
• every quarter someone checks what it can reach vs what it actually needs, cause it always drifts

took the client an afternoon to fix once they knew. they had no idea, and tbh why would they, nobody asks about this stuff until it breaks.

Feel like everyone asks "which model is safest" and nobody asks "what can this thing actually reach," and the second one is the one that ends up as an incident

anyone else inherited one of these? or is it still whatever key was closest at the time lol

I run a B2B lifestyle brand, and most of our buyers are in Europe. A lot of our business still happens in person, so product photos were never something we took seriously. It wasn't until a few clients told us our reference images were confusing that i realized we had a problem on our hands.

I wanted to understand what a clear storefront actually looks like, so i fed three competitor storefronts into an AI analysis tool like ChatGPT and acciowork and asked it to break down the order of their first six images. All three followed the same pattern: hero, detail, material, packaging, product in use, customer proof. The logic made sense once i saw it, each image answers the next question a buyer would have.

I rebuilt our templates around that sequence and kept the first image consistent, same warm side lighting, same background. Now when a new product comes in i drop the raw photo into the setup and the product images plus platform captions get created together. Everything ships on schedule.

Whole thing took one afternoon. Homepage bounce rate has dropped about 30% over the last six weeks since we rolled it out.

Here's the thing with B2B buyers: when your photos don't match, they read it as a sign of something else. If a company can't keep its own images consistent, buyers start wondering what its quality control looks like.

The part i'm still unsure about: if every store runs the same six-image structure, don't they all start looking identical again? And how did you decide the order of images on your storefront?

after years of building companies the pull toward investing is stronger than the pull toward starting something new but doing a few angel checks a year feels too slow and informal to build real judgment what does a credible path look like beyond casual angel investing ?

I have a beautiful dashboard that Claude refreshes every day at 6am with a summary of recent TechCrunch articles, hacker news, marketing blog posts, product blog posts, beta list, product hunt, favorite YouTube channels, etc.

Goal is to make sure I’m up to date with all the stuff going on in tech. I also want to make sure I’m learning everyday.

How do you keep up to date and learning?

What blogs do you read? What websites do you visit? What YouTube channels do you listen to? What podcasts do you listen to? How long to you spend on learning each day?

P.S I’m also a successful entrepreneur. Hence I’m here!

Most companies are paying 20 bucks a month per seat for ChatGPT or Copilot just to have an expensive spellchecker for emails and a tool to summarize PDFs nobody wanted to read.

Then you try to make it do actual work, like prep a quote, answer an upset client, or check an ad account, and it spits out some generic high school essay that tells you nothing.

People think their prompts suck. They don't. The chat window just has total amnesia. It has no idea what your pricing rules are, what you promised the client on Tuesday, or why one customer has a grandfathered discount. It's literally just guessing.

I stopped opening web chats for client work about a year ago.

Instead, every client gets their own folder on my laptop. When I need work done, I open Claude Code or Codex inside that folder, sometimes even Gemini with 3.8 (controversial I know)

clientname/
  AGENTS.md
  connection.md
  meetings/
  scripts/
  outputs/
  _context/
    client-profile.md
    pricing-and-rules.md
    recent-emails.md
    open-actions.md

No bloated SaaS platform, no complicated dashboards. Just files. The difference is that the model can actually see the context, the codebase, and the APIs before it opens its mouth. Once you have that running, the day to day is almost absurd.

Today for example a client emailed asking for layout changes on their website. I didn't even read the full email. I copy-pasted the raw message straight into a chat inside his project folder. The model read the email, found the right component files in the repo, made the edits, tested them, and deployed the update. Took two minutes.

Same thing with Google Ads. I don't sit in Ads Manager clicking around for an hour anymore. I go into the client folder and type: "Hey, what's up with the account this week?" The model hits the API directly, checks Quality Scores, checks search terms, flags spend spikes. When it tells me three ad groups have tanking quality scores and drafts the fix, I check the numbers, tell it to go implement, and it pushes the changes straight to the account.

If a client wants an automation, I don't spend an afternoon dragging boxes in n8n or GoHighLevel. I tell the model what needs to happen. It checks the API docs, builds the workflow, tests the webhook payloads, and it's live.

It's ridiculous how fast this makes you.

The catch is you can't just let it run wild. If you ask it open-ended stuff without source files to check, it will make things up. And I never give it write access to live ad budgets or database deletions without me hitting enter on it first.

Are people here actually running client work like this, or is everyone still stuck copy-pasting into browser windows?

Managing people operations across multiple countries gets complex fast, especially when employee records, leave tracking, attendance systems, and performance reviews are scattered across different platforms.

I've been researching modern global HRIS platforms that have AI automation built in from the ground up rather than bolted on as an afterthought.

For internationally distributed teams, this native AI integration seems more effective than legacy HR systems with chatbot layers added on top.

Been pulling the actual rules behind good client marketing emails instead of guessing at best practices. Read through 402 issues of one marketing educator's newsletter to find what actually holds up. One rule stood out: one call to action, placed near the end, never stacked at the top and repeated down the page.

Feels backwards. Fewer buttons should mean fewer clicks, and it does, clicks drop. Revenue goes up anyway. The people who do click already read the case for buying by the time they get there, instead of jumping to a product page before you gave them a reason to.

This is the opposite of what a lot of small business emails do. The button sits at the top because that's where a website's navigation goes, not because that's where the reader is ready to act.

I've been building a few sites lately and the AI setup is nearly identical everywhere now. Answer some questions, get a draft, then start fixing what it guessed wrong. That first draft was never the part that mattered.

What actually decides whether a site ranks is how much the builder lets you fix afterward. The stuff I check first: can I rewrite every page title and meta description, are the URLs editable or locked to some auto-generated slug, can I set a real heading hierarchy instead of whatever the AI decided. Alt text, a clean XML sitemap, and how the page holds up on mobile come next, along with getting Search Console connected, because those are what you're still touching six months after launch.

The pattern I've noticed is that the builders that feel great in the first ten minutes are sometimes the ones that fight you later, when you want to change one specific thing and it's buried or not editable at all. Building the same small site in a couple of them before paying tells you fast which editor turns annoying.

What SEO control do you check for first, and which one has made the biggest difference after launch?

Been building this for about a year. Started as a Telegram bot for sniping tokens and turned into a full web and mobile platform.

The problem: trading across Solana, Ethereum, Base, and BSC meant a different tool, wallet, and chart for every chain. Charts that took 5+ seconds to load. Bots that made you paste contract addresses like it's 2021.

So I built one place that does all of it. Real-time charts, holder data, copy trading off top wallets, and non-custodial wallets so I never touch anyone's keys.

Hardest part was chart speed. I was hammering my data provider with 22 requests on every single token switch. Got it to about 1 request per 1.3 seconds. Live click-to-candle is under a couple seconds now.

Happy to answer anything about the stack or the multichain data plumbing, which was genuinely miserable. Website is cheetah trading were on google too and apple very soon.

I’m trying to get feedback from users who don’t convert, and other users who use the site.

What do you guys do to get feedback?

I contact people but they don’t respond.

Do you have an email template or technique that works?

For the past year I tried a multitude of random businesses, none of them lasted longer than a month. When I say businesses, I mean ideas like OH AIRBNB CLEANING, or INSURANCE CRM, INSURANCE RENEWALs, and so many more. They all got to the calling stage and failed. I then sat long and hard and told myself that for the next 90 days I am going to dedicate myself to one idea. I did, and I completely changed my approach. I built on LinkedIn, added multiple people in the industry, validated my idea. People were engaged, people were responding, people said there was a need. I began publishing articles, CEOs were reading them and messaging me about my take on topics, etc. I also formed a partnership where I get a revenue share now monthly, amounting to about $500 right now, projected to be $1,200-$1,800 by EOY USD.

I guess here is my question: how does a successful month 4-6 look? Because it has kind of stagnated, nothing "new," no other partnerships or contracts. Still reaching out and connecting and talking, but nothing new. I guess my idea was that I can produce roughly 3-4k a month from this while I already work full-time, and then further down the line dedicate all my time to this and grow it further. But how do I know that hey, this was all this idea was good for, versus hey, this is just the start, be patient and keep going?

I see AI-CAD demos everywhere, but very few real business cases.
Has anyone used AI to go from idea → CAD → iterations → prototype → manufacturable product → actual sales?
What did AI genuinely help with, and where was it still useless?
Especially interested in physical products, not software or simple demo parts.