r/Entrepreneurs

Had an idea today and I can’t tell if it’s actually good or if I’m just excited because it sounds easy.

Basically, everyone has a LinkedIn that’s decent but nobody has a personal website, because updating two profiles feels like a chore nobody signed up for. So the pitch is I take someone’s LinkedIn, feed it into Claude Code with a prompt or two, and it spits out an actual personal site with real animations and effects, something that looks like a designer spent a weekend on it. Host it on Vercel, hand over the link, charge $80. From what I can tell this is maybe an hour of work once I’ve got the prompt dialed in.

I know Carrd and Framer and every AI portfolio builder already exist, so I’m not pretending this is some novel tech thing. The difference I’m going for is zero effort on the client’s end. No template picking, no dragging blocks around, no “please fill out this 12 field form first.” They send a LinkedIn URL, they get a finished site back.

The part I’m least sure about is whether this is a real business or just a nice weekend gig that caps out at 10 to 15 clients before I run out of people who care enough to want a personal site. There’s also nothing stopping someone from building the exact same wrapper and racing me to the bottom on price since the moat is basically a prompt.

Would anyone actually pay $80 for this, or does it only work as a favor for a friend’s portfolio? And if it does work, where would you even find the first 10 people who want one?

One thing that took us a while to figure out: how to price private events vs. public classes.

A public class is selling individual seats. A private event is selling the whole room. So instead of just guessing a flat price, we started thinking about it as: what would those seats have made us on a good, busy public night? That's the baseline. Then we add a bit more on top for the exclusivity and the extra setup/teardown work.

Ends up landing around 1.4-1.6x what a sold-out public night would've made us, and honestly people rarely push back on it — I think because it's tied to something concrete instead of just a random number.

For founders and business owners:
What's something people don't appreciate until they've actually started a business?
What advice would you give someone thinking about taking the leap?

Actually, I’m a student in the web development field.

But I want to quit and start a new career as a businessman. The problem is that I don’t know how to begin. What kind of business should I start? What activity should I focus on?

I’ve been spending the last eight months thinking about what I could do, how I could start a business, reading books, and looking for advice on YouTube. But I still don’t know if I’m looking in the right places or reading the right books. I don’t even know where to begin or what my first step should be.

Could you please help me figure this out? How should I start? Do you have any advice on finding the right business or identifying the first step I should take?

We’re two co-founders building a cybersecurity software company, and we’ve reached a very classic founder question: we both want to be CEO.

I started the project and come from a technical background, with around 10 years of experience in IT/cybersecurity. I later brought in my co-founder, who is much more sales-focused.

He has experience selling and running other businesses, but no technical background and no experience working inside a large enterprise.

Right now, we both do a bit of everything except he doesn’t touch the technical side.

His view is that the CEO is usually the person who sells. I’m not sure it’s that simple, especially for a cybersecurity software company at an early stage.

So I’m curious: at this stage, what makes more sense a technical founder as CEO with the other founder leading sales/GTM, or the sales-focused founder as CEO?

What would you base that decision on?

39F with 3 year old kid working at good position in IT company.

My job is hectic and stressful. I am a AMS solution architect. so lot of pressure and coordination which takes most of my time. The company culture is also that things dont get closed and people play email games. I keep on losing my time. In my mind, even if i am not working , stress is always there and things just keep on piling up. I want to start by my business I try to find time by waking up early. But now work has started creeping in and i have to work early mornings as well because i have toddler.

I m gonna be 40 soon and I m afraid this is my last chance, scared of quitting job what happens if I lose everything..

I am always unhappy and dissatisfied... though i am raising my kid, being good wife and serving my career.

Working moms who have business please suggest how do I change my mindset, how should I manage my time where to start?

One thing I've noticed is that having sales doesn't necessarily mean having healthy cash flow.

A business can be growing, getting more customers and even showing a profit on paper, but still struggle because money is tied up in inventory, invoices haven't been paid yet, or suppliers need to be paid before customers pay.

I'm curious for those who have been running a business for a while:
What caused your biggest cash-flow problem?
Was it slow-paying customers, taking on too much inventory, expanding too quickly, unexpected expenses, debt repayments, or something else?
And what did you change afterwards?

I'm particularly interested in hearing how people handle working capital when there's a temporary gap between paying expenses and receiving customer payments. There seem to be plenty of financing options out there, but it's not always obvious when borrowing actually helps versus just creating another problem.

Would be good to hear some real experiences from other entrepreneurs rather than the usual “just increase revenue” advice.

I’m sure many of u are familiar with Alex the G, Genghis Khan, Caesar, Hannibal, Sun Tzu, etc etc

It’s like war leaders are immortalized and even business leaders use them to inspire themselves and others….. I’m an avid readr adn I want to learn from the best in history (or even legendary figures who are fictional but good examples)

Who do you think of when you think about business?

What books (especially biographies and how to manuals) did u love most?

I recently ready Book of Five Rings by Musashi and it was great (kinda hard to understand sometimes but I totally got value to apply to my work)

Unpopular opinion: I don't think posting every day is automatically a good content strategy.

A lot of accounts seem to optimize for frequency instead of quality.

Post every day → you need ideas every day → eventually the hooks get weaker, the topics get repetitive, and you're basically creating content just to hit the posting quota.

I've seen better results when people cut their posting frequency and put that extra time into the actual idea, first line, thumbnail/title, and overall packaging.

Basically:

10 mediocre posts < 5 posts people actually want to click on.

Obviously this won't apply to every account or platform. Some content models benefit massively from volume.

But if you've been posting daily for months and growth has completely stalled, I'm not convinced the answer is to post more.

Has anyone here actually seen better growth after reducing their posting frequency?

I’m a night life promoter and I want to start a sparkling water bottle company. I have designed a bottle. I would just need to figure out where I can produce the water and fill the bottles. What is the best way to organize this?

I launched to nobody. No mailing list, no following, no budget for ads. I tried one round of cold email, felt like a telemarketer doing it, and converted about as well as one.

What I did have was a search box. People were already asking for what we had built, in public, in threads. More of them than I expected. They just had no idea we existed.

The method was boring. I wrote down the questions a buyer in our category would actually type: best tool for X, alternative to (competitor), how do you handle Y. I searched each one on Reddit sorted by new, then again on Google with site:reddit.com to catch the older threads that already rank. Quora and Hacker News got the same treatment. Everything else I ignored.

My rules were simple. Reply only where the question was a genuine fit. Answer the whole thing first, properly, including the parts that had nothing to do with us. Name the other options honestly, including the ones that were a better call for that person. Mention ours as one option, with the case where it fits and the case where it does not. Never post a link.

The first customer came from a reply a few weeks in. After that a slow trickle. Two came from one old thread that ranks on Google and still sends somebody every few months, which was the only part of this that compounded on its own.

Being honest about the scale: that is ten customers over a few months, not a growth hack. Most replies did nothing. Maybe one in five produced anything I could measure, and the rest were just me being helpful on the internet, which is fine but does not pay rent.

Timing mattered more than anything else I changed. Replies I got in within a couple of hours did far better than the same reply a day later, because by then the thread had its answers and nobody came back to read mine. And checking every platform every day for the few questions worth answering is the part that nearly made me quit. Most of what I read was noise.

So I automate the monitoring now. I use ParseStream, but use whatever tool you like, just make sure it has AI filtering or you will spend the day reading junk.

This scales badly past a point. At the first customers stage it is still the best zero budget channel I know of.

That's what people think about me but I question my own decisions, I question my own wishes

I am a tannery owner, 26 years old, got a lot of laborers.

There are still things I am "figuring out", I been creating a business system that doesn't need me to be there. A better cash flow and other business things

I also notice how demanding my job is and I question it, just like the other entrepreneurs, business owners, and merchants

Do you guys really think it is worth?

This one's a classic soft brush-off and it always feels awkward to push back on without sounding pushy. Curious how people actually handle it in the moment, do you agree and follow up with a specific next step already scheduled, or try to keep them on the call a bit longer to dig into what's actually holding them back? What's worked for you to keep this from turning into a dead lead?

With AI, everyone is building their own solutions and apps to solve their everyday personal and professional problem. I feel that, still today, developers have an edge because they follow the DevOps process by planning/creating a PRD and understanding what the architecture is. If something breaks (which it often does) they know how to fix it; on the other hand, non-technical folks ask Claude to fix it without knowing what is happening.

They do not test, and all they hope is for Claude to fix everything for them.

I wanna start off directly by saying that there's an obvious advantage to using one company for several parts of your stack. You have fewer integrations to build, fewer vendor relationships to manage and generally one place to go when something breaks especially when you're still trying to get a product launched that simplicity can be pretty valuable. What I think worries me is what happens later when the business grows and you decide one part of that provider's offering no longer works for you. If several important parts of your product are built around the same company then replacing just one of them could potentially turn into a much bigger migration. Going completely modular from day one doesn't seem ideal either because then you're accepting a lot of extra complexity just to preserve flexibility you might never need. For entrepreneurs who've dealt with this how do you decide how much vendor dependence is reasonable and at what point does the convenience of an all in one provider start becoming lock in you'd rather avoid?

So i'll be doing random side projects and sometimes just decide to use AI for things to speed up the process and learning curve but realize either it is really good at the task I want it to do or just straight up horrible. The trouble I'm having is seeing these really good ones makes me think there are probably other good tools out there but just under the radar right now. And the other way around I waste time looking for tools when at this time a human far exceeds AI. Do you guys feel these tools will slowly start popping up more and more to replace humans out of freelance work? I have this site shouldifreelanceit.com and was honestly shocked how many tools there are when adding to it but I still feel like a lot of them are just shit and we need humans for things (mainly creative tasks imo). I wonder how soon AI will reach our level and possibly replace us. It would be cool to promote humans over tools because there are so many things we have to offer we all may not know about.

What are yall thoughts?

I’m currently dealing with a "good" problem, but it’s becoming a massive bottleneck for my business and I could really use some advice from people who have scaled sales teams.

I have a sales guy who is a literal machine. He’s a full-cycle unicorn: he hunts for his own leads, does the outreach, and closes with a terrifyingly high win rate. Because our product hits a real pain point, he takes home a very fat commission check every month. He's happy, I'm happy.

Here is the catch: he only operates in the Spanish-speaking market.

We are now in a position where we desperately want to expand into other regions and languages (English, mainly, but open to others). The market is there, the product is ready, but my star player is walled off by a language barrier.

I’m facing a classic founder's dilemma:

Option A: Do I hand him a hefty budget, tell him to hang up the phone, and have him build, train, and manage an international sales department? (My fear: a great player doesn't always make a great coach, and I'd be losing my best closer in the trenches).

Option B: Do I leave him alone to keep printing money in his region, and try to find his exact clone but equipped with different "language packs"? If so, how do you even replicate a top performer's magic in a market you (or they) haven't tested yet?

I'd love to hear from sales vets or founders who have crossed borders and scaled beyond a single star player. How did you handle the language leap? All suggestions (or cautionary tales) are highly appreciated!

Hi I make good websites and can make a website for portfolios, businesses, one page websites, resigns, anything. Here’s my website of work https://juicewebdesigner.github.io/Juice-Web-Services/ and I’m only charging 50$ USD

I struggle so much with getting any sort of meaningful business from any of my ventures. There is a long list of things I can do but it seems like any amount of hustling gets me nowhere. My business ranges from web design/SEO to photography to engineering to music. I have 3D printers, CNC machine and zero dollars of profit to show from it. In the last 2 years i've made a total of $1200 on web design from 2 clients. Tons of free work to gain Google Business Stars and only got 1 review. The most money i've made from anything is about $3500 trading futures. My social media stuff gets zero traction. Contacting local business to legitimately save them time and money gets zero responses.

Then I see other businesses with too much business and not enough time and can't figure out what to do. A local business shut down because it was their side gig and their main job required more hours from them.

I'll admit i'm not great with marketing because I don't like to be on camera. My goals aren't extraordinarily high like making half a million a year. I'd love to do $50k this year in anything other than my current job.

Has anyone else been in this situation where they were able to break through or was it all just up to luck and people you know?