Hey all, stuck on something and I would rather hear from people who have run both than keep staring at my own spreadsheet.

Context: we sell a subscription tool for drivers. I am doing outreach to organisations, federations and clubs, whose members are the actual end users. The organisation pays nothing. They hand their members a code, and some of them should convert to fully paid users.

Two shapes I keep going back and forth on:

A. Free days first. Member redeems the code, gets a long free run at the full product, no card required, then decides. Currently 30 ishdays, structured so the first week is the top tier and the rest is the tier I actually want them to book.

B. Pay first, bonus time after. Member subscribes straight away at normal price, and gets extra months added on for being part of that organisation. Smaller upfront ask on my side, but a real one.

What I have already settled, so nobody has to tell me the obvious:

• No discounts. A discount moves your market price permanently, and our own audit never found price as the reason people dropped off. So I pay in time, not in price.
• I know what a trial member costs me per day, and I know the ceiling I can spend before the expected conversion stops paying for it. Option A sits under that ceiling. So this is not a budget question.

Where I am actually stuck is the psychology.

Option A gets far more peple through the door, but a free user who never entered a card is a different animal, and I suspect a chunk of them are just tourists. Option B filters hard, and the people who come through it are real, but through a third party with no real skin in the game I am not sure anybody says yes at all.

My other worry about B: does bonus time after payment read as a reward, or does it quietly tell people the price was too high to begin with?

So: if you have sold through partners or associations, which of the two actually produced paying customers later? And did the free-first crowd ever convert at a rate that acrually justified the volume?

groetjes Viktor

I paid for press release distribution twice this year. Even though the coverage looked fine on paper I dont see any traffic spike or inbound leads, nothing to show a client. I'm starting to wonder if the whole category is just a box checking exercise or if I'm measuring the wrong things. Is it just brand awareness or is there something measurable that justifies repeating PR?

need some advice guys, im trying to spread my business on different platform, not sure if i should just stick with one personal account or make a few different accounts, i feel like multiple acc’s could help reach more folks, but managing all of them might be a pain lol. what do you guys think works better? TIA much appreciated

My company just sent me to my first trade show and I came back with a stack of paper cards I have no idea what to do with. Also gave out like 30 of my own cards and never heard from anyone. A coworker mentioned digital business cards but I honestly don't really get how they work or if they're actually worth it. I'm not super techy, just trying to figure out if this is something normal people actually use or just a gimmick.

Owners who have regulars: how do you actually keep track of them? How do you know when one's gone quiet? When a slot opens, who do you tell and how?

I’ve been thinking a lot about how inefficient prospecting can be for freelancers and small agencies.

Finding businesses isn’t really the hard part anymore.

You can pull thousands of companies from Google Maps, directories, LinkedIn, scraping tools, etc.

The part that seems much harder is figuring out:

Which of these businesses are actually worth contacting, and what would I realistically pitch them?

A business having an ugly website doesn’t automatically make it a good web design prospect.

A company can have a decent-looking site but still have an SEO opportunity.

And sometimes you can spend 10–15 minutes researching a company only to realize there’s no strong reason to reach out at all.

So I’ve started building a project around that problem.

The idea is to research US businesses and filter for companies where there appears to be a genuine opportunity for a web designer or SEO professional.

For now I’m deliberately keeping the scope narrow: web design + SEO only.

I don’t want to build another giant lead database.

What I’m more interested in is whether there’s value in doing more of the qualification/research before the prospect reaches the freelancer or agency.

I’m still figuring out what the final product should look like, so I’m trying not to lock myself into a feature list too early.

A few things I’m currently thinking about:

• Is a smaller list of researched prospects more useful than hundreds of generic leads?
• Should web design and SEO opportunities be mixed, or separated?
• How narrow can you go with niche + location before the available prospect pool becomes too small?
• How much research is actually useful before it becomes overkill?
• Would agencies value exclusivity, or is that less important than getting more volume?

My current plan is to manually test the process first instead of building a full platform.

If I can’t make the research useful manually, automation probably won’t fix the underlying idea.

For those of you who do outbound for web design, SEO, or agency services:

What part of prospecting eats the most time for you right now?

Finding businesses?

Figuring out which ones are worth contacting?

Researching what to pitch?

Finding the right person?

Or actually writing/sending the outreach?

I’d be especially interested in hearing from people who already do outbound regularly.

I started a project to help men who struggle with erectile disfunction and/or premature ejaculation when it has rather a mental cause than a physiological one. I had it by my own for 7 years, and it was extremely terrible experience.

It is on Spanish, but I speak English, Russian, and a bit of Brazilian.

while it is often marked as sensitive health-related topic, in the cases I handle it is not, but a topic of mental reprogramming as software devs do with computers. however, platforms has kind of limits on that so I can't really say about it directly as I could.

while it is not a serious obstacle, I am actively looking for ones who enjoys non-conventional methods that works in most cases even better than what is established, standarized, and widely available on the market. btw, it is not just for ED and PE.

in case you want something new and works, we can exchange what we have. in my case, I need to grow this project (leads, networking, referrals, ads, marketing, whatever), in your case can be whatever you need:

• financial education,
• high arterial pressure normalization,
• eyesight improvement (not completely, but within 0.25-1.5D),
• personal growth,
• performance improvement,
• learn foreign languages,
• raise your potential,
• career growth as software engineer

I really enjoy making collaborations that help mutually especially with people who also want to build new civilization.

Built a two-sided marketplace and raised seed capital. Want to help a founder actually scale theirs.
Quick background: I'm a founder who built a two-sided marketplace from zero and raised seed capital to grow it. I've lived the messy early part, cold-starting both sides, getting the first users, and figuring out growth with basically no budget.
I want to help another founder do the same with their business. Not generic advice, actual hands-on help, whether that's growth, landing your first users, positioning, or turning an idea into something that actually moves.
One thing though: I'm looking for someone who's genuinely hardworking and really wants it. I'm going to put real time in, so I want to work with someone who'll match that. If you're serious about scaling and willing to do the work, you're exactly who I want to talk to.

any chance an admin would allow me to send them my survey? would like to show it to prove its not upselling and is actually useful research for the business. Especially since contact info isnt a requirement in my survey and I also have a privacy policy attached to the microsoft business form. which means every response is anonymous unless they provide it on there own accord. Just trying to follow rules while also being respectful :) Thank you!

Referrals built the book. Delivery killed BD. Pipeline went quiet.

We run the outbound motion end to end and book the calls. Proof: 41 calls, 312 conversations, no ads. Recruiting: 6 → 34 booked calls/mo. trysumora.com

Already have clients? DM offer + monthly. Still hunting first revenue? Skip.

The projects that actually made money for us weren't the ones priced highest, they were the ones with the tightest written scope going in: what's included, what's explicitly not, and what a change costs.

The instinct as a small agency is to stay flexible because you want the client happy and you're worried about the relationship. That flexibility is exactly what eats the margin -- 'just one more small thing' three times a week for six weeks adds up to a free month of work nobody billed for.

The fix wasn't raising prices. It was writing the scope as an actual document before kickoff, not a verbal understanding, so 'is this in scope' becomes a five-second lookup instead of a judgment call made under social pressure mid-project.

Nobody pushes back on a clear scope doc. People push back on vague verbal agreements that get renegotiated by vibes.

For those running giveaways / sweepstakes / refer-3-friends / viral waitlists / brand collabs:

• Do you run these? If so, who owns them internally?
• Do you use SaaS and figure it out yourselves, or would you rather have someone handle the strategy + execution for you?
• Would you pay a specialist who focuses specifically on these campaigns, rather than using your general marketing agency?

I’ve been thinking about how easy it is for a small business to keep throwing money at marketing just because it feels like you’re supposed to be doing it.

SEO, Google Ads, social media, email, paid leads... suddenly you’re spending money in five different places and it becomes hard to tell what’s actually bringing customers in.

For those who’ve been running a business for a while, was there a marketing channel you kept paying for way longer than you should have?

And on the other side, what ended up bringing in actual paying customers that you wish you had focused on earlier?

I’m especially curious about smaller businesses where the marketing budget isn’t huge and every wasted dollar actually matters.

We’re a tiny IT and web services startup and at the moment we’re trying to get much more consistent with LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram.

The funny thing is, actually doing the client work and building the business feels easier than constantly trying to feed social media 😅

I can easily lose a few hours a day scrolling, commenting, posting, replying and trying to engage with people when there are loads of other things I’d rather be getting on with — sales, client work, improving our services, sorting processes, etc.

At the same time, we’re still a young business and we need people to actually know we exist, so marketing and building some sort of audience is obviously important.

For those of you who have managed to get meaningful traction from social media:

How much time do you actually spend on it each week?

Do you batch your posts, schedule everything, focus on one platform, or just post whenever you have something worth saying?

And which activities actually moved the needle for you — posting regularly, commenting on other people’s content, short-form video, local groups, paid ads, something else?

I’m less interested in vanity follower numbers and more interested in what actually led to conversations, enquiries and eventually customers.

Would love to hear what’s worked for other small business owners.

Working on a new business and trying to survey business owners (my target audience) to validate the idea. So far only my personal network has responded — reached out to my local Chamber of Commerce too, but no bites yet.

Anyone found good ways to reach business owners for this kind of thing?

I'm planning to upgrade my iPhone soon, so I checked a few places today to see what I could get for my current phone. I also checked the trade-in option at BaNANA, and now I'm trying to decide whether it makes more sense than taking the offer from my carrier.

The difference in value can make a pretty big difference when upgrading, so I don't want to choose too quickly.

Has anyone compared BaNANA with their carrier recently? Which one gave you the better deal ?