u/Current-Payment-5403

All answers accepted !

Hey there,

Dev agency owner with Converge Labs here based out of London. Can't help but notice that most of our clients now come from the US and, although I like to think we're priced decently for the quality of our work. It just seems to be harder and harder to work with UK businesses.

Is it more of a marketing problem than a market problem? Curious if others services have experienced the same?

London agency here. Been developing 20+ projects over the past 3 years and now our devs have some availability.

You can check us out at Converge Labs.

Cheers

Hey sub,

Setting myself this challenge of generating $100,000 in 30 days. Been working as both a SaaS and Agency owner from London for a few years now and worked on some amazing projects across the years.

Here's what I'm starting on: Most of the top devs and designers I see usually have some time sitting on free time in between projects. 

In the UK we have Too Good To Go where you can find discounts on food surplus, what if we had the same for devs and designers?

The logic is the same. An unbilled hour is gone forever and could be used for agencies and freelancers to improve their portfolio, building new client relationships and would allow buyers to find top talent at a cheaper price (only for relatively small scopes).

Two things I genuinely don't know yet:

1. Would you ever accept work below your rate card, even invisibly? Or is that a line you don't cross regardless of how the week looks?
2. If you would, what would you need to see to feel safe doing it?

Thinking about starting to collect applications with the following criteria (feel free to comment and I’ll reach out)

- 10 projects worked on minimum

• 3 years of operating minimum
• 2 clients we can call

We'll share any learnings along the way !!

Hey everyone,

Setting myself this challenge of generating $100,000 in 30 days. Been working as both a SaaS and Agency owner from London for a few years now and worked on some amazing projects across the years.

Most of the top devs and designers I see usually have some time sitting on free time in between projects. 

In the UK we have Too Good To Go where you can find discounts on food surplus, what if we had the same for devs and designers?

The logic is the same. An unbilled hour is gone forever and could be used for agencies and freelancers to improve their portfolio, building new client relationships and would allow buyers to find top talent at a cheaper price (only for relatively small scopes).

Two things I genuinely don't know yet:

1. Would you ever accept work below your rate card, even invisibly? Or is that a line you don't cross regardless of how the week looks?
2. If you would, what would you need to see to feel safe doing it?

Thinking about starting to collect applications with the following criteria (feel free to comment and I’ll reach out)

- 10 projects worked on minimum

• 3 years of operating minimum
• 2 clients we can call

 

Hey everyone,

Thinking out loud and see if it sticks with anyone here. Most of the top devs and designers I see usually have some time sitting on free time in between projects. 

In the UK we have Too Good To Go where you can find discounts on food surplus, what if we had the same for devs and designers?

The logic is the same. An unbilled hour is gone forever and could be used for agencies and freelancers to improve their portfolio, building new client relationships and would allow buyers to find top talent at a cheaper price (only for relatively small scopes).

Two things I genuinely don't know yet:

1. Would you ever accept work below your rate card, even invisibly? Or is that a line you don't cross regardless of how the week looks?
2. If you would, what would you need to see to feel safe doing it?

Thinking about starting to collect applications with the following criteria (feel free to comment and I’ll reach out)

- 10 projects worked on minimum

- 3 years of operating minimum

- 2 clients we can call 

On the demand side, also accepting any small scope projects, feel free to reach out

Hey sub,

Thinking out loud and see if it sticks with anyone here. Most of the top devs and designers I see usually have some time sitting on free time in between projects. 

In the UK we have Too Good To Go where you can find discounts on food surplus, what if we had the same for devs and designers?

The logic is the same. An unbilled hour is gone forever and could be used for agencies and freelancers to improve their portfolio, building new client relationships and would allow buyers to find top talent at a cheaper price (only for relatively small scopes).

Two things I genuinely don't know yet:

1. Would you ever accept work below your rate card, even invisibly? Or is that a line you don't cross regardless of how the week looks?
2. If you would, what would you need to see to feel safe doing it?

Thinking about starting to collect applications with the following criteria (feel free to comment and I’ll reach out)

- 10 projects worked on minimum

- 3 years of operating minimum

- 2 clients we can call 

On the demand side, also accepting any small scope projects, feel free to reach out

Soo many people on Reddit and other socials claiming they’re making $10k, $20k, sometimes even $50k+ a month from apps they built with AI tools. (A lot of the times it seems to be some ads from the vibe coded tools themselves, or at least they like to push those stories)

I’m curious how common this actually is outside of the posts that go viral.

Has anyone here personally built an app with Claude, Cursor, Codex, etc. that turned into a meaningful income stream? Or do you even know someone who has?

If so I'm curious, please mention:

What the product actually does

How you got the first users

How long it took to build

Roughly how long it took before it started making real money

I’ve literally been in the industry since before AI and now specialise in bringing vibe coded apps to production and revenue and I have never personally seen those examples

I see so many founders here that just vibe-coded their app and got no users. It's heartbreaking because I know the amount of time, effort, and energy that goes into doing so, because I've been doing it myself. One solution that we try to implement ourselves is that, in our company, we first started developing our own products. Now, slowly, from interest to taking some vibe-coded apps to production, we see some problems that vibe coders face.

I believe we need more discipline. Vibe coding, at least a big part of it, is just another (expensive) form of dopamine.

I do believe that if you want to take it to the next level, vibe coding is very useful for prototyping and having some type of product that you can then try to sell to your close network. If you want to take it to the next level, most companies build a moat. I don't think it's really realistic to have, with a firm conviction, the idea that vibe code by itself will bring a successful business. It's just one of the many components of the business, and perhaps one skill that we should all learn to do more is the distribution side.

That's one thing that I try to do. Now, back to the main problem: vibe coding into the void. Since it's a dopamine problem, having a very strict framework is "I do not build unless I reach X number of interests for that specific feature." From there, building feature by feature is something that could save 90% of the vibe code that I see here.

Feel free to send over your app and I can give it a look and try to provide feedback. I have seen 300 founders applications in the last year, so perhaps I could be of help. 

Hey I launched this crazy challenge 3 days ago. Never thought this would get me this type of attention. Launched my first SaaS 3 years ago and managed to make 6 figures (from both SaaS and Agency developing SaaS). Been running the dev shop out of London where we help non-technical (business-savvy) founders launch their product and get to market.

It day 3 and here are some results so far:

53k views

8+ Discussions

1 Meeting Booked

1 Meeting Had

$0 so far.

Here’s what’s working and what’s not working.

Been working on our positioning with the following specs:

* Professionals that have been in their industry long enough to know the problems. (Legal/health/services/finance/trading/education)
* Needs to be non-technical and business savyy
* Based in the UK or the US 
* Believes AI will / is disrupting their industry. You either use it / learn to use it or suffer the consequences
* Better if they’ve already started a company before.

I’m adding now « been burnt before » by an outsource dev agency. They usually went for vey cheap prices and now trust that it’s not always the best option. 

From past client data, this positioning is good but I’m thinking I might not be advertising in the right spaces and wondering if  should niche down on one specific vertical there. We’ve been working with lawyers, wellness professionals, traders, investment bankers… to help them launch their products. One assumption I have is that they’re not really where I post about us. 

What’s been working:

* Top of funnel and awareness from Reddit posts (50k views)
* What hasn’t been working has been Linkedin Outreach although my profile has almost 10k followers, I see LinkedIn as more of a mid-term game than Reddit. 
* Been reaching out to consultants from the data analytics industry as well as they usually are sitting on demand for Software Dev and it’s worth it for them tow ore with us. 

Designed our offer specifically for this challenge at $19,000 for the build instead of $25,000. Still wondering if it’s a good thing to lower down our prices. 

Something needs to change very soon if I want to even be able to reach the goal. 

One second play I’m working on is building the first accelerator you can watch. We've been launching and getting in touch with angel investors to invest into our companies. We've already selected some founders. In a world where building products gets easier, distribution is the real moat and we want to leverage content to follow our founders and help them build an audience. 

Plan for the next day:

One of the only way to shorten the sales process is to catch demand where it’s sitting. Currently figuring out a way to find those signals such as companies hiring for Ai engineers jobs locally and going to see them… I’m also aware these signals are exploited by such a big part of the industry we need to come up with better strategies

Speak soon!

I have been running a small dev studio out of London with clients based in UAE for a while now brand identity, websites, packaging and AI SaaS products. Delivery side is solid. I’m stretched thin is consistently bringing in new business while also running projects.

Looking for someone here who enjoys the sales side , cold outreach, meetings, closing, keeping clients happy after the handshake. Dev background isn’t required but if you have worked around agencies or handled client facing work, that helps a lot.

This is a partnership with equity, shared decisions, building the thing together. I’d want to work on a couple of deals first to see if we actually get along before anything formal.

Happy to answer questions in the comments.

Been building AI softwares both for myself and our clients for some time now and will tell you most of the tricks and tips learnt and used to reach 6 figures from Reddit. 

I remember the first product that I launched. My co-founder and I had genuinely no idea of what we were doing. We thought there’s this big problem we should solve (in an industry we never even worked on…) and we would be billionaires by year 2

Funny to think back about those times…

Long story short, we learnt to code and shipped our first version to a few of our network. Always heard you need to validate the problem first and the best way to do so is to spin up a quick landing page.

Go and see the top performing landing pages out there (from companies that have studied and their whole model is to convert like Unbounce), keep the format and change the content to your value proposition. Now we needed traffic to that page. 

The single best way we used to sell lifetime deals before we had a product was to reach out to ICP onLinkedIn and approach them from a startup angle i.e. ‘we’re just two young ambitious men trying to solve a problem for you, would you mind giving it a look etc…’ Sold 3 lifetime deals there. First internet money !!!

Slowly getting to a product that was decent, we now wanted to grow our waitlist.

That’s where Reddit came in, especially this sub…

At the beginning, it was just a lot of interactions and making a few posts to get people to join the waitlist. I’m not sure I remember exactly but got to 100 waitlist. The problem was that we only launched 6 months later and most of these waitlist had gone cold but the time we launched (so please nurture your leads somehow).

Now launching the product, we grew it to a few hundred users just with this simple strategy which bought 90% of our users.

Let’s call it the Infinite Success Loop.

And this is exactly why you’re reading this post.

Redditors (and I include myself) are attracted, not to say addicted, to success stories with the aim of finding the secret recipe and reproducing it for their business.

This is why you will work on your business, then post how you achieved it, grow your business from this traffic, post about your new achievements etc…

I legit made a post for every new 50 users when starting out. « Just reached 50 users, then «just reached 100 users » etc…

Be truthful though ! People can see it and even if they don’t you’re the one losing out if you’re trying to fake your success.

After having grown that product, a few users loved it and asked for us to develop an AI products for them. First contract was $1,400 for a week of development, the second was $3,000, the third was $5,000. We now run a whole agency charging serious founders between $15,000 to $50,000 to work with them minimum 6 months on translating their vision into reality.

These days we only take on a few builds at a time, and I say no to most of what comes in, usually because the founder hasn't defined the problem yet, which is the same lesson from the first product. If you're at that stage and want a second opinion on whether your idea is actually a build, I'm happy to tell you it isn't.

A few learnings from seeing hundreds of founders over the past year.

I come from a maths background, been working in tech for some time, helps traditional businesses implement AI to either 1. Make their life easier or 2. Grow their business. Ideally both, at least that’s what everyone thinks.

The truth is different though.

I’m sad to see that the big majority of people, and I pray not to be part of them although I can find myself there sometimes, CAN NOT THINK for themselves.

We really need to develop a critical thinking, and examine where our opinions and core beliefs come from. This is something that we see both in personal relationships, professional relationships, politics etc… 

Now coming to AI… A big part of the implementations that I’ve seen in businesses (more relevant for corporate than small businesses) comes from peer pressure or this FOMO around implementing AI.

You want to implement these technologies for the sake of it, without breaking down the problem first. Most of the time you don’t even need technology to solve it!!!

Is there a few times where implementing technology and AI is beneficial? Of course but make sure it’s the case and you’re starting from the problem, not from your peer telling you how great AI has been for him when he hasn’t seen any ROI…

I've got a short list of questions I run through with a business before agreeing to build anything. Happy to share it if it's useful to anyone.

I know this thread doesn’t like AI much and I can understand why.

I come from a maths background, been working in tech for some time, helps traditional businesses implement AI to either 1. Make their life easier or 2. Grow their business. Ideally both, at least that’s what everyone thinks.

The truth is different though.

I’m sad to see that the big majority of people, and I pray not to be part of them although I can find myself there sometimes, CAN NOT THINK for themselves.

We really need to develop a critical thinking, and examine where our opinions and core beliefs come from. This is something that we see both in personal relationships, professional relationships, politics etc… 

Now coming to AI… A big part of the implementations that I’ve seen in businesses (more relevant for corporate than small businesses) comes from peer pressure or this FOMO around implementing AI.

You want to implement these technologies for the sake of it, without breaking down the problem first. Most of the time you don’t even need technology to solve it!

Is there a few times where implementing technology and AI is beneficial? Of course but make sure it’s the case and you’re starting from the problem, not from your peer telling you how great AI has been for him when he hasn’t seen any ROI…

I've got a short list of questions I run through with a business before agreeing to build anything. Happy to share it if it's useful to anyone.

Can't be thankful enough for the bubblers. This is where it started.

3 years ago I Had an idea and no skills to develop it. Started learning bubble and become quite good at it.

Developed our first product and some founders wanted us to develop their app for $1,400 in a week. Then the second app at $3,000 and now we're breaking 6 figures and turned into a software dev house based in London, launching our internal products as well.

Ngl I moved away from bubble due to performances issues and "perfectionism" but will be forever be grateful to this community.

How has bubble been developing with the advent of vibe coding tools?

Been running a small AI software dev house out of London for the last 2 years. 6 people now and growing. Took the company from 0 to 6 figures and I want to do it again.

I want to show this is possible to generate 150,000 in 15 days (without using any of my warm network or referrals from current clients. ) Hopefully can inspire a few to start their own as well!

I will, though, leverage some of our past work to do the convincing. The rules are the following: Revenues are counted when contract is signed, Need to be from cold intros. I’ll use our work but will start our positioning from zero.

The beginning:

As I worked with many founders, I’m personally a big believer that purpose and mission should be the driver behind companies. You see a version of the world that needs changing, that’s not there yet, Every founder should be a visionary from the start. Even if that’s « the people in my area needs to have access to this incredible Chinese food ». Whatever form it takes, you’re betting on a vision of the world that’s not there yet. The bigger the mission, the better your company.

So I’ll do that exercise myself:

As informations become more and more available due to AI, judgment and critical skills become more and more critical. This has been a pattern with painters as camera became more available, construction as machinery became available, writers has books become more available… That’s my « bet ». We want to be the ones productising this experience from professionals.

So I will start first with our target audience (from past clients data):

• We choose to serve professionals that have been in their industry long enough to know the problems. (Legal/health/services/finance/trading/education)
• Needs to be non-technical and business savyy
• Based in the UK or the US 
• Believes AI will / is disrupting their industry. You either use it / learn to use it  or suffer the consequences
• Better if they’ve already started a company before.

Now we know who we serve, I need to figure out the best way to serve them. 

Offer: We’ll help you translate your vision into a production-ready product and help you grow it for the first 6 months.

Usual Price: $25,000 

Discounted Price for the challenge: $19,000

If we really believe in the product then we would price it down lower and take some equity as well.

(Not too worry about vibe coding, since a non-technical founder can only take it so far imo. You end up with more issues and cost than paying someone from the beginning or you spend a loot of your precious time, to still hire a dev anyway down the line). Very useful for prototyping though

Plan now: 

• LinkedIn hyper personalised Outreach to Startups hiring in London / US -
• Reddit interactions and posts

See you on day 2

Lol might be talking like AI but I’m not

Let's get this starteed

Been running a small AI software dev house out of London for the last 2 years. 6 people now and growing. Took the company from 0 to 6 figures and I want to do it again.

I want to show this is possible to generate 150,000 in 15 days (without using any of my warm network or referrals from current clients. ) Hopefully can inspire a few to start their own as well!

I will, though, leverage some of our past work to do the convincing. The rules are the following: Revenues are counted when contract is signed, Need to be from cold intros. I’ll use our work but will start our positioning from zero.

The beginning:

As I worked with many founders, I’m personally a big believer that purpose and mission should be the driver behind companies. You see a version of the world that needs changing, that’s not there yet, Every founder should be a visionary from the start. Even if that’s « the people in my area needs to have access to this incredible Chinese food ». Whatever form it takes, you’re betting on a vision of the world that’s not there yet. The bigger the mission, the better your company.

So I’ll do that exercise myself:

As informations become more and more available due to AI, judgment and critical skills become more and more critical. This has been a pattern with painters as camera became more available, construction as machinery became available, writers has books become more available… That’s my « bet ». We want to be the ones productising this experience from professionals.

So I will start first with our target audience (from past clients data):

• We choose to serve professionals that have been in their industry long enough to know the problems. (Legal/health/services/finance/trading/education)
• Needs to be non-technical and business savyy
• Based in the UK or the US 
• Believes AI will / is disrupting their industry. You either use it / learn to use it  or suffer the consequences
• Better if they’ve already started a company before.

Now we know who we serve, I need to figure out the best way to serve them. 

Offer: We’ll help you translate your vision into a production-ready product and help you grow it for the first 6 months.

Usual Price: $25,000 

Discounted Price for the challenge: $19,000

(Not too worry about vibe coding, since a non-technical founder can only take it so far imo. You end up with more issues and cost than paying someone from the beginning or you spend a loot of your precious time, to still hire a dev anyway down the line). Very useful for prototyping though

Plan now: 

• LinkedIn hyper personalised Outreach to Startups hiring in London / US
• Reddit interactions and posts

Current Revenues Challenge: $0

See you on day 2

Lol might be talking like AI but I’m not, perhaps I just talk to Claude a bit much

Hey Saas

Been running a small AI software dev house out of London for the last 2 years. 6 people now and growing. Took the company from 0 to 6 figures and I want to do it again hopefully

I want to show this is possible to generate 150,000 in 15 days (without using any of my warm network or referrals from current clients. ) Hopefully can inspire a few to start their own as well!

I will, though, leverage some of our past work to do the convincing. The rules are the following: Revenues are counted when contract is signed, Need to be from cold intros. I’ll use our work but will start our positioning from zero.

The beginning:

As I worked with many founders, I’m personally a big believer that purpose and mission should be the driver behind companies. You see a version of the world that needs changing, that’s not there yet, Every founder should be a visionary from the start. Even if that’s « the people in my area needs to have access to this incredible Chinese food ». Whatever form it takes, you’re betting on a vision of the world that’s not there yet. The bigger the mission, the better your company.

So I’ll do that exercise myself:

As informations become more and more available due to AI, judgment and critical skills become more and more critical. This has been a pattern with painters as camera became more available, construction as machinery became available, writers has books become more available… That’s my « bet ». We want to be the ones productising this experience from professionals.

So I will start first with our target audience (from past clients data):

• We choose to serve professionals that have been in their industry long enough to know the problems. (Legal/health/services/finance/trading/education)
• Needs to be non-technical and business savyy
• Based in the UK or the US 
• Believes AI will / is disrupting their industry. You either use it / learn to use it  or suffer the consequences
• Better if they’ve already started a company before.

Now we know who we serve, I need to figure out the best way to serve them. 

Offer: We’ll help you translate your vision into a production-ready product and help you grow it for the first 6 months. + Can help connect you for your first raise.

Usual Price: $25,000 

Discounted Price for the challenge: $19,000

If we really believe in the idea than the price comes down and we take equity in the company

(Not too worry about vibe coding, since a non-technical founder can only take it so far imo. You end up with more issues and cost than paying someone from the beginning or you spend a loot of your precious time, to still hire a dev anyway down the line). Very useful for prototyping though

Plan now: 

• LinkedIn hyper personalised Outreach to Startups hiring in London / US
• Reddit interactions and posts

Current Revenues Challenge: $0

See you on day 2

Lol might be talking like AI but I’m not

Hey there,

Been running a small AI software dev house out of London for the last 2 years. 6 people now and growing. Took the company from 0 to 6 figures and I want to do it again.

I want to show this is possible to generate 150,000 in 15 days (without using any of my warm network or referrals from current clients. ) Hopefully can inspire a few to start their own as well!

I will, though, leverage some of our past work to do the convincing. The rules are the following: Revenues are counted when contract is signed, Need to be from cold intros. I’ll use our work but will start our positioning from zero.

The beginning:

As I worked with many founders, I’m personally a big believer that purpose and mission should be the driver behind companies. You see a version of the world that needs changing, that’s not there yet, Every founder should be a visionary from the start. Even if that’s « the people in my area needs to have access to this incredible Chinese food ». Whatever form it takes, you’re betting on a vision of the world that’s not there yet. The bigger the mission, the better your company.

So I’ll do that exercise myself:

As informations become more and more available due to AI, judgment and critical skills become more and more critical. This has been a pattern with painters as camera became more available, construction as machinery became available, writers has books become more available… That’s my « bet ». We want to be the ones productising this experience from professionals.

So I will start first with our target audience (from past clients data):

• We choose to serve professionals that have been in their industry long enough to know the problems. (Legal/health/services/finance/trading/education)
• Needs to be non-technical and business savyy
• Based in the UK or the US 
• Believes AI will / is disrupting their industry. You either use it / learn to use it  or suffer the consequences
• Better if they’ve already started a company before.

Now we know who we serve, I need to figure out the best way to serve them. 

Offer: We’ll help you translate your vision into a production-ready product and help you grow it for the first 6 months.

Usual Price: $25,000 

Discounted Price for the challenge: $19,000

If we really believe in the idea then the prices comes down and we take some equity

(Not too worry about vibe coding, since a non-technical founder can only take it so far imo. You end up with more issues and cost than paying someone from the beginning or you spend a loot of your precious time, to still hire a dev anyway down the line). Very useful for prototyping though

Plan now: 

• LinkedIn hyper personalised Outreach to Startups hiring in London / US
• Reddit interactions and posts

Current Revenues Challenge: $0

See you on day 2

Lol might be talking like AI but I’m not