u/partha_33

We are a team of eight, early stage B2B, and we have been on HubSpot's free tier for about four months. So far we are using the CRM for contact management, the meeting scheduler, and basic email logging. It is holding up better than I expected but I am starting to hit what feel like walls and I am not sure if I am missing something or if an upgrade is genuinely the next step.

A few things I am trying to get clarity on before we commit to anything.

First, email sequences. We are doing all our follow-up manually right now. Is there any way to run automated drip sequences on the free tier or is that a hard paywall regardless of workarounds?

Second, reporting. The pre-built dashboards are fine for now but we are starting to get questions from leadership about attribution and campaign performance that the default views do not answer. At what tier does the reporting actually become useful for that kind of question?

Third, for teams that have made the jump from free to Starter or Professional, was there a specific moment or use case that made the upgrade feel necessary rather than just nice to have?

CADTH (Canada's Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health) just released a final recommendation supporting public reimbursement of semaglutide 2.4mg (Wegovy) for adults with obesity and at least one weight-related comorbidity.

But what's the catch? It's recommended with "conditions"; specifically, that patients are enrolled in a "structured weight management program" and that the cost-effectiveness is improved through confidential pricing agreements with the manufacturer.

This matters because Canada's provinces often follow CADTH recommendations. If multiple provinces add Wegovy to their public formularies, that's millions more people with access.

Been dealing with neck/upper back crap for about 6 years now, plus knee pain that flares if I walk more than a few blocks. I’m 34, work a desk job in Midtown, and yesterday my coworker joked that I sit like a question mark, which lowkey stung and also made me realize how much I’ve normalized this.

I’ve done the usual: NSAIDs, a bit of PT, a chiropractor run, random YouTube stretches. Some stuff helps short term but I never get real, lasting back pain relief, it’s like I always end up back at square one. Late last night I was doom-scrolling and reading about these “protocol” type treatments that mix injections, home exercises, hands-on rehab, lifestyle coaching etc. Sounds good on paper, but maybe I’m overthinking this and it’s just fancy branding for regular PT?

Has anyone here tried a more structured, multi-part plan like that in NYC, especially for neck/back/knee pain all together? Did it actually change your day-to-day or was it just another expensive experiment? Any red flags I should watch for before booking something?

We ran both for eight months. Monday had all the project structure, timelines, dashboards, looked great to stakeholders. Slack was where work actually happened. The two didn't talk to each other in any real way so we were maintaining two separate realities.

The Monday boards were updated by roughly 40% of the team consistently. The other 60% would check it when reminded, not update it unless pushed, and default to Slack for anything time-sensitive. So the boards were always partially stale and nobody fully trusted them, but nobody wanted to say that out loud.

After dropping Monday we leaned into Slack-native tooling for the daily task layer. We use Chaser for task assignment and automatic follow-up, it keeps everything in Slack so there's no tab-switching and adoption has been noticeably higher than anything we ran externally. For quarterly planning where a board view actually matters we still use a lightweight tool, but day-to-day it's all Slack.

The thing I didn't expect: the "visibility" Monday was supposedly providing wasn't real because the data was always incomplete. Incomplete visibility is actually worse than no visibility because you make decisions based on it.

Not saying this is the right call for every team, if you have the discipline or enforcement to keep an external tool updated it's probably a better setup, but for us the Slack-first approach worked better than anything we tried before.

I’m helping a small creator hit the YouTube monetization threshold, and honestly the biggest bottleneck right now is watch time. Content quality is solid, CTR is decent, but organic watch hours are moving painfully slow.

I have looked into buying watch time, but most of what I see feels sketchy fake retention, sudden spikes, or just horror stories about channels getting flagged or analytics getting completely messed up.

Not looking for shortcuts that kill the channel long term just wondering if there’s any controlled or safer way people are using to give that initial push.

Would really appreciate real experiences (good or bad).

I'm not sure how to write this without it sounding like a testimonial so I'll just be honest about what happened and you can take from it what's useful.

I'm 29. I spent four years trying to get evaluated and being told variations of 'you seem fine.' Two of those attempts were with people who clearly had a particular picture of what autism looks like and I didn't match it. The masking had done its job too well and I left both appointments feeling more confused than when I went in, because if I'm not autistic then why does everything feel like this.

I went through the Sachs Center last autumn. The session itself was a focused 2 to 2.5 hour clinical interview with a PhD psychologist, with standardized rating scales I'd done beforehand, and I got the diagnostic letter the same day. What was different was that the psychologist started from a place of understanding that high-masking adults present differently and that the absence of obvious symptoms isn't the same as the absence of autism. She asked different questions. She was interested in the internal experience rather than the observable behavior, how things feel from the inside rather than how they look from the outside, and those are very different lines of questioning.

The report I added on afterwards was specific to me in a way the process never had been before. Four to five pages, and not a checklist of criteria I did or didn't meet, it was a clinical picture of how my brain actually works. I've read it multiple times because every time I find something that explains something I'd filed away as just being bad at life.

I don't think formal diagnosis is for everyone and I'm not saying this is the only option, but if you've been through evaluators who didn't seem to understand masking, it matters to find one who does.

Deep in the photographer search and running into the same problem everywhere, the portfolios all look stunning and I genuinely cannot figure out how to differentiate between people whose work I love equally.

Price is similar, style is similar, experience level seems comparable.

How can I make the final decision when the obvious stuff isn't helping

There's a point in growth where the support headcount math just doesn't close. Volume doubles, you'd need to double headcount, margins compress, it doesn't work. The standard answer is automation, but the automation that handles basic stuff at lower volume doesn't necessarily cover the harder query mix that comes with higher volume. More customers means more edge cases, more product-specific questions, more multi-step issues. So just automate it is only partially true. The question is where the actual ceiling sits for what can be automated vs what still needs a human.

Most ai companion apps are still text based which is interesting because human communication is mostly nonverbal and tone based. Stripping all of that out and reducing a relationship to typing seems like a weird limitation that nobody questions.

There's a handful that do voice now and even fewer that do video. The voice ones feel like an improvement because tone carries so much context that words alone miss, but they're still one dimensional since the AI can't see you.

The only platform I've found doing real two-way video where it actually reads your expressions and tone during the conversation is tavus. Not just video playing at you, it picks up on visual and audio input at the same time and the responses reflect that. Conversations feel qualitatively different from text or voice only.

The question I keep coming back to is whether multimodal interaction is the future for all companion AI or if text stays dominant because it's lower friction. Video requires you to be present in a way that text doesn't and I'm not sure everyone wants that from an ai companion. But for people who want depth over convenience the gap is enormous.

It's easy to get overwhelmed by how many of these are open at once right now. cash app had a significant data breach where a former employee downloaded customer data without authorization. Brokerage account numbers, portfolio values, phone numbers. The settlement allows for up to $2,500 in reimbursement for documented losses or a smaller flat payment without documentation.

At the same time there's an instacart settlement open for customers who placed orders between January 2018 and December 2024 and paid service or delivery fees. There's a snapchat case open for users who experienced mental or emotional distress from the platform. There's a flo data privacy case for period tracking app users between 2016 and 2019.

The issue isn't that people don't care. It's that nobody sends you a clear notification and most of these you have to find yourself before the window closes.

The mice in the chicken coop are out of control. They eat the feed at night, they nest in the bedding, and I'm worried about them spreading disease to the flock. I can't use poison because the chickens will eat the dead mice or the bait itself. I've heard both citronella and peppermint recommended as natural mouse repellents. I placed some peppermint oil soaked cotton balls around the coop and honestly can't tell if they're doing anything. The mice are still there every morning. Does citronella work any better than peppermint for mice specifically? Or are both of these just internet myths that don't hold up in a real farm environment? I'm also open to other natural methods. Traps work but I'd have to empty them every single day because the mice are that numerous.