I had a multi million pound business until COVID wiped it out. I tried to rebuild as web dev, then AI came along.

I built a product for a niche and was going well but, rather naively, we had 2 clients and they pulled the rug. 3 hits in 5 years has been tough and for the first time I'm beginning to feel drained and doubting my ability.

I'm 45 and have had success and failures. Highs and lows.

I'm now running web businesses (Personalised gift platform, niche seasonal travel co) and a b2b project. Non are hitting the spot yet and it's becoming harder and harder to keep going.

I always had a focus to retire when I was 50 and was on track until COVID but since then I've not been able to get things back on track. I've managed to save a little cash in the bank but that is dwindling.....

Rather than put the barriers up to ai, I have embraced it and the b2b project has this at its core. But I do worry with the ease of AI software if indeed this is sustainable. I network regularly and the feedback on this has been very positive but b2b seems to be mega hard to get users to part with cash. And that's where I struggle.

I'm definitely an ideas and build kinda guy...I come up with an idea, research and build. The b2b project is a culmination of 4 different projects in one.

Christmas is around the corner (!) and hopefully the e-commerce might see some life. I honestly don't feel hopeful and worry about what will happen next.

It's just a rant I need to have.

I’m a web dev with 5+ yoe, working on contract right now and have been working with the same client since 1.5years now.

Sometimes I feel scared as to what if I am laid off, based on current condition of tech industry it’s going to be really hard to find next opportunity.

Earlier I used to get many client projects but it’s a ghost town since AI went mainstream.

I tried building my own SaaS projects but couldn’t market them and hence no success there.

So now I’m really anxious as to if I out of my current contract work, what’s next?

Where should I be focusing now? I’m 25 right now so there’s a long road ahead in life but I’m clueless as to what to do.

Please share thoughts or advice/suggestions, thank you so much!

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I run a dev shop that builds MVPs for founders. For a while my whole pitch was the obvious one: we save you time and money getting your MVP built. It's what everyone in this space says.

Recently I killed that positioning entirely, and I want to know if I'm right or about to shoot myself in the foot.

Here's my thinking. The founders who chase "cheap and fast" are usually the ones with the smallest budgets, the most anxiety about spending, and often the weakest ideas. They're price shopping, so they're gone the moment someone quotes $500 less. I was competing on the one axis where there's always someone cheaper, and attracting exactly the clients I didn't want.

The founders I actually want to work with, people with a genuinely strong idea who are trying to raise money, don't care about saving a few thousand dollars. They care about their product being excellent, because a polished, well built MVP is what gets them taken seriously by investors. For them, "cheap" is actually a red flag, it signals the work will be cheap too.

So I repositioned as a premium dev shop. The promise isn't "save money," it's "come here to get the best possible version of your product built, the one that gets you funded." Higher price, better clients, work I'm actually proud of.

The bet is that in this space, being the affordable option is a race to the bottom, and being the excellent option is where the real, serious clients are.

But I'm second guessing myself. Am I narrowing my market too much? Is "premium" harder to sell when you don't have a big-name portfolio yet? Has anyone here made the jump from competing on price to competing on quality, and did it actually work, or did the pipeline dry up?

Genuinely want the honest take, including if you think I'm wrong.

Hey r/entrepreneur, I am Ambrish, founder and CEO of Rivo.

I have built autonomous systems for most of my life, including at Amazon and Cruise, where I led AI during the launch of commercial robotaxi service in San Francisco.

I left to build something I hadn't seen applied to personal finance: self-driving money.

Rivo was born from a frustrating personal experience. My former wealth manager had left my hard-earned money earning 0% because he needed "explicit instructions" before moving it, while continuing to charge a 0.65% management fee. That experience made me realize there had to be a better way to manage idle cash.

The more I looked into it, the bigger the problem got. U.S. households hold nearly $6 trillion in transaction accounts, much of it earning close to nothing. Not because people don't care, but because they're busy, and the system was designed to profit from that.

So I built Rivo. It securely connects to your existing bank account, monitors your cash flow to identify cash you aren't likely to need, moves it into U.S. Treasury Bills, and brings it back before the bills are due. You keep your bank and never have to manually transfer money.

We've raised $3.1M in total funding, backed by South Park Commons, 645 Ventures, 20VC, Wisdom Ventures, Script Capital, and Jag Duggal (former CPO at Nubank). Our team includes leaders from Personal Capital, Mint, Capital One, JPMorgan Chase, and Microsoft.

Happy to go deep on anything:

• Leaving a high-profile AI role to start from scratch
• Fundraising as a first-time founder (what worked, what didn't)
• Building in fintech: compliance, banking partners, regulators
• Applying autonomous systems thinking to personal finance
• What we got wrong early
• How we think about the idle cash problem

If you want to know more, you can check us out at rivofi.com, find me on LinkedIn, or drop by our subreddit r/TryRivo.

I've been building a wearable device company for 6 years. Started in a college dorm with no engineering background, went through 8 prototypes, a contractor who took our money and delivered nothing, hundreds of cold emails a day for months, and a regulatory process that is still humbling me weekly. We're funded and heading toward launch.

None of that scared me the way a microphone does.

Public speaking terror is common among founders and almost nobody talks about it, because the founder is supposed to be the face. Investors fund conviction. Customers buy belief. If you can't perform belief on command, people quietly downgrade you. So we hide it.

Last week I couldn't hide it anymore. I got selected as a finalist in a live pitch competition, a few hundred people in the room and tens of thousands on a livestream, with a cash prize on the line and professional cameras everywhere.

What I did to survive it, in case it helps another founder who freezes:

1. I rehearsed the first 15 seconds a hundred times and nothing else. Not the whole pitch. Just the opening. Fear lives at the threshold. If you can get through the first three sentences on pure muscle memory while your brain comes back online, the rest of the pitch is just you talking about the thing you know better than anyone alive. Nobody knows your company better than you. You cannot be stumped on your own life.

2. I anchored to one person, not the crowd. My mom was in the audience. She's the reason the company exists. When my brain wanted to process "thousands of people are watching," I redirected to "explain it to her." A crowd is unfathomable. One person is a conversation. Your version might be a co-founder, an early customer, whoever the work is actually for.

3. I treated the fear as information, not instruction. The racing heart before I went up was identical to the racing heart before every real milestone of the last six years. First investor meeting. First demo. First regulatory call. The fear never once predicted the outcome. It just showed up, like weather. You don't cancel the trip because of weather.

4. I made the stakes asymmetric on purpose. Worst case, I freeze in front of strangers I'll never see again, and the company survives because companies aren't killed by one bad pitch. Best case, prize money and exposure. When I actually wrote the downside out, it was embarrassment. That's it. Six years of work was never on the table. Founders catastrophize stages because the spotlight feels existential. It isn't.

The outcome: we won $3,000 and I walked off the stage with my hands still shaking.

The bigger outcome: the thing I'd organized six years of my life around avoiding took nine minutes, and the version of me that avoided it had been paying for that avoidance daily, in investor meetings I under-delivered in and intros I didn't ask for.

If you're a builder who hides behind the product, at some point the product needs a spokesperson and you're the only applicant. Rehearse the first 15 seconds. Find your one person. Go.

I just tested.
The power of 1 launch video > 20 lead magnets!!

I've spent months building lead magnets and content system on LinkedIn for inbound.

500k+ impressions/month, tbh, solid reach..I guess

But last week we launched our first motion launch video,
none of those posts convert like this simple launch video did!!!!!!!!

This one video brought:
→ 50+ users
→ 14 paid clients (~$2k)
→ +33% LinkedIn company followers

Cost to make it: ~$5

The ROI is insane!

p.s. the secret of $5 video is not Fiverrr!! which is another part I feel insane! it's cursor+remotion 👊

(but with the same launch video, my X is silent..
still need to figure out how to X)

So we're going all in on video now.
Trying to ship as many as we can. Let's see how it cooks!

2 years ago I had a job and I got fired without any warnings or meetings. Last year I started investing in stocks and it was going great, until I lost everything.

This year I decided my new motto would be hard work. I started a web design agency making fast, modern websites that make better websites than 90% of agencies out there. 0 clients.

I think I’ve come to conclusion that “trying to make it” is a waste of time because no one ever does apart from
Maybe 0.1% of the whole human population.

Does anyone know whether email or LinkedIn is the best for cold outreach (either one would be personalised, so the volume isn’t a factor).

I’m not looking for “both”. I want to make the most of my limited time, so would rather focus on the one that has the best return on time invested.

New to entrepreneurship or just starting out? This is your space. Ask the questions you're afraid to ask elsewhere.

Experienced folks, jump in and share what you wish someone had told you early on.

WRONG TITLE Youre not behind (probably)

So i want to start by saying this is more of a "my opinion" post no facts or figures to back up anything im saying... so google it to verify if you care to.

I 27M run a roofing company, right now im doing about 10k a week top line, 5ish bottom. Over the last month I have done 0 roofing (picking up side projects and referral work off it). I have been down from someone important to me being diagnosed with aggressive cancer, so i haven't been door knocking (my most effective lead gen). So I've been coasting.

I put out door hangers or do door dash to feel productive when I just cant deal with people for a while. I know I could take the time and play games or whatever, it just makes me feel worse so I work out and I work.

I was doing a delivery today and I saw some college kids going out to the bar and partying, and i thought about how I missed out. I get jealous sometimes from seeing these people going and having the "movie" fun. At 21 I got married last year my son was born, I never had the party phase. I was... responsible and did the "right" things.

I look online and see 18 and 19 year olds flexing 200k weeks, and agian always out having a party for some reason.

I look to my peers. Not the ones that decided to try and build a business, but the ones who learned a trade or went to college or just worked a regular job. For years I watched them not work as hard and make far more than I did. Even when I saved and invested my money.

I look at the old heads around me. The ones telling me to get a job with a pension, go back to school, or "do good work and you will always have more than you can do".

I look at all of this and it gets me down. Then I think about it for a second. I have the freedom to visit my dying loved whenever I want and my finances are fine. The kids partying will honestly probably have their hard times at another time. The flexing teens saying their millionairs aren't and if they are, there's a reason and it doesn't effect me. My peers no longer can make what I do (especially when im actually working). The old heads I've proved right or wrong, but i have proven the life I've earned.

I get to spend all the time i want with my wife and son, I get to keep learning building and growing. Even though at times I feel envy or regret, truthfully I dont think I would want my life any different at this point.

For all the people from 25-45 who's in the same boat. I know the struggle. I have been to the point where I am trying to work a normal job or something just to make money to try to advertise somehow. I have had my wife (this might be a male pride issue) covering our expenses and even potentially investing more into the business. I have failed in almost every way imaginable. You come out the other end eventually, my only prayer is that its sooner rather than later because I understand it sucks.

There have been days where I didnt want to look at the red bank numbers, or get out of bed to ACT like I was working. I didnt want to face the fact it wasn't actually doing anything, I was waisting my time... until I wasn't

I have nothing to sell anyone unless you need a roof in KY but, if you are struggling or feel like you have to be some online guru to make it. I promise you dont.

I'm still sad, I still feel regret, I still make more mistakes than I can count. I am still human, and glad I chose the path I did.

I want a relatively big website with many products (not to sell on the website, only to show them, so there's no danger of someone's money being stolen or even their mail or anything, they wouldn't need to register). We sell furniture B2B, mostly to hotels, but there's high season and low season, during low season I don't have much to do, so I want to sell to retail during that season (using ads during low season and not using them during high season, trying to have about the same amount of work all year), I don't have products since the clients I'm selling to have their own designers that tell me what they need and I build exactly what they want (personalized), so I need to create every product with AI to have pictures, and then build them in real world if someone orders it. I don't care if it takes months because as I said I have free time during low season (4-5 months).

Is it a good idea or building it with AI and using facebook/instagram/google ads will be only a waste of money?

The AI that delivers the greatest ROI is usually the AI nobody sees.

We're wrapping up an engagement with a healthcare staffing agency where we built a custom AI compliance engine that automatically validates licenses, certifications, and role-specific accreditation requirements for candidates. What started as a custom solution has evolved into a micro-SaaS platform.

The system runs entirely in the background. Recruiters don't interact with it. Candidates don't interact with it. Yet its impact is massive.

A verification process that previously required a team of three people and took 3 to 5 days can now be completed in roughly 20 seconds. The result isn't a flashy chatbot or an AI assistant nobody asked for. The result is faster candidate clearance, faster interview scheduling, faster placements, and the ability to fill roles ahead of competitors.

The candidate experience hasn't changed. What has changed is the speed at which qualified candidates get hired.

That's where many AI discussions miss the mark. AI doesn't have to be visible to be valuable. In fact, the highest-value AI solutions are often the ones operating quietly behind the scenes, removing bottlenecks, reducing manual effort, and accelerating business processes.

The companies winning with AI are not necessarily deploying the most agents or buying the most software. They're identifying operational constraints and using AI to eliminate them. When you can turn days into seconds, the conversation stops being about AI and starts being about business growth, market share, and competitive advantage.

*Original post at the bottom of this post*

Update: still nobody cares!

Over a week ago I decided to CALL places that ignored my emails and online inquiries.

Some places did not pick up the phone AT ALL. I left a voice mail for 1 place, as well as another email. (No response still and it’s been over a week or so)

Sad because that place looked really good to as a manufacturer and they have what I want!! Anyway. Over it.

After 3 tries of calling, I got a call back from another great place which was exciting. Chatted for about 15 minute discussing everything and all seemed good like he cared! He told me email him after the call, and I did. After a few days of no answer, I emailed AGAIN. Nothing. Another one bites the dust.

Then, I called 2 other places, and got an actual email for someone in sales! Great I thought, an email of someone who actually works there. Emailed those 2 ppl, (2 different manufacturers), NO ANSWER.

Thankfully I have 1 or 2 back up plans (a place that consistently answers me, but I am just unsure of their quality and I don’t know if they will actually be able to produce what I want exactly, judging from their private label samples I tried). Still a contender though.

I also have been googling a ton the other day and found a few more potential manufacturers that I will be contacting tomorrow.

It’s just sad because the places I got the courage to call were all great legit places.

I guess they don’t want to make money, or money from me, or start-ups money.

The guy that sounded enthusiastic is the most upsetting to me. Getting ignored twice by him directly after he told me to email him to try out some products. I’m used to it, as I’ve said this has been going on for a while, me getting ghosted by manufacturers.

**Original post** down below.

I straight up email manufacturers, I even use their contact form, and now I started calling, and half these places do not answer and do not respond to the voicemails.

Why is it so difficult to get in contact with manufacturers to develop a product or private label.

I’m just ranting because I have been ghosted SO many times on top of not even getting responses.

I even buy the product to sample, as this one place recommended, and then I must’ve said something (just inquired about the sample size discrepancy), and boom, blacklisted.

I have had enough.

But yet I keep going!! It’s been over a year of trying to make a place work.

saw a boosted facebook ad yesterday that was just a logo. no headline, no offer, no reason to click, just a logo floating on white with "check us out!" underneath.

ran for two weeks straight at $40 a day. checked the page today, still nothing new, no reviews, no recent posts.

that is roughly $560 spent to remind maybe a couple thousand people that a business has a logo.

ive been running an ad agency for a while now and this is the number one thing i see wrong with small biz ads. people think the ad job is to look professional. it is not. its job is to stop the scroll and speak to a problem someone already has in their head.

"check us out" isnt a pitch, its a formality. nobody has ever clicked an ad because a business politely asked them to.

if youre running ads right now, ask yourself if a stranger scrolling at 11pm would actually stop on it, or just scroll past because it looks like every other business card ad out there.

anyway thats my unsolicited rant for the day

so i built this thing and honestly i was proud of it. spent forever making it good, kept adding stuff, polishing it, telling myself once its good enough people will just find it.

nope lol.

went months barely getting any traffic and the whole time i blamed the product. redid the landing page like 4 times, messed with the pricing, added features nobody even asked for. felt productive but nothing actually moved cause that was never the real issue.

the issue was just that nobody knew it existed. like at all. i had it stuck in my head that marketing is the thing you do later, once everything is perfect. but the product is never gonna be perfect and meanwhile the market just keeps moving without you.

what actually changed things was kinda dumb honestly, i just started putting it in front of people every single day. posting, talking about it, being kind of annoying about it. same exact product i already had. people just finally saw it.

if your heads down grinding on your product right now and wondering why its dead quiet, id really be honest with yourself about how much time your actually spending getting seen vs just making the thing better. mine was like 90/10 and not in the good direction.

anyway curious how you guys split it. how much of your week actually goes to building vs getting it in front of people

i want to sell nicotine pouches online i am in the US), and was wondering if there is anything special that i need to do to sell online and across state lines? i already have an llc and an online store.

Had a week? Same. This is your consequence-free space to complain about clients, platforms, algorithms, your own decisions, or the general chaos of running a business. Keep it venting with no personal attacks. We'll be back to being professional tomorrow.

Okay, my recent business lasted for like three years and it is a success story of me. I guess it's worth a share here. Honestly, I am tired of asking questions here and I think it will be a good time to share my story.

Winter 2023, I witnessed one of my friends (who's a literal god in machine learning with a focus on finance) generates pictures with algorithms. I asked him how he does it, and he gave me some paper links and some github links. I found something called "VQGAN+CLIP" and started playing with it.

I commited to the world of image generation after that and tested basically every single model relased from then on. Latent Diffusion, Princess Diffusion (if I remember the name correctly) and also Disco Diffusion. But none of them were better than my boy "Stable Diffusion".

I remember at the time, midjourney was the king. I had a premium account there and generated over 1000 images at the time. I remember I had access to a lot of computational power in terms of RTX 2080 TI's and also 3090 TI's. So I fired up some scripts for finetuning SD and I put everything on Github with the name Open Journey.

A few weeks later, I woke up. I remember it was rainy and I wasn't in the mood to go to work since I hated that startup and I contacted my other co-founders and informed them I'm not coming but after I hung up, I just noticed my phone makes a lot of noises. I got up and saw it is LinkedIn. A huge amount of messages and connection requests.

Apparently someone had posted my "midjourney quality fine tune of SD 1.5" on Hacker News and I got a lot of attention. I did interviews on German magazines although I'm not German (I'm Iranian) and it made a spark in my head.

I said to myself I have to make it something worth much bigger attention and make it available to the public. So I wrote a platform in my day-offs, in my nights, I skipped a lot of meetings/dates just to deliver it for the next Iranian new year and second magic happens here!

I posted a twitter and asked if anyone is interested to test an alternative to Midjourney and its name is "Mann-E" (a play with the name of Persian Painter, Religious Leader and Self-Proclaimed Prophet Mani and Wall-E, like Dall-E) and I expected like 10-15 maximum 20 of my friends. You won't believe, in course of 3 days, I had email address of over 180 people.

When I posted a video of the platform some people "called me" and I found they got my number from my previous coworkers and they were media people. I got a shit ton of media coverage without paying a single penny.

I have made a cheaper alternate to Midjourney and people loved it. I am proud of what I made, and I am proud I shut it down when I felt people are not into these alternatives anymore. This is my story. In the course of 3 years, I got grants, I got investment, I sold a lot, I ended up richer than the past both in my pocket and in my brain.

Okay, that is it!

Ive got a few hours free today while the Mrs is out for lunch and honestly Im bored

Ive spent a fair bit of time lately talking to people on here about their businesses and ideas and helping where I can

But today I thought Id flip it

Anyone want to jump on a call and just talk business?

No mentoring no coaching no sales pitch

I dont care if youre running a seven figure business or youve got an idea scribbled on the back of a napkin

Tell me what youre building

Tell me what you think Im doing wrong

Challenge one of my ideas

Or maybe we come up with something completely new

Sometimes the best business conversations happen when neither person is trying to sell the other one anything

Maybe the mentor becomes the mentee today

Anyone keen?

I spent last night helping strangers build their businesses and learned something

I put a post up yesterday basically saying I had some spare time and was happy to help

It ended up being a much better night than I expected

I spoke with people at completely different stages of business

Some were still sitting on an idea

Some were trying to work out their website

Some were experimenting with AI content

Others just needed someone to bounce an idea off

We ended up building a few things and testing some ideas together

What I enjoyed most was there was no transaction involved

Nobody was trying to sell anyone anything

Just business owners and people wanting to become business owners sharing what they know

Ive built businesses for years but Im still learning every day especially with how quickly AI and technology are changing things

Last night reminded me that one of the best ways to learn something is to use it solving someone elses problem

You see weaknesses in your own thinking pretty quickly when youre trying to explain it or build it for someone else

So I thought Id throw the discussion open

What are you currently building

And whats the one thing youre stuck on right now

Maybe someone reading the comments has already solved it

Just trying to help my neighbour

God bless

Perfectionist here, 20 years in IT. I've cleaned up after enough shipped-at-60% products to know what that costs. The bug nobody fixes because the guy left.

So my instinct is to finish things. Properly. Except the market doesn't pay for finished. It pays for used.

My clear position:
Shipping early doesn't teach you what to build. It teaches you what those ten specific people tolerate.

A finished product with no users has one problem: distribution. That's solvable. An ugly product with ten customers has a product problem, a reputation problem, and a rebuild ahead of it.

Both sides have a body count. One dies of neglect, the other dies of silence.

Which one do you pay for?

just wanted to say thanks to everyone who messaged me after my last few posts

had some really cool conversations and got to actually help a few people out

helped with a couple of websites

played around with some ai videos for peoples businesses

talked through a few business ideas and problems

and honestly ive enjoyed the shit out of it

im not selling anything and theres no course coming 😂

i just like building stuff and helping people where i can

so if youre building a business and stuck on something sing out

if i know how to help ill help

if i dont maybe we can figure it out together

Title should say passionate** not passion**

I am thinking heavily on starting a perfume business. I wouldn’t say this is my passion or hobby. I have a tiny tiny interest in perfume. I enjoy smelling them but don’t actually wear them or have a bunch.

I’d say my bigger passion is sunscreen and skin care. I’m torn between the 2 categories.

I’m kinda leaning towards perfume because I enjoy peoples excitement around fragrance (on social media, here, etc). It brings people joy and I like that.

Skin care brings some people joy but it comes with some caveats. I also think it would kinda be easier to get someone to buy a fragrance, since people collect.

My vision is a clean unisex semi-affordable line (around $60 for 50ml bottle).

My only worry is that I’d be seen as a “fraud” since it’s not my passion or I’m not super knowledgeable in the category. I would be working with professionals, not making this myself.

Thoughts?