As the title says guys so what's the most valuable $1,000/month you've spent in your business?

I started building The Dollar Web a couple of years ago.

Over the past 6 or so months, I've seen numerous other sites pop up advertising similar services. I actually don't mind the competition. I've spent countless hours being thorough with testing, gathering feedback, and focusing on user experience.

I've posted about the site on Reddit and quickly learned that this category has left a bad taste in many people's mouths. Without even visiting the site, I've had several people accuse it of being a thoughtless pile of AI slop. What's worse, I've had some Redditors go to the site and blindly give various tools on the platform a 1-star rating with zero use.

Yes, I use AI for coding.

I also have a LLC, business insurance, auth benefits, a premium model with real paying users, cloud backup for progress tracking, applications that create business, education, event planning, and productivity artifacts, and a growing number of repeat visitors and daily users.

When you see the privacy-first, browser-based tool bundle pitch, is your immediate reaction that this must just be AI slop?

PS - I did not use AI for any of this post. If it's slop then it's human slop.

We have a few acquisition channels that are working and a solid content foundation, and we're now looking for someone senior to own the overall growth strategy on a part-time basis. Where do companies typically find fractional CMOs or senior growth marketers? If you do this kind of work, where do your clients come from?

Hey guys, running into a pricing structural question as we build out our product tiering.
A lot of our users turn out to be agencies managing anywhere from 10 to 40 client accounts. Big legacy players in our space charge hefty per-site add-ons ($50-$100/mo per connected domain), which seems to be a major pain point for agency owners trying to keep margins healthy.
We're considering offering a flat "agency tier" (e.g. up to 30 sites for one flat monthly price) to undercut the big players and capture that market.

For anyone who has offered flat-rate/volume packages instead of per-unit pricing:
Did it lead to higher retention, or did you get burned by heavy power-users?
How did you validate the threshold before pushing the pricing live?
Appreciate any feedback from fellow founders who’ve tested both models.

***I want to HELP founders understand why their growth stalled.

Hello Friends,

I run a non-tradition diagnostic consultancy that help founders and business leaders understand why their growth isn't working.

So for example let's say you have built a tool, a product or a service that you have been actively marketing for a while.
Maybe you are noticing any of the following:

a. You know the work is good but there is no traction.
b. People are paying attention but no one is converting.
c. You feel like you've been riding gears and things aren't looking the way you planned.

I want to talk to you and hear your problems. What are your current pain points? I want to hear about your story and what you've been building.

I'll be here for the next few hours if you want to shoot DMs or talk in the comments.

Transparently, I am collecting information on how to make my services better but I figured I'd come hang out with the folks getting the real work done rather than LinkedIn.

I’m testing whether an AI-directed process can attract 500 voluntary followers in 60 days.

No ads, spam, fake accounts, or bought engagement. Every decision, cost, failure, and result will be documented publicly.

What would make this experiment genuinely worth following?

Started this B2B thing with 2 people and for the first few months I probably spent 80% of my week on the product. Somewhere around customer 8 or 9 that completely flipped last week I looked at my calendar and I'd spent maybe 6 hours building and the rest was researching companies, following up taking calls and trying to remember where every conversation was at. Revenue is moving so I can't really complain but this wasn't how I pictured my week going.

I've started getting the repetitive parts out of my day and keeping my time for the conversations where someone might buy it's helped but I'm still kind of stuck on how much of sales a founder should keep doing themselves. Part of me thinks staying close to customers is probably the most useful thing I can do right now another part really misses having an entire afternoon where I could just build something

I checked my Supabase backend dashboard today.

34,495 total requests in the last 7 days.

It’s a pretty small number compared to other social media apps, but for something I built and have been quietly working on, seeing actual people use it enough to generate this much traffic feels really good.

The app is called Wildgram - a social app where you go outside, take pictures of animals, and use them to unlock/catch them in your collection similar to Pokedex but with real animals.

Still very early, but this is probably one of those screenshots I’ll look back on later and remember when it was tiny.

Started a small experiment 57 days ago. Gave every startup in the network a tiny bar on their site showing other startups.

The idea was simple. You show others, others show you.

Now there are 77 startups in it generating impressions for each other daily without paying a single dollar for ads.

Wondering if this actually scales or hits a wall at some point.

My idea is to produce podcasts and content for small and medium companies. The model: one 45 minutes recorded conversation with the founder per month, and I turn it into everything they publish for the next 30 days: the episode itself, short form clips, an article, LinkedIn posts, a newsletter.

I have no portfolio yet and every prospect asks for samples before they'll talk price. So my plan is to record and produce the first episode for free fully delivered and then ask whether they want to continue at €1,200/month.

Two things I'd like a reality check on:

1. The free first episode: it costs me roughly half a day. My thinking is that it removes the "can I see examples" wall and lets the work sell itself. But I'm aware this can backfire (people take the free thing and disappear or it anchors the service as low value). Has anyone run this as an entry motion for a retainer service? What conversion did you actually see, and did it attract the wrong kind of client?

2. One price, no tiers: I'm considering a single €1,200/month option instead of good/better/best. Simpler to sell and it stops the race to the cheapest tier, but I might be leaving money on the table with clients who'd have paid more.

For context I'm solo, doing this alongside a part-time contract, so I can realistically handle 4-6 clients. Not looking to build an agency.

Any hard feedback welcome, especially from people who've sold monthly retainers to SMBs.

I use Reddit to get clients.

I also use it like a normal human with varied interests, cough, the pit bull sub, but yes, firstly, I am here to get clients.

And Reddit already works really well for me. It generates about 80% of my website traffic and, currently, 100% of my clients. I usually get somewhere between 20 and 30 DMs a week, and some of those conversations turn into paid work.

Up until last week though my clients were exclusively lurkers.

They see an answer I wrote, poke around my profile, visit my website and then send me a DM. Last week was the first time I landed the actual OP as a client.

He asked a pretty basic question. It was the sort of thing I’ve probably answered 20 times over the past nine months. I left a useful answer and went on with my day.

This time, he reached out.

We moved from Reddit DMs to email pretty quickly, scheduled a Zoom for the next day and he paid the deposit invoice before lunch.

Less than 24 hours from Reddit post to paid project.

So that’s fun. And honestly, I’m still amazed it worked :)

There was no magical sales comment involved. I answered basically the same question I’ve answered many times before, repetition is a massive part of the Reddit game. This time the right person happened to ask.

Based on what has worked for me, I think there are two important lessons for anyone trying to find clients on Reddit.

1. The biggest lesson to know to succeed on Reddit, IMHO: Know the sub

You need to spend actual time in a subreddit before you post.

Reading the rules is not enough. The rules are one thing. The culture is something else entirely.

I was reminded of this in fairly spectacular fashion last week when I made a genuinely emotional and vulnerable post in one of the Severance TV show subs.

The written rules said no low-effort or AI-generated content. Fair enough.

What the culture apparently meant was, “If you have AI in your username, approximately 30 people will angrily threaten you within 30 minutes.”

Which was honestly kind of amazing because the post also got five thoughtful, human responses within the first 20 minutes. It clearly wasn’t spam or a low-effort AI post.

I had just completely failed to read the room.

The written rules tell you what the moderators might remove. Spending time in the community tells you what people value, what they’re suspicious of, what jokes land and what will cause a spontaneous mob to form before you’ve finished making coffee.

This matters even more if you’re trying to get clients because people can smell a drive-by sales pitch immediately. You are participating in a community. You aren’t publishing to an audience you own.

2. Be a human someone can actually hire

This sounds silly, but I see so many accounts trying to find clients while giving potential clients no way to investigate or hire them.

No real profile. No quick “hire me” link. Nothing explaining what they do. Sometimes the profile is private, so nobody can even see how they interact outside the one conveniently professional comment they just wrote.

Maybe this is unfair, but when I see a private profile, my immediate thought is that this person writes things they don’t want potential clients connecting to them.

Nobody likes trolls. Nobody wants to accidentally hire one.

If I’m thinking about giving an internet stranger money, I want to see what they’re like when they aren’t actively trying to sell me something.

My Reddit history is absolutely not one long advertisement. People can see me talking about business and software, but they can also see me talking about my kid, my dog, church, food, TV and whatever else has my attention that day.

I don’t think that hurts my client strategy. I think it’s part of why it works.

People aren’t just hiring a list of skills. They’re trying to decide whether they trust this particular internet stranger enough to send a DM, move to email, get on Zoom and eventually pay an invoice.

So make it easy for people to figure out who you are. Fill out your profile. Include a simple link. Let them see that you actually use Reddit like a person instead of appearing five minutes ago because you smelled a sales opportunity.

Then answer questions without demanding anything in return.

Most answers won’t produce an immediate result. That doesn’t mean nobody noticed. When Reddit sends 80% of my website traffic, I know people are clicking even when they never reply or upvote.

Write for the quiet people. Answer the repetitive questions. Give people enough information to investigate you without having to take your word for it.

Most of the time, the person who eventually hires you will be quietly reading from the sidelines.

But occasionally, the OP is the one who follows up and that feels extra awesome :)

When we first started, I kept the payment decision pretty simple.

My main question was basically: “Does it work?”

It did, so we picked one payment provider and moved on. At the time we only had a small number of subscriptions, and honestly, there were bigger things to worry about.

A few months later, after getting more customers, I started noticing how much more connected everything had become.

More renewals meant more failed payments, refunds, subscription changes, and customer payment data tied to the same setup.

The question that came to mind was: what would actually happen if we ever needed to leave this provider?

I realized it wouldn’t just be changing one integration. We had active subscriptions, billing logic, checkout flows, and customer data all connected to that decision.

The interesting part was that the provider wasn’t actually causing a problem. I just hadn’t thought about how dependent we had become on that system.

Now I’m trying to find the right balance between keeping things simple early on and making sure future changes don’t become unnecessarily painful.

Has anyone else had a system that worked perfectly in the beginning but became something you had to rethink after growing?

Six months ago I would have told you our biggest problem was finding good creators. It wasn't. Our biggest problem was that we kept betting the whole campaign on one or two of them.

We'd source a creator who felt perfect on paper, brief them carefully, get one polished video back, run it, and then either it worked and we scrambled to find "another one like that," or it flopped and we assumed UGC just didn't work for us that month.

What actually turned it around was embarrassingly simple: stop treating each creator as a bet and start treating the whole batch as the unit that matters. Run 10-12 different people/angles in parallel instead of one at a time, expect most of them to be mediocre, and judge the batch instead of the individual piece. The math evens out in a way that picking "the right creator" never does, because you genuinely cannot tell which piece will land until it's in front of real people.

This is basically why we ended up building Flare UGC around a rotating monthly roster instead of one-off gigs, so this isn't a neutral outside observation, grain of salt. But the volume-over-selection lesson would be true even if we'd never built anything around it, and it's the single biggest mindset shift I'd hand to anyone starting out with creator content on a budget.

Curious if other founders here landed on the same conclusion the hard way, or found a different fix.

I'm building a stock market for music royalties. Independent artists sell fractional shares of their catalogs to their own fans, on regulated rails. Incorporating this week, broker-dealer and transfer agent already priced, raising now.

Last week I asked a 44,000-member songwriter community one question: what would actually stop you from selling a piece of your royalties to your fans?

30+ comments of getting absolutely worked over later, here's the intel.

The objections I expected: fees, broke fans, legal complexity.

The objections I actually got:

1. "Why would I even do this?" The top comment. Nobody wakes up wanting to securitize their songs. They wake up the day a fund emails them offering 4.7x their annual royalties for their life's work while Springsteen's catalog cleared ~33x. The trigger isn't ambition, it's the lowball.

2. "I'd lose my masters." Flat wrong, and the most repeated. Selling a royalty slice isn't selling copyright, the same way selling a bond isn't selling the company. When the most informed music community on the internet believes this, the education gap isn't an obstacle. It's the moat.

3. "My fans wanting my music isn't my fans needing to own it." The sharpest one in the thread. The venn diagram of "supports you" and "wants an investment" is not a circle. Correct. It also only needs to be 1-2% of monthly listeners to fill a raise.

4. "Asking fans for money feels like begging." Buried under everything else, this is the real one. Kickstarter feels like begging because it is - money flows one way. Ownership flips the direction: not "support me," but "invest in me." That reframe turned out to be the entire product.

5. "Only artists with bad catalogs would sell." Adverse selection, the smartest finance objection in a songwriting forum. The answer is listing standards: minimum trailing royalties, verified statements, clean rights. The stock market solved this exact problem in 1934.

The meta-lesson: every single objection attacked the premise. Not one attacked the mechanics. Nobody said "your fee is too high." They said "I don't believe the overlap exists." That's not a pricing problem, that's a category-creation problem - and category-creation problems are the ones worth working on.

The mods removed the post for "market research." Kept answering in the comments anyway. Worth it.

One more thing it confirmed: the artists this is actually for - $100K+/yr catalogs - aren't in Reddit forums. They have agents and managers. Which told me exactly where the sales motion lives, and that's where this week went.

Building in public. Ask me anything.

I have a business related question and I’d really appreciate answers from people who have actually worked in these industries.

If someone is starting a business completely from scratch, what would be the better option: building a software company, such as a subscription based product/SaaS, or starting a hardware/physical product company?

I personally have not worked in either sector, so I’m trying to understand this from people who have actual technical and business experience.

From what I’ve heard, hardware can have lower margins and much higher operating costs . Software seems like it could have better margins and recurring revenue through subscriptions, but I’m sure there are also major challenges that someone without experience might not understand.

So for people who have worked in software, hardware, or ideally both:

What are the biggest pros and cons of each when starting from scratch?

Which one generally requires more capital and has more operational complexity?

Which one is easier to scale?

How different are the margins and cash flow?

which one would you choose and why?

I’m not looking for a simple “software is better” or “hardware is better” answer. I’m trying to understand the actual tradeoffs from people who have experience in these industries.

I’d especially appreciate answers from people

I've spent about ten years as a business analyst, which mostly means I write the document everyone nods at and nobody reads.

For a long time I thought the job was the document. Get the requirements clean, get sign-off, hand it to the builders. I got good at making the doc look finished.

Then I watched a project go out completely wrong even though every box was signed. Turned out ops and finance had quietly assumed two different things about the same process, and the tidy spec papered right over it. Nobody lied. They just never had to say the uncomfortable thing to each other's face, because the document let everyone agree in private and mean different things.

That was the moment it clicked. Requirements gathering isn't collecting answers, it's forcing the argument that people are avoiding. The real spec was sitting inside a disagreement two managers were too polite to have in the same room.

Now most of my actual value is engineering that fight early, when it's cheap, instead of finding it in QA when it isn't. It feels less productive than typing up a neat doc, and it saves the whole build.

For anyone doing solo consulting or fractional work around process and delivery: how do you get stakeholders to disagree out loud early without it turning into a turf war you get blamed for?

I’ve had my company profile on Clutch for around 8 years.
Recently, I decided to purchase their “Verify My Company” service, which costs around $500/year.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
My company is clearly listed on Clutch as a Ukrainian company. During the verification/payment process, Ukraine is available as a country option.
There was no warning saying Ukrainian companies were not eligible.
No restriction.
No message saying verification was unavailable in Ukraine.
Nothing.
So I selected Ukraine, paid the $500, completed the required steps — and waited.
The verification badge never appeared.
I contacted Clutch support and asked what was happening.
Their response:
“Through the conflict area, we’re unable to verify Ukraine companies.”
Seriously?
There are three things here that I find extremely problematic.
1. You accepted my money for a service you apparently knew you could not provide.
If Clutch does not verify Ukrainian companies, why is Ukraine available during the purchase process?
Why can a Ukrainian company pay $500 for verification?
Why is there no warning before payment?
If a service is unavailable to an entire country, customers should know that before their credit card is charged — not after they contact support asking where the service they purchased is.
2. “We’re unable to verify Ukraine companies.”
Not my company specifically.
Not “we couldn’t verify certain documents.”
Not “we need additional information.”
Apparently, Ukrainian companies as a category cannot be verified.
Ukraine has thousands of legitimate technology companies operating internationally, paying taxes, signing contracts, employing people, and working with customers around the world.
What exactly makes a Ukrainian company inherently “unverifiable”?
And if there is a legitimate compliance reason, why isn’t it disclosed before purchase?
3. Calling Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine a “conflict area.”
This one particularly surprised me.
Ukraine has been defending itself against Russia’s full-scale invasion since February 2022.
Reducing that to some vague “conflict area” language while simultaneously using it as justification to deny verification to Ukrainian businesses feels incredibly tone-deaf.
Ukrainian companies have spent years trying to keep operating, employing people, paying taxes, serving international clients, and maintaining their reputations while our country is being attacked.
And now apparently we can still pay Clutch for verification — we just can’t actually get verified.
I’ve been on Clutch for around eight years, which is why this was especially disappointing.
I’d genuinely like to hear from other Ukrainian founders:
Has anyone else paid Clutch for verification and then been told that Ukrainian companies cannot be verified?
And more broadly — am I missing something here, or is accepting payment for a service and only afterward telling the customer that their entire country is ineligible as absurd as it sounds? 

My LinkedIn Automation SaaS got stuck at around $600K ARR for a long stretch. I'm not saying that's a bad number by any means, but it was just stuck.

And while i was stuck, a competitor came in and completely disrupted the market. they came in at $3/month per LinkedIn account while I was charging $99. 

and instead of trying to position for everyone (how i did), they went hard after one narrow, loud segment and built their entire positioning around them.

And it worked out crazy well for them.

They scaled to ~$13 mil a year within a couple of years, and I stayed f*cking stuck at $600K the whole time watching it happen. I felt like a loser during that time, and I don't say that lightly.

What eventually helped me make sense of it was a framework I picked up from Alex Hormozi. The idea is that every product business moves through 2 phases.

There's the search phase, where the actual job is figuring out who really wants your product and why. You're talking to customers constantly, figuring out your segment, figuring out your position in the market, and basically trying to understand what people actually want before you try to scale anything. It's supposed to be slow and a little messy.

Then there's the exploitation phase, where you take whatever the search phase proved and scale it hard. marketing, sales, ops, everything.

Once I understood that, i realized what happened. They were already deep into exploitation while i hadn't even finished searching, and i didn't know it back then. 

I was ‘taking a guess’ at my audience while pretending i had it figured out, and expecting exploitation phase level growth.

Now, before jumping to any conclusions i try to answer these 3 questions first:

Who are my actual early adopters?
What position do they hold in the wider market?
Not who could theoretically buy this, but who's already showing me they want it?

I’m still veryyy far from $13 mil ARR, but that’s okay, I know where i stand now.

If you're in the middle of that feeling right now, comparing your numbers to someone else's, I’ll just tell you that I've been there too, and most of what I thought it meant about me turned out to be wrong. 

Slow down and answer those 3 questions, you’ll find clarity there.

Keep going y’all ✌️

P.S. My SaaS is SalesRobot DOT co if you’re curious (now at $1mln ARR)

Been watching how big the whole “aura” and “aura farming” trend has become and thought there was an opportunity to build something around it.

So I built TheAura100 (might come up in google search)

A simple way to vote on who has the most aura and see how people rank.

Still super early and I’d love some real feedback from people who don’t know me.

Would you actually use this? And what would make you come back?

honestly can't believe it. built this product because three weeks after shipping my product my GTM was a disaster, investor pipeline all over the place, invoices slipping through the cracks.

connects up the tools you're already using and lets you run/query all of it in plain language instead of twelve tabs open at once.

to celebrate, i'm giving the next 100 founders a year free (worth up to $2400!) if you connect 2+ tools and tick off 15+ to-dos in your first two weeks. genuinely want more real usage before i go raise next month... the more people using the platform, the faster we can improve it.

use code REDDIT14 at signup for a 14 day trial instead of the usual 3, plenty of time to actually put it through its paces.

withbase dot ai