u/Cangingperceptions

I've been trying to take strength from the story of Prophet Ayuub alayhie salaam. Alhamdulillah i had 2 very good businesses in the coffee industry, and i was making a good income on my own for a family of 6 with me being the only provider in the house. Things started to become difficult running the business with staffing issues. I decided to sell the business in the high 5 figures as well as the equipment from the other business and had healthy 6 figures to try and launch a new business that i'd hoped would've given me location and time freedom. However, the new project was an absolute flop, i lost all of my savings. It has now been 2.5 years and i've tried so many different ventures and they all have literally failed. I've been getting by, by selling my previous possessions which has sustained me untill now. I've applied for over 300 jobs, and have a rejection letter from 80% of them, and the remainder just literally ghost me. I've made about £2000 in the last 2.5 years. Sometimes, i feel like i've been afflicted by ain, or hasad. As per my title, i'm continuing to try and persevere and be patient like Prophet Ayuub alayhie salaam was.

I have recently launched some software for restaurants, and guess what? Still zero sales. May Allah make it easy for all the Muslims and forgive us for our shortcomings. Ameen

Been on Zepbound 6 months, down about 38 lbs. Like most of you I saw the "eat protein, lift weights" advice early on and just nodded along without really getting why lifting mattered beyond the generic "use it or lose it" thing everyone says.

What I didn't get until later: muscle isn't just tissue sitting there burning a few extra calories. It's the main site in your body for clearing glucose after you eat, and it's tied into your hunger and fullness signals too. If you drop weight without building or holding onto muscle, your body composition hasn't really changed even though the scale has. That's a big chunk of why regain happens once people come off the meds.

The part nobody explains is HOW to do the strength training bit. "Lift weights" isn't a plan when you're wiped out, feeling nauseous some days, and have never touched a dumbbell in your life.

So genuinely asking, for those of you trying to strength train on a GLP-1, what's the real blocker for you? Is it not knowing what to do, low energy killing your motivation to even start, not knowing how much protein you need around training, gym intimidation, preferring to just do it at home, or something else entirely?

I'm trying to understand what's missing for people here, not just repeat the "eat protein and lift" advice that assumes everyone already knows how.

No team.

No budget.

No prior audience.

I built SideTracked because I kept losing entire days to work that felt productive but wasn't. Not Netflix. Not scrolling. Actual work. Redesigning things nobody asked for. Reading competitor blogs instead of building. Starting new ideas when the current one got hard.

Every productivity tool I tried assumed I already knew which tasks mattered. None of them asked whether what I was about to do actually served the goal I said was my priority.

So I built something that does.

One project. Five AI tasks specific to your goal and identity. And an alignment guard that asks one question before you can add anything new to your day: does this actually serve today's goal, or does it just feel productive?

I launched here a week ago knowing almost nothing about Product Hunt. Got to #56. Had one user tell me it wasn't worth paying for. Rebuilt the onboarding based on that feedback. That same user came back, said it was 10x better, and subscribed.

That's where things are. One paying customer. A product that works. And a genuine belief that the reason most side projects don't ship isn't laziness, it's drift.

Free to try at sidetracked.site. Would love feedback from anyone building something right now.

Spent years in specialty coffee and hospitality before building this so I've felt the no show pain first hand, a table sat empty on a saturday night bcos someone couldn't be bothered to cancel.

Built ReserveTable to fix that. It takes card details at booking and charges a no show fee automatically if someone doesnt turn up, handles reservations end to end too.

Not trying to hard sell here, just looking for a handful of independant restaurants in the UK willing to give it a go. Happy to answer questions or show how it works if that's useful to anyone.

Spent years in specialty coffee and hospitality before building this so I've felt the no show pain first hand, a table sat empty on a saturday night bcos someone couldn't be bothered to cancel.

Built ReserveTable to fix that. It takes card details at booking and charges a no show fee automatically if someone doesnt turn up, handles reservations end to end too.

Not trying to hard sell here, just looking for a handful of independant restaurants in the UK willing to give it a go. Happy to answer questions or show how it works if that's useful to anyone.

I built reservetable. app

I've had some interest to validate my app, but getting in front of restaurant owners on a budget is proving difficult due to lack of funds to run ads, etc.

How do i find a marketing team that would be willing to run ads and marketing campaigns for a revenue share?

Been in and around the restaurant industry for years (came up through specialty coffee, now work closer to the reservations/ops side), and if there's one thing that never gets talked about enough outside the industry, it's how much damage a no-show actually does compared to how small it looks on paper.

A missed 4-top on a Friday night isn't just one lost check. It's a table that could've turned twice, a server who planned their section around it, food that was already prepped, and a walk-in you turned away an hour earlier because you were "fully booked." Multiply that across a month and it's genuinely one of the bigger silent leaks in a restaurant's revenue, right up there with food cost creep.

The frustrating part is most of the "fixes" restaurants reach for don't actually address the root issue:

• Card-on-file with a blanket "we'll charge you if you don't show" policy sounds good, but a lot of places never actually enforce it because the manual work of chasing it down isn't worth the awkwardness.
• Overbooking to compensate just shifts the problem to overwhelming the kitchen and floor staff on the nights everyone does show up.
• Confirmation texts help some, but a generic reminder doesn't create real commitment the way a deposit or a personalized touch does.

Curious what this sub has actually found works. Anyone here run a place where you got no-show rates down meaningfully, and what did it take? Was it policy, tech, just training your host stand to have better instincts, or something else entirely?

Posted here before about how tracking your actual days instead of guessing at them changes stuff you're not even trying to fix. My brother thought it was nonsense, said i was just imagining connections that weren't there

so we made it a bet. he picked one thing, dishes, since he genuinely never did them same day. rule was just log it every night, done or not done, no other changes allowed. i wasn't allowed to give him any other advice

week 2 he texted me annoyed because he'd started making his bed too, which he has never done in his life, and swore he didn't decide to start, it just happened. week 4 he canceled a subscription he'd been meaning to cancel for 8 months. none of that was the bet

what's interesting is he still thinks discipline itself didn't change, and honestly i agree with him now. what changed is he started actually noticing the small failures instead of letting them blur together. once dishes went from "vague ongoing failure" to "a thing i log every night," his brain apparently started applying that same lens elsewhere without asking him

he still owes me for losing the bet btw, he swears the spillover thing would've happened anyway. hard to prove either way i guess

anyone else tested this on someone skeptical instead of just noticing it in themselves

I work a normal 9-5, and last year i was kind of a mess in a low key way. not like rock bottom, just constantly late replying to people, apartment always slightly chaotic, gym membership i paid for and used maybe twice a month. nothing dramatic, just death by a thousand small inconsistencies

decided to fix literally one thing, the gym, because it was the easiest to measure. just committed to going same 3 days every week no matter what. wasn't trying to become a new person, just wanted to stop wasting the membership fee honestly

around month 3 i noticed i was replying to texts same day instead of leaving people on read for a week. didn't try to fix that. it just started happening. then my apartment stopped being a disaster zone, also didn't touch that on purpose. even started actually opening mail instead of shoving it in a drawer, which sounds small but i'd been doing that drawer thing for like 2 years

what i think happened is discipline isn't really separated by area the way we treat it. like we act like "gym discipline" and "reply to texts discipline" and "keep your apartment clean discipline" are different skills you build separately. i don't think they are. i think it's one skill, proving to yourself you show up when you said you would, and once you prove that in one area your brain kind of applies it everywhere without you deciding to

could be confirmation bias, could be i just had more energy from actually working out, not ruling that out. but the timing lined up too cleanly across stuff that had nothing to do with each other for me to fully write it off as coincidence

curious if other people have noticed this too, and if so did you pick the "starter area" on purpose or did it happen by accident like mine did. also curious if anyone's tried this deliberately, like picked one small thing specifically to see if it would spread, instead of just noticing it after the fact

Been lurking here for a while and figured i'd share what actually worked for me bc most discipline advice made me feel worse not better

for years i thought i just had bad willpower. read atomic habits twice. did the whole 75 hard thing for like 9 days. always fell off and always blamed myself for being weak

what actually changed things was way less inspiring than any of that. i started talking out loud every night, just a voice memo, saying what i actually did that day vs what i told myself i'd do. no writing, no app, just talking

first week was brutal ngl. hearing myself say "no i did not go to the gym, again" out loud is a different kind of uncomfortable than just knowing it in your head. you can lie to your own brain pretty easily. way harder to lie out loud to a recording of your own voice

after like a month i wasn't even trying to have more willpower. i just couldn't unsee the pattern. i skipped the gym every single time i had a rough day at work, no exceptions, 100% of the time. that's not a discipline problem, that's a "i need a different plan for bad days" problem, and i never would've known that if i wasn't forced to look at weeks side by side instead of one day at a time

same thing happened with money. i kept saying i wanted to save more and then would randomly blow 200 bucks on nothing. turned out it was always within 2 days of a stressful week. once i saw that i stopped moralizing about it and just automated savings before i could touch it on those specific days

the thing nobody tells you is discipline isn't really about forcing yourself harder. it's about seeing your actual patterns clearly enough that you stop needing willpower for the same fight over and over. most of my "laziness" was just me repeating the same mistake because i never had the pattern in front of me, only vibes and guilt

anyway not selling anything, just wanted to share since this sub is usually more helpful than the productivity ones. curious if anyone else found something that actually shows you the pattern instead of just being another tracker you abandon after 2 weeks

Not doom scrolling. Not Netflix. I mean the stuff that disguises itself as progress.

Redesigning things nobody asked for. Reading competitor blogs for two hours because starting felt harder than researching. Starting to plan a completely different project the moment the current one got difficult.

I called it productive drift when I figured out what was happening. The work felt real. I felt busy. My to-do list got shorter. The actual project I cared about moved almost nothing.

The thing that broke it for me was one question I started asking before I let myself start anything new: does this actually move my project forward today, or does it just feel like it does?

Sounds obvious. Almost impossible to answer honestly in the moment when you actually want to do the thing.

Anyone else recognise this? Not the obvious procrastination but the sneaky kind that looks exactly like a productive day until you check whether the thing that matters moved.

Building for nobody is easy. Building for the right people is the hard bit.

What I’ve learned is that a lot of people waste time polishing something before they’ve properly answered who it is for. If you do not know the customer, you end up guessing on the features, the message, the design, and even the price.

The real work is figuring out:

who feels the pain most

who is already looking for a fix

who will actually pay

where they already spend time

what language they use when they talk about the problem

That part matters more than trying to make something look fancy early on.

I used to think building was the main thing. Now I think finding the right person is the main thing.

Would you rather have a decent product for the right people, or a great product for the wrong ones?

Talking from "Experience"

Weight loss isn't about one thing. It's about everything working together.

Mindset + eating + movement = results that last.

Most people focus on one piece and ignore the rest. They try to exercise more while eating junk. They try to eat clean while feeling miserable mentally. They try to be perfect and burn out.

The ones who kept weight off? They worked all three. Slowly. Consistently. Without punishing themselves.

Moral of my post is to motivate you.

Be consistent and control where your mind flows. Be conscious and intentional

Talking from "Experience"

Weight loss isn't about one thing. It's about everything working together.

Mindset + eating + movement = results that last.

Most people focus on one piece and ignore the rest. They try to exercise more while eating junk. They try to eat clean while feeling miserable mentally. They try to be perfect and burn out.

The ones who kept weight off? They worked all three. Slowly. Consistently. Without punishing themselves.

Moral of my post is to motivate you.

Be consistent and control where your mind flows. Be conscious and intentional