u/roxylezan

genuine question because I think I've been blaming the wrong thing. capcut is free, it does captions, the cuts are fine. by every measure the editing part is solved. and yet getting four videos out still eats my entire saturday.

sat down and worked out where the time actually goes and editing was maybe a third of it. the rest is setting up to film, redoing takes because I fumbled a line, getting the lighting to match the last one so the set doesn't look different, then resizing and reuploading for each platform. capcut doesn't touch any of that. it fixed the one part that was already fixable.

the only thing I've seen that goes after the filming half is the AI avatar stuff (seen a lot of posts talking about it here lately), which is what I am working on right now, I went with Argil and I'm honestly still unsure about it for anything where being on camera is the whole point. so I'm not really recommending it, more just noting it's the only thing aimed at the actual bottleneck.

so how are you lot doing it? is everyone batching a month of filming in one day, or have you found something that cuts the setup and retakes down? because honestly it's not the editing that's killing me.

We're an SDR team of 8 on Apollo for outbound, with find rate somewhere in the 50s for a while now and mobile coverage dropping off hard on anything EU-based.

So we're burning through credits on bad data and eating into send limits with bounces.

Started looking at whether a waterfall enrichment setup would lift those numbers or just add another bill, and from what I've read in this sub FullEnrich, BetterContact, and Prospeo are the ones that come up for the comparison.

Can't figure out from the docs whether that find rate improvement holds on EU lists or mainly shows up on US ones, since EU phone is where we're bleeding most, and the credit model makes it hard to benchmark without running a test batch first.

So if you made the switch from Apollo to FullEnrich for the data layer, what did find rate look like afterward?

I'd appreciate any pointers here.

Our feedback ends up scattered across Gong calls and Intercom and a graveyard of NPS comments we never really read.

So we've been shopping for proper VoC tools and got down to 3 so far: Chattermill feels very enterprise for a team our size, Unwrap is interesting on the ticket-clustering side, and BuildBetter because it handles internal meetings too, not just customer-facing stuff.

Anyway, who did you pick and what broke first?

We're comparing EORs for an EU expansion (Germany and Netherlands first, with Poland potentially next), and the MSA always brings up things the sales call glossed over.

So far, these are the questions:

- Do you own your legal entities in each country, or are you routing through a third-party aggregator?

- What certifications do you hold and are they country-specific or blanket?

- What's the deposit per employee and is it refundable on a clean offboarding?

- What's your average time from a signed MSA to the first compliant employment contract being live?

- What happens to employee data if we terminate the relationship?

We're currently between Workmotion, Deel, and Remote, testing contract turnaround and whether they own their entities in each country.

So that's where we are. What would you add?

« Je me lave les cheveux et j'en ai une poignée dans la main à chaque fois. » C'est ce qu'une amie m'a dit samedi, sept mois après son accouchement.

Elle savait que ça arrivait, tout le monde l'avait prévenue. Elle s'attendait pas à ce que ce soit à ce point-là, ni que ça dure aussi longtemps.

Sa sage-femme lui a dit que c'était hormonal et que ça repousserait, mais de faire vérifier sa ferritine parce qu'après une grossesse c'est souvent bas. Prise de sang faite, ferritine à 14.

Au groupe de la crèche, deux mères lui ont parlé de compléments. Une est sur un truc de chez Nutrimea, l'autre sur du Granions. Les deux disent que c'est surtout le fer qui a changé quelque chose et pas le reste de la formule.

Ce qui la freine c'est qu'elle allaite encore et que sa sage-femme lui a dit de rien prendre sans en parler d'abord. Elle a rendez-vous mardi pour lui montrer les résultats.

Celles qui sont passées par là, vous avez pris quelque chose ou vous avez juste attendu que ça passe ?

We've been using an EOR for our German and Dutch hires since we started building internationally, and I'm starting to wonder if we're being overcharged.

The reason is that the invoices are getting harder to reconcile and I can't figure out what the markup on employer social contributions should look like or whether the compliance fee line is a standard item or just padding.

Our current provider is fine operationally, but the billing has gotten opaque enough that when I compared fully-loaded EOR cost against what direct employment would run us in the Netherlands, the gap was bigger than the original quote suggested.

A founder I talked to who'd switched providers mentioned Workmotion as being more transparent on itemization, and Deel gets mentioned here a lot too, but I haven't evaluated either seriously yet.

So my question is, what are you all benchmarking EOR fees against in Germany, and is there a reasonable range for the management fee as a percentage of gross salary?

Knee-deep in user research calls lately and the recording side is handled, but the synthesis layer is where it falls apart.

Grain and tldv are good for clips, Dovetail wants everything manually tagged before it's useful, and a PM on my team has been using BuildBetter to pull themes across interview rounds because the repo was already fragmenting across different people's naming by the time we hit double digits.

Haven't cracked the synthesis layer yet, so what does your pipeline look like from raw call to shareable insight?

We're a small UK startup, and the best person for a role we've been trying to fill turned out to be in Spain, so we're about to hire our first employee outside the UK and I had no idea how different employing someone there would be from doing it here.

Once I started digging into it the employer social security in Spain adds close to a third on top of the salary, the pay is split across 14 payments a year instead of 12, and there are severance rules and a collective agreement that set the floor on a lot of the terms.

So in other words, opening a Spanish entity for a single hire makes no sense, and an employer of record looks like the way to do it without setting one up.

The ones everyone recommends to me whenever I ask around are Deel and Remote, and another founder who hired in Spain told me to also look at Workmotion because they own their own entities across Europe, so before I commit I'd rather hear from people who've run a Spanish employee through one of these than go off the sales calls.

What I mainly care about is whether the fully-loaded cost they quote is what leaves the account each month and whether the contract they generate holds up under Spanish law.

So if you've made a first hire abroad this way, I'd want to know which one you'd pick again.

I've been working a normal full-time remote job for a couple years and treating it like a nomad gig, hopping countries every few months.

And since work from anywhere was the whole offer I never told HR exactly where I was and it never came up.

Then the company rolled out one of those AI notetaker tools on every call, and it logs where you're dialing in from, so when someone lined up the locations they realized a chunk of us hadn't been in our home country for most of the year.

Turns out that's a bigger deal than any of us thought, because once you spend enough time in a country you can trip tax residency there (and me sitting on the payroll from all those places) may have created a taxable presence for my employer on top of it, so overnight it was my problem and theirs across 3 different countries.

The company didn't want to kill remote, since plenty of us would've walked, so the only way to keep everyone working without tripping a law somewhere was either drag us all back home or bring in a compliant middleman

So they went the compliant route, moving the nomad-heavy people onto EORs that employ you properly wherever you're really based (one of those Deel, Workmotion or Remote type setups you've probably seen and never questioned what they do) which more or less legalizes the exact thing we'd all been doing under the table.

I just wish I'd known that was an option before I spent a year sitting exposed.

So if you're nomadding on a salaried job right now, it's worth working out where you're really tax-resident before it comes back to bite you, because being remote doesn't keep you hidden anymore.

Back in the whole work-from-home rush, we told the team to live wherever they wanted and just do your job from the beach if you feel like it, and it made hiring so easy that people took us at our word and scattered.

We never really tracked where anyone went, so when our accountant sat down to reconcile payroll we had people spread across 11 countries.

A few who'd picked up and moved without ever mentioning it, and every one of those is somewhere we now count as operating for tax and payroll.

Each country wants something slightly different, local payroll registration in some, permanent-establishment exposure in the ones where senior people are signing contracts, plain misclassification risk on the folks we'd kept as contractors…

Plus a couple where we'd probably owed social contributions for a year before we noticed, so it was really 11 versions of the same headache.

We didn't want to kill the policy, since being able to live where you want is a big part of why people stay, so the fix was expensive…

We moved everyone onto EORs that become the legal employer in each country (Deel or Remote where they had coverage and Workmotion for the rest), which turns 11 payroll messes into somebody else's compliance problem and still came in under what we'd have owed in back-taxes.

So if you're working from wherever right now, it's worth checking who your legal employer even is, because a surprising number of companies never sorted this part out and it tends to surface at the worst possible time.

Ok so I finally decided to take omega 3 seriously and picking one has turned into the most annoying part of my week, I assumed I'd grab a bottle and move on but every single one tells a different story on the label and I've ended up more lost than when I started.

Right now I've got four sitting in front of me. There's Nordic Naturals which everyone online seems to love but it's the priciest by a fair bit, there's a Kirkland one I grabbed off the supermarket shelf that's cheap but the actual EPA/DHA per capsule is way lower than the big number on the front once you read the small print, there's Solgar that the pharmacy pushed and my mum swears by but it smells a bit fishy the second you open it, and there's a Nutrimea one that has the shortest cleanest ingredient list of the lot but I keep second-guessing it because I don't know anyone in real life using it so I've got nothing to go on besides what the label tells me. I don't know if I'm overthinking the additives thing or if it really matters day to day.

For people who've sorted this out, do you just go off the EPA and DHA numbers on the back and ignore everything else, or does the source and the extra stuff in the capsule matter enough that it's worth paying more, because right now I'm one more spreadsheet away from just closing my eyes and picking one?

Coucou les filles,

Je me pose des questions sur le collagène marin pour la peau et les ongles, parce que je veux m'y mettre sérieusement mais sans payer surtout pour la marque.

Une copine qui en prend depuis un moment a commencé avec du Vital Proteins, vu partout sur Insta, mais elle trouvait ça cher et bovin, avec un dosage réel plus bas que prévu une fois les grammages lus. Elle est passée à Nutrimea depuis, moins cher et avec un dosage plus proche des 8-10g par prise qui reviennent dans les études, et elle a l'air convaincue, mais je sais pas si c'est un vrai effet ou un placebo.

Du coup celles qui en prennent depuis plusieurs mois, vous êtes sur quelle marque et est-ce que vous avez vu une vraie différence sur la peau, les cheveux ou les ongles, ou c'est surtout dans la tête ?

Merci les filles !

Working out what our real per-image cost floor is for PDP photography and i can't find good numbers anywhere.

We're a fashion brand doing around 5k SKUs this year (up from 1.5k a couple years back), and photography is now one of our biggest line items.

Current setup goes through a traditional studio and once you factor in studio time, model rate, retoucher hours, and the time cost on our end managing the shoots, we're sitting somewhere in the £60-90 per PDP-ready image range.

Hero and campaign on the other hand sits above that but we're focused on the volume tier.

We've obviously looked at freelance photographer networks (cheaper per shoot but coordination overhead has been brutal for other people i've spoken to, and consistency across markets drifts), on-demand studio subs like soona (decent quality, sits around £25-35 per image at volume but people i've asked said the SKU throughput ceiling doesn't scale past a certain catalog size).

Also general AI cutout tools like photoroom (dirt cheap for background work but not producing on-model outputs that hold up for a fashion PDP).

Where I'm digging now is the fashion-specific AI side, someone in a fashion ops slack put lalaland and Tayla on my radar, the second one being Aboutyou's internal tool, which spun out under SCAYLE, and the number they threw around was £1-3 per image at volume including QA which sounds aggressive but they said fit rendering on tailored pieces was where it held up.

I haven't tested it directly and would love to hear from anyone who has.

the catch is that per-image cost on its own is misleading, you can be at £1 an image, lose 3% GMV against studio, and be net negative. What i need is per-image cost weighted by conversion delta on PDP.

which is where i'm stuck, if you've stacked studio and AI in the same catalog, what came out ahead once you weighted for conversion?

And for anyone who's tested any of the options mentioned above, is the on-model quality where the vendors are pitching it or is there still a visible gap?

Asking because I'm about two seconds from caving but the rational part of me keeps pulling the brakes.

Since perimenopause kicked in my nails split constantly and my hair's been shedding more than usual (nothing alarming per my GP, bloods fine). My cousin who works in a pharmacy handed me a tub of marine collagen to try by Nutrimea saying it had helped a lot of her customers. I told her I was skeptical, she just said "try it and see."

I'm 3 weeks in, taking it in the morning. My nails do seem a bit less brittle, but I can't tell if it's the collagen, the fact that I've been eating better alongside it, or just me noticing because I'm paying attention.

For those who took it long term: is there a real effect past a few months, or is this the kind of thing where you're mostly paying for the feeling of doing something?

Bit of a confession because I wasted a lot of time being stubborn about this.

For about 2 years I felt awful, gaining weight I couldn't shift, freezing all the time, exhausted, hair thinning in the shower. Instead of getting it looked at properly I convinced myself I could sort it naturally. I did the essential oils, the adaptogens, cut gluten and dairy, seed cycling, the whole wellness-influencer starter pack. I was weirdly proud of not just reaching for a pill, and honestly a bit suspicious of doctors and tests in general.

None of it moved the needle. What finally got me somewhere was booking a proper full thyroid panel, not the basic one, the kind that runs fT3, fT4 and the antibodies. I compared a couple, Medichecks and Thriva, ended up going through Lucis, and the antibodies came back high. Turns out I'd been well into Hashimoto's the whole time, and no amount of lavender oil was ever going to touch an autoimmune condition.

The part that stings is I probably set myself back 2 years romanticising the natural approach instead of just getting the data.

Anyway, if this sounds like you and you've been putting it off, get the full panel done. Adaptogens don't out-argue your immune system.

After i had my daughter i was wrecked in a way that went well past normal newborn tiredness, hair falling out in clumps, mood on the floor, heart racing for no reason, freezing when everyone else was warm. Both my GP and the other mums all said the same thing, that's just what the newborn stage does to you, it'll pass. So i spent months assuming i was just bad at this and half wondering if it was postnatal depression.

My GP did run bloods at one point, checked my TSH, said it was normal, sent me home. Which i now know is the exact trap a lot of you here hit, because TSH on its own can look fine while the real problem is sitting in the antibodies nobody's testing for.

It was my husband who pushed me to get a proper full thyroid panel done, antibodies and all, not just the one number, and we did it through Lucis because my GP wouldn't run the rest. My TPO antibodies came back high, and with the rest of the picture it finally got me the postpartum thyroiditis into Hashimoto's diagnosis that explained every single thing i'd been gaslit about for months.

What gets me is how close i came to just accepting i was a weak, useless new mum, when the whole time it was autoimmune and treatable, and a single TSH was never going to catch it. If you're postpartum and being told your thyroid is 'fine' off a TSH alone, please push for the full panel with antibodies. Anyone else only have theirs show up in the antibodies after a 'normal' TSH?

There are so many zombie shows out there and everyone seems to have a different opinion. I want to know which one actually stood out to you and what made it different from the rest.

32f, been running for years. Last season i found out the hard way that my ferritin was on the floor when my training fell apart, sorted that and felt human again. But it got me wondering what else i should be keeping an eye on as an endurance runner, because clearly the standard GP "you're fine" doesn't catch this stuff. From what i've read it's not just iron, vitamin D, B12, thyroid and the inflammation markers all seem to matter for recovery and energy.

So now i'm trying to set up a proper baseline to track across a season rather than only testing when something breaks, and i'm a bit lost in the options:

- the at-home finger-prick kits, Medichecks and Thriva look like the big ones

- a clinic blood draw through something like Randox or Bluecrest

- a fuller panel through a european lab i came across, Lucis

- or just nagging my GP to rerun ferritin and leaving it at that

For the runners who track their bloods properly, which of these actually gives a useful full picture for an endurance athlete, and how often do you retest? Trying not to either under-test and miss something or waste money testing everything every few weeks.

For the best part of two years i swapped nearly all my protein over to tinned tuna, ate it almost every single day, sometimes twice, basically dropped the chicken i used to live on, because tuna is lean, cheap, quick and every fitness account online I’ve seen treats it like the perfect food, and if anything i felt smug about how clean i was eating next to the takeaway-every-night crowd, so when i ran a Lucis panel out of curiosity was for my mercury to come back high enough to get flagged by the lab.

The thing i didn't account for when i see people preaching to eat more fish is that the bigger predatory fish, and tuna is right up there, concentrate mercury, and eating it daily stacks it up in your system faster than your body can clear it back out, so the healthier i thought i was eating, the more of a heavy metal i was steadily loading into myself, and there were symptoms in hindsight, a bit of hand tingling, some brain fog i'd pinned entirely on work, that i'd never in a hundred years have connected to my dinner.

What gets me is that i'd been so pleased with myself about the discipline of it, meal-prepping the same lean thing every day while everyone else ate junk, and the very habit i was proudest of was the one slowly poisoning me, and because tuna has this bulletproof health-food reputation it never once crossed my mind to question it, i'd have kept going indefinitely if a panel hadn't put a number in front of me.