r/EntrepreneurRideAlong

About a month ago we launched rhyme.com, a Reddit alternative we'd been joking about building for literally years. It stopped being a joke at some point we're spending our days watching signups climb on the dashboard every single day with basically zero traditional marketing, so I figured I'd share what it is and a few things I've learned.

Rhyme is topic-first instead of community-first. A few things we do differently:

• One topic per subject. No r/gaming vs r/games vs r/gamers situation where the same conversation is split five ways.
• No volunteer moderators putting their thumb on the scale. Moderation is global and consistent.
• Posts can automatically appear in multiple relevant topics, and topics have an actual hierarchy (so posts about Airpod Max appear in Airpods, and Apple, and Technology...big win for discoverability).
• Optional verification if you want it (and/or want to filter by it!)
• No public like counts. And dislikes require a reason, so people hopefully aren't just downvoting because they disagree.
• The algorithm softly deprioritizes outwardly unpleasant behavior, trolling, flaming, aggression, that kind of thing, and quietly prioritizes positive interactions instead.

It's browser based and it works great on desktop and mobile, there's an iOS app and the Android app is pending review. Shout out Google, should be any day now.

We put up a waitlist before launch, had a little bit of Reddit drama along the way that honestly I think worked in our favor because people started talking about us, and since then it's just been steady growth. The reception has been really good too, surprisingly there's been almost no negative feedback on the concept itself. People send feature suggestions and we implement the ones that make sense, but nobody's really ragging on the core idea, which is really cool.

A few things I've learned:

Don't go looking for an idea. This project was something our team talked about for years, we joked about it because of how unlikely it would be to compete with giant established social platforms. But eventually it became obvious that this was something we'd wanted for ourselves for a long time, and that's the easiest thing to build (something you want for yourself). Don't create a solution looking for a problem, and don't sit around hunting for problems either. Just keep an open mind and you'll notice something in your day to day that you could actually play a role in fixing.

Stick to your guns. We've had a couple people pop up wanting public like counts, or wanting to claim topics so they can moderate them themselves. We hear them, and they're awfully loud about it, but for every one person griping there's ninety nine people quietly enjoying the thing as it is. Don't let a vocal few steer you away from your actual core vision.

Be honest with yourself. Don't chase buzzwords or the next big thing. Talk to people you actually trust and figure out if your idea has legs before you sink real time into it.

Happy to answer any questions and if you want to check it out it's rhyme.com !

Are you a business owner? If yes, what is it and would you advice a 22 year with limited resources to start it?

Not naming the app because this isn't a promo post, it's a therapy post.

Rejection 1 (Apple): EULA wording. Fixed in a day. Annoying but fine.

Rejection 2 (Apple): my annual subscription card showed "per month" pricing more prominently than the total yearly price. There's a specific guideline for this (3.1.2c). I'd read the guidelines twice and still missed it. Fixed, approved.

Then Google. My app touches health data (voice journaling crossed with sleep/heart data from your watch), and Google's health policy machine decided the whole app was out of policy. Suspended, not rejected. Suspended means the package name is dead forever. I appealed with a detailed explanation. Denied in what felt like minutes. I'm still not convinced a human read it. Only path forward: new package name, new listing, republish from zero (so much pain in the a$$), this time with a wellness disclaimer and the minimum possible health permissions. Approved.

Lessons, in case they save someone a month: the two stores are different countries with different laws, passing one means nothing for the other. Health-adjacent categories get machine-reviewed harshly, ask for fewer permissions than you think you need. And a suspension kills the package name permanently, so if you're in a sensitive category, maybe don't launch on your "real" identifier first.

Happy to answer anything. What's the worst review outcome you've eaten?

I have a portfolio of web apps that are currently in the 7 fig. (Before tax) ARR range.

My biggest bottleneck preventing me from scaling harder is recruiting the right devs when I need them the most.

We have issues where services become unavailable for long periods of time due to me not having the right technical resources available.

To make matters worse, we have people on waitlists for new products for several months on end. One waitlist is exceeding 2 years this coming August.

“Just hire more devs” - yeah, easier said than done lol. Half the resumes I get are people with nothing more to offer other than a bunch of AI slop projects, and the good candidates I get end up having skill incompatibility issues down the line.

If someone can help me with advice in regards to addressing bottlenecks for a startup in the scale up stage, i would be willing to pay well for it.

Dm me if you can help.

i spent months building a saas, polished it, launched it, and got single digit visitors for weeks. i assumed the product was broken. it wasnt. i had just never actually run the distribution experiment, and i want to save someone else the month i wasted staring at an empty analytics dashboard.

the mindset shift that fixed it: you spent months engineering the product, distribution deserves the exact same engineering effort. not "some marketing on the side", an actual project with a spec. most founders treat building as the real work and marketing as a chore they bolt on at the end, then wonder why nobody shows up.

here is the system that actually moved the needle for me.

pick ONE channel, not five. the instinct when you are desperate for traffic is to be everywhere at once, which means you are nowhere with any consistency. i picked short form video because it is the cheapest discovery on the internet right now and you do not need to show your face, screen recordings with a one line problem hook on top are enough. whatever you pick, the rule is the same: go deep on one place your buyers already gather.

lead with the problem, not the product. nobody wakes up wanting your features. they wake up with a frustration. "i built a tool that does X" gets scrolled past, "here is the annoying thing i kept hitting and how i killed it" gets watched. your best marketing line is usually a sentence you already said out loud when you were angry enough to build the thing.

treat every post as a free ad test. you are not trying to go viral, you are trying to find which angle makes people stop. because organic content costs nothing, you can test five different hooks in a week, kill what flops, and double down on what hits. that is A/B testing your messaging for zero dollars, and it tells you what to eventually put on your landing page.

show up daily for ninety days before you judge anything. this is the part everyone quits before. the failure mode i see constantly is founders posting for two weeks, seeing nothing, and concluding the product is bad. two weeks is not an experiment, it is a warm up. the algorithm and the audience both need volume before they trust you.

and hold off on paid ads at the start. ads amplify messaging that already converts, and at launch you do not know yet which pitch lands. organic is how you find that out for free. paying to scale a message you have not validated just burns money faster.

the reframe that stuck with me: distribution is not a talent some people are born with, it is a system you build, same as your product. and honestly the feedback loop is faster than infra work, you learn what resonates in days instead of months.

curious what channel everyone here is betting on right now, and whether anyone else hit that "the product is fine, i just never told anyone" realization the hard way?

Shipped Countspace today, a countdown-boards app I've been chipping at nights/weekends. Basic idea: stack multiple countdowns on one board and share the link, instead of the usual one-countdown-per-URL sites.

Posted on a couple subs this morning and got one really good comment from a top commenter on r/SideProject that made me realize my landing page explains the concept in words when it should just show a personal example board upfront ("summer trip + wedding + festival" style). That kind of hurt but useful.

Anyone else launching this week? Would love to swap notes on what's actually working (or not). Also open to a quick look if you have a sec, mostly want to know if the "boards of countdowns" thing clicks or feels weird.

Solo built, Next.js + Supabase. First day of real traffic. It's a lot.

Link in the comments.

Both the setups are very different. My batches are smaller, I correct postures personally and try to give each student proper attention. I can only take limited students in each batch, so pricing too low just to match gyms can make it harder to scale the studio sustainably and this also would leave me with no profits, not even break even. I am at a position where I am handling all the admin and teaching work to keep costs down and grow my business in next few months.. so when people push back on price, all this really discourages me and a part of me starts to worry that what if people stop enrolling to my classes!

If are selling something capacity-limited, how do you deal with people who say that you are too expensive and keep comparing it to something which is not at all relevant?

Been building an accountability tool for founders (Grillr) and a bunch of people from here started asking if there was a place to just throw ideas at each other and get real feedback, not the "this is amazing bro" type comments.

So I made a small Discord for it. There's a "grill my idea" channel where people post their idea and others (including me) rip into it honestly, plus a startup of the week thing to keep people accountable.

Still small so it's not chaotic yet, easy to actually get seen and get real answers.

comment if you want the link

A few months ago a guy named Marc found me online. Non technical, had an idea for an AI stylist app, no wireframes, no spec, just a clear vision and a budget.

Day 1: 45 minute call. We cut his feature list from 12 features to 4. This is always the hardest conversation.

Day 2 to 4: design. We sent him the first screens within 48 hours. He changed the direction once, which is normal and fine at this stage. Changing direction in design costs nothing. Changing it in development costs thousands.

Day 5 to 12: development. Daily updates, short videos of progress. He saw the app running on his phone on day 8, which is the moment every founder finally believes it is real.

Day 13 to 14: App Store submission. Approved on the first try because we handle the review guidelines from day one instead of discovering them at the end.

What made this work when most projects drag for months: a fixed price agreed upfront (no hourly billing, so no incentive to go slow), a brutal scope cut at the start, and a founder who made decisions fast.

What I would tell anyone sitting on an app idea: the gap between idea and live product is much smaller than you think, but only if you resist building everything at once.

AMA about the process, costs, or App Store stuff.

A few weeks ago I finally stopped overthinking it and started my own mechanical engineering consulting business.

I did everything people tell you to do. Registered the business, bought the domain, built a website, got a professional email, polished my LinkedIn… the whole thing.
Now I’m staring at my inbox waiting for clients that obviously aren’t going to magically appear.

For some background, I’m a mechanical engineer working full-time in product design. My company focuses on CAD, product development, FEA, CFD, engineering calculations, prototyping, and manufacturing drawings. I’m confident I can do the engineering work. Selling it is what I know nothing about.

I’ve tried Upwork and Fiverr with basically zero results. Right now I’m putting together a cold email campaign because I honestly don’t know what else to do.

For those of you who have actually built a consulting business, what got you your first few clients?
Was it cold outreach? Networking? LinkedIn? Referrals? Knocking on doors? Something completely different?

If you were starting from zero today, what would you spend the next 30 days doing?
I’m not looking for some magic trick. I know this takes time. I just don’t want to spend the next six months doing things that never had a chance of working in the first place.

I’d really appreciate hearing from people who’ve actually been through it.

I've been a developer for 10+ years. Self taught, always freelancing, never worked as a dev inside a company. So I never really felt like a "real" developer, I just got things done but was never part of big projects.

Whenever I tried building my own products I hit the same wall. Either it existed already or it was too hard to build alone. So my stuff either stayed unfinished or went nowhere.

Now with AI I can basically build anything. In the last months I shipped a Saas for compliance in the construction industry, an internal staff organization system for construction (I use both daily at my full time job), and a Google Ads MCP that automates the ad campaigns for the compliance SaaS. Right now I'm building a DJ application, I was a product manager for DJ products a decade ago so that one is a bit of a passion project.

What I realized: building was never the hard part. Marketing is.

Small niches like construction are brutal. Ads cost a fortune because Google thinks they're badly targeted, and nobody is actively searching for these products because they basically didn't exist before. No search volume to capture.

The Ads MCP got some traction, 100 GitHub stars in 2 weeks, but then I saw others getting 5k stars in 2 days. And most of my stars came from posting on Reddit, where mods love closing anything that looks like self promotion.

So how is everyone dealing with this? We all got the same superpowers at the same time, which means competition got way harder overnight. Building is cheap now. How do you actually get users?

Hey guys, I was just using an internal tool my dev made to find leads for us. I started filtering them (since there's no perfect tool to get "accurate" results. I have to filter 😒)

And so I noticed that it is literally the same thing as an email list. People are still cold dming on reddit so I started thinking if a segmented by persona profile reddit username list would have any value that someone would pay for it.

What do you think?

I’m testing a niche travel discovery product and wanted to share the thinking behind it, since I’m trying to figure out whether the pain point is real or if the niche is too focused.

The idea started last year when some friends were visiting Greece and wanted to find good beaches.

Their discovery process was basically:

• search “beaches” on TikTok
• open Google Maps
• click through random travel guides
• ask locals if they happened to know the area

That generally works, especially for the popular beaches, but it breaks down when you have a specific situation in mind.

For example, people do not always want “best beaches in Greece.”

They want things like:

• sandy beach in Corfu with parking nearby
• calm water near Naxos with a taverna
• quiet beach in Crete with shade
• family-friendly beach that is not packed in August
• beautiful beach that does not require a 4x4

I realized there was a gap between generic travel content and actual intent-based discovery.

So I started cataloguing beaches with practical details like sand vs pebbles, shade, parking, tavernas, water conditions, crowds, access difficulty, photos, and map location. Then I built a natural-language search layer on top so people can search by what they actually want instead of browsing generic blogs.

I also added some guide-style content for SEO, but the main thing I’m testing is whether a very narrow search experience can beat generic content for a specific travel use case.

Current status:

• free product
• no signup
• around 500 views per week
• started ranking on Google even though I initially made it last September, but just last month I discovered a huge bug so it got wrongly crawled and never ranked
• mostly trying to understand if people find this useful enough to come back or share it

The questions I’m thinking through now:

1. Is this too niche, or is the niche the reason it might work?
2. What would you test first for monetization?
3. What metric would you care about most at this stage: traffic, repeat usage, email capture, search volume, affiliate intent, or something else?
4. How would you approach distribution beyond SEO, Reddit, and basic social posting?

context: i'm the founder of a small AI coding tool and a few other tiny software products. not linking anything here because this is more of a field note than a launch post.

I spent the last week doing the thing a lot of founders do when they are tired: posting the product everywhere and hoping the right people magically appear.

It did not work very well.

The posts that were basically "here is what i built" got some views, a few comments, and a lot of silence. The comments that did better were the ones where i forgot about conversion and just answered the exact problem in front of me.

Tiny sample size, so don't read this as gospel. But the pattern was strong enough that i'm changing the workflow.

What went wrong

1. I tried to make launch posts carry too much weight

A launch post is a bad place to explain the whole product, prove the pain exists, build trust, handle objections, and ask for feedback at the same time.

That makes the post read like a pitch deck wearing a hoodie. People can feel it.

My better posts/comments were narrower. One topic, one mistake, one specific thing learned.

For an AI coding product, that meant talking about verification drift, persistent terminal sessions, and why agents need proof gates instead of vague "done" messages. For a VPS deployment product, it means talking about rollback, logs, SSL, and boring server ops instead of "Vercel for VPS" over and over.

The concrete pain works better than the positioning line.

2. I was posting from the product's point of view, not the user's moment of pain

This sounds obvious, but i kept catching myself doing it.

Bad version: "my app supports Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, persistent terminals, remote control..."

Better version: "i keep losing track of which AI agent changed what, which tests actually ran, and whether the terminal state survived after i closed the app. here is the workflow that reduced that chaos."

Same product area. Completely different reader reaction.

The second one gives someone a useful mental model even if they never use my tool. That is the bar i want to hit.

3. I underestimated how much Reddit hates founder smell

Not founder honesty. Founder smell.

Founder honesty is: "i built this, i'm biased, here is exactly what broke and what i learned."

Founder smell is: "we're excited to announce a revolutionary platform that empowers builders..."

I had more of the second than i wanted to admit. Even when the wording was casual, the structure was still product-first.

The fix i'm using now

Before posting, i force the idea through this filter:

• would this still be useful if i removed the product name?
• is there one specific mistake or workflow change?
• can a reader copy something from it today?
• am i avoiding links unless the subreddit clearly wants them?
• did i disclose that i'm the founder if the product is mentioned?

If the answer is no, it becomes a draft, not a post.

The new weekly cadence

I'm moving to this:

• 80 percent: useful comments on posts where i can actually help
• 15 percent: founder notes like this, with no links
• 5 percent: product-specific posts, only in communities where that is explicitly allowed

The comments are not a trick. They are research. If i can't be useful in a thread about the problem, i probably don't understand the problem well enough to write a good launch post.

The most useful thing i learned this week

A small, honest comment can tell you more than a polished launch post.

One person asking "but would users come back in week two?" is more valuable than twenty passive upvotes, because now i know what to measure. For my AI coding tool, that means repeat sessions, resumed terminals, projects reopened, and whether people come back to the same agent workflow after the first novelty hit.

That changed the product analytics i care about. Not downloads. Not signups. Repeat project/session resume.

That is the kind of feedback i was hoping launch posts would magically generate, but it came from conversation instead.

My current rule

If a post reads like it was written to extract attention, i don't post it.

If it reads like a useful note i would send to another founder even if there was no product attached, it is probably safe.

Curious how other builders handle this. Do you separate "helpful public notes" from actual launch posts, or do you just post the product directly and let the market judge?

I used to think that when operational problems hit my business, they’d be big, obvious fires. I thought I’d be dealing with major customer complaints or massive scheduling disasters.

But in reality? The real profit and time killers are tiny, quiet leaks that barely register on their own.

Yesterday, I spent about 45 minutes on what should have been a 2-minute task. I had to confirm if a client actually approved a $120 add-on service. That meant:

1. Checking our email thread (nothing there).

2. Scrolling through my phone’s SMS history (nope).

3. Asking my partner if they spoke to them on the phone (they did, but didn't write down the details).
   None of these micro-tasks—like looking up a gate code, double-checking if a team member saw a client's special request, or copy-pasting the same status update three times—justify buying a massive, expensive software system.

But together, they cause massive context switching. By 3 PM, I feel exhausted, yet I haven’t done any high-value work like marketing or outbound sales because my day was death-by-a-thousand-papercuts.

For those of you running service businesses: How do you decide when a "tiny leak" is worth building a dedicated process or tracker for, versus just accepting it as the normal chaos of running a business? Where do you draw the line?

idk if i'm the asshole in this one, so lemme give you context and you tell me what to do: I've worked with this guy for months now. we had this platform that finds leads on reddit (PLEASE, spare me the self-promo shit talk; we ain't selling it right now, which is part of the issue)

It was web hosted and that's how i used it before.

I used to promote that platform as the marketing co-founder, 50/50, but we didn't have any co-founder agreement, so there's nothing to prove i have ownership except for the posts where i publicly declared i was a co-founder a few months ago.

Got a few users, but after we saw how many other competitors joined and that it became a commodity, we decided to move on and work on something else. but there are still some of our users who asked us for source code access after we closed it, and so we sold it to them.

Fast forward a few months now; we decided to start focusing on our freelancing, he as the developer and I as the copywriter and designer.

i'm a marketer and so he said, 'You can promote my service and I'll give you a split if you get me clients.'

I said, 'Cool, give me that tool we worked on before to find the leads to DM them' (i get clients by dming them)

i said you can't expect me to sit there for hours and swift through 100s of reddit threads looking for that one interested lead only to get ghosted, when i can literally just scan and then filter and let it DM for me as well (accuracy is a bit low; i still need to filter but it does the job)

He said, "it doesn't work; it will be useless."

"wdym it doesn't work? i LITERALLY used it when it was hosted, and it worked PERFECTLY fine." I said.

Then he said reddit doesn't have any good leads and there still other ways to promote. HE LITERALLY told me before that most of his clients came from reddit. And I also booked some from reddit as well.

Anyways, we kept back and forth and he still refused to give me access (since now it is not web hosted anymore, he will have to give it to me as source code access, so i think he's afraid that i might turn on him and start selling it on his back)

oh, and for context, i also helped shape how the platform works inside out based on my expertise as a cold DMer; i showed him how to build it in a way that reduces the risk of a ban. so i DID have that skin in the engineering side aside from the promotion i did back then.

now, idk what to do; like, i tried to manually find the leads, and i hated the shit out of it because it is just utter time-sucking bullshit, when i can do other tasks that has more importance than something that is LITERALLY automated and i just need to hit play.

And it even affected my results as well; i'm still booking some clients here and there, but the process of finding and DMing is just taking a lot of time, and no matter how much i explain that to him, he just keeps saying it doesn't work. it is not worth it. Find another way to promote.

so wth should i do now?

Edit: Thank you guys for the help, it really means a lot. One of the commenters said to ask him to host it again, I asked him before but he said it will take a lot of time and so we just avoided it. But I asked him again and I managed to convince him (somehow) to rebuild the backend to host it again. And yeh, ik, i learned my lesson. Always get a contract.

Hey everyone,

Wanted to share where I'm at and get some honest input from people who've been through this.

I built a Chrome extension for people who sell on Kleinanzeigen (Germany's biggest classifieds platform). The problem it solves: ads sink down the search results over time, so sellers manually re-post them to get back to the top. My tool does that in one click — it carries over the title, description, price, and photos automatically. It's live and free, and I use it daily for my own ads.

The build was the easy part. Getting users is the real challenge — and where I'd love advice.

What I've tried so far:

• Direct outreach to high-volume sellers (bike shops, clothing resellers). A couple replied, most didn't. One business was interested but went quiet.
• I've got a landing page and just started posting in maker/beta communities.

Where I'm stuck / questions for you:

• For a niche tool tied to a specific platform, what actually worked for you to get your first 10-20 real users?
• Direct outreach feels slow and hit-or-miss — is that just the reality early on, or am I missing a better channel?
• How did you figure out if people would pay before building payment infrastructure?

I know the honest answer is often "it depends," but I'd genuinely value hearing how others cracked the cold-start problem for a niche product.

Happy to share the tool with anyone curious — just ask in the comments.

Thanks 🙏

I use PDF files daily and only for some standard stuff such as editing, merging, and conversions. Recently, I have tried PDFHouse since I have seen different reviews and decided to check it out by myself. So far, it has worked well enough, but I prefer not to upload any sensitive information. These files are kept offline. I am interested in how you deal with this issue. Do you use any web-based PDF services for your daily routine?

I built a tool for video editors and I'm decent at the building part but genuinely lost on the getting-people-to-see-it part. Would love how you'd approach the distribution.

What it is, quickly: you give it a video and it analyzes the mood, pacing, and cut placement, then picks royalty-free background music that fits and places it to the edit, auto-ducking under speech so dialogue stays clear, and mixing without re-encoding so there's no quality loss. It works as a Premiere and DaVinci Resolve extension plus a browser version, and it's free.

My audience is video editors and content creators, the people who currently spend 30+ minutes hunting Epidemic Sound or Artlist for a track that fits, then hand-placing and ducking it. I know they exist and I know the pain is real; I just don't know where they hang out or how to reach them without being the annoying "check out my tool" guy who gets banned.

What I'm stuck on:

- If you were reaching editors, which channels would you actually bet on? YouTube tutorials, the Premiere or Resolve plugin marketplaces, TikTok, Discord editing communities, something I'm not thinking of?

- Is a free tool better shown via a "watch it score this clip in 20 seconds" demo, or via written before and after comparisons?

- For a tool that lives inside an editor, does content marketing (tutorials and workflow tips) beat paid, or is that wishful thinking at zero budget?

- Anything you'd avoid because it burned you?

Full disclosure so it's not weird: I made it, it's free, and I'm 14, so this is a "help me learn how to reach people" question more than a "promote my thing" one.

A client of mine runs a business with a few different portals and websites. Every time his dev team ships an update, someone has to manually go through the apps to make sure nothing broke. He wanted that manual checking automated.

I said the sensible path was to have his developers write automated checks inside the codebase itself. Standard practice. Every serious software project does this. Cheap. Fast. Reliable. It's not fancy, but it works, and it costs basically nothing to run.

He didn't want that. He wanted AI. AI was going to solve everything, apparently.

So we built the AI version. Months of work. It uses AI to look at each screen of his app the way a human would, and decides whether things look right. He ran it on one feature the day we handed it over.

$900 API bill by end of day.

His Slack message was one word: 'Bro.' Attached the invoice screenshot. Holy hell.

Now the awkward part: the tool actually works. Really well. It does exactly what a human tester would do. Catches things a person might miss. Documents everything with screenshots. Genuinely impressive.

But $900 per feature-check isn't testing. That's a mortgage payment.

If we'd done the sensible thing from day one — normal automated tests inside the code, and only used AI-vision for the parts normal tools genuinely can't handle (things like Google Maps autocomplete fields, custom date pickers, weird embedded widgets) — the same run would've cost him around $30. And it would've been 10x faster.

The lesson I keep coming back to: AI is a scalpel, not a sledgehammer. Slapping it on every step of a process because 'AI is the future' is how you turn a $30 job into a $900 one.

This is happening everywhere right now. Business owners hear 'AI' and want it in every corner of the company. Sometimes it's the right call. A lot of the time it isn't. The hard part is figuring out which BEFORE you get the $900 bill.

Anyone else seen this? Where has AI actually paid off in your business, and where did it turn out to cost more than the problem was worth?