u/kbk3173

I’m a freelancer/business owner in Europe and I’m trying to become much more deliberate about my banking setup.

For the last few years I’ve mainly used fintechs such as Revolut for day-to-day banking and moving money around. My company has generated a decent amount of income, but I’ve historically kept most of the money inside the company and transferred relatively little to my personal account.

That worked while I was focused purely on growing the business, but the downside is that I’ve built almost no meaningful history with traditional banks. The fintechs I use also don’t offer much in terms of credit where I live.

My business is now more stable, so I want to start using the full banking system properly: mortgages, business credit, personal credit, high-limit cards, overdrafts, investment products, relationship banking and eventually private banking if it makes sense.

What would be the smartest chronological order?

One thing that has made me question my setup is seeing entrepreneurs in my industry with $200k+ Amex limits who, from what I can tell, make less than I do.

Meanwhile, because I’ve mostly kept profits inside my company and relied on fintechs, my personal banking profile probably looks significantly weaker than my actual financial position.

So I’m also wondering whether Europe is even the best place to build this.

If European banks are structurally conservative with entrepreneurs/self-employed people, I would be open to moving a meaningful portion of my capital and banking activity to the US if the banking and credit ecosystem is materially better for business owners.

I’m not looking to borrow money I can’t afford. I want to understand how to deliberately build a strong banking profile and eventually have access to substantial credit when there is a good reason to use it.

For someone starting with a profitable company, decent liquidity, but almost no traditional banking history, how would you structure the next 12–24 months?

And for anyone who has banked substantially in both Europe and the US: where would you build the relationship if you had the choice?

I work in trade finance, so every single day I receive messages from self-described commodity brokers looking for financing, instruments or introductions.

Some of the proposals are genuinely unbelievable.

There seems to be an entire online subculture convinced that someone will sell them $50 million of gold, copper, sugar, EN590, Jet A1 or another liquid commodity at a huge discount to market. They will then find a buyer at something close to market price and pocket the spread.

No balance sheet. No committed trade finance facility. No established supplier relationship. No inventory risk. No hedging. No logistics infrastructure. No meaningful working capital.

Sometimes they don't even have a direct relationship with the supposed buyer or seller.

Instead, there are five intermediaries between each side exchanging SCOs, ICPOs, NCNDAs, IMFPA agreements and commission sheets. Everyone is calculating their commission on a cargo that nobody in the chain has financed, controlled or even verified.

What amazes me is how strongly some people believe in the model.

If a producer or established trader controls a highly liquid commodity worth tens of millions of dollars, why would they give an unknown intermediary a massive discount and allow that person to capture a virtually risk-free spread?

Real commodity traders earn margins because they provide something economically useful: capital, credit, logistics, storage, transformation, market access, risk warehousing, arbitrage capability or reliable offtake.

Yet there is this parallel commodity universe where the business model seems to be:

**Find cheap cargo → find buyer → issue paperwork → become millionaire.**

And when you explain why the transaction makes no economic sense, they rarely reconsider the premise. They just assume they haven't found the right "direct seller" yet.

I encounter this constantly because I work in trade finance.

Where did this whole culture come from?

I used to spend around $2,000–$3,000/month on Google Ads for my consulting business and the ROAS was insane. Same niche, same core services, same types of keywords and locations I’m targeting today.

Eventually I got comfortable and stopped reinvesting in ads. It didn’t hurt immediately. I probably had another two years of runway from recurring clients and new business coming through SEO.

About five months ago I finally switched Google Ads back on.

The result: basically zero... I acquired less than 3 new customers.

Demand for the service is still there. The keywords that used to generate business still have search volume. I’m targeting essentially the same markets.

I also wasted about two months with AI Max enabled before realizing a significant amount of the budget was going toward completely unrelated search terms. I turned that off and tightened everything up, but performance is still nowhere remotely close to what I remember.

So for people who have been actively running Search campaigns from 2020 through today: what fundamentally changed?

Did keyword matching become much looser? Is manual Search simply less effective now without enough conversion data for Smart Bidding? Are there settings/features that are basically mandatory today that didn’t exist back then?

I feel like I’ve returned to Google Ads after five years and I’m playing a completely different game with an interface that just happens to look familiar.

Curious to hear from people who actually managed accounts throughout the entire transition.

Hi all,

I'd like to know if any of you here made profit using Polsia. I came across a video about them claiming they're a unicorn, helping founders launch autonomous companies. I do have some cash to spend and I'm wondering if its worth testing out. Please let me know if you manage to make money with it.

I'm building a marketplace where users can upload projects (text, images, etc.), and other users can browse them. I know this is a noob question, but what's the simplest architecture for an MVP?

How do I connect the frontend to a database without making things overly complicated?

I just need the listings to update automatically whenever the database changes, support text and images, and be easy to maintain. Also, roughly what would this cost for around 100 active users per month? I'm trying to avoid overengineering this.

AI Max has been a total waste of money. I tested it for 3 months.

I was charged for keywords that have nothing to do with my business. Not even broad match was that bad.

If anything, it allowed me to add a bunch of keywords to my negative keywords list. If you just started using AI Max, please monitor your search terms frequently. You’ll be surprised.

I don’t recommend using it at all. Specially since the Google reps push it so much.

I wish I could get a refund for this daylight robbery 🤣

I’m considering leaving Portugal for Orange County* California.

I work remotely, I like being in Lisbon but I struggle with being ambitious here. Also, I’ve dealt with “institutional laziness” from banks, etc that seems normal here but it actually looks like a passive way of sabotaging my business.

Anyone left Orange county for Portugal? Tell me why you made that choice.

Don’t get me wrong Portugal is an incredible place, but I feel like I’ve outgrown it. 2-3 months a year max.

Before anyone tries to shun me for not liking this country enough: the Portuguese themselves leave. I do have Portuguese blood myself and I love this country. It’s just that I don’t want to stay in a place where I don’t see opportunities.