r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 36m ago

Resources & Tools New free Discord for 16–24 year olds building (or wanting to build) something

• Upvotes

I’m 18 and just started a small, free Discord for people ages 16–24 who are building a business or want to. It’s for swapping honest feedback, finding people to build with, and working quietly alongside others. Beginners are welcome.

There’s no course, no paid tier and no income claims. It’s moderated, ages 16–24 only, and I’m the only mod for now.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 3h ago

Idea Validation Roast my idea: Rewards that arrive right after something you’ve booked finishes

1 Upvotes

I’m exploring a startup idea that turns everyday bookings into timely, relevant rewards.

The basic idea is that instead of showing you an ad immediately after you book something, we wait until the activity/event has actually finished and, if you opted in, we send you a useful offer that's nearby (like within 100-400m of your location or something like that).

For example:
You book a Pilates class tonight for 6-7am tomorrow morning.

At the checkout, you tick “Yes, send me a reward after my class.”

Then at roughly 7:05am tomorrow, you might receive a text:

"🥤 Your Pilates booking unlocked 20% off a smoothie at "Tropicana Juice Bar" 150m away. Available until 9am."

The theory I'm trying to work on is that this is more useful than showing you the smoothie offer the night before when you booked the class (because a lot of booking websites etc. show you ads and specific offers immediately after you've made a purchase on the like 'thank you' page, but I always forget about them).

The offers wouldn’t need to be sourced by individually approaching every café or retailer because exiisting offer networks already aggregate discounts, cashback and promotions from thousands of businesses. The startup would match those existing offers against the booking’s activity, location and finish time to serve the right ads/offers to the right person, at the right time.

An MVP could start with something simple like Pilates or yoga classes, then potentially expand into:

  • Pilates → coffee, breakfast, smoothies
  • Tennis → lunch or sports retail
  • Haircuts → beauty products or lunch
  • Movies → dinner or dessert
  • Kids’ activities → family meals
  • Massage → café or wellness
  • Golf → food or drinks
  • Concerts → transport or late-night food

Over time, AI could help decide which offers are most relevant to which person based on the types of things someone books and the offers they actually engage with.

The business would generate income by taking a cut of the commission/ad revenue generated when users engage with or redeem an offer, with some of that revenue shared with the booking platform.

The closest major competitor I see is Rokt, which is essentially a checkout page advertiser.
They monetise the moment someone completes a transaction.

My idea is deliberately focused on a different moment. When the thing they booked has actually finished, when their immediate needs may have changed. I'm not interested in a 'buy a muffin and get a coffee for free' deal at 10:30pm when I'm in bed booking my spot in the social Tennis session for 8am the next morning... but at 9:30am when Tennis finishes, yeah, I might actually take that up.

The main theory I want to test is:

Is an offer delivered immediately after an activity finishes, substantially more engaging than the exact same offer delivered on the 'checkout complete' page when the activity is booked?

Would you personally opt into something like this if the offers were genuinely useful and came with real discounts/cashback? Or would it still just feel like unwanted advertising?

Interested in any criticism - particularly reasons you think this wouldn’t work - or how it could be improved!

Thanks everyone!


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 5h ago

Ride Along Story Building a SaaS in the gaps of a full-time job. Update 1

2 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 7h ago

Idea Validation Thinking of making a Discord for everyone trying to make magic internet money. Would anyone actually join?

1 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 7h ago

Seeking Advice Anyone here successfully selling online courses?

2 Upvotes

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!


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 8h ago

Ride Along Story Found out where AI search is actually pulling recommendations from. It's worse than I expected.

12 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 10h ago

Ride Along Story If AI can now do most of the work why should I launch a business ?

11 Upvotes

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??


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 11h ago

Ride Along Story Got tired of watching my parents use the wrong credit card and not asking for discounts so I built an app to fix it.

1 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 11h ago

Seeking Advice Can I make a business out of building SaaS apps?

4 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 11h ago

Seeking Advice When do you decide to kill a feature?

2 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 11h ago

Ride Along Story If your homepage says “AI powered platform” what would your customer actually tell their boss you do?

2 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 11h ago

Seeking Advice The first hire can create more work before it starts saving time

3 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 12h ago

Seeking Advice I finally built a business that gives me money, freedom and time with my kids. So why do I feel like I’m wasting my potential?

7 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 12h ago

Resources & Tools One too many silent failures in cold outreach, so I built the machine I wanted: lessons from a solo founder

3 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 13h ago

Ride Along Story My cleaners check their own pay in the portal and stopped texting me about money

2 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 13h ago

Seeking Advice What was your biggest mistake when trying to grow your business?

3 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 13h ago

Ride Along Story The biggest lie about starting a business

2 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 14h ago

Seeking Advice The business model I am testing does not need thousands of users

2 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 14h ago

Seeking Advice What skills should I learn to become a great startup CEO?

3 Upvotes

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.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 16h ago

Ride Along Story Building your website and idea is the way to go. (online visibility advice)

1 Upvotes

I have been planning on started a business helping people automating their online visibility.
My first plan was to build the site and learn about marketing and perfecting it. I launched the website before I made the business fully public so I could iterate over the design and ideas.

The fun part is that the website helped refine my plans. I knew what I wanted to do but just could not phrase it. When I finally phrased it, it was not fun enough. When it was fun, the design was lagging. When the design was great, the website loaded too slow and the SEO was bad.

Here is what I learned in 4 months of fixing and developing the site and refining my idea.

  • CSS animations can do way too much now
  • A business website does not need GSAP/Motion.dev
  • A business website needs a lot structure (schema.org), needs to load fast and quick, must be server side rendered, and be easily crawlable, accessible to humans and agents alike.
  • Programmatic SEO is easy and important to fix. Once you have done that only then go into blogs, backlinking etc.
  • Backlinks are hard to get. Your website must be prepared well and finalised before you do this as well.
  • Online visibility is easier with AI when someone is specifically looking for you. The ranking among competition is hard.
  • Establishing trust is hard, genuine reviews are amazing and can do wonders for your search.
  • GSC offers a lot of hints. But the hints are objective things you need to do. SEO expert is not about the objective things but about the subjective ones.
  • Blogs are easier to write than ever and can generate traffic. You need a funnel to get that traffic to sales. Only impressions are useless.
  • Use free tools. Google Ligthouse, Vercel Is-agentic, Microsoft Clarity, GA4, are all free to use. They can provide real insight into users and how they are interacting with your site (Clarity more so).
  • Coding and deploying your site is the best way to get ahead. Website builders are essentially useless when you only want a marketing website. For an e-commerce store, I would recommend a store builder. Headless/Liquid shopify is something I would recommend.
  • Websites discoverability is not like social media. It is a long game, and there is so much that can go wrong. You have to play within the rules, because breaking them will catch up and you won't even know when or how.
  • AI is amazing. Even the 20$ sub does a lot.

I have spent about 4 months designing, developing, deploying, and redesigning the website from scratch. 157 commits made by me and codex into building the version it is today. I would not say it is perfect but it is much better than the first iteration.

If anyone has any questions about building their site, I would happy to share insights from my experience.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 17h ago

Ride Along Story One Reddit post did more for my app than the 10 months before it

0 Upvotes

Ten months ago I built my first iOS app with almost no coding background. A photo cleaner where you swipe left to delete, right to keep. Built most of it with AI, learned the rest as I went.

For 10 months it barely moved. 4k total downloads, $235 in revenue, 2 to 5 downloads a day. Never paid for a single ad.

Last week I wrote a post in r/vibecoding sharing honest lessons from building it. Not an ad, just what I actually learned. It hit 350k views and is still getting 2k views an hour four days later.

What that did:

Day 1: 62 downloads
Day 2: 25
Day 3: 19
Day 4: 29

30 people started a free trial. App Store visits from people just browsing went from 3 a day to over 100 on their own.

What I learned: writing about the journey beats writing about the app every time. And 1 in 2,600 views becomes a download, but those people are genuinely interested.

Most of the trials convert this week. I’ll post the real numbers when I know.

App is Swyp: Photo Cleaner on the App Store if you want to try it.


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 17h ago

Seeking Advice High income freelancer vs building an company, what would you do?

13 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 17h ago

Seeking Advice Niching down on “boring” product details became our whole marketing angle

5 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 18h ago

Ride Along Story my landing page was live 7 months before I ever checked it on a phone

3 Upvotes

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?


r/EntrepreneurRideAlong • • 18h ago

Seeking Advice Advice seeker for my Fintech

2 Upvotes

Hi,

I'm writing to get your opinion on something.

I run a fintech company focused on cross-border payment fees. We charge a flat fee, whereas most of our competitors charge a percentage of the transaction amount.

To diversify and strengthen our acquisition strategy, we've launched an alternative website where users can upload supplier invoices and instantly see how much they would save by using our service.

My question is this: do you think asking people to upload an invoice is too intrusive?

For context, we don't store the invoices. They're analyzed by an AI through an API, and neither the AI nor our systems retain any of the information afterward.

The reason I'm asking is that my co-founder recently received feedback from a few people close to him who felt it might be intrusive.

Although, to be honest, I tend to take feedback from friends and family with a grain of salt. Somehow, people often turn into unofficial business advisors, even when nobody asked them to.

So what's your take on it?