r/growthguide

run a small wholesale/distribution business with a growing list of b2b customers on terms. As volume goes up, ar is getting messy: repeat orders, partial shipments, returns and credit notes, and the same accounts that drift late but are still too important to just cut off. Right now everything lives in the accounting system’s AR module plus a couple of spreadsheets to track edge cases. I’m trying to decide whether it’s worth adding dedicated accounts receivable software that fits wholesalers and distributors better, or if that just means one more system to feed and reconcile.
If you stayed on the built‑in ar and made it work, or if you switched to a separate AR tool and actually felt the difference in how you manage invoices and collections, I’d be interested in how it played out over a few months.

I have been helping a friend with a small Instagram page for a clothing brand. It is still a small setup, so every post feels like a small experiment. In the beginning, we only looked at new followers. If a reel brought in some new people, we thought that post worked. Simple product photos usually performed well because they looked good and were easy for people to share.

After some time we started noticing the people who were leaving too. When the posts felt too much like an advertisement or were only about discounts we noticed some people unfollowed. It was never a huge number, but it happened often enough that we started paying attention.

We also started looking at the type of followers coming in. A page can gain followers but that does not always mean they are interested in the content. Sometimes people follow and never interact, while others actually comment, save posts or ask questions. That helped us understand if we were attracting the right audience.

The posts that felt more natural usually worked better with the people already following the page. Things like showing how a design was created, packing orders, sharing behind the scenes or explaining the story behind a product. These posts did not always bring a lot of new followers but the conversations felt more real.

Now I am not sure what tells you more. New followers show what attracts people but the people who leave can also show what is not working.

For people managing small pages do you pay more attention to who follows who unfollows or both?

Bit of a painful founder lesson.

I spent roughly a year building Hookami, a product for YouTube creators.

For months, I explained it by listing everything it could do:

trend research, outlier detection, video deconstruction, beat sheets, thumbnail analysis, pre-publish review, MCP integration...

All technically true.

Also a pretty terrible pitch.

Reading it back, it sounded like another crowded AI toolbox with seven tabs and a monthly subscription.

The actual problem was much simpler:

Creators can generate content faster than ever, but they still don’t know which idea is worth spending the next week on.

That changed the way I talked about the entire product.

I stopped leading with:

>

And started leading with:

>

The product hadn’t changed.

The framing had.

Hookami starts with evidence: which topics are gaining momentum, which videos are outperforming their own channel baseline, what is driving the movement, and which angles already look crowded.

Only then does it move into scripting, packaging, and pre-publish review.

Basically, I had been selling the engine when the real value was helping someone avoid making the wrong video.

Even the MCP integration fits differently now.

“Works inside ChatGPT and Claude” sounds cool, but it isn’t the core promise. It simply brings the research layer into the tools creators already use.

Now I’m testing the positioning in the least scalable way possible:

• personalized outreach to individual creators;
• a 30-day account with no posting obligation;
• direct onboarding;
• one question after they use it:

>

That answer matters more to me right now than signups, impressions, or people saying the landing page looks nice.

I wish I had focused on that question a year ago instead of constantly asking which feature to build next.

What did you remove from your pitch before people finally understood what your product was actually for?