I joined our high school's afterprom committee as a parent volunteer, and the first thing I noticed was how old-school it all was. Paper tickets, a cash box, and a clipboard at the door.

The part that really bugged me came later. Once a kid was inside, nobody outside knew anything. Parents dropped them off and hoped. If a kid left at 1am, mom found out when they walked in the door, or didn't.

I'm a developer, so I did the thing developers do and said "I can build something for this." Online tickets, waivers signed ahead of time, QR check-in at the door, and the piece I cared about most: a text to the parent when their kid checks in, and another one if they leave.

The waivers turned out to be the sleeper hit. Before, it was a stack of paper forms and a line of kids at the door hunting down a parent signature at 11pm. With the waiver built into the ticket purchase, we had 560 kids at afterprom and only 3 showed up without a signed waiver. The committee, and our inflatable company who needed the waivers, couldn't believe it.

We ran afterprom on it in 2024 and 2025. About 14 months ago I opened it up to anyone, figuring other schools might want it.

What I didn't expect was everyone else. Community benefit dinners, a bar, festivals, small nonprofits. It turns out anyone selling general admission tickets has the same problem the afterprom committee had. They're stuck between a cash box and a ticketing site that takes a cut of every sale.

This year I added silent auctions because a customer asked, and we've now run two of them start to finish. One had 86 people bidding from their phones, which was honestly fun to watch live.

And last month I signed my first school district, with a few others asking about it. That one still feels a little unreal.

This week we passed $100k processed. It's customers' money, not mine, but for something that started as a favor for the afterprom committee, it's a big one for me.

Where it's at:

• $100k+ processed
• About 3,600 tickets sold
• 12 paying orgs, including that district
• 2 silent auctions done

Goal is 50 paying orgs by the end of the year, so there's work to do. Right now that means cold email and, as of this month, actual paper postcards mailed to schools. Feels very old-school for a software company, but schools still read their mail. I'll report back on which one works.

Happy to answer anything about building for schools, selling to volunteer groups, or running payments for them.

So I got about 8 mins to write this before I gotta go to a church get together.

Since my last post I explained that I was stuck on the logo, and wasn't sure about the branding.

Well after a few days of messing around with it, I finally came across a visual identity that I like. It's quite simple, and most importantly it is cohesive with the niche my app is for AND it also makes sense.

The elements aren't random, they are placed with intention.

Fast forward after that, with the logo taken care of the next steps were really just finalizing things, and making sure my app passed all of Apple's ToS, rules, etc.

What I did was just download all of the relevant PDF's fed them into ChatGPT and had it audit my app, I'm sure this process isn't perfect but it gets everything off the ground and I can refine it later.

I've also figure out my instagram handle for the app, bought a domain and put up a simple website.

So lots done!

Once we publish the app my attention moves to marketing which is really my bread and butter.

Marketing wise I think I'm going to have a serious account and a silly account, both promoting the app. I think the silly account has a lot of potential to catch on, especially since social media and marketing is relaxed with how you approach it.

So yeah, that's where we're at. One thing I'm finding important is not to get distracted with other ideas and apps. I have a lot of ideas in my head and it's really easy to just want to do other stuff too.

Like for example, I kinda want to start a Youtube channel with like a Minecraft Lets Play (I know SUPER saturated market lol), and yesterday I spent some time brainstorming how to pull that off, but then I realized, like I have my app. I don't need another thing to focus on.

That's not to say I can't do a Youtube channel for fun, but it shouldn't be looked as starting a business, it should just be some silly thing I do to blow steam off.

That's about all I got.

Looking forward to part 3 where we go into the marketing, and hopefully our app gets accepted to the Apple store.

Edit: Monetization wise, I'm thinking of the app being paid right from the start. (I think). It doesn't make sense why someone in the niche I'm targeting wouldn't pay for the app. Free is nice for more users, but meh, I think paid right off the start is the way to go.

The ad dashboard says the campaign's working.

Meanwhile, the person paying for it is looking at orders, booked jobs, or the bank account thinking, "Where?"

Sometimes nobody's lying. They're just counting different things.

Which would be fine if somebody didn't have to decide whether to keep spending money before everyone agrees on the numbers lol.

Curious what the biggest mismatch you've actually caught looked like.

most US cards skip 3DS on small amounts so carders loved my $9 plan. the algorithm is the following: card goes through, owner disputes, I refund $9 and pay a $50 fee on top. and that was 5-6 times a month!

what fixed it:

1. card country must match billing address

2. IP country must match card country

3. no payments via vpn or proxy

now it's about one dispute every two months. I also tried Stripe radar before this and on default settings it let stuff slip.

link is still a pain as it doesn’t have sms check at almost any amount and the smart ones use residential IPs and the right address. a fresh account trying to pay 2k with Link is most likely a stolen account and for that reason I killed amazon pay a year ago.

free trials got farmed too. I capped signups at 3 per IP, they rotated vpns and made 300-500 accounts, so I had to block vpn signups last month.

processors want disputes under 0.5% and you can't ignore this.

if every stolen card had been real, I'd be rich rich

I do automation work and most of my clients came from Reddit posts like "we spend 6 hours a week on invoices, is there a tool for this". I kept finding them 3 days late. So I built a Chrome extension that tags those posts as you scroll, and put it on the Chrome store last week.

Week 1 numbers:

- 27 installs

- about 1 active user a day, and some days that's me testing

- under 2 cents in total running cost

- 1 post removed by mods in a lead gen sub, because my account is new there

The installs vs usage gap is the real problem. I looked at what a new user sees. They install it, nothing opens, they go to their Reddit home feed and see almost nothing happen, because it only checks business subs there. So they assume it's broken.

The fix is in review now. After install, it opens a short page with one button that takes you straight into r/smallbusiness, where it tags posts right away.

For people who launched something free, what fixed the gap between installs and real usage for you?

I’ve been building a business for almost two years now, and I’m struggling with something I really didn’t see coming.

The whole idea came from a problem I was personally dealing with. I wanted something that didn’t exist, so I decided to create it myself.

Well, earlier this year, my personal circumstances changed pretty drastically, and the problem that inspired me to start this business is no longer something I deal with.

The problem is still very real for plenty of other people, and I absolutely believe there’s a market for what I’ve created. I still think this could be a really successful business.

I’ve already put so much time, effort, and money into it. The software has been built, beta testing is underway, and I’m getting pretty close to being ready to launch.

Now I’m at the point where I need to start marketing and actually getting customers, and I just can’t seem to find the same motivation I had when I started.

I think a lot of my drive came from personally experiencing the problem I was trying to solve. Every time I dealt with it, I was reminded why I was building this thing. Now that it’s no longer part of my life, I feel disconnected from something I’ve spent nearly two years working on.

Part of me wishes I could find someone who was excited about the business and wanted to take over running it, while I stayed involved in a supporting role. I just don’t know how realistic that is at this stage.

Has anyone else experienced anything like this? Especially if you started a business because of something you personally needed, and then your circumstances changed before you ever got it off the ground?

I’m curious what you did and whether you managed to get that motivation back. I hate the thought of walking away when I’m this close, especially because I still genuinely believe in what I’ve built.

Hey entrepreneurs,

Can you tell me more about how you make your decision when it comes to pricing? How do you come up with a price for your subscription plans / membership package?

I start with a low price and then increase it by X% after getting X number of payments.

Think about a person who made a cool product idea but needs help with marketing. Somewhere else theres a designer wanting a fun project to work on and theres someone with business know how who wants to help a new team. All three could work well together but they might never meet. Thats something I think about a lot when it comes to finding people online. LinkedIn helps with professional connections, Reddit groups let people meet through shared interests and Indeed, MeeBoss are trying to match people with the right opportunities and make it easier to talk directly but I wonder if most platforms still require people to know exactly what they are looking for before they start searching. What if you could find people based on what you are working on, what you are good at and what you want to learn next? Have you ever met someone online who turned out to be the perfect person to work with?

I’ve run a message-based ecommerce business selling luxury watches and sunglasses for about 6 years, no traditional checkout funnel, just ads driving people into a conversation, and I’ve closed over 8,000 sales that way. One pattern took me way too long to actually name and act on, especially with higher-ticket pieces where misreading intent costs a lot more than it would on a cheap impulse buy.

There’s a type of person who messages just to ask price and shipping, even when it’s already clearly stated in the content that brought them there, then disappears. I used to think this was just normal browsing behavior. It’s not, it’s a specific, identifiable segment that rarely converts, and with luxury items specifically, it’s even easier to misread, since everyone “window shops” luxury goods, so the volume of low-intent messages can look deceptively similar to real interest.

A few things that actually helped me tell the difference and adjust around it:

Real buyers usually don’t ask questions that are already answered in your content, if someone’s asking something you’ve clearly stated, that’s a weak intent signal, not a strong one, no matter how interested the message sounds.

Delivery metrics (reach, impressions, CPM) can look completely stable while your actual sales quietly decline, if that happens, don’t assume it’s ad fatigue, check what’s changed in your buyer pool itself, not your ad account.

With luxury/high-ticket items specifically, resist the urge to treat every inbound message with equal effort. Fast, high-effort replies should go to the profiles and behavior that actually match your real buyer pattern, not everyone equally, since a wasted hour on a low-intent “window shopper” costs you more here than it would on a cheaper product.

Curious if others selling luxury or high-ticket items through message-based funnels have noticed something similar, or found different ways to separate real intent from noise. Happy to go deeper on anything here if useful.

I'm Lucy, solo founder. Nudge is simple: a follower pays a coach upfront for one personal answer. The coach answers when it fits - voice note, text, or a short video. No answer in the window, the follower gets refunded automatically and the coach owes nothing.

Why I built it: coaches I knew were spending their evenings in DMs answering detailed personal questions for free, then feeling too guilty to just stop. The questions were worth money. There was just no clean way to charge for one answer without it getting awkward.

Early numbers, all of them small: about 35 experts have pages, roughly $16K has gone through, and almost all of it went to the coaches since they keep 90%. Top earner is a coach at around $3.5K. Most pages, honestly, have earned close to nothing - which is kind of the whole lesson below.

What flopped: cold outreach. I sent a lot of DMs. A lot. Replies were fine, roughly 1 in 5, but coaches who signed up cold almost never earned anything. Reading how Patreon started later made me feel better - Conte pitched 40 creators one by one and got zero, and it only moved once he earned on it himself. My version was smaller: I stopped sending links and did the whole setup for one coach instead - her page, her launch post, everything - then flagged her paid questions so none of them sat there expiring. She earned first. Then coaches in her circle started asking how, and every earner since has come from that kind of setup help or from another coach mentioning it. Basically none came from a cold DM converting on its own.

So the next month is built around that: a small cohort, everything done for them, and I only scale the parts that get someone their first paid question.

It's readnudge.com if anyone wants to poke at a live page.

Genuine question for anyone who has built something two-sided: what actually got your first suppliers over the line - doing the setup for them, paying them to start, or something I haven't tried yet?

Last year a founder hired us to fix his positioning. He’d rewritten his homepage four times in six months and sent us all four versions. Every version was clearer than the one before it. Conversion didn’t budge once.

His product helped agencies track time against client budgets. We watched recordings of his last 20 sales calls. By the end of every demo, the prospect could explain the product back to him almost word for word. Then they’d say “this is cool let me think about it” and never come back.

So we didn’t rewrite the homepage. People understood the product just fine. They didn’t care enough to pay for it...

I now run a few checks before I’ll take on any positioning project.

First, the founder demo. Get prospects on a call with the founder who can explain the product better than any homepage ever will. If they still don’t buy after a full live walkthrough, rewriting the site won’t fix it. If they buy on calls but never from the site, that’s positioning and that’s the fixable kind of problem.

Second, ask what they did before you. Ask every prospect how they handle the problem today. An ugly spreadsheet or someone on staff doing it by hand? Good. The pain is real and they’re already paying for it in hours. If the answer is “honestly, we just don’t,” there’s no urgency and I’ve never seen a headline create it.

Third, listen to how they say no. Positioning problems sound confused, “so what does it actually do?” or “how is this different from X?” Value problems sound polite, “looks great, not a priority right now.” The polite ones worry me a lot more.

And last, find where you lose them. If people never sign up, look at the messaging. If they sign up, use it for two weeks and then quietly drift off, they understood it fine. It just didn’t matter enough.

The time tracking guy did have one segment that paid without much pushing: agencies on fixed fee retainers. They bought almost every time, because every hour over budget came straight out of their own margin. Hourly agencies just billed the extra time to the client, so the problem cost them nothing. Same product, same pitch. One group needed it and the other was mildly curious. He narrowed to retainer agencies, and over the next quarter his close rate on calls went from about 1 in 10 to roughly 1 in 3.

There are three things I keep going back and forth on, and I’d like to hear how people here think about them.

When should a founder stop rewriting the homepage and ask whether the problem is worth solving at all? My rough rule: two rewrites with no change in conversion, then you stop touching copy and go run 15 calls yourself. If those calls don’t convert either, it was never the homepage. Most founders do a fifth rewrite instead. I get why. Rewriting copy feels like progress, and questioning the problem feels like failing.

Would you narrow to the segment that’s already paying, even if your TAM shrinks on paper? I would, every time. I’ll take a small market that pays over a huge one that says “cool, let me think about it.” Investors are the tricky part, since narrowing makes the deck look worse right when you need to raise. And when one segment pays and another won’t convert, I almost always treat it as an ICP problem first. The product clearly works for somebody, so step one is finding more of those people.

Would you rather have customers who understand your product but feel no urgency, or customers who badly need a solution but don’t understand yours? I’d take desperate and confused. You can fix confusion with a better demo or a clearer page. Urgency is a different story. I don’t know anyone who’s figured out how to make someone feel urgent about a problem they don’t really have. If you’ve actually pulled that off, I’d love to hear how because I’ve watched a lot of founders try.

TLDR: if people won’t buy after the founder demos it live, it’s the product or the market, and a new homepage won’t fix it. Confused NOs usually mean positioning, polite ones usually mean value. If one segment pays and another doesn’t, narrow to the one that pays before you rebuild anything.

Hello guys, you might remember me from my newsletter Wifi Moolah.

I usually pick one side hustle every month and build it from scratch and try to show my readers whether it makes money or not.

Last month I did this with a cold email agency, this month I am building a niche job board.

So far, I have built it out using a job board software. I am not much concerned on the design and all perspective but my main goal is to monetize it.

Here are some ways I can think of monetizing it:

1. The traditional route of growing it through SEO, newsletter and social media and then selling featured job posts to companies. But I am not much optimistic with this model because essentially I feel this process is kinda broken and too much overused that employers might not resonate with this.

2. Digital products. So my niche is kinda growing and a high paying one. So maybe if I make some digital products and sell it to people looking to get into this field. Although the problem here is I myself do not have much knowledge of this and might have to outsource it.

3. To put a hard paywall to check job openings. Again like I said, I am operating in a single niche and this model might work for it. Not sure tho.

My end goal is to build a passive income source from this. My costs for it currently are $10 for the domain and $50/mo for the job board tool.

Any suggestions to make it better are welcome.

Hey all. Found something last week I keep thinking about.

We started tracking where the chatbots pull answers from when someone asks them to recommend a company in our field. One of the cited sources was a subreddit I had never heard of. 29 visitors a week. The thread had 3 upvotes and 2 comments, and it was a list of companies written by the moderator, who runs one of them.

That post is doing more inside ChatGPT than a year of our blog has done for us.

The cynical move is obvious. Make a subreddit, write your own list, put yourself on it. It works and costs nothing. The other read is that this is early SEO again and anyone building on it gets wiped out in one model update.

Anyone else tracking where AI assistants cite you from?

I've been thinking about how businesses approach software as they grow.

A company starts with a CRM, adds a project management tool, an inventory system, a reporting platform, and a few automation services.

Initially, everything works reasonably well.

But over time, employees start exporting data between systems, maintaining spreadsheets to fill gaps, and manually handling processes that the software was supposed to simplify.

Eventually, the business is paying for multiple subscriptions while still struggling with its workflows.

At that point, there are several options:

• Continue using the existing tools and improve integrations.
• Build custom modules to address the gaps.
• Develop a consolidated internal application.
• Replace the existing systems with a larger enterprise platform.

Each approach has trade-offs involving cost, maintenance, flexibility, and long-term ownership.

I'm curious how others have approached this.

For businesses that have moved from off-the-shelf software to custom applications, what was the tipping point?

Was it licensing costs, limitations in existing tools, integration problems, or something else?

And looking back, did building custom software actually make things easier, or did it introduce a different set of problems?

Quick way I look at it when someone asks if they should buy another tool or have something custom built. Take the task that annoys everyone, count how many people touch it, how many hours a week it eats, and what an hour of their time actually costs you. Multiply that by 52 and add what the mistakes cost (the wrong email, the missed invoice, the lead that fell through). That yearly number is what any fix has to beat.

Then look at the other side. A tool is a monthly fee forever, custom is a one time build plus upkeep, and a rough rule of thumb is to budget something like 15 to 20 percent of the build cost every year to keep it running and secure. If the yearly cost of the problem is smaller than that you probably just need a better habit, not software.

Where custom starts to win is when the process is stable, specific to how you work, and the tools you already pay for dont talk to each other. If you are still figuring out how your business runs, use off the shelf stuff first and learn.

I build custom software for work so I like talking this through, feel free to message me or drop your numbers in the comments and Ill give you my take.

No promotion here.

It's always something that lives rent free in my head, i'm stuck with several ideas that i cannot wrap around my business because I have business opportunities on some niche features, and i try to always "generalize" features.

My current business is SaaS but i guess you might have the same issue in any business :

Imagine a plumber who suddenly starts offering door lock cylinder replacement because there is a strong demand for it, should he wait until he can offer 100% of a locksmith's services before adding it to his "catalog", or does it make sense to offer it anyway? On my side I think he should wait

Here I am anyway, my SaaS is a product that merge a lot of tools in order to allow users to do very specific tasks for few cents per task, I have users all over the world but mainly from France and US (I have some from other EU countries and also Asia).

My main issue : 6 users, from France asked me for a specific task, being able to use some tools from government in order to manage more easily their accountability, taxes etc..
I really think there is some traction on this specific product, but to provide a complete service I have what I called playbooks (basically cooking recipe using many tools to get to an expected result).

All the playbooks I have on my app are "globalized", exploitable by any type of user.

I'm asking myself if I bring specific playbook for France only (and i have other use cases like this), would it become an incomprehensible mess if i'm going through niches like this (because clearly, i will not go on the path to integrate this feature for all countries in the world) ?

The app work well actually, users are happy, I'm frightened to break the current rise of my app by becoming unintelligible.

If you faced this issue, did you continue or gave up ?

For those marketing B2B software, how do you brief a short video when the person using the app is not the person approving the subscription?

I would show the user's actual task first, but also make the buying constraints visible. If an employee can finish a report in two minutes only after an admin connects the data source, that setup belongs in the explanation. Otherwise the video may attract people who like the result but cannot try it at work.

AI can help pull recurring objections from sales notes into the brief. I would still want someone who has used the product to show the task and explain what access they needed.

Have you made separate videos for the user and the buyer? What changed in the questions people asked or the quality of demos booked?

I ve been trying to understand the following statement if AI can generate websites, music, creatives, games etc in an already overcrowded place what is the point of creating another one??

I work full-time as a Fullstack Software Engineer. In between, I built KanoBoard, a Kanban tool that skips the setup wizard.

Where I am:

- Product live, free to start

- Couple of LinkedIn posts, 40+ views so far

- No sign-ups

Biggest struggle: getting anyone to see it

I'll post updates here. If you've balanced a job and a product, what helped you stay consistent?

A friend of mine has invested significant time into developing an online course but is struggling to generate sales. I really want to help her, but I don’t know much about selling online courses.

Has anyone here had success with Kajabi? I’d love to hear what marketing strategies worked for you and how you generated your first sales. Any advice would be appreciated!

Okay hear me out.

I've been building apps, messing around with crypto/Web3, launching random projects, and basically trying to figure out how to make money on the internet for a while now.

And one thing I've realized is that doing all of this alone kinda sucks sometimes lol.

So I was thinking...

What if we made a Discord community for literally anyone trying to build something online?

Developers, indie hackers, SaaS founders, crypto/Web3 builders, app creators, marketers, people running online businesses, or even someone who has absolutely no idea what they're doing yet but wants to learn.

Not another Discord filled with people selling courses, paid signals, or promising you'll make $10k in 3 days 😭

Just actual people building actual things.

Share what you're working on, help each other with problems, exchange feedback, find collaborators, share what's working and what isn't, maybe even help each other get those first few customers.

Someone knows how to code but sucks at marketing. Someone else is great at marketing but can't code. Someone has a great idea but doesn't know where to start.

Why not help each other?

No paid memberships, no gurus, no bullshit.

Just a bunch of internet strangers trying to make cool stuff and hopefully some money along the way.

Would anyone genuinely be interested in joining something like this?

If enough people are down, I'll actually make it.

I’ve been running my own small business for about 6 years now, mainly as a freelancer and consultant. For most of that time, I also had several employees and temporary workers on my payroll.
Over the years, some were hired directly by clients, while other positions disappeared because there simply wasn’t enough work anymore. Since a few months ago, I’m back to running the business on my own.
And strangely enough, I’m probably in one of the most comfortable positions I’ve ever been in.
My main client originally hired me for a two-year project. We’re now in year three, with the contract being extended every quarter due to budget approvals. The current extension runs until December, and there’s a reasonable chance they’ll extend it again.

Besides consulting, I’ve developed an additional revenue stream supplying materials and equipment to different contractors and projects connected to this client. Depending on what’s needed, that generates anywhere between €200 and €16,000 in additional monthly revenue. Revenue, not profit.
I also do some niche recruitment for other clients, often confidential searches for positions that haven’t been advertised because the person being replaced is still working there.
So from a business perspective, things aren’t bad at all.

But here’s the problem.
I’m bored out of my fucking mind.
The first years of my current project were absolute chaos. Constant firefighting, inefficient processes, people working against each other, problems nobody wanted to take ownership of.
And I actually loved it.
I enjoyed figuring things out, building structures, solving problems and making things work.
Over time, I introduced enough structure and efficiency that we managed to reduce the operational team from around 20 people to 7.
The client appreciates what I’ve done, trusts me and gives me an enormous amount of flexibility.
I can bring my kids to school, pick them up, participate in school activities and actually be present as a father.
I don’t have to kill myself working ridiculous hours just to generate a decent monthly income.

I know plenty of people would love to be in this position.
But mentally, I’m starting to struggle.
There’s hardly any challenge left.
Most of my frustration now comes from dealing with external parties who repeatedly make stupid mistakes or create problems that we can see coming from miles away.
We spend a ridiculous amount of energy preventing their problems from becoming ours, because once they do, fixing them afterwards takes ten times the effort.
Some days I genuinely feel like I’m getting dumber.
I used to thrive on complexity, managing people, building operations and figuring out how to make things better.
Now that everything actually works, I feel like I’ve lost the very thing that kept me motivated.
And I can’t figure out whether that’s a genuine problem or whether I’m just incapable of appreciating what I’ve built.

Here’s where it gets complicated.
I want to build something again.
Not necessarily work more hours, but actually create something, develop it, improve it and see it grow.
I’ve considered scaling my consultancy, and I’ve also been looking into acquiring an existing small business where I could apply my experience in operations, restructuring and efficiency.
The idea of taking something with potential and making it significantly better genuinely excites me.
But I haven’t figured out exactly what that next step should be.
And despite having a flexible schedule, I don’t actually have that much free time. Between my current client, recruitment assignments, material sourcing and family life, I probably have less than five hours a week that I could realistically dedicate to building something new.

So it’s not as simple as just starting another business on the side.
What bothers me is that I feel intellectually underused. I miss building things and leading people. I also can’t shake the feeling that I might be leaving a lot of financial potential on the table by staying comfortable.
At the same time, I seem to have developed an inability to simply enjoy the peace I’ve worked so hard to create.
And that makes me question my own motivations.
Am I genuinely ambitious, or have I become so accustomed to chaos and problem-solving that I need those things to feel useful?
Am I wasting my potential by staying where I am?
Or am I being an idiot for questioning a situation that gives me financial stability, freedom and time with my children?
Maybe I’ve also absorbed too much of the hustle culture nonsense telling us that if we’re not constantly growing, expanding or chasing the next opportunity, we’re somehow falling behind.

I honestly don’t know anymore.
There’s also the practical reality.
My contract expires in December. I expect another extension might be possible, but I don’t want to find myself scrambling for a new client a week before the contract ends.
Walking away from something good without a solid alternative feels stupid.
But continuously extending it without working towards something else feels like I’m slowly putting myself on autopilot.
And I don’t want to wake up five years from now realising I’ve spent all that time maintaining something instead of building something.

So I’m curious, especially from people who’ve been self-employed or running businesses for a while:
Have you ever reached a point where your business was finally running smoothly, but you started feeling like you weren’t?
Did you learn to appreciate the stability, or did you use it as a stepping stone towards something bigger?
If you started another business or acquired one while maintaining your existing income, how did you realistically find the time?
And perhaps most importantly, how do you distinguish genuine ambition from being addicted to problems, pressure and constant progress?
I’m not looking for motivational quotes or someone telling me to be grateful. I already know I have a good situation.
I’m genuinely interested in how other people navigated this phase.
I want to feel like I’m building something again.

Edit / Full disclosure: English isn’t my native language, so I used AI to help translate, clean up and structure this post. The experiences, thoughts and frustrations are entirely my own.

For roughly a year now, I've built SaaS apps and MVPs for people who want to make money with their idea.

However, I'm struggling with the continuity of sales. Around 50% of my projects came from offline network. While I'm grateful for it, I'd much rather have control over the TOFU. I don't want to wait for my cousin's friend's uncle to ask for an internal MVP from me.

I've thought of a few options:
1. Build a personal brand in social media: TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, X
2. Build a high quality lead acquisition engine from Reddit / Facebook / other forums
3. Outsource the sales process

I can develop way more apps (with AI) than I can get customers, so I'm purely focusing on getting more predictable sales funnel. Once the sales are solved, I'm at comfortable income and I can just enjoy life :D

I suppose I'm competing with agencies and my strength is the personal connection to the customer. Does this leave the first option as the only one: personal brand?