r/Entrepreneurs

been running a small renovation company in west yorkshire for about two and a half years. three-man crew. we do kitchens, bathrooms, some extensions. decent work, nothing flashy. close rate on quotes was hovering around 22 percent which felt low but i didnt know what good looked like.

met a plumber named dean at a builders merchant in shipley. he's been solo for nineteen years. asked him what his close rate was. he said about 65 percent. i asked how. he said "i stopped emailing quotes and started delivering them in person."

i thought he was joking. he wasnt.

he drives to the customers house, sits at their kitchen table, walks through the quote line by line, and answers questions on the spot. takes about twenty minutes. he said the close rate went from "about where yours is" to 65 in the first three months after he made the switch.

his logic was simple. an emailed quote gets compared on price because price is the only thing you can compare in a PDF. a quote delivered in person gets compared on trust because the person is sitting across from you and they can see you know what youre talking about. "they're not buying the quote. they're buying whether they'd be comfortable with me in their house for three weeks."

tried it for two months. drove to every quote. sat at the table. walked through it. our close rate went from 22 to 41 percent. the jobs we won were bigger because the conversation naturally surfaced things the customer wanted but hadnt mentioned in the initial brief.

its slower. costs petrol and time. but the maths works out dramatically in favour of showing up.

dean charges more than me and wins more than me. the difference isnt his plumbing. its his presence.

One-star situation. Customer posted in a local Facebook group with 8,000 members: "Used [our business]. They left a mess and overcharged me." 340 comments. Most taking her side.

My instinct: defend ourselves. Post our version. Show the signed quote.

What I did instead: nothing for 24 hours. Then posted a single comment: "We spoke with [name] directly. The mess has been cleaned, a partial refund has been issued, and we've changed our process to prevent this. Thank you for holding us accountable."

No defense. No counter-narrative. No blame. Just resolution.

The comments shifted within hours. "This is how businesses should respond." "Respect for not making excuses." "Just booked them based on how they handled this."

3 new customers in the following week who specifically mentioned the Facebook thread. One said: "I saw the complaint and your response. The response is why I called you."

The complaint was embarrassing. The resolution was marketing. Not because I planned it as marketing. Because genuinely fixing a problem publicly is more persuasive than any advertisement.

If a complaint goes public: fix it publicly. Don't defend. Don't explain. Fix, acknowledge, and let the resolution speak.

I'm software engineer who work in the startup in sri lanka. Im my university time I create a blog using blogger about history, and I buy a domain and connected it with and able to get approved by the google adsense around 2019. I tried some methods to get traffic to that blog but it failed. Also I recreate the blog with wordpress after few years but no success. My main issues are the lac of initial investment and the content creation, I can't write proper content even I interested in the history niche. But i manage the create 1.4k followers facebook page and a group also create youtube channel currently with 700+ subscribers. But I didn't add any content lately so they are not active now.

In last 2-3 month I try to build this again. I change my blog structure completely and I plan to recreate it as publication place that anyone have interest in the history and if they found something they can upload that to my system and go trough the public voting system and get approved the article in the site. Also mainly I focus the system to be like knowledge graph, which means if someone create the content about some historical event, artifact, person they can link other articles to it so it can visually analyze the connection from other events or artifacts from the history.

I complete the frontend and connection visualizing part and all the initial steps are done and the system is live now also I connected the adsense account to that and it show the adds there. But I need to implement the public user login part and the content uploading and public voting system. I say lot of sites that are publishing the articles about history but they are like normal blogs, not have analyzing part there, So I think my system have potential to grow. But I got 0 traffic at this moment.

Currently I implement the system using free AI models and it generate blog post everyday and automatically published them to the system. I do this because initially need to have some content in the site to show when someone came to it. currently i successfully generated 130+ articles with the connections. But I need to make this system, people come and create content there and published them. So it go through the public voting and it create majority acceptable publications about the history.

This is my honest story about this. I need a help from you to fine-tune this idea and also I need to invest my time to implement other feature of this system. But if it not going to be success It is useless to do so I need some advises. I don't have money to promote this system now. Also my English knowledge is also not good, so sorry for the mistake in there. But this is the thing that is in my mind. So can you give me some advises about this situation? If anyone ask I will give the link also. Thank you...

Not gonna lie, I’m kinda mentally drained from the investor/networking side of entrepreneurship lately.

You spend so much time reaching out to people, hopping on calls, hearing “this is interesting” or “let’s definitely keep talking,” and then half the time it just disappears into thin air.

No follow up.
No real intention.
Just another conversation that goes nowhere.

I think what gets exhausting is not even the rejection. It’s the false hope. People sounding excited, making it seem like something could actually happen, just for weeks or months to pass and nothing comes from it.

Meanwhile you’re sitting there genuinely trying your hardest to build something, improve yourself, stay motivated, stay disciplined, keep the “right mindset,” all while quietly wondering if any of it is even enough.

People love saying “just keep going” but some days you honestly hit a point where you’re like damn… maybe not everyone makes it. Maybe hard work alone doesn’t guarantee anything.

I don’t know. Just one of those discouraging entrepreneur days today.

I’ve had a pretty good month and wanted to share the good vibes with this community. I’m giving away $300 each to 30 different people (Venmo, PayPal, or CashApp whatever works for you).

No catch, no "subscribe to my channel" BS. I just want to help 30 people out with a meal, some gas, or whatever you need right now.

How to enter:

Just Upvote & leave a comment below and tell me one good thing that happened to you this week (or something you're looking forward to).

°••°^•//♥\°//♥♣/♠

I’ve had a pretty good month and wanted to share the good vibes with this community. I’m giving away $300 each to 30 different people (Venmo, PayPal, or CashApp whatever works for you).

No catch, no "subscribe to my channel" BS. I just want to help 30 people out with a meal, some gas, or whatever you need right now.

How to enter:

Just Upvote & leave a comment below and tell me one good thing that happened to you this week (or something you're looking forward to).

°••°^•//♥//♥♣/♠

Day One of the challenge. Start growing your home service business using these daily tips or ignore me and stay stuck! When your sitting in your truck at 8PM tonight, telling your wife you're once again putting out daily fires, think about how you had a chance to get off your truck (or van(....

I’m done chasing shiny ideas. What I want now is boring, repeatable, and predictable income. That’s why I’ve committed fully to Amazon to eBay. This isn’t a theory for me anymore, I’m already running it and seeing consistent results.

Right now I operate one eBay account that averages around $2,500 a month in profit. The model itself is straightforward. I list products on eBay that already have proven demand on Amazon, usually at around a 100% markup. When an order comes in, I purchase the item on Amazon and ship it directly to the buyer. No inventory, no ads, no content, no audience. Most orders only net $10–$15 after fees, but I stopped caring about single-sale profit a long time ago. Volume is everything.

What made this stop feeling like gambling and start feeling like a business was scale. Once I pushed the store to roughly 10,000 active listings, sales became predictable. At that point, eBay stops being about “hoping something sells” and turns into managing flow. As long as listings are clean, stock is checked before fulfillment, messages are answered quickly, and metrics stay green, orders come in daily. The workload is repetitive but simple: add listings, fulfill orders, handle messages, send offers, and prune dead listings.

The key lesson here is that output beats perfection. I don’t hunt for “winning products.” I build a large catalog of boring, everyday items and let the algorithm do its job. eBay rewards activity, consistency, and reliability far more than clever tactics.

Now the plan forward is just replication. I’ve already opened a second eBay account and it’s ready to scale. I’m running the same playbook while maintaining the first store. One account at ~$2.5k/month is proven. Two accounts at the same level puts me around $5k/month. Over a year, that gets me to an extra $30k without changing the model or adding complexity.

I’m treating this like a real business now, not a hustle I jump in and out of. Same system, same discipline, same expectations every day. I’m posting this so I can look back later and see whether I stayed boring and consistent or went back to chasing noise.

edit: I made a discord with guide that explains everything; You can access it here: ebay dropshipping guide

Planned a SaaS company with 10,000 users. Got a consulting practice with 26 clients. Planned to hire a team of twelve. Have two contractors and a part-time VA. Planned to be in an office with exposed brick and a ping pong table. Work from the bedroom my daughter outgrew when she started school.

Revenue is about 70 percent of what I projected for year six. Hours worked are about 60 percent of what I projected. Which means the per-hour math is actually better than the plan even though the headline number is worse.

My daughter and I walk to school together three mornings a week. I coach her football team on Saturdays. I was at every single school event this year. My wife and I had dinner together at a normal hour more nights than not.

None of this was in the business plan. All of it is in the life the business made possible.

The plan measured revenue and headcount because those are the numbers you put on a spreadsheet. The life measures time and presence because those are the things you feel when the spreadsheet is closed.

If your business is smaller than you planned but your life is better than you expected, that's not underperformance. That's a different kind of success that nobody teaches you to measure because it doesn't fit in a cell.

This started as a Friday afternoon curiosity project and turned into the most useful thing I did all year.

Exported our last 200 sales emails. Sorted by outcome. Took the 50 that led to a closed deal and the 50 that led to silence or a no. Read every single one side by side looking for patterns. Word choice. Length. Structure. Tone. Anything.

The pattern was not what I expected. It wasn't about length. Both groups averaged roughly the same word count, around 140-180 words. It wasn't about personalization. Both groups referenced the prospect's company and situation at similar rates. It wasn't about the call to action. Both used direct asks.

The difference was pronouns. Specifically the ratio of "you" and "your" to "we" and "our."

In the 50 winning emails, the word "you" or "your" appeared an average of 9.2 times. "We" or "our" appeared 2.4 times. Ratio: roughly 4 to 1 in favor of the prospect.

In the 50 losing emails, "you/your" appeared 3.8 times. "We/our" appeared 7.1 times. Ratio: almost 2 to 1 in favor of us.

The emails that closed talked about the prospect. The emails that didn't talked about us.

I went back through our email templates and rewrote every one with a forced constraint: "you" must appear at least three times before "we" appears once. The first draft of any email now gets checked against that ratio before it sends.

Close rate on email-sourced leads went from 14 percent to 23 percent over the next quarter. Same prospects. Same offer. Same person writing the emails. Different pronoun ratio.

We were losing deals because our emails were about us. The prospect doesn't care about us. They care about themselves. The email that makes them feel seen wins over the email that makes us sound good every single time.

I've just finished building a CRM brand deal management app for micro-influencers, and have no idea how to actually get it in front of an audience. I tried to make a LinkedIn post but got 0 users. Any advice?

One pattern I keep seeing across different SaaS and online businesses is this.

At some point, they start increasing marketing activity and it all looks like progress on the surface. There’s more happening, more tools, more output.

But growth doesn’t really change in a meaningful way. It just becomes a busier version of the same results.

What usually stands out in these situations is that the limiting factor isn’t actually effort”or even channels.

It’s something earlier in the chain that never got fixed properly, usually positioning, offer clarity, or how the product is being understood by first-time visitors.

So all the extra activity ends up amplifying something that isn’t fully working yet.

I keep seeing this especially when companies move from early traction into trying to scale acquisition.

Curious if others here have seen the same thing where more marketing didn’t actually translate into better growth.

Is anyone else getting destroyed by call screening on inbound leads?

I’m not talking about cold calling. I’m talking about leads that JUST filled out a form on your site. They literally asked to be contacted. And you still can’t reach them.

Apple’s call screening on iOS is filtering out calls from unknown numbers by default now. The phone doesn’t even ring. It intercepts the call and asks the caller to state their name and reason. If you’re using any kind of auto-dialer or power dialer, you’re getting screened out instantly because the system can’t respond to the prompt.

The numbers are insane. Cold call success rates dropped from 4.8% to 2.3% in just one year. Over 65% of US mobile users now have some form of call screening active. And Apple holds 55-58% of the US smartphone market. That’s not a small edge case. That’s the majority of your leads.

But here’s the part that really kills me. This isn’t just a cold outbound problem anymore. Even on inbound, even when the lead is hot and just submitted their info 30 seconds ago, your number shows up as UNKNOWN and gets screened. The lead never sees your call. By the time you try again or send an email, they’ve moved on.

Speed-to-lead used to mean “call them within 5 minutes.” Now it means “good luck getting through at all.”

I’ve been building something around this problem called Hyper AI. Instead of calling the lead, you send them a link right after form submission. They click it and instantly enter a video call with an AI agent that shares its screen, walks them through the product, answers questions, and can send payment links or schedule a follow-up meeting. No phone call needed. No screening. No waiting.

It completely bypasses the call screening problem because the lead initiates the connection, not you.

But I’m curious how others are dealing with this. Are you seeing the same drop in connect rates on inbound? How are you guys handling it?

Every founder I meet is building for either indie hackers/solopreneurs or trying to land Fortune 500 logos.

Nobody wants to build for the 200-person logistics company in Ohio or the 400-person marketing agency in Bangalore. And that's exactly why there's a massive opportunity there.

Here's what I've learned building for this "boring" segment:

They actually pay. They don't need a free tier forever. If you solve a real problem, they'll give you money in week 2.

Their problems are unsexy but painful. Nobody writes a TechCrunch article about desk management or internal workflow automation. But these companies lose thousands of hours a year on this stuff.

Competition is weaker. Every YC startup is fighting over the same developer tools and AI wrappers. Meanwhile, mid-size companies are running critical operations on spreadsheets and WhatsApp groups.

They're loyal. Enterprise clients will replace you the moment a bigger vendor adds your feature. Mid-size companies that love your product will stick with you for years.

I'm building in this space right now and the biggest challenge isn't product — it's convincing other people (investors, advisors, even friends) that it's worth doing.

Anyone else building for the "boring middle"? Would love to compare notes.

Everyone talks about the companies that got into Y Combinator.

Nobody talks about the ones that didn't and still won.

I spent some time digging into YC's history because I kept hearing "just get into YC" as startup advice and I wanted to understand what that actually meant. What I found was more interesting than I expected.

YC is the closest thing the startup world has to a filter for potential. 1.5% acceptance rate. A 3-month program. $500K for 7% of your company. Access to the most powerful startup network in the world. Alumni include Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox, DoorDash, Reddit. Their combined portfolio valuation is in the hundreds of billions.

And yet.

SendGrid was rejected by YC. Got into Techstars. Built the company. IPO'd. Acquired by Twilio for $2 billion. Gone.

Buffer was rejected by YC. Built anyway. Became one of the most profitable and transparent SaaS companies in the world. Joel literally published the rejected application, go Google it.

Dropbox was rejected by YC twice before getting in on attempt three. Drew Houston didn't quit. He came back with a better product and a better story. The rest is history.

Chameleon rejected by both YC and 500 Startups. No connections. No Valley network. Found a way anyway.

The thing that all of these founders had in common wasn't a YC badge. It was the refusal to treat rejection as a final answer.

YC themselves have said they look for founders who will pursue success "relentlessly, with or without YC." Read that again. They're literally telling you the thing they're screening for, the same thing that lets you succeed without them.

The mistake most founders make is thinking the goal is to get into YC. The goal is to build a company people need. YC is one path to that. A useful path. Not the only path.

If you got rejected: document what feedback you got. Build for 6 more months. Come back with traction. Or don't come back at all, build the $2B company anyway.

Hii everyone, I just want to know about money. How money can be made? Not in generic ways like do freelancing, sell products or make videos.. not this kind of stuff.

I really want to know about money, see if I learn a skill and I want to sell any client so I'm unable to find the clients. But the main point is I don't want to know same repetitive things like,

1. Do job.

2. Have a service.

3. Sell products.

4. Sell content (make videos)

And that's it.. This is not that thing I want to know. Can you tell me guys?

Okay around 3 months back I started developing and selling sites to businesses this was pretty hard at first as I had no experience with developing or cold calling but by month 2 I had closed my first 5 clients once that happened.

I then decided to make my own site and socials as to give new clients trust Incase they look me up and to give them more information on what I do I’m currently at 7 clients now I have increased what I charge and what I offer it’s no longer sites and has turned into Leah generation at this point with automated systems and sites alongside seo basically everything to help businesses grow.

I have 1.6k in revenue I have my own website socials and am running ads my site is stackwellcreative.com

Let me know your thoughts on my site and if you guys have anything that’s currently working
My main question is there anything I can be doing to help me scale it to the next level that I’m missing?

I’ve been building Telegram bots for a while and the moment I tried to monetize one I realized there’s basically nothing out there for it. InviteMember solves this perfectly but only works for groups, not bots.

I’m thinking of building something that handles this for bots, payments, access control, the whole thing. But before I spend time on it I just want to know if other people actually run into this problem too. Do you build bots? Have you ever wanted to charge for access and just didn’t have a clean way to do it?