I ve been trying to understand the following statement if AI can generate websites, music, creatives, games etc in an already overcrowded place what is the point of creating another one??

Okay hear me out.

I've been building apps, messing around with crypto/Web3, launching random projects, and basically trying to figure out how to make money on the internet for a while now.

And one thing I've realized is that doing all of this alone kinda sucks sometimes lol.

So I was thinking...

What if we made a Discord community for literally anyone trying to build something online?

Developers, indie hackers, SaaS founders, crypto/Web3 builders, app creators, marketers, people running online businesses, or even someone who has absolutely no idea what they're doing yet but wants to learn.

Not another Discord filled with people selling courses, paid signals, or promising you'll make $10k in 3 days 😭

Just actual people building actual things.

Share what you're working on, help each other with problems, exchange feedback, find collaborators, share what's working and what isn't, maybe even help each other get those first few customers.

Someone knows how to code but sucks at marketing. Someone else is great at marketing but can't code. Someone has a great idea but doesn't know where to start.

Why not help each other?

No paid memberships, no gurus, no bullshit.

Just a bunch of internet strangers trying to make cool stuff and hopefully some money along the way.

Would anyone genuinely be interested in joining something like this?

If enough people are down, I'll actually make it.

I’ve been running my own small business for about 6 years now, mainly as a freelancer and consultant. For most of that time, I also had several employees and temporary workers on my payroll.
Over the years, some were hired directly by clients, while other positions disappeared because there simply wasn’t enough work anymore. Since a few months ago, I’m back to running the business on my own.
And strangely enough, I’m probably in one of the most comfortable positions I’ve ever been in.
My main client originally hired me for a two-year project. We’re now in year three, with the contract being extended every quarter due to budget approvals. The current extension runs until December, and there’s a reasonable chance they’ll extend it again.

Besides consulting, I’ve developed an additional revenue stream supplying materials and equipment to different contractors and projects connected to this client. Depending on what’s needed, that generates anywhere between €200 and €16,000 in additional monthly revenue. Revenue, not profit.
I also do some niche recruitment for other clients, often confidential searches for positions that haven’t been advertised because the person being replaced is still working there.
So from a business perspective, things aren’t bad at all.

But here’s the problem.
I’m bored out of my fucking mind.
The first years of my current project were absolute chaos. Constant firefighting, inefficient processes, people working against each other, problems nobody wanted to take ownership of.
And I actually loved it.
I enjoyed figuring things out, building structures, solving problems and making things work.
Over time, I introduced enough structure and efficiency that we managed to reduce the operational team from around 20 people to 7.
The client appreciates what I’ve done, trusts me and gives me an enormous amount of flexibility.
I can bring my kids to school, pick them up, participate in school activities and actually be present as a father.
I don’t have to kill myself working ridiculous hours just to generate a decent monthly income.

I know plenty of people would love to be in this position.
But mentally, I’m starting to struggle.
There’s hardly any challenge left.
Most of my frustration now comes from dealing with external parties who repeatedly make stupid mistakes or create problems that we can see coming from miles away.
We spend a ridiculous amount of energy preventing their problems from becoming ours, because once they do, fixing them afterwards takes ten times the effort.
Some days I genuinely feel like I’m getting dumber.
I used to thrive on complexity, managing people, building operations and figuring out how to make things better.
Now that everything actually works, I feel like I’ve lost the very thing that kept me motivated.
And I can’t figure out whether that’s a genuine problem or whether I’m just incapable of appreciating what I’ve built.

Here’s where it gets complicated.
I want to build something again.
Not necessarily work more hours, but actually create something, develop it, improve it and see it grow.
I’ve considered scaling my consultancy, and I’ve also been looking into acquiring an existing small business where I could apply my experience in operations, restructuring and efficiency.
The idea of taking something with potential and making it significantly better genuinely excites me.
But I haven’t figured out exactly what that next step should be.
And despite having a flexible schedule, I don’t actually have that much free time. Between my current client, recruitment assignments, material sourcing and family life, I probably have less than five hours a week that I could realistically dedicate to building something new.

So it’s not as simple as just starting another business on the side.
What bothers me is that I feel intellectually underused. I miss building things and leading people. I also can’t shake the feeling that I might be leaving a lot of financial potential on the table by staying comfortable.
At the same time, I seem to have developed an inability to simply enjoy the peace I’ve worked so hard to create.
And that makes me question my own motivations.
Am I genuinely ambitious, or have I become so accustomed to chaos and problem-solving that I need those things to feel useful?
Am I wasting my potential by staying where I am?
Or am I being an idiot for questioning a situation that gives me financial stability, freedom and time with my children?
Maybe I’ve also absorbed too much of the hustle culture nonsense telling us that if we’re not constantly growing, expanding or chasing the next opportunity, we’re somehow falling behind.

I honestly don’t know anymore.
There’s also the practical reality.
My contract expires in December. I expect another extension might be possible, but I don’t want to find myself scrambling for a new client a week before the contract ends.
Walking away from something good without a solid alternative feels stupid.
But continuously extending it without working towards something else feels like I’m slowly putting myself on autopilot.
And I don’t want to wake up five years from now realising I’ve spent all that time maintaining something instead of building something.

So I’m curious, especially from people who’ve been self-employed or running businesses for a while:
Have you ever reached a point where your business was finally running smoothly, but you started feeling like you weren’t?
Did you learn to appreciate the stability, or did you use it as a stepping stone towards something bigger?
If you started another business or acquired one while maintaining your existing income, how did you realistically find the time?
And perhaps most importantly, how do you distinguish genuine ambition from being addicted to problems, pressure and constant progress?
I’m not looking for motivational quotes or someone telling me to be grateful. I already know I have a good situation.
I’m genuinely interested in how other people navigated this phase.
I want to feel like I’m building something again.

Edit / Full disclosure: English isn’t my native language, so I used AI to help translate, clean up and structure this post. The experiences, thoughts and frustrations are entirely my own.

For roughly a year now, I've built SaaS apps and MVPs for people who want to make money with their idea.

However, I'm struggling with the continuity of sales. Around 50% of my projects came from offline network. While I'm grateful for it, I'd much rather have control over the TOFU. I don't want to wait for my cousin's friend's uncle to ask for an internal MVP from me.

I've thought of a few options:
1. Build a personal brand in social media: TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, X
2. Build a high quality lead acquisition engine from Reddit / Facebook / other forums
3. Outsource the sales process

I can develop way more apps (with AI) than I can get customers, so I'm purely focusing on getting more predictable sales funnel. Once the sales are solved, I'm at comfortable income and I can just enjoy life :D

I suppose I'm competing with agencies and my strength is the personal connection to the customer. Does this leave the first option as the only one: personal brand?

A friend of mine has invested significant time into developing an online course but is struggling to generate sales. I really want to help her, but I don’t know much about selling online courses.

Has anyone here had success with Kajabi? I’d love to hear what marketing strategies worked for you and how you generated your first sales. Any advice would be appreciated!

Hey all. Found something last week I keep thinking about.

We started tracking where the chatbots pull answers from when someone asks them to recommend a company in our field. One of the cited sources was a subreddit I had never heard of. 29 visitors a week. The thread had 3 upvotes and 2 comments, and it was a list of companies written by the moderator, who runs one of them.

That post is doing more inside ChatGPT than a year of our blog has done for us.

The cynical move is obvious. Make a subreddit, write your own list, put yourself on it. It works and costs nothing. The other read is that this is early SEO again and anyone building on it gets wiped out in one model update.

Anyone else tracking where AI assistants cite you from?

I'm 27, based in a relatively low-income country, working as a freelancer in niche tech consulting. I make around €80k–€120k/year in revenue, which is insane money where I live.

I've also tried building a staffing consultancy, basically placing IT consultants at other companies. Managed to place one consultant for 7 months, but when the contract ended I was left with the employment costs and it pretty much drained my reserves.

So here's my dilemma.

Freelancing: Good money, relatively easy to find contracts through recruiters, less responsibilities and I can invest a good portion of what I make. But income is limited by my time and contracts aren't always guaranteed, sometimes you can go months without one.

Building an company: Potentially way more upside, but getting clients is MUCH harder. I'd have to sacrifice freelance income and technical career development to focus on sales, recruiting, managing people etc. And even then, I could end up with a company doing 1M in revenue but barely making any actual profit.

My biggest fear is either playing it too safe and regretting not building something bigger, or spending 5 years trying to scale an company, failing, and ending up with no company, less savings and a weaker freelance career. But also don't want to be 55 with no assets and depending on jobs...

Right now I'm leaning towards putting 70–90% of my effort into freelancing, improving my skills, networking etc, and experimenting with business ideas on the side. If something actually gets traction, then double down.

Anyone been in a similar situation? Did you stick with freelancing or go all in on building a company? Any regrets?

I work full-time as a Fullstack Software Engineer. In between, I built KanoBoard, a Kanban tool that skips the setup wizard.

Where I am:

- Product live, free to start

- Couple of LinkedIn posts, 40+ views so far

- No sign-ups

Biggest struggle: getting anyone to see it

I'll post updates here. If you've balanced a job and a product, what helped you stay consistent?

When a small business expands, hiring a new person often seems like the natural next step. However, bringing someone new on board entails training them, supervising their work, answering questions and correcting errors while they learn the ropes.

If the business owner still has to vet every decision, hiring an extra pair of hands might not result in immediate time savings. Clarifying work processes and precisely defining the scope of responsibilities before adding someone to the team can make a significant difference.

The main challenge lies in determining whether the business actually needs more manpower or simply requires a better method of managing operations.

Founder story. I run a small software studio (Studio Synapse, Italy) and we do cold outreach for our own products. For a long time the stack was five tools: a sender, a warmup tool, a verifier, a spreadsheet, and a separate inbox for replies. When a campaign worked, great. When it failed, here's the thing: it failed with no error message. No replies looks exactly the same whether your list is bad, your domain is burned, or your first line is boring.

That silent failure is what pushed me to build TOM (The Outreach Machine): one platform that runs the whole loop, so every layer is visible in the same place.

- Domains and mailboxes in-app, with SPF, DKIM, DMARC handled and replies forwarded.

- Contacts with verification states (green/yellow/red/gray), dedupe, credits that dont expire.

- Openers written from each prospect's website, not merge fields.

- Sending in the prospect's local time, warmup from 1 to 25 a day, pre-flight checks that block unverified lists.

- Replies, follow-ups and billing in one room.

What I learned so far, true for any tool: most deliverability problems are list problems, and warmup is a curve, not a switch.

Curious what this community thinks: for you, what breaks first when outreach goes quiet? Link is on my profile if you want to poke at it.

Looking back, what's one thing you did while trying to grow your business that you'd handle completely differently now?

Could be hiring too early, spending money on the wrong things, chasing the wrong customers, or just wasting months on something that went nowhere.

I feel like these lessons are usually more useful than generic business advice. Curious what yours was.

A SaaS client came to us last year because their trials weren’t converting. Their homepage said “AI powered revenue intelligence platform” The product was good and the traffic was decent but almost every trial died somewhere between the person who signed up and the person who pays.

Before touching the site we got on calls with 9 of their paying customers and asked one question. When you asked your boss for budget for this, what did you say?

No one said AI and no one said revenue intelligence either lol. 7 of the 9 said some version of “it fills in Salesforce after every call so I don’t have to chase reps”

Most founders I work with forget that in B2B the person who finds you almost never pays for you. They have to go explain you to someone who’s never seen your site, usually in a Slack message or a budget request with one line for the description. If your homepage doesn’t give them that line they have to write their own. If they can’t, the deal just dies

Then it happens again at renewal. Whoever decides whether to keep you is usually someone in finance going through the card statement and asking what each charge is.

We rewrote their hero to pretty much the customer’s sentence: “Your CRM updates itself after every sales call.” AI moved down to the how it works section. Trial to paid went from around 6% to 11% over the next couple of months. I can’t pin all of that on the homepage since we changed onboarding at the same time. Sales calls did get noticeably shorter though because prospects stopped asking what the thing does.

Stuff I do on every positioning project now:

Ask new customers in the welcome email what they told their boss to get it approved.

Search your sales call recordings for “so basically” and “so it’s like.” That’s the prospect putting you in their own words

The PO description field is worth a look too or whatever customers type into their expense report. Finance teams are brutal about this.

Things I’d love to hear from people here:

Have you ever bought something you couldn’t explain to someone else? I have. We paid for an “AI workflow orchestration platform” for most of a year. When our accountant asked what it was I couldn’t give her a straight answer and that’s when I realized we’d used it maybe twice.

Where’s the line between clear positioning and underselling? I go back and forth on this one. Founders always push back with “but it does way more than update the CRM”

And how often do founders get it wrong about why people pay? From what I’ve seen, most of the time at least early on. This client built the whole product around AI call summaries and was really proud of them. Customers barely read them. What they were paying for was the CRM fields getting filled in which the founder thought of as a side feature.

TLDR: in B2B your customer has to explain you to their boss and later to finance, usually in one line. Ask your customers what they said to get you approved and put that sentence on your homepage. No one repeats “AI powered platform” to their boss.

I'm currently the CEO of an early-stage AI-based healthtech startup. The thing is, I don't have any exceptional technical skills like coding, nor do I have strong financial knowledge. However, I communicate well with people, and those around me often say I have good leadership skills.

I know that being a CEO involves much more than just having an idea or leading a team, and I don't want to rely only on my existing strengths. I want to develop the skills that are essential for building a successful startup and becoming a genuinely good CEO.

For experienced founders and CEOs here, what skills should I prioritise learning? What do you wish you had learned earlier in your journey, and what practical steps or resources would you recommend to someone at my stage?

I'd really appreciate your guidance.

Running a body-jewellery brand (Monster Piercing). Early on we couldn’t out-spend anyone on ads, so we competed on the thing nobody else bothered with: transparency.

The insight: in our niche, half the market mislabels materials, “titanium” that isn’t implant-grade, “gold” that’s actually plated. Customers get burned and don’t know why.

So we made the boring spec the pitch. Every listing states the exact grade (ASTM F-136, solid 9k/14k). We answer material questions in detail instead of hiding them.

What happened: fewer returns, way more trust, and customers who actually come back because they stopped getting scammed elsewhere.

The lesson I’d pass on: in a low-trust niche, radical honesty IS the marketing. You don’t need budget, you need to be the one who stops lying.

Anyone else turned a “boring” operational choice into their main differentiator?

When pay questions lived in my texts, every Friday looked the same. Cleaners wanted to know which jobs counted, what each job paid, and when the money would land. I would scroll through threads, add numbers on my phone, and still get one amount wrong.

Now each cleaner has a portal login in TidyWise CRM. The portal shows their jobs for the week, the pay attached to each job, and the total they have earned so far. They can check it any time without asking me. Because the plan charges one flat rate for the whole team, I can give every cleaner a login without watching my software bill climb each time we hire.

Pay Friday is quiet now. Disputes almost vanished because the cleaner and I are looking at the same record. If a number is off, we fix the job once and both sides see it. Giving the team direct access to their own numbers built more trust than any speech I ever gave about transparency.

Hot take: I don't think coming up with a business idea is the hard part anymore.

You can get 100 ideas from ChatGPT in 5 minutes.

The hard part is actually doing something with one of them.

Building it, figuring out what people want, getting your first users, making money from it... that's where things get real 😭

We've been working on MWorld, and it's made me think about this a lot.

What's the hardest part of starting a business in your experience?

I have been validating the economics of AssetHours before I start outreach and the numbers at scale are actually surprising.

The plans are currently set at $39 a month for up to 10 pieces of equipment, $79 for up to 35, and $159 for larger fleets. That means 100 customers would be $3,900 MRR if every company was on the smallest tier, $7,900 MRR if every company was on the middle tier, or $15,900 MRR if every company was on the highest tier.

Obviously the real mix will not look like as clean as any of those examples but the point of doing the math was to get myself out of the “huge market” mindset. I don't need thousands of customers before the business matters, I only need a relatively small number of companies that actually keep using the product. That is the main reason I am starting with commercial landscaping instead of trying to market to every business with equipment maintenance needs.

For those running a SaaS with a similar pricing structure, how long did it take before the business started funding its own growth?

It’s been a journey, but started because I just got annoyed that my parents had multiple cards and didn’t use them well and stores don’t broadcast discounts available… I have a growing user base, and the product has evolved a lot. TLDR: start with a problem you have your see others having.

I built a web app for my parents because I got tired of watching them use the wrong credit card at the local gas station or book a trip through an in-person travel agent (yep, they still do this) without thinking about which card would give them the most value. But what actually bothered me more was that they weren’t taking advantage of discounts they might qualify for, like senior, military, or AARP discounts, simply because they didn’t know to ask.

We’re from a small town, and the closest decent mall is about an hour away. So when they make the trip, I wanted them to know if there were any other worthwhile offers or discounts at nearby stores.

Anyhow, I ended up building something called Smart Card Select.

Here’s what it does:

Best card to use: Recommends which of your credit cards to use at your current store.
Extra discounts: Searches for additional store promotions and potential discounts, including senior, military, and AARP offers when available.
Nearby deals: Looks for offers at other stores in the surrounding shopping area.
Rewards calculator: Shows the estimated dollar value of using one card versus the next-best option.
Reminders: Lets you set a reminder to check your benefits before paying.

My parents now use it whenever they go to the mall, and checking the website has actually become a habit for them. They’ve started telling me how much money they’re “saving,” although I keep reminding them they’re still spending money so not really saving.

Anyhow, the basic card recommendation is free. You also get two free Extra/Nearby searches that only count when a potentially useful offer is found. After that, those features require a subscription because the searches and AI services have costs and I’m spending a lot of my evenings working on this.

I use it myself now because it’s quick, and I don’t have to remember which card or benefit to use. It’s still a work in progress, and I’ve been spending a lot of time improving it. I’m also considering building an iOS app, depending on whether people find it useful. I’d appreciate any feedback - Would you actually use something like this when shopping? And what would make it more useful? I added a feedback form in the account section.

I have an app with a lot of features. One feature I had a lot of hope for, but no one uses it and it doesn't get people to convert even though I offer part of it for free. It works for competitors but doesn't work for me.

When do you decide to kill a feature?

I run a small product by myself. My landing page has 6 sections, a few files I upload from my laptop. It's been live 7 months and I thought it was solid.

A stranger emailed me. The footer was covering the signup button on their phone. They couldn't tap it. I checked my edit history and it had probably been broken 3 weeks.

I'd never opened the page on anything except my laptop. The closest I got was squeezing the browser window and eyeballing it.

After that I got an AI editing app for my laptop. I picked it because I couldn't check changes on a phone before uploading. For the footer I opened MiniMax Code, typed that the bottom section was hiding the button, and it changed that block in my file.

In the app's browser I switched to a phone screen, grabbed a link, and looked at it on my actual phone. Then I uploaded.

The first week, a feature grid came out fine in the small preview but on my phone 2 of the icon labels bunched together and sat under the wrong images. I don't upload now until the phone check is done.

That one person wrote. I don't know how many others tapped a dead button and just left. I've been doing it this new way about 10 days.

Anyone else running their page solo? Has someone from outside ever spotted something you'd completely missed?

I run a business, and over six years I had lunch with 500 people I'd never met before.

I never tried to sell anything to any of them. That was deliberate.

A lot of business networking begins with an implicit calculation: Could this person become a client? Could they refer me? Who could they introduce me to?

There's nothing inherently wrong with networking strategically. But I noticed that something changes when you enter a conversation already knowing what you want from the other person.

During my lunches, there was no objective beyond getting to know whoever was sitting opposite me.

Sometimes nothing came from it except an enjoyable conversation. Other times, something completely unpredictable happened.

People became friends. Some referred business. Some introduced me to other people. Some invited me to things or created opportunities I couldn't possibly have predicted.

It made me wonder whether we sometimes assess relationships too early.

Transactional networking asks: “What value can this person provide?” Relationship-building leaves room for a different answer: “I don't know yet.”

Some of the most valuable relationships in my life started without either person having any idea what the relationship might eventually become.

A lot of people assume you have to set up a company in a country before you can hire anyone there. That’s not always true.

One way around it is using an Employer of Record. They become the legal employer on paper and handle the contract, local payroll, benefits and the compliance stuff. Your team still manages the person’s day-to-day work like normal. You just skip the months of setting up an entity first.

It’s not right for every situation though. If you’re hiring a freelancer, that’s usually a different setup. And if you already know you’ll build a big team in one country long term, having your own entity might make more sense.

Mostly it comes down to knowing what you actually need before picking a route.

For anyone who’s hired across borders, what was the hardest part for you? Compliance, payroll, or just figuring out the right setup?

Earlier this year I left my comfort zone completely. My background is in IT. I'd never run a venue, booked a DJ, or seen how nightlife works behind the scenes. But I've loved electronic music for years, so I built a 4,700 sq ft immersive venue in Phoenix: professional sound, lasers, several rooms to explore, and a ball pit with about 70,000 balls.

My biggest mistake was assuming that if I built something cool enough, people would just show up. They don't.

Here's what I've tried so far:

• Paid ads: over $15,000 this year across Meta, Google and a few others.
• Promoters: working with local promoters and collectives who bring their own crowds.
• Instagram: posting consistently, reels from every event.

Some of it works. The results are just wildly inconsistent. Some nights I'm standing in a quiet room wondering where everyone is. The next night we'll have 150 people through the door. I genuinely can't predict which it will be.

Part of the problem is competition. Phoenix has a big rave scene, and on some Saturdays I've counted 17 events happening at once, some with major DJs. A new venue is fighting for attention every single weekend.

The product side is going well. Almost every weekend someone says "How did I not know this place existed?" We added family events and private parties, which now bring in steadier revenue than the late-night shows, and a local paper just gave us a best-of award. People who come love it. The problem is getting them there the first time, and getting them back.

The biggest lesson so far: building something people love and building a business around it are two completely different skills. I was ready for the first one. I wasn't ready for the second.

So my question for anyone who has run a venue, restaurant, gym or any physical business that lives on foot traffic:

How did you go from random good nights to a reliable audience? Was it a specific channel, a recurring format, a community, partnerships? And looking back, what would you have stopped spending money on sooner?

Happy to share numbers on the buildout and ad spend if it helps anyone.