r/EntrepreneurRideAlong

ive spent the last 6 months treating my saas like a traditional startup. you know the drill. obsessing over the perfect tech stack, mapping out a 12 month roadmap, worrying about scalable architecture. basically just building in complete isolation.

was procrastinating on fixing some nasty auth routing bugs today and went down a rabbit hole looking at the roster for a 48h ai hackathon happening in shanghai next week (hosted by rednote). tbh looking at how these solo devs operate is giving me a massive existential crisis.

it feels like the entire concept of a 'startup' is completely compressed now.

i used to think hackathons were just demo theater. u build some duct tape project over a weekend, get claps from three judges, and abandon the repo on monday. but the math has changed. since ai basically made the raw coding part free, the speed of execution is ridiculous.

these arent just students padding their resumes. im seeing people compress what used to be a 6 month seed stage into a single weekend. its definately concrete now. just one person, a specific friction point, 48 hours, and a prototype that regular people can actually try and use.

the thing that really hit me was the feedback loop though. they arent stealth building at all. they just drop raw demo videos of these tools directly onto the host platform during the sprint and let actual users roast the ui/ux in the comments. they get instant brutal validation before they even write the final commit.

meanwhile i literally spent three days last week refactoring my database structure for an app that currently has exactly zero paid users.

we used to think the moat was 'knowing how to build the complex system'. now im starting to think the only moat left is having a hyper-specific problem, shipping a concrete solution in days instead of months, and having the stomach for immediate public feedback.

if the timeline to ship has collapsed this much, a 48 hour sprint isnt a toy anymore. its the actual startup phase just stripped of all the pitch decks and bs.

mostly it just makes me realize how much time ive wasted playing 'founder' instead of just shipping the damn thing. going to close figma and actually push some code today.

We just had this with "Dun & Bradstreet", someone told us it lets you check other companies before working with them, and it was very important to us at the time. Eventually, having a set list of collaborators, we kinda used it less and less so I wanted to cancel it... only to find out the agreement requires you to give at least 90 days' notice before the end of the term. If you don't, it automatically renews for another full year!!

Of course it's on me for not reading the small print but 90 days notice? For a yearly subscription? So I wrote to them, several times, and the only non-automated reply I got was them making it clear that the contract is very much enforceable + LEGAL ACTION if the balance isn’t paid.. so much for negotiating my way out of this.

So we're onto another year with these guys even if we don't use their services anymore.. is this the new "okay" for B2B contracts at all? Do I need to speak to someone, or is the 3 month thing always enforceable in the USA?

I started time tracking last month to figure out where my day actually and I thought I was being productive, but i was wrong.

So I logged 160 hours of work, which were divided into these tasks:

- 52 hours in meetings that could have been emails, that's a third of my entire month sitting in rooms where my attendance didn't matter.

- 31 hours answering the same 8 questions I've already answered before. Questions like "How do we do this", "What's the process for that", "Who approves this thing", the same questions from different people every week.

- 18 hours switching between tasks because I kept getting interrupted. So I started something, then get pulled into a conversation, then try to remember where I was, all the time.

- 23 hours on actual strategic work, the stuff I'm actually supposed to be doing as the founder. Less than 15% of my time.

The rest was admin, emails, putting out fires, and pretending to work while being completely mentally exhausted.

I'm paying myself a salary to attend meetings nobody needs me in and answer questions that should be documented somewhere.

What i changed was rejecting meeting invites unless I'm critical to the decision, cutting my meeting time by 60% in two weeks.

The documented the 8 questions I answer repeatedly, now I send links instead of explaining the same thing for the 100th time.

Also blocked 3 hour chunks with no interruptions, because mornings are for actual work, afternoons are for coordination and fires.

After tracking time again this week, it was 41 hours of strategic work, which is still not perfect but way better than 23.

Most founders think they're busy being productive, but we're actually busy being available for things that don't need us.

I recommend you tracking your time for one week, you'll hate what you learn but at least you'll know what to fix.

Anyone else tried this?

Half of the posts here are written with AI. Probably 5/6s of the posts are written by people promoting a product or service in a spammy fashion (posting the same post onto multiple subreddits). It would be relatively easy to get rid of both of these types of posters with an active moderation team. Can I ask, u/GoodMacAuth why have you not implemented more moderators? You made a post about looking for moderators 8 months ago yet you are still the only moderator.

I wouldn't be posting this if I didn't think this subreddit had potential, but I think it's falling short of that potential.

If you have a business and need a website, I have some extra time. I will build you out a cool website. Ideally a landing page. I just want to build cool stuff and I need cool things to build.

I likely only have capacity for one person. Please comment below if you want your old legacy landing page revamped or just need something built from scratch.

I will give you the source code as well. Everything is yours.

for me it was learning how to build systems. i thought the hard part was getting customers but the real challenge was keeping everything running without me personally doing every task. the day i stopped being the bottleneck in my own business was the day things actually started growing

what was yours?

It’s time we talk about 'Meaningful Call' pricing.

In the 2026 Voice AI landscape, a "Meaningful Call" (also sometimes called a Billable Event or Qualified Interaction) moves away from the stopwatch and focuses on value delivered.

Think of a 'Meaningful Call' as a filter. Instead of paying for every second the line is open (including 'please hold' music or the caller sneezing), you only pay when the AI actually does work, like identifying a lead, answering a specific question, or logging a transcript that’s actually useful for your sales team.

I’m curious to get your take: Would you rather pay Per Minute or Per Meaningful Call?

quick context for anyone new: I built a pipeline for creating AI influencers and monetizing them on Fanvue. been teaching others how to do it for about 2 months now.

what's working:
the technical side is actually easier to teach than I expected. most people get through the ComfyUI and LoRA training within 2-3 weeks.

what's not working:
the social media growth side takes longer. getting a following around a new AI character doesn't happen overnight and some people get impatient here.

what surprised me:
people who stick through the first month are seeing real results. had a student get their first Fanvue subscriber this week after starting with zero experience.

the model is repeatable. that's the main thing I wanted to prove and so far it is.

if anyone's been thinking about something similar or has questions about the AI influencer space in general, drop them below.

I’ve spent the last few months talking to local business owners, and the #1 complaint is "subscription fatigue." Between CRM, accounting, and hosting, most startups are bleeding $500/month before they even make a sale.

It actually led me to start DeskPlusPro. I wanted to create a hub where entrepreneurs can get the heavy-hitting tools they need (like QuickBooks) without the recurring monthly "tax" on their growth.

My question to the founders here: At what stage of your business did you stop caring about the monthly cost and start valuing the "Cloud" features more? I’m trying to figure out if the perpetual license model is still what the community wants, or if I should pivot my focus.

(Not here to spam, but if you’re looking to cut your overhead, I’ve got my project link in my bio—would honestly love some feedback on the pricing/user experience!)

Hi all! Are you a math tutor wanting to spread your math expertise to others or a learner looking for math assistance? MatheCord is a new Discord server that will be launching in a few days. MatheCord connects math tutors with students. You will also have the opportunity to sell/purchase educational digital materials on the server along with other beneficial features. To stay updated with MatheCord’s launch, feel free to search for us on socials and follow:

Facebook: /mathecord

X: @mathecordtutoring

I ran 10+ ecom brands before I was 25. Here are the 5 that taught me the most by failing.

I guess you could say I was a serial ecom entrepreneur when I was younger. Between the ages of 16 and 22, I ran somewhere between 10 and 15 online stores. Some print on demand, some dropshipping, some a little of both. Most of them failed. A few made real money. All of them taught me something.

So I put this post together where I can break down 5 of the brands, explain the ups and downs, and break down the things I've learned from these experiences.

Store 1: Living Jungles (2016)

This was one of the first dropshipping stores I built in high school. It was based around jungle animals with a focus on lions. Think lion bracelets, lion pendants, generic tees. Simple jewelry moved the best. The numbers looked decent. But every time I tried to scale the ad spend, I hit a wall.

I kept thinking it was product fatigue or bad angles. Then one day I stumbled onto a Shopify tutorial on YouTube that was made 3 months before I even started my store. It had a similar theme. Same winning product. Same layout. And half the comments were people saying they just copied the whole store.

No wonder my best-selling product was trending on AliExpress.

That's when it clicked. I wasn't just competing against real brands. I was actually competing against hundreds of people who watched the same video, copy pasted the same store, and were running low quality ads to the same audience. The market was flooded with people who had no idea what they were doing and that somehow made it worse because it trained customers to ignore everything in that niche.

Lesson: Before you build the store, go find out how many other people are already selling the same thing. Saturation from copycats is a different kind of competition and in some situations it can be more detrimental than competing against a bigger real brand.

Store 2: First Glass Drones (2017)

This one was a different kind of painful. I started on the higher ticket side selling more expensive drones. The customer acquisition cost was brutal. We were spending hundreds of dollars to acquire a customer on a product we made maybe $70 on.

So we pivoted to cheaper drones to bring the acquisition cost down. Average order value dropped from around $220 to about $50. Customer acquisition cost dropped too, but only to around $40 to $50. We were still losing.

The bigger problem was targeting. With the jungle store, I knew exactly who I was selling to. With drones, I had no idea. Some buyers were into tech. Some were into aviation. Some were filmmakers. Some were hobbyists. Completely different people with completely different reasons to buy. I never locked in a clean customer profile and the ads never found their footing because of it.

Lesson: You have to know exactly who you are selling to before you spend a dollar on ads. If you can't picture the specific person sitting on the other side of that purchase, you are not ready to advertise yet. Go hang out where your customer hangs out first.

Store 3: Crypt Tees (2019)

This one was a print on demand store selling crypto-themed apparel right at the peak of the 2019 crypto bull run. The timing felt perfect when I started this brand. I was trading crypto and deep in the crypto community. It was the hottest topic in finance at the time and the engagement around crypto was at an all time high.

The problem was advertising. You can't run Facebook ads or Google ads for anything crypto related without getting flagged. So I went directly to one of the biggest crypto YouTube channels at the time and worked out a partnership deal. We had a few successful drops. Things were moving.

Then the market crashed. Bitcoin went from $20k to around $6k in what felt like overnight. The people I was working with on that channel went from fully engaged to completely MIA. I think some of them just got wrecked in the market and disappeared. The channel's engagement dropped around 70% within 6 months. All my traffic was gone with it.

The store could have survived into the next crypto cycle years later. But I didn't wait it out.

Lesson: Two things here. Chasing trends is genuinely risky because the exit is never as obvious as the entry. And partnerships with people you don't fully know are a liability. If that team had stayed committed, we might still have had something. They didn't and I had nothing to fall back on, so I moved on.

Store 4: PrezTees (2020)

To be straight up this one was interesting. I'm not American, I saw an opportunity and I took it. From the outside looking in, the country was ridiculously divided. Tensions were high and so were the people who felt like it was necessary to wear their political beliefs on their clothing in public.

This was a print on demand store selling political apparel right after a big election cycle. I built up an organic following on Twitter when the platform's political landscape was completely different and sales came in every single day without running a single ad.

I did this in college and while my friends were working 6 hour shifts after class, I was making sales during lectures. Fun fact, the only A I ever got in college was from presenting this business to my business communication class for our Shark Tank assignment. It was supposed to be an imaginary business, but I just pretended like it wasn't real and showed the class the logos, designs, and business plan.

I knew from the start this type of product had a ceiling. You can make real money riding controversy, but you cannot scale it without risk. The bigger you get, the more you become a target. I was not interested in ending up on any kind of list or creating problems that followed me outside of the business. So I kept it controlled and eventually let it wind down.

Lesson: Short term cash grabs can work. But if you are afraid to scale something because of what might happen when it gets too big, that fear will eat at you. You cannot build a real vision around a brand you are scared to grow. Know what you are getting into before you start.

Store 5: Baking Buddies (2021)

This was honestly one of my best stores and the way it ended still stings a little.

We sold high-end baking tools. Chocolate molds, cake decorating kits, cookie stencils, the kind of stuff serious bakers actually want. I personally hate baking and everything artsy about it but I understood the customer and the product sold well. We had an incredible Q4. Christmas cake decorating kits, cookie decorating sets, holiday themed everything. We were doing around $35k a month.

Then right as we came out of Q4 and into February, my Facebook ads account got banned overnight.

What happened was my supplier had been giving me product images that were actually stolen from North American competitors. I had no idea. One of those competitors filed a copyright report, hit my ad account, and that was it. Gone. The store ran on Facebook traffic almost entirely. Without ads, there was nothing left to work with. I ended up selling the store and moving on.

Lesson: If you cannot physically order the product, shoot your own content, and verify where your images came from, you are sitting on a ticking clock. It is not worth it. Takes one report to lose everything you built. Source your own content from day one and then you can sleep at night without worrying about copyright.

To wrap this up:

I regret nothing. I made this post so you don't make the same mistakes I made.

Every one of them taught me something I could not have learned any other way. How to read a market. How to find a customer. How to spot a ceiling before you hit it. How to protect yourself legally. How to build something that can actually last.

These insights followed me into my next stages of life when I eventually stopped running my own brands and started my agency. When I started getting my first agency clients, I was not just someone who understood what I was selling, which was email marketing at the time. I was someone who had actually run the stores. I knew what a supplier headache looked like. I knew how to optimize a product page. I knew how ads interacted with the backend. Clients would hire me for emails and end up getting someone who could look at their whole operation and solve problems they didn't even know existed.

I don't know where I'd be now if I hadn't failed so much when I was younger.

We are a bunch of Senior level software engineers from different domains within the industry. We have exposure to multiple projects and solutions. If anyone has an idea of an app or software that needs to be implemented and deployed, we can help you out for a fair price, since we are based in Sri Lanka.

We were born in the 90s and not vibe coders therefore🙂

i’m currently using gumroad to sell my digital product, but i haven’t made any sales yet

not sure if the problem is my product, pricing, or just lack of traffic

i’m still new to this, so i’d really appreciate any advice from people who’ve actually sold on gumroad

how did you get your first sales

what worked for you

and what should i focus on first

just trying to figure out what i might be doing wrong

Many of you have been asking about the WhatsApp assistant .It automatically replies to every customer instantly and keeps all their contacts saved so anytime you have an offer or promotion, you can reach out to everyone at once and bring in sales immediately ,you’re basically turning every single inquiry into future business

Setup is $100 and $25**/month**

One beginner decided to stop overthinking and just follow a system.

Used AutoDrop AI:

Picked a winning product

Launched a store in days

Started running ads with proven creatives

No prior experience. No coding. No complicated setup.

This is what happens when you stop learning endlessly and actually execute with the right tools.

I created this tool, it's kinda like... A sales department in your pocket.

It let's you automate your entire outreach (calls, emails and DM's) at one place.

And when someone responds, AI steps in, Qualifies, follows up, and books meetings directly into your calendar.

So all you do is walk into booked meetings.

The tool has:

- A lead database of 375M contacts

- A CRM

- A dialer (manual/power) with inbuilt call recordings

- Email integrations (unlimited mailboxes-upto 50k emails/month)

- LinkedIn integration with sendpilot

- contract system (tracks e signatures)

- multi channel sequence builder

- AI appointment setter 

All in one place.

I'm looking for people who actually run outbound for their businesses to review it and give me their 2 cents.

Quick context: I'm a solo founder building SealSEO. It's an AI-powered SEO toolkit that writes blog posts, does keyword research, runs site audits, and auto-publishes content to your site.

I built it because as a solo founder I literally didn't have time to write 4+ blog posts a month AND do keyword research AND monitor my site health. And I definitely wasn't going to pay $200/mo for enterprise SEO tools.

The tool is live and working — I've been using it on my own site and in ~2 weeks of AI-generated blog posts, I'm already at almost 1K impressions in Google Search Console (screenshot attached). But I need more eyes on it before I feel confident scaling. So I'm offering 1 month of Pro access (free) to anyone willing to actually use it and give me feedback.

What you'd get:

- AI blog generation (writes full articles from a keyword)

- Auto-publishing to your site

- Keyword research with real data

- SEO audit with prioritized fixes

- Google Analytics + Search Console in one place

If that sounds useful to you, shoot me a DM with your email and I'll set up your account. Especially looking for people running blogs, niche sites, or SaaS products.

Thanks in advance to anyone who helps out.

Not complaining, just sharing because I know I'm not the only one

doing the math on every delivery.

I run a small cannabis delivery operation and WeedMaps is

non-negotiable for discovery — but watching them get paid every month even when they are providing much added value, it started to feel like a tax.

So I built Own Your Dirt. It's a dead-simple CRM specifically

for delivery operations. Tracks your customers, keeps you

compliant, and your customer data is YOURS — not feeding

someone else's platform.

No complicated setup. No features you'll never use. Just:

- Customer tracking and history

- Compliance documentation

- Delivery logs

- Flat monthly fee (no per-transaction anything)

It's not trying to replace WeedMaps for discovery. It's for

what happens AFTER they find you — building YOUR customer

base so you're in control. Would love to hear from others if they are feeling a little squeezed?

If anyone wants to kick the tires, happy to give a look.

Not a huge operation, just a tool I built because I needed it. Happy building all.

Hey everyone,

I've been working as a freelancer and the "monthly planning" part was killing my productivity. Most AI tools charge $30+/month just to give you some basic captions.

So, I decided to build my own "Machine" using Python and the Gemini API.

What it does:

• Generates a full 30-day calendar (Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, etc.).
• Creates scroll-stopping Hooks, Captions, and CTAs.
• The best part: It generates high-detail AI Image Prompts (Midjourney/DALL-E) for every single post.
• It exports everything into a clean CSV/Semicolon file, so I just bulk-upload it to Meta Business Suite and I'm done for the month.

I also added a "Monthly Focus" feature so it never repeats the same ideas (e.g., I can focus on "Lead Gen" one month and "Brand Awareness" the next).

I’ve bundled the script, a setup guide, and 10 master prompts into a small package.

I'm looking for some feedback from fellow marketers. If you want to check it out, let me know in the comments and I'll send you the link! > (Not posting the link here to avoid being spammy).

Cheers! 🚀

I got rejected from dentistry this year, so I’m on a gap year trying to figure out what to do. I got bored pretty fast and realised something: every study app I used was missing half the tools I needed. One had flashcards, another had notes, another had a timer… nothing had everything in one place.

It’s called FlashNotes - a web‑only study workspace that mixes AI revision tools with all the productivity stuff students normally spread across 5 different apps. It’s freemium: the core features are free, and premium is £3.99/month.

Here’s what’s inside:

AI tools:

- Flashcards from PDFs or typed notes

- Summaries + practice questions

- Concept explanations

- Auto‑organised subjects/topics

Study tools:

- Flashcards

- Quiz mode

- Spaced repetition

- Searchable notes

Dashboard:

- Cards due

- Tasks

- Streak

- XP + levels

- Study activity

Productivity:

- PDF annotation

- Mind maps

- Calculator

- Graph plotter

- Pomodoro timer

- To‑do list

- Timetable

- Exam countdowns

- Friends + teams

- Daily/weekly challenges

Built it solo during my gap year. Still improving it, but it’s fully usable.

Would love honest feedback - especially what feels unnecessary or what you’d want added.