u/x_philomath_x

They were doing everything right on paper, good camera decent audio a proper backdrop, every Tuesday without fail a new video would go up, their founder was articulate and genuinely knew their industry better than almost anyone I had come across, by all accounts this should have been working

Six months in and the numbers were flat the views plateaued around 400, comments were mostly from their own team, they came to us frustrated and honestly a little defeated asking what they were doing wrong

We went back and watched everything they had posted and then we asked to see everything they had recorded

That second part changed everything

They had been recording long form every week and it was like full 45 to 60 minute sessions where the founder just talked through industry topics answered hypothetical questions riffed on trends and to be very honest it was really good stuff, and every week someone on the team would pull a clip from the beginning or the end of the session because those were the easiest parts to find and that would become the post

Nobody was actually watching the full recordings to find the moments that mattered

We spent two days going through three months of their back catalogue and what we found was kind of embarrassing in the best way, there were moments buried 30 minutes into sessions that were genuinely brilliant, like a take on their industry that we had never heard articulated that way before, a personal story that the founder had almost thrown away as a side comment that stopped all of us in the room and Stuff that would have genuinely connected with people if it had ever seen the light of day

We restructured their entire workflow and Instead of clipping from the outside in we started identifying moments first and building content around those moments and to be very frank about it, Within 6 weeks their average views had tripled and one post crossed 40,000 impressions

The thing is that the content is never the problem, It was always the process of finding what is actually worth showing to the people so that they can feel relatable and relevant.....

I'll be straight with you, I was never the guy who dreamed of starting a company since childhood. I was the guy who was exceptionally good at building things for other people and honestly for a long time that felt like enough

I did my MBA from IIM Calcutta which is where I first started thinking seriously about products and markets and why certain things work and certain things don't. That way of thinking never really left me

At Booking(dot)com I got promoted from Senior Product Owner to Director in 9 months, that same journey typically takes 3 to 5 years, I built the world's largest restaurant reservation platform over 100,000 venues globally, the numbers were good and the results were real and by every external metric I was doing great

But I kept seeing something that nobody around me seemed to want to talk about, I went from Booking(dot)com to Foodics to Yoco to Everli to Blacklane and the same thing was happening everywhere

Content teams were sitting on hours of recorded footage, interviews panels keynotes podcasts events and barely using any of it, not because they didn't want to but because nobody had figured out how to make that footage usable without burning out an editor

Video editors were making decisions they were never supposed to make, which clip goes out, what moment represents the brand and what soundbite connects with the audience,to be very honest, that's not an editing decision, that's a strategy decision and it was landing on the wrong desk every single time…..

Marketing teams were spending serious money on video production and then posting one highlight reel and calling it done, meanwhile 90% of the footage that could have been powering their content for weeks just sat on a hard drive somewhere

I saw this also in startups, I saw it in scaleups and I saw it in enterprise teams with actual budgets, the problem wasn't resources it wasn't talent it was that nobody had built the right infrastructure for video to actually work the way modern content teams need it to

I won't pretend the path here was clean but before Montage I founded Floost and raised money built it out and walked away having learned that being right and being early are two completely different things and the market doesn't care which one you are, then came Kitnebaje same energy different circumstances same lesson

After that I went deep on podcasting and video tools and honestly that one hurt the most because we had real customers and the revenue potential was there but when I looked at the market clearly I knew we were too late for that specific angle and walking away from something that actually has momentum is a different kind of hard than walking away from something that never worked

Most people would have kept going because the numbers looked okay on paper but I've been on the wrong side of timing enough times to know that conviction alone doesn't save you

So here's what I'm building……

After everything I saw across all those companies across all those teams I'm launching Montage,the core idea is simple,the person who understands your audience and your message should be the one deciding what clips get made, not the editor, the editor should be executing not deciding

And Montage puts that control back where it belongs, you write a brief describing what you're looking for the AI surfaces the best moments from your footage ranked by how well they match, you edit at the word level like a Google doc smart reframing handles vertical formats, automatically 4K files up to 20GB export straight to Premiere Final Cut or social

It's built for content teams and producers who post consistently and actually care whether what they put out performs, the people backing this include founders of Fiverr Wix and Daily(dot)co and AI leaders from Amazon Meta and YouTube, people who understand what video infrastructure looks like when it actually works

And now the part what I learned

Timing beats being right every single time, your failed attempts aren't detours they're what qualifies you for the thing you're actually supposed to build, and that pattern you keep seeing that nobody else seems to notice that's not you overthinking it that's your edge

I'm going to keep documenting this whole journey here also we are going to launch it on product hunt on 23rd….It’ll be everything the wins the hard days the decisions that don't have clean answers

If you're building something or thinking about making the leap follow along, happy to answer anything below

I realize this sounds like an exaggeration. It's not.

I spent the last 18 months talking to mobile engineering teams about their testing workflows. Here's what I found over and over. The team adopts Appium or Espresso or XCUITest. They write 100-200 automated tests. They feel good about their coverage. Then 3 months pass.

The UI changes. Selectors break. Tests start failing for reasons that have nothing to do with bugs. QA engineers spend 20+ hours a week repairing tests. Developers stop trusting the test suite because it cries wolf too often. New tests don't get written because all the bandwidth goes to maintenance.

One QA lead told me she spent more hours maintaining automated tests than she had previously spent doing manual testing. Let that sink in. The automation made her job harder, not easier.

The root cause is the same everywhere. Tests are coupled to code-level identifiers that change whenever the UI changes. The abstraction is wrong. You're not testing "does the user see a login button." You're testing "does element with ID btn-login-primary exist in the DOM." Those are different questions and they diverge every time a designer touches the interface.

We built a tool that tests the first question instead of the second. Vision AI looks at the screen and finds elements the way a human does. The tests are written in plain English. When the UI changes, the test still passes because it was never coupled to the code.

14 paying companies are using it in production right now. Launched on Product Hunt today. But the bigger discussion I want to have is this: why did we accept for so long that "automated testing" means "maintaining a fragile test suite?" Was there ever a version of selector-based testing that actually scaled without drowning the team?

Genuinely curious what this sub thinks.

Not clickbait but I genuinely had a meeting with my co-founder where we said we might need to shut this down.....

We had revenue, we had clients and we were not broke.....but we had zero financial visibility and we'd made a hiring decision assuming we had runway we didn't actually have, our books were always a month and a half behind and our burn rate was a guess, we had no idea if we were profitable until our accountant sent a PDF, usually 5 weeks after month-end....

By then the decision was already made, the money was already spent...

Our accountant was great and she wasn't slow on purpose, she was dealing with a manual process that just took that long, QuickBooks wasn't syncing things cleanly, bank feeds needed manual cleanup, reconciliations were happening in spreadsheets.

A friend of mine recommended we look at how the data flows before assuming the person was the bottleneck, we restructured everything to feed into a dashboard that updated in real time, Reconciliations started happening automatically, our accountant went from spending her time on cleanup to spending it on telling us what the numbers meant.

For the first time in 2 years I knew our actual cash position on a Tuesday morning and not at end of month, not in a PDF but on a random Tuesday....

we didn't shut down, we raised a small round 4 months later with clean, investor-ready financials ready to send same day they asked.

The near-death experience was entirely preventable, the information was always there but it just wasn't organized

Two years ago I was leading product at Booking(dot)com, managing their restaurant reservations platform across 100k+ venues globally. But there was this one problem I kept running into that nobody was solving properly.

Every single company I worked with had hours and hours of video content sitting in Google Drive doing nothing. Webinars, interviews, conference recordings, podcasts. All of it just dying in folders because turning a 60-minute recording into 10 good clips meant either hiring an editor for weeks or spending your entire weekend fighting with a timeline.

I tried every tool out there. Opus Clip would give me 40 clips and maybe 3 were usable. Descript felt like learning a whole new production suite just to pull a few soundbites. Most tools compressed my footage before even processing it. You'd upload 4K and get back something that looked like it was shot through a window.

And the thing that really got to me was this. The AI wasn't actually saving anyone time. It was just moving the work around. Instead of editing on a timeline you were now spending hours sorting through bad AI suggestions trying to find something that didn't make your brand look cheap. That's not a solution. That's just a different kind of headache.

So I quit. Went through my savings faster than I'd like to admit. Convinced a few people way smarter than me to come along for the ride. And we started building Montage.

The core idea took us months to nail. We wanted you to be able to edit video the same way you edit a text document. You see the transcript, you delete a sentence, the video cuts. You remove a word, the clip tightens. No timeline. No keyframes. Just text. Sounds simple when I say it but getting the cuts to feel seamless without any jarring audio jumps was probably the hardest engineering problem we dealt with.

The second thing we refused to compromise on was quality. Most AI tools quietly downscale your footage to save on processing costs and hope you don't notice. We didn't want to do that. Montage handles files up to 20GB at full 4K. Your resolution stays untouched from upload to export. That alone took us close to four months of infrastructure work to pull off without the costs blowing up.

We also went a completely different direction from what everyone else is doing with clip generation. Instead of dumping 30 to 50 random clips on your screen and saying good luck, Montage asks you what you're actually looking for. You give it a brief. It comes back with 8 to 10 clips scored and ranked against what you asked for. One of our early testers was an agency producer handling content for 6 clients. She told us this alone cut her review time from around 3 hours to about 40 minutes per video. That conversation honestly kept me going through some rough weeks.

The last few months were all about the stuff that separates something people try once from something they actually keep using. Branded captions with your own fonts and colors because nothing kills credibility faster than those default white captions every AI tool loves. Speaker tracking that actually follows the person when they move instead of just slapping a center crop on everything. Export to MP4 for social or XML for Premiere and Final Cut so it fits into whatever workflow your team already has. Google Drive import so people stop downloading and re-uploading the same files like it's 2014.

We also brought on a few interns through LinkedIn who turned out to be ridiculous. One of them built our shareable review link system in about two weeks. Now anyone can open a clip in the browser and review it without creating an account or downloading anything. Sounds like a small thing but for agency teams waiting on client approvals it was a game changer.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend everything is perfect. We're early. There's stuff on the roadmap I wish was live already. Background library indexing so you can upload your entire archive and have it ready to go. Auto audio enhancement for those recordings where the room sounded like a parking garage. Dynamic reframing that tracks panning cameras not just static shots. It's coming but it's not here yet.

What we have right now though, it works. And the people using it keep telling us it's already better than what they were doing before. That's enough for me to feel good about putting it out there.

We launch today on Product Hunt.

Montage is for content producers, marketing teams, podcast hosts, agency folks, event organizers. Anyone who has way more footage than time and is sick of tools that promise the world but just give you a different version of the same problem.

Would love some support on launch day. And honestly if you try it and hate something about it, tell me. That feedback matters more than any upvote.

wanted to write something from both sides of where I sit, as someone who reads almost every post that comes through this community and as someone who is in the QA trenches every day at work, because there is a gap between what gets discussed here and what is actually happening in real teams right now and I think it is worth addressing

the thing I keep seeing in posts here is that most QA conversations still revolve around coverage metrics, test case counts, and which automation framework to use, and while those things matter they are increasingly not the conversations that are going to define the next few years of this field

what is actually shifting right now in practice is the assumption that tests need to be written in code by someone who understands selectors and locators and platform specific frameworks, that assumption is getting genuinely challenged for the first time and I do not think most QA engineers are fully prepared for what that means for the role

I have been running into this at work where UI changes that used to require a full day of test maintenance are just not breaking things the way they used to because the execution layer is interpreting the screen visually rather than hunting for an element ID that no longer exists, and the time that frees up is significant, we are spending it on actual test strategy and edge case thinking instead of firefighting broken scripts

the other thing I want to start a conversation about is how we as a QA community talk about value, because the posts that do the best numbers here are always the ones about tools and frameworks and almost never the ones about how to make the case internally for what QA actually prevents, and I think that silence is part of why QA keeps getting cut first when budgets tighten

would genuinely love to know what people here are seeing in their own teams, is the tooling shift something you are experiencing or is this still mostly hype from your perspective, and what conversations do you wish this community was having more of

I run a small SaaS company out of Austin, four person team, been on QuickBooks Online since we launched in 2021, over the first two years I did what everyone said to do, connected Stripe for payments. Hooked up our expense management tool. Linked our payroll processor. Set up the native integrations and let everything sync automatically, on paper it looked like a modern efficient financial stack. Everything talking to everything. No manual data entry. Just clean automated books.

But that was the story I was telling myself

So, last spring my co-founder asked me how long I actually spent on the books every month. Not the bookkeeper, me personally reviewing and cleaning things up after all the integrations had done their thing

And I had never actually counted so I started tracking it for one month

The number was eleven hours ( : 

Eleven hours of my time in a single month going behind integrations that were supposed to be automatic and fixing what they had gotten wrong and stripe was the biggest problem, every payout hitting our bank account was a net amount after fees but QuickBooks was seeing the deposit and booking it as gross revenue, so our P&L was consistently understating income and our processing fees were completely invisible, I had been manually adjusting this every single month for two years and had just accepted it as part of the process without ever questioning why it was still happening….

The expense management tool was creating duplicate entries about thirty percent of the time so it would sync a transaction and then QuickBooks would also pick it up from the bank feed and suddenly we had two entries for the same thing and finding and deleting duplicates had become a routine part of my month end process and again I had just accepted it as normal

The payroll integration was posting journal entries to the wrong accounts intermittently, not every month, just often enough that I had to go through the payroll entries manually every single month to verify they had landed correctly rather than just trusting them

None of these problems were dramatic on their own, each one seemed like a minor inconvenience, together across a month they were eating eleven hours of founder time on cleanup that was supposed to have been automated, the thing that really got me was when I calculated what eleven hours of my time was actually worth to the business and compared it against what I was theoretically saving by having the integrations in the first place

The integrations were not saving time, they were shifting where the time went. Instead of manual data entry upfront I was doing manual cleanup on the back end and the cleanup was actually less predictable and more frustrating than just doing it properly in the first place would have been

I spent a couple of weeks properly investigating each integration to understand exactly where the failures were coming from and fixing them at the source rather than just cleaning up the output every month for the Stripe issue the fix was building a proper clearing account setup so gross revenue and fees were handled correctly before anything hit the books

For the duplicate entries I found a setting in the expense tool that I had never configured properly that was causing the double sync, for the payroll mapping I spent an afternoon with my accountant rebuilding the account mapping from scratch to match our actual chart of accounts

going from eleven hours to two and a half hours was not about finding better tools or switching platforms, it was about actually understanding what each integration was doing to the books and fixing the underlying problems instead of living with the symptoms

If you are running multiple integrations into QuickBooks and you have never actually timed how long you spend cleaning up after them every month, do that this month before you add anything new or switch anything out, the number might surprise you

Happy to go into detail on the Stripe clearing account fix specifically if anyone wants it because that one alone was probably four of the eleven hours every month

I want to write this out because I think there is something useful here for other accountants who take on bookkeeping clients outside their main job and maybe for business owners who hire people like me

Quick background. I am a staff accountant at a mid size firm in Cincinnati, been doing it for five years. About two years ago I started taking on small business bookkeeping clients on the side, mostly referrals from friends, nothing massive, just a few clients who needed monthly bookkeeping at a rate that made sense for both of us

I thought my accounting background made me well qualified for it and honestly it does in most ways

But last month I made a mistake that embarrassed me more than anything I have done in my professional career

One of my clients is a small retail business, about 80 to 100 transactions a month, nothing complicated. I have been doing their books for eighteen months without any issues

Last month was a busy period at my main job. We had a large audit and I was working long hours and by the time I got to my side client work I was genuinely exhausted. I rushed through the monthly reconciliation, got everything to balance, sent over the reports, considered it done

Two weeks later my client called me and asked why their profit looked so much higher than usual

I went back and looked and found that I had miscategorized a large equipment repair expense as a capital asset instead of an operating expense. It was a $6,400 repair bill that should have come straight off the P&L as an expense but instead I had booked it as an addition to fixed assets

The effect was that their profit for the month was overstated by $6,400 and their tax liability for the quarter was going to be wrong if we did not catch it

The fix was straightforward and we caught it before anything was filed so no real damage was done

But here is what I keep thinking about

My client trusted me because I am a qualified accountant. They assumed that meant the work was accurate. They had no way of knowing I was exhausted when I did it or that I had rushed through the reconciliation. They just looked at the report and believed it

And the thing that really unsettles me is that if their profit had looked normal they probably would not have called me. The mistake would have sat there until tax time when their CPA would have hopefully caught it. Or not

I caught this one because the number looked obviously wrong to someone paying attention. Most mistakes do not look obviously wrong. They just sit quietly in the books making everything slightly less accurate until something forces someone to look closely

What I took from this is that the quality of your bookkeeping is not just a function of who is doing it, it is a function of the conditions under which they are doing it. An exhausted qualified accountant makes worse decisions than a fresh average bookkeeper. That is just true and nobody talks about it

If you are a business owner with a side bookkeeper or even a full time one, having at least a basic understanding of what your key numbers should look like each month is not about not trusting them, it is about having a second set of eyes that never gets tired

And if you are an accountant taking on side bookkeeping work, please be honest with yourself about when you are too stretched to do it properly, the people relying on your work do not know when you are running on empty

I was running LinkedIn content for a B2B HR tech client at a digital agency, my first real job out of college. The product was genuinely good, solid reviews, happy customers, the kind of company that should have had no problem growing. My job was to tell that story on LinkedIn and for a while it looked like I was doing exactly that.

Numbers were strong. One post crossed 80,000 impressions in a single week. The client sent a congratulations email to the whole team and we celebrated like we had done something that mattered.

Then the renewal came around and they asked one question. Show us how LinkedIn contributed to pipeline.

We pulled everything we had, impressions, reach, follower growth, engagement rate, share of voice against competitors. It looked great on slides. We had grown their presence from basically nothing to one of the more active accounts in their category in under eight months.

They didn't renew. We lost a $4,200 a month retainer and I went home that evening genuinely confused about what had gone wrong.

What I understood only later was that the whole time we were running that content, real people from real companies inside their ICP were showing up every single week, liking posts, leaving comments, coming back. Some of them were almost certainly evaluating HR software at that exact moment, and we had absolutely no visibility into who any of them were. We saw the numbers climb every week and felt good about it. We never saw the people behind the numbers.

The impressions were real, the interest was real but we just had no way of knowing whose interest it was and by the time anyone thought to ask that question the budget conversation was already done.

i manage linkedin content for a bunch of clients, content is working, numbers are good, some clients are at 50-100k impressions a month. on paper everything looks great.

the problem is i have absolutely no idea which of that engagement is real.

and by real i mean, someone who actually has the problem, might have budget, and is at a point in their life where they'd consider a conversation. that person exists in every post that does well. they're just buried under the client's old coworkers, seventeen recruiters, a competitor who likes everything, and a bunch of people who engaged because the hook was good and had nothing to do with the actual product.

finding that person manually works when you have one client. it doesn't work when you have several and the posts are going out every day.

things i've tried:

Somehow found a fix that moved the needle a bit. what clicked for me was the repeat engagement angle, someone who's shown up on three different posts over two weeks is not the same as someone who liked one thing on a tuesday, that distinction sounds obvious but tracking it manually across multiple clients and multiple posts is a nightmare. and it does that automatically and we've booked calls from it that wouldn't have happened otherwise.

apollo for enrichment once someone looks interesting. just checking if the role and company size actually match before anyone wastes a touch.

clay for building scored lists. layering job title and company data on top of engagement history. still tweaking the scoring but it's better than gut feel.

phantombuster for pulling raw engagement data. clunky, yes. necessary, also yes.

the gap i haven't closed: i can tell you who engaged. i cannot reliably tell you why. same post, same comment, could be a potential buyer or could be someone doing research for completely unrelated reasons. we're still making that call manually and getting it wrong enough that it bothers me.

if you're doing linkedin lead gen at any kind of scale, how are you handling this? is there something that actually solves the intent piece or is everyone just doing a version of what i'm doing and not talking about it?

I got the annual invoice for our intent data platform this morning and It was $20,000, I felt like an idiot while I clicked approve, we've spent a year looking at spreadsheets of companies that don't actually talk to us and the problem is the data is too broad, the platform sends an alert saying a massive company like IBM or Oracle is surging in our category.....

My reps then have to call a global switchboard and try to find one person out of thousands of employees, It's a signal with zero direction. We aren't building a pipeline because of this guessing, so Last month our SDRs spent 30 hours calling into these surging accounts and didn't book a single meeting.

I changed how we work three weeks ago, I was tired of watching the team spend half their day cross referencing LinkedIn profiles with Apollo just to find an email, I needed to know which specific person was actually looking at us, somehow got a fix to identify people who interact with our LinkedIn posts. It finds the directors and vPs who like our case studies or comment on competitor threads.

The results are pretty clear, our reply rate on these social leads is 14%, compared to the 2% we were getting from the anonymous intent list and we're also saving about 12 hours a week per rep because they aren't digging through profile tabs manually anymore.

I'm will going to cancel the $20k tool next quarter cause our growth is in the people who actually talk to us on social media, not in a dashboard of surges.

Are u guys seeing results with these big intent tools, or is it just noise for you too?

So, for the first three years of running my business I checked my P&L religiously every single month. Revenue line, expense line, net profit at the bottom. That was my entire financial management system.

The problem with the P&L is it tells you what happened but it tells you almost nothing about why it happened or what is about to happen

The report that actually changed how I make decisions is the Statement of Cash Flows and almost nobody I talk to looks at it regularly

Most small business owners I know either do not know it exists or vaguely know it exists and have never actually opened it because it looks complicated

Here is why it matters more than your P&L in practice

Your P&L can show you a profitable month while your bank account is somehow still shrinking and the Statement of Cash Flows is the only report that explains why

It breaks down exactly where cash came from and where it went across three buckets, operating activities which is your day to day business, investing activities which is equipment and assets, and financing activities which is loans and owner contributions

The moment I started reading this report monthly I understood three things about my business I had never seen clearly before

First I could see exactly how much of my profit was actually turning into real cash versus sitting in receivables. My P&L said I was profitable for eight straight months but the cash flow statement showed me that a growing chunk of that profit was just invoices that hadn't been paid yet and my actual cash conversion was getting worse not better

Second I could see my seasonal patterns in a way the P&L never showed me clearly because the P&L smooths things out in a way that hides the timing of when cash actually moves

Third I could see immediately when owner draws or loan payments were quietly eating into operating cash in a way that was invisible on the P&L

In QuickBooks it takes about four clicks to pull this report, Reports, go to Business Overview, Statement of Cash Flows, set your date range

If you have never looked at it before pull the last twelve months right now and just spend twenty minutes reading it, it will probably tell you at least one thing about your business that your P&L has been hiding from you the whole time

we run a small outbound agency for b2b clients and everyone keeps saying cold email is dead

reply rates going down, domains getting burned, traditional databases just spitting out garbage with repetitive work....

we kept hearing it and honestly last quarter we felt it too

so instead of just guessing we decided to test three different list building methods properly in parallel

we sent over 10000 emails and made around 2000 dials to see what actually converts for 5k to 50k acv offers

one approach was fully manual research, one was massive static databases, one was intent based AI

same icp, same period, different list sources

and here is the breakdown of what we did....

manual research

the quality is unmatched no doubt, you find a prospect, read their recent posts, check their company news, write a bespoke hook so we had our team doing this full time and that's why reply rates were solid.

but the problem is the cost and speed, researching one prospect properly takes 15 to 20 minutes, and each rep could realistically build a list of maybe 20 to 30 people a day

and the moment you push for more volume the quality drops and the personalization gets weird

CONCLUSION - high quality. high cost. low scale.

static databases

we tested the big ones mostly which were completely scalable, you filter by title and headcount, export 5000 leads, load them in and the cost per lead is basically zero

the problem is the data is completely static and intent is non existent its like someone fitting your demographic filter does not mean they want to buy today and we were seeing terrible bounce rates and maybe a 1 percent reply rate and half of those replies were just asking to be unsubscribed

CONCLUSION - low cost. high scale. low quality.

intent signals

we tested a few intent scrapers like LeadSift, traxy and TexAu (this is a nightmare to set up) but traxy ai was the one we ended up running the longest, the idea it runs upon is simple. so it skips the demographic guessing game entirely and that is the part that actually matters

for example with manual you are guessing slowly. with databases you are guessing quickly but with something that works on intent signals you are not guessing at all

it runs in the background and monitors social platforms for people actively complaining about the exact problem our clients solve and we were pulling lists of people who just asked for vendor recommendations hours ago and the reply rates spiked because the prospects were already problem aware and warm.....

the obvious concern going in was that the volume would be too low to sustain an agency pipeline

but it wasn't

talking about raw numbers the emails dropped massively but the book rate doubled because every single slot was used on someone who actually needed help

CONCLUSION - high quality. low cost. high scale.

but here is the thing. none of this is magic whether you go manual, databases, or intent signals, two things have to be right before anything else

first, your offer

if you are selling a vitamin instead of a painkiller your reply rate will be bad regardless of how warm the lead is your service actually has to solve a hard expensive problem

second, your delivery

when someone gets your email and they are actively looking for a solution they still hate corporate jargon most pitches read like a legal document and nobody cares about your Connected workflows

your email needs to answer one question instantly, and it is can you fix the thing I am stressed about today so get those two things right first

then the list building method you pick becomes a question of scale and budget, not survival

We are putting together a proper intent monitoring setup for next quarter and before I go down with the trials I wanted to see what people here are actually using in the real world not just what shows up in G2 listicles

Basically what we are trying to track is when someone from our ICP hits our website, any job changes or new hires at target accounts, LinkedIn activity like follows and engagement, event attendance and any competitor related signals we can pick up on, the goal is to get all of this feeding into our CRM so our sales team can prioritize outreach based on actual buying signals instead of just working a static list

Honestly the LinkedIn engagement piece is what I am most curious about because that feels like a gap most of the bigger intent platforms do not handle that well, like I want to know when someone from my ICP is consistently liking and commenting on our content because that to me is one of the strongest signals you can get and I have not found a clean way to track it at scale yet

what is actually working for you and what would you avoid..???

Hey everyone.

First thing I want to say is genuinely thank you. This sub started as a small corner of Reddit for people who were tired of QuickBooks being harder than it needed to be and it has grown into something I'm actually proud of. Every post, every comment, every person who took five minutes to share something they figured out the hard way is the reason this place is worth coming to.

You are the sub. Not me. I just keep the lights on.

That said I want to lay out a few things clearly so we stay the kind of community that's actually worth being part of.

What this sub is for

Real talk about QuickBooks, bookkeeping workflows, accounting software, fintech tools, CPA life, solo bookkeeper struggles, firm management, small business finance, and anything that lives in that world. Stories, questions, wins, failures, rants, tips. If it's real and relevant it belongs here.

This is a community built on people sharing what actually works for them in the real world. Not textbook answers. Not vendor marketing. Real experience from people doing the work.

What this sub is not for

Spam. Self promotion disguised as a post. Affiliate links. Tool reviews that read like press releases. If your first and only post is promoting something you built or sell it will be removed and you will be banned. If you built something genuinely useful, contribute to the community first, share the thing second.

Also low effort posts. "How do I use QuickBooks" with no context is not a post. Give us something to work with.

A few ground rules

Be specific when you ask questions. The more context you give the better the answers you'll get. Vague questions get vague answers or no answers at all.

Be honest when you share experiences. Nobody here needs a polished success story. The posts that get the most engagement are always the ones where someone admits things went wrong before they figured it out.

Treat each other like professionals. Disagreements are fine. Disrespect is not.

If you see something that violates the rules, report it. I cannot be everywhere and I rely on the community to flag things.

What I want to see more of in this sub

Real workflow breakdowns. Show us exactly how you do something step by step. The stuff that took you months to figure out might take someone else thirty seconds to read and implement.

Honest tool comparisons from actual users. Not sponsored content. Not affiliate reviews. Just someone who has used two things side by side telling us what they actually found.

War stories. The client whose books were a disaster. The month end close that went sideways. The thing you tried that completely failed. Those posts teach more than any how-to guide.

Questions from beginners. This community should be useful to someone who just started on QuickBooks as much as someone who has been using it for ten years. No question is too basic here.

One last thing

If you have been lurking and never posted, this is me telling you directly that your experience is worth sharing. You do not need to be an expert. You just need to have gone through something real. Write it out. Post it. Someone here will find it useful.

Glad you're here. Let's keep building something worth coming back to.

The mod team

There is this moment that happens pretty regularly in my work and I have never really gotten comfortable with it no matter how many times I have been through it and that is the moment when I have to tell someone who hired me thinking their books were basically fine that their books are actually not fine at all

Most people who come to me with a bookkeeping problem have been quietly avoiding looking too closely at their finances for months sometimes longer and they have told themselves a story about how it is probably not that bad and then I get in there and have to tell them that actually it is pretty bad and watching that land on someone is genuinely uncomfortable every single time

The hardest ones are the small business owners who are clearly working incredibly hard and genuinely trying to build something and they just did not know what they did not know about bookkeeping and now they are sitting on a problem that is going to cost real money to fix

I have gotten better at having the conversation over the years, I lead with what is fixable rather than what is wrong, I try to give them a clear path forward before they have time to spiral about how bad it is, and I never make them feel stupid because honestly most of these issues come from nobody ever teaching people this stuff not from carelessness

But it is still the part of my job I like the least and I am curious if other people in this community have developed approaches to this conversation that work well because I am always looking for ways to make it less painful for everyone involved