u/zascar

I got a shams company several years ago I no longer want or need. No longer in Dubai. Don't have money to spend on this. What happens if you ignore it?

A business partner of mine has built and launched a very impressive app that provides many tools and services for small businesses all in the one place and built with AI at the core..

It combines finance, accounting, payroll, cash-flow forecasting, expenses, quotes and invoicing, VAT and PAYE submissions, CRM, project management, reporting, market intelligence, SEO, website building, social media management, workflow automation and day-to-day business operations in a single EU-compliant system.

It is built for SMEs with less than 20 employees that may currently rely on multiple disconnected systems, bringing everything into one app that acts as an AI-powered digital brain for the entire business.

This isn't just an idea - it was built by someone as their PHD project, has launched and has customers and got awards and grants - but it's currently aimed solely at the European market.

I have the ability to launch this in UAE - it would need some further development to change to the UAE accounting rules etc etc

I'm trying to get a hold of whether this would be something that UAE small businesses would like. And from your perspective, would it be handy to have one app that manages all of this, with an AI brain at the centre?

We're also working on some additional AI features, enabling you to simply ask questions and get the answers without having to navigate and run complex reporting for finance.

I'm also considering bundling it with another platform that provides a multi-currency bank account for sending and receiving from 5 major currencies - almost like a business in a box.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated.

A business partner of mine has built and launched a very impressive app that provides many tools and services for small businesses all in the one place and built with AI at the core..

It combines finance, accounting, payroll, cash-flow forecasting, expenses, quotes and invoicing, VAT and PAYE submissions, CRM, project management, reporting, market intelligence, SEO, website building, social media management, workflow automation and day-to-day business operations in a single EU-compliant system.

It is built for SMEs with less than 20 employees that may currently rely on multiple disconnected systems, bringing everything into one app that acts as an AI-powered digital brain for the entire business.

This isn't just an idea - it was built by someone as their PHD project, has launched and has customers and got awards and grants - but it's currently aimed solely at the European market.

I have the ability to launch this in UAE - it would need some further development to change to the UAE accounting rules etc etc

I'm trying to get a hold of whether this would be something that UAE small businesses would like. And from your perspective, would it be handy to have one app that manages all of this, with an AI brain at the centre?

We're also working on some additional AI features, enabling you to simply ask questions and get the answers without having to navigate and run complex reporting for finance.

I'm also considering bundling it with another platform that provides a multi-currency bank account for sending and receiving from 5 major currencies - almost like a business in a box.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated.

A business partner of mine has built and launched a very impressive app that provides many tools and services for small businesses all in the one place and built with AI at the core..

It combines finance, accounting, payroll, cash-flow forecasting, expenses, quotes and invoicing, VAT and PAYE submissions, CRM, project management, reporting, market intelligence, SEO, website building, social media management, workflow automation and day-to-day business operations in a single EU-compliant system.

It is built for SMEs with less than 20 employees that may currently rely on multiple disconnected systems, bringing everything into one app that acts as an AI-powered digital brain for the entire business.

This isn't just an idea - it was built by someone as their PHD project, has launched and has customers and got awards and grants - but it's currently aimed solely at the European market.

I have the ability to launch this in UAE - it would need some further development to change to the UAE accounting rules etc etc

I'm trying to get a hold of whether this would be something that UAE small businesses would like. And from your perspective, would it be handy to have one app that manages all of this, with an AI brain at the centre?

We're also working on some additional AI features, enabling you to simply ask questions and get the answers without having to navigate and run complex reporting for finance.

I'm also considering bundling it with another platform that provides a multi-currency bank account for sending and receiving from 5 major currencies - almost like a business in a box.

Any thoughts or comments appreciated.

I am a startup consultant and I was recently working with a wealthy individual based in France helping him bring his idea to life. Over 9 months, I carried out consulting work for the client. This included business strategy, software mock-ups, website design, pitch decks, go-to-market planning, marketing, growth strategy and other work to help build his company before launch.

The understanding was that once the company was established and funding was transferred, I would be paid. We drafted a contract, but it was never signed because we kept going back and forth on revisions. During this time, I continued working in good faith.

I discussed a monthly retainer with him and submitted 2 invoices, the last being for €36,000. He never disputed the invoices. In fact, on one occasion he simply pointed out a typo and asked me to correct it for his lawyer.

I have extensive WhatsApp messages documenting the relationship, plus a shared drive containing around 20 separate work deliverables showing the work was completed.

After he disappeared, I eventually received a reply through his lawyer saying, essentially: “We didn’t have a contract. You didn’t provide value, but I’ll offer you €5,000 as a settlement.”

I would prefer not to go to court. My hope is that a French lawyer could send a strong legal letter which encourages him to negotiate a settlement closer to the original figure.

Big lesson learned. I will never work again without a signed contract. But if anyone has any specialisation in this area and might be able to help me without costing a fortune, I would really appreciate it.

Sorry for the long story but I did nine months of consulting work for a client. He was young and inexperienced, but comes from a very wealthy family. I built out everything needed for his startup, strategies, business plans, websites and more.

It was all on the constant broken and delayed promises of me getting paid once the company was set up and the funds were transferred. I continued to work based on believing his promise. I gave him a discounted rate of around 35,000 euros, and there was an additional payment for building of software. I'm not too sure what happened in the end, but he clearly changed his mind and completely disappeared.

I did not have a signed contract, but we did get to contract stage. His first draft was awful. When I went back with changes, soon after, he stopped replying. But I did enormous amounts of work, all documented in a Google Drive, and literally dozens of WhatsApp messages, screenshots of him promising imminent payment for months on end.

Eventually, I found his lawyer and wrote formal demand letters. He came back to me denying that we had a contract, denying that I'd done any valuable work, but he did offer me 5,000 euros.

That tells me he knows he has to pay me something, but I'm not accepting that.

The client is in France, but I was living in Dubai at the time (I'm Irish now living back in Ireland). I enlisted a Dubai lawyer, but long story short I got the absolute runaround for the last three months, I think they are basically scammers unfortuantely, I paid them $3.5k but I can probably kiss that goodbye.

Now I need a different approach. I really can't spend a lot of money on this, but can anyone please advise me how I can chase down the rest of the payment?
Thanks

I've been working in AI for the last number of years - founder but also advised/consuted on a few projects and I also write about the subject and have quite a few followers.

I'm not technical, but I've been building a lot with AI for personal and for customers.

I've now joined forces with three other people: one highly technical and experienced. The others have experience around finance, operations, product and sales. All of us have 20-plus years of experience in big companies and at C-level.

Our aim is to help businesses who are confused by AI but want practical results. $5-50m range, not tech industries. We look for bottlenecks and where time and money is leaking, and then build systems to fix those problems and work towads becoming an Ai native company.

We all have a number of use cases that we've done on our own, that we can bring together across manufacturing, retail, e-commerce, oil and gas, and some other areas.

We do have our first customer that's come from referral, but I want to try and do some marketing/outbound lead gen. I'm wondering, can anyone here tell me how they went about starting a similar agency?

Has anyone else done this? How did you get your first few clients? And do you have any advice for me?

I'm kicking off an AI-native business transformation agency. I'm currently looking into how we should try and get our first bunch of clients. I'm wondering about using AI cold calling, but I'm just not too sure if it's robust enough to properly use yet. I'm kind of thinking some people at least will find it novel and interesting that an AI is calling them about AI services, and at least get them interested to have a call with me.

Has anyone used it successfully?

About three months ago, I posted here about a problem I had with a Client who stiffed me on a payment. She messaged me saying, "My father is an expert in this type of debt recovery law, and you should go and talk to him." I went and met the law firm, and they seemed great. I paid them upfront.

And since then, they've done very little and are now completely ignoring my calls. I can't seem to find the messages with her from this time, so I'm hoping she might see this and send me a message.

There's been a huge amount of coverage on these lately. Companies like SpaceX and StarCloud are proclaiming that once launch costs fall low enough, the economics will make it better to have data centres in space than on Earth. But a lot of people are pushing back, saying the physics means it's impossible.

I don't know the answer, but my assumption would be that SpaceX has some of the best engineers and physicists on the planet, and they wouldn't have gone this far unless they thought they had a solution. Secondly, investors wouldn't pour billions in unless they were pretty confident that they could pull it off.

So is this all a scam, or could data centres in space be viable? What's the truth on the problem of cooling?

I know some people will get upset by this, but I dont think the finder experince is as good as Windows.

I moved from Windows to Mac a while back ago overall enjoy really it - I'm not going back - but it annoys me constantly how file management is just not intuitive for me

There are many ways in which it's unquestionably better than Windows. I love the ability to have a custom saved search, so I can find just my list of PDFs across all the directories. Photos created in the last month, for example.

But then some things really frustrate me. When I create a folder in my downloads folder, It stays in line of when it was created. Doesn't stay at the top like Windows does normally.

Then when I'm looking to move between the different views, the list, the icons, the gallery, et cetera, sometimes the shortcut boxes are at the top, and sometimes they're not.

If I want to adjust the size of the icons in thumbnail mode, sometimes it's there and sometimes it's not, especially when I'm in the browser and looking to attach an image.

Maybe it's just me. Maybe I don't get it and I'm doing it wrong. And please feel free to correct me or tell me if I should be doing it differently.

It's just that I work on an awful lot of different projects, and my downloads folder is pretty busy. I find it difficult to get things organised, whereas on Windows, it seemed to be an awful lot easier.

Can anyone give me some tips as to how I can make this process a bit better? Are there any standard shortcuts or workflows that I must know?

I helped build a website for a friend of mine, and we built it out with Lovable Cloud, email integration, CRM system in the backend, and some other things. But understandably, he wants full control over this himself, not for it to be sitting on my Lovable account.

I've already transferred the ownership and admin rights, but it seems that all the plumbing underneath, like the cloud database and the email and domain connections, are all based on my account. His business doesn't want that. They want full control, so I'm trying to figure out how to do the transfer. The only problem, it's asking me to do things like backup databases, buckets, and do migrations, which is out of my technical capability. I'm hoping there's just some way to actually get the website transferred from one workspace to the other, because I can't risk the potential of bringing the website down.

Does anyone know if I can get Lovable to handle this, or is it simpler than I imagine? And if not, do I need to find someone to be able to handle this migration for me?

I'm really interested in trying to learn about this new concept of having a one central AI-powered database acting as a digital brain for your business, pulling in all of the various data sources and having one single source of truth.

People like Nate B Jones talk about it and I really want to try to build something - but concious how wrong they can go.

Are there any credible ones already build I can base off? Has anyone done this?

I built a website for a client. Pretty normal website just with a simple crm back end for enquiries and sending emails etc.

Now its finished I want to transfer to their account so they have full control and can remove me. I made them an admin but im still the owner. Aparantly transferring the entire site will be a lot of work

Apparently, I have to export all database tables, download storage buckets, note G4A and tracking pixels, transfer, republish, reconnect domain, restore files and admin settings, and verify.

Does that sound right to you guys? I'm not super technical, so I'm just worried I'm going to run into problems with database and storage buckets, et cetera. How much of this will it just do automatically, and can anyone advise how I can do this safely?

I'm currently doing two things: One is looking for a new job. The other is looking for consultancy clients for my AI native business consultancy business.

Both of them require making a short list of applicable companies, finding the right type of person, finding their email, and then sending them a short, customised email.

I'm doing it, number one, to companies who've recently raised money and might want to hire my type of profile. The second thing is, I'm still doing some consulting and looking for people who might need my skills.

Right now, I'm building an app that does the top-of-the-funnel stuff, the research, and the shortlisting. But I'm wondering later on, could I build in the ability to actually locate the person, locate their email address, and send them an email?

Does anyone know if this is possible with Lovable?

Any pointers appreciated. Thanks.

Multistrada for shorter riders

I’ve had a few Ducatis over the years, but I think my next bike might have to be a Multistrada. I keep hearing people say it’s the last bike you’ll ever want to ride, which sounds very appealing.

The only issue is that I’m short - about 5’5” with a 29-inch inseam - and the Multistrada is obviously a tall bike.

I’m also on a fairly restricted budget, so I can’t stretch to a newer V2 with the factory low seat option. I’m probably looking at an older 1200, roughly 2010 to 2015. I definitely want the 1200 rather than the 950.

I’m trying to understand which years or models are best for shorter riders. Are there particular versions with lower seat heights, or ones that are easier to modify?

From what I’ve read, a lower seat can bring things down by around 10 to 20mm, and there also seem to be lowering links available. I’m used to bikes around 810mm to 830mm seat height max, but even 830mm can be on my toes depending on the width of the bike. The Multistrada looks quite wide, so I’m guessing the effective height feels even taller.

I’m also wondering whether I should look for an S model, but I’ve heard the versions with the more advanced electronic suspension may be harder to lower or modify properly.

So my questions are:

Which older Multistrada 1200 models are best for shorter riders?

Are there any years or versions I should avoid?

Has anyone here lowered one successfully with a seat, linkage, or suspension setup?

Is the S model a bad idea if lowering is likely needed?

Any shorter riders here around my height who can share how they get on with the bike day to day?

Any advice, experience, or tips would be really appreciated.

I left Ireland about seven years ago and before I did I sold two bikes. A 2008 Fireblade and a 2015 Hyperstada. Now I come back 7 years later and I look at the prices and the two bikes I sold are selling for exactly the same amount of money as when I left. Some slightly more. What the hell's going on with the market?