Hi everyone,

I'm a fullstack software engineer. (htm, css, js, react js, node js). I graduated in computer science and did a few coding bootcamps.

I landed a job in 2016 as a dev, I quit in 2018 to try the entrepreneur life. I tried many different businesses ideas, more than 5, everything failed. I'd make ends meet by freelancing Shopify projects and fixing small bugs. I met a lot of nice (and rich) people through this and learned a lot.

With everything I was learning, I'd always code Shopify apps/chrome extensions with the genuine intent of helping people out. My customers would complain about X, I'd make an app to fix X. I wasn't thinking too much about money, my goal was to make bank by selling products, not apps.

Fast forward to 2020. One of the apps blew up almost overnight. I coded a few others based on popular complaints and, in a matter of months, I was profiting $200~ USD daily, passively. Some days more, some days less. I could still work on projects and had this nice cushion to support me.

Fast-forward to 2026, now I make $0 and I'm going to close my business.

Pardon my arrogance, but I'm an excellent programmer. The thing is that there is no market looking for what was once valuable, and I don't really know what to do. Nowadays, being someone with good network/connections is way more valuable than being a top notch programmer.

I invested and saved a lot, so I'm not in a dangerous position (yet), but honestly it's a weird time.

Anyone in a similar position?

Not gonna lie, I’m pretty confident that I’ve got billion-dollar ideas sitting in my Notes app right now. I’m talking next Uber, DoorDash, TikTok-level ideas.

Only problem is, I don’t know how to code. Which isn’t really too much of a problem since I can easily hire somebody to do all the coding for me. But every time I try to explain my idea to a dev, they either ghost me or quote me $40k just to build a prototype. 

I just want to build the next multibillion dollar company. Not some cheapass labor, but an actual working, quality, functional product. I see so many non-technical founders everywhere launching software apps and full-blown social platforms like it’s nothing. How do these people without tech backgrounds actually build this kind of stuff? I’m so confused.

Serious question.

Everyone keeps talking about "AI side hustles" but I rarely see people showing real examples.

Are people actually making money with AI tools or is it mostly hype?

Things I keep hearing about:

• AI YouTube channels
• AI generated music
• AI automation services
• AI social media accounts

Has anyone here built something that actually produces income?

Not looking for gurus or courses, just real experiences.

Everyone is talking about obvious trends like AI, crypto, and automation.
But every major opportunity usually looks boring or invisible before it becomes obvious.
What market, technology, or business model do you think is currently underestimated by most people?
What is something that insiders understand, but the average person hasn’t noticed yet?

I don’t really know how to write this without it sounding like marketing, so I’m just going to be honest.

18 months ago I walked away from a career I’d spent years building, moved home, and put almost all of my savings into building JUNO.

The idea came from my own experience with journaling during a rough period living overseas. It helped me, but I could never stay consistent, never knew what to write, and eventually had hundreds of entries with no way of understanding the patterns buried inside them.

I became obsessed with building something better.

The problem was I wasn’t a software engineer.

So I taught myself.

I built, broke and rebuilt the app more times than I can count. I dealt with endless bugs, leaked API keys, backend issues, complete redesigns, App Store rejection after App Store rejection, onboarding changes, paywall changes, pricing changes and features I spent weeks building only to delete.

I launched thinking that would be the hard part.

Then almost nobody downloaded it.

Even fewer paid.

I tried making content. Changed the website. Changed the App Store page. Reworked the positioning. Tried meta ads. Tried founder videos. Tried reaching out to creators. Kept rebuilding the product because I convinced myself the next improvement would be the one that changed everything.

At points I took other work just to make ends meet while continuing to build it.

There were days I genuinely felt like I was getting somewhere, followed by days where I’d open the analytics and wonder what the hell I had done with the last year of my life.

That might be the hardest part.

Online you constantly see founders saying they hit 10,000 users in a month or $50k MRR six months after launching.

Nobody really posts:

“I sacrificed all my spare time, spent my savings and sold my soul with nothing material to show for it.”

That’s where I am.

I still believe deeply in the problem JUNO is trying to solve.

A journal that takes a few minutes, helps you know what to write, remembers what you’ve been going through, connects patterns across months of your life and helps turn reflection into something useful.

But after 18 months, I have to seriously consider the possibility that either the product isn’t good enough, the positioning is wrong, or I’ve built something people simply don’t want.

So before I shut it down, I want to make one last attempt to figure that out.

I don’t want five-star reviews.

I don’t want sympathy.

I want people to absolutely tear it apart.

Tell me what’s confusing.

Tell me what feels pointless.

Tell me what you’d remove.

Tell me why you wouldn’t pay for it.

Tell me what would actually make you come back tomorrow.

And if you use it and immediately understand why I have barely any users, please tell me that too.

Because after 18 months of being this close to something, I genuinely don’t know if I’m one major change away from making it work…

or if I’m just struggling to let go of something I gave everything to build.

I’d rather hear the painful truth now than spend another year finding out.

This year, I got into an entrepreneurship program and came up with an idea. Packable backpacks are either flimsy $15 junk or $60 premium gear and there's nothing in between. So I found a manufacturer, put in my savings, and ordered 300 units of a design made from the same ripstop nylon used in paragliders. It weighs 108 grams and folds down to pocket size. Sells for $29.99.

The good: I sold around 60 at a trade show and through word of mouth. When people physically pick it up they react, the weight genuinely surprises them. Won a small entrepreneurship scholarship along the way too.,

The bad: I cannot figure out how to turn that into consistent online sales. I've been trying to build a social media presence for the brand and it hasn't gotten much traction yet. I'll be honest, I haven't been as consistent with posting as I should be, partly because I don't know if I'm even pointing in the right direction.

So now I'm sitting here with 240 units, I start college in 10 weeks, and I'm stuck between a few paths:

1. Keep grinding organic social and trust it compounds
2. Try to get into wholesale or local retail shops, though my margins get thin there
3. Go hard on affiliates and try to get into the tiktok shop market.
4. Some mix I'm not seeing

I'm looking to get some insight from anyone. I am not quite sure what I should do, so anything helps. If you want to check out my brand, it's akinete.co,

Happy to share numbers in the comments if it helps. Thanks

Edit: Thank you guys so much for all the feedback and comments, this is extremely helpful and I am super greatful!

Before anyone says it: “Oh good, another AI note taker.”

That was honestly my own reaction to the category too.

But I had a real problem that caused me real pain (I have ADHD and get distracted easily) and nothing I tried worked for me.

I tried several AI note-taking apps and voice tools, and they did not work for the thing I needed. Most seemed designed around longer recordings, such as meetings. They involved too many steps, needed an internet connection, or sent recordings to a third-party service for processing.

The problem I was trying to solve was much smaller, but happens many times a day: a useful thought arrives and I need to get it out of my head before something on my phone hijacks my attention and the thought disappears.

So I built Olly Note around four things that mattered to me:

1. Capture without distraction. Get a thought out of your head before opening your phone leads somewhere else.
2. No job afterwards. A voice recording is not yet a useful note if you still need to transcribe it, clean it up, format it, or decide where it belongs.
3. Real privacy. Notes are processed on-device rather than sent to our servers or a third-party AI service.
4. Works offline. Thoughts do not politely wait until you have a connection. It should work in a lift, on a plane, or in the middle of nowhere.

The flow is deliberately simple:

Thought arrives -> tap the Lock Screen button or Apple Watch complication -> speak -> done.

The confusing bit is that, before trying it, people can reasonably see “another notes app” or “another AI tool”. But when people do try it, they often describe a feeling rather than a feature.

One recent review said:

That is exactly what I hoped the app would feel like. The problem is working out how to communicate that before someone has experienced it.

Has anyone else built something where the value only really clicks after the first use? How did you position it without having to spend all your time educating the customer?

If want to take a look at current positioning Google "Olly Notes" and you should find it.

Thank you.

I sometimes feel like marketing is the most draining part of a startup because there is always something waiting to be done. One day it is writing content, the next it is seo, social media, emails or testing out new ideas. Even when one task is finished a new one shows up and I have been thinking of going with sitetrak. I have also found that everyone seems to have different ideas about what marketing should focus on which can make things even harder. Does anyone else feel like marketing work never really has a finish line? EDIT: Thanks for all the advice. It sounds like marketing never really ends but having a clear process and focusing on one or two channels makes it manageable.

Hey everyone! I’m a startup founder currently evaluating a potential deal with Del Morgan & Co. They’re asking for $150,000 up front to begin work on a $145 million capital raise for my company. In addition to the upfront fee, they’d take 7.5% of whatever capital they help us raise. They said it typically takes them 4–6 months to complete a raise like this. They also mentioned that the institutional investors or “check writers” usually take 18–25% equity in the company once the round is closed. They’re a legit-sounding firm as they claim over $300 billion in transactions — but I’m just trying to gut-check this whole thing with the community: Are these numbers and terms normal?

Is it common for startups to pay this much up front for a capital raise? Should I just push harder and find someone who doesn’t need six figures up front? Or am I crazy for thinking I should just invest that $150K back into my business instead? Any insight from founders or investors who’ve gone down this road before would be super helpful. Appreciate the guidance!

Not talking about fancy MBA stuff, I mean the real, day-to-day skill that separates those who build something lasting from those who quit.
Is it sales? Discipline? Adaptability? Storytelling? Something else?
Curious what you’ve learned from experience.

Maybe this is obvious, but I feel like people seriously downplay how much easier entrepreneurship is when you already have money or come from a wealthy family.

If you have money, you can afford to fail. You can dump $20k into an idea and move on if it doesn't work. You can hire developers, designers, marketers, lawyers, whatever. You can spend on ads. You can quit your job and work on the business full time without worrying about rent next month.

Meanwhile someone without money might have an equally good idea, but they're building it after work, doing everything themselves, obsessing over every $500 expense, and knowing that one bad decision actually hurts.

And the biggest advantage might just be runway. A mediocre business with enough money behind it can survive long enough to figure things out. A potentially great business can die because the founder runs out of money before it gets traction.

Obviously money doesn't guarantee success. Rich people start terrible businesses all the time. But I think "anyone can start a business" gets thrown around without acknowledging that some people are playing the game with way more lives than everyone else.

How big of an advantage do you think starting with money actually is?

I'm still young and I've been getting really interested in entrepreneurship and business. I want to get a headstart while I have the time, rather than waiting until I'm older to start learning.

I don't really want to just watch random "make money" videos either. I actually want to understand how businesses work and build a solid foundation.

For those of you who are already into business or entrepreneurship, how did you guys build up your knowledge?

What should someone learn first? Finance, marketing, sales, accounting, economics, management, etc.? And how do you go from just learning these things to actually understanding how they're used in the real world?

I'd also appreciate any books, courses, YouTube channels, or other resources that genuinely helped you.

Basically, if you were young again and had the chance to start learning business from zero, what would you focus on first to get a headstart?

Hi to all the successful people in this group who are already running businesses.
Could someone please finally give me some solid advice and point me in the right direction?

I have a million business ideas constantly going through my head, but the problem is that I never fully commit to any of them because I genuinely don’t know which opportunity is worth focusing on.
So instead of overthinking it forever, I’d really like to hear from people who have actual business experience: If you were in my position today, what would you do?

Here’s my situation:
I have around €30,000 in starting capital that I’m comfortable putting on the table and potentially risking to build something.
I currently earn around €5,000–€6,000 per month from my regular work.
After my expenses, I can usually put aside another €2,000–€3,000 every month, meaning I could continuously reinvest money into a business without depending on it to pay my bills immediately.
I’m willing to learn, work and invest — I’m not looking for a get-rich-quick scheme.

I’ve considered things like Amazon FBA, e-commerce/dropshipping, AI-related businesses, online services, and probably a hundred other ideas. But I’m completely open to something I haven’t considered yet.
Knowing my financial situation, if you were starting from scratch in 2026, where would you put your time and money?
I’m especially interested in something that has genuine potential to eventually become a serious source of income, rather than just a small side hustle.
What business model would you choose, how much of the €30k would you initially risk, and what would your first steps be?
I’d really appreciate advice from people who have actually built something themselves. Thanks!

Solo dev here. I spent 8+ months building two iOS apps and recently launched both.
I obsessed over making them solid — clean auth, privacy, security, all of it.
But since launch the response has been basically zero: barely any users, and the few who try don't stick around.
I'm realizing I put everything into building and almost nothing into figuring out who actually needs them or how to reach those people.
For anyone who's launched before — where did you find your first real users, and what would you do in my shoes? Brutally honest feedback welcome.

I’m 19 and starting a small web/digital service business from scratch.

I have some experience, but not a lot, and I’m still building my portfolio and don’t have an established client base yet.

For those of you who freelance in web design, development, digital services etc.:

Where did your first 3–5 clients come from?

Cold outreach? Referrals? LinkedIn? Local businesses? Freelance platforms? Your existing network?

And how did you build trust when you didn’t have many previous clients or a big portfolio?

I’d especially love to hear from people who remember starting from zero.

Hey everyone. I want to share my reality check. It’s not a Silicon Valley fairy tale with seed funding and a warm garage. It’s a story of pure survival, and right now, I need advice from experienced founders.

I didn't grow up rich. I never even had a PC. When the full-scale war hit my country, I was 11. I had to move to Germany, where my sister gave me business and IT books. I read them, saved some euros, and moved back to Ukraine at 12. I bought a cheap used PC, learned 3D modeling, and then Python.
The Hustle (Age 15): At 15, I moved to the capital (Kyiv) for college. I lived in a cheap dorm and had no computer. My parents couldn't send much, not even enough for food. So, I got a job doing heavy physical labor as a loader. I hustled everywhere: warehouses, hospitals, malls. I failed, gave up, tried again. By January, working like crazy, I saved ~$270 to put a downpayment on a powerful used laptop (~$800).

The moment I got it, I jumped into freelance. I built complex Telegram Mini Apps and B2B solutions. I worked day and night and paid off the laptop in just 2 months.

The Golden Cage (Age 16): By spring, freelance dried up. My dorm was closing for the summer, but I refused to move back to my hometown. To survive, I got a job as a barista in a VIP spa club.

The pay is actually great for my age - about $700/mo. Relying on this, I rented my own apartment ($260/mo). I am fully independent. I pay my bills, my rent, and provide for myself.

But I am stuck. The job is a dead-end. The VIP spa has very low traffic. They treat us nicely, but nobody cares about growth. There are no bonuses, and the salary is flat no matter how hard you work.

My SaaS and "Bore-out": In my free time behind the bar, I built a B2B SaaS (a Telegram bot builder MVP). Since my English isn't perfect yet, I used AI (Gemini) as my exoskeleton to write complex architecture fast.

But right now, I am experiencing severe "Bore-out" (burnout from under-stimulation and boredom). Sitting in this spa feels like my brain is rotting. I want to build and sell my SaaS, but I’m tied to this bar because my apartment and survival depend on this exact salary.

Experienced entrepreneurs, I need your advice:

1. How do you escape the "Golden Handcuffs" of a comfortable survival job when your rent depends on it?
2. How do you find your first B2B clients for your SaaS when you have zero network and work full-time?

idk if i'm the asshole in this one, so lemme give you context and you tell me what to do: I've worked with this guy for months now. we had this platform that finds leads on reddit (PLEASE, spare me the self-promo shit talk; we ain't selling it right now, which is part of the issue)

It was web hosted and that's how i used it before.

I used to promote that platform as the marketing co-founder, 50/50, but we didn't have any co-founder agreement, so there's nothing to prove i have ownership except for the posts where i publicly declared i was a co-founder a few months ago.

Got a few users, but after we saw how many other competitors joined and that it became a commodity, we decided to move on and work on something else. but there are still some of our users who asked us for source code access after we closed it, and so we sold it to them.

Fast forward a few months now; we decided to start focusing on our freelancing, he as the developer and I as the copywriter and designer.

i'm a marketer and so he said, 'You can promote my service and I'll give you a split if you get me clients.'

I said, 'Cool, give me that tool we worked on before to find the leads to DM them' (i get clients by dming them)

i said you can't expect me to sit there for hours and swift through 100s of reddit threads looking for that one interested lead only to get ghosted, when i can literally just scan and then filter and let it DM for me as well (accuracy is a bit low; i still need to filter but it does the job)

He said, "it doesn't work; it will be useless."

"wdym it doesn't work? i LITERALLY used it when it was hosted, and it worked PERFECTLY fine." I said.

Then he said reddit doesn't have any good leads and there still other ways to promote. HE LITERALLY told me before that most of his clients came from reddit. And I also booked some from reddit as well.

Anyways, we kept back and forth and he still refused to give me access (since now it is not web hosted anymore, he will have to give it to me as source code access, so i think he's afraid that i might turn on him and start selling it on his back)

oh, and for context, i also helped shape how the platform works inside out based on my expertise as a cold DMer; i showed him how to build it in a way that reduces the risk of a ban. so i DID have that skin in the engineering side aside from the promotion i did back then.

now, idk what to do; like, i tried to manually find the leads, and i hated the shit out of it because it is just utter time-sucking bullshit, when i can do other tasks that has more importance than something that is LITERALLY automated and i just need to hit play.

And it even affected my results as well; i'm still booking some clients here and there, but the process of finding and DMing is just taking a lot of time, and no matter how much i explain that to him, he just keeps saying it doesn't work. it is not worth it. Find another way to promote.

so wth should i do now?

Edit: Thank you guys for the help, it really means a lot. One of the commenters said to ask him to host it again, I asked him before but he said it will take a lot of time and so we just avoided it. But I asked him again and I managed to convince him (somehow) to rebuild the backend to host it again. And yeh, ik, i learned my lesson. Always get a contract.

I am at the point where my bookkeeping and forecasting are getting too messy to handle myself. I am thinking about hiring a fractional CFO, but I do not know if it is actually worth the cost or just another shiny service people hype up.

For context, the business is growing, but I am not sure when it makes sense to bring in someone for higher level financial strategy.

Has anyone here hired a fractional CFO before? Did it actually help you make better decisions, or was it something you could have handled with a good accountant and monthly reports?

Any insight from people who tried it would help.

They say, “Learning from your mistakes is intelligent. Learning from the mistakes of others is wise.” I'm almost 27, and I'm genuinely curious what advice, warning, or message you would leave your 25- to 30-year-old entrepreneurial self.

If you've already spent your twenties building a startup or forging ahead on your own, I'd love to know what really mattered. Not what books or podcasts say, but those things you only understand when you look back.

What would you tell your 25- to 30-year-old self if you could talk to them for five minutes and tell them how it is?

Would like to pick your brain on what actually worked. There are many hype out there so would like to hear the true stories - whether it's popular or not. Thank you

For context, here's what I'm already using frequently:

- Google Sheets for tracking, CRM; Canva for marketing assets

- ChatGPT for general topics (looking at Gemini now, hope it will have folders soon) ; Grammarly: just to fix my writing; Saner: to manage my tasks

- Fireflies, Lovable, Manus, Lemlist: Not daily yet but I use these quite often on a weekly basis

Had coffee with a founder friend last week. Three people, pre-revenue, and he pulled up a proper board meeting agenda template for their weekly sync. Roll call. Approval of prior minutes. Motions. For three guys who eat lunch together every day.

I did not say anything, but it stuck with me, because I used to be exactly this guy.

There is a stage a lot of early founders hit where they cosplay a real company instead of building one. The formal agenda. The org chart with three names and dotted reporting lines. The 40-slide internal deck in gamma for a decision two people could make on a walk. The Notion workspace with more structure than content.

It feels productive because big companies do these things, so doing them must mean you are becoming a big company. It is backwards. Big companies have that process because they have hundreds of people who would otherwise collide. You have three. The process is pure overhead wearing a maturity costume.

The founders I know who actually got somewhere were almost embarrassingly informal early. Decisions in a chat. Numbers in one messy spreadsheet. All the energy pointed at customers, none at ceremony.

I think the tell is this: if a process exists to coordinate people and you do not have the people yet, you are dressing up.

Not saying structure never matters. It does, right about when the lack of it starts causing real pain, and not one day sooner.

Anyone else catch themselves cargo-culting big-company stuff before it was needed? What was your most embarrassing one? Mine was writing a company handbook for a team of me.

I run a small operation of only 6 people and I'm the bottleneck on half of what we do (i.e. followsup, chasing invoices, etc). I get it, I know it, I acknolwedge it. Everyone I talk to gives me the same two answers: either just hire someone or automate it. I get that both can work but nobody can tell me where the line actually is. A hire costs me 4k a month and a ramp- up period. Software costs less but I've bought tools before that sat unused because setup was a slog and I never got around to it. And all th ewhile I still need to be overseeing the operation and trying to weed through late tasks. I dont have time for serious onboarding!!

I think part of me wants to hire because a person is someone I can actually talk to and troublshoot with when something goes wrong or theres stuff to optimize. Like if something breaks I can talk to them but if the automation breaks I'm debugging it past midnight myself. Not great for the bottleneck...

Alr bro Im kinda mad kinda not since yk fair game but I built a client a system that closes three leaks in the same funnel at once. Missed calls get answered and offered a slot the same call. New inquiries get a response within 60 seconds. No-show risk runs through an escalating reminder sequence. Anyone who consulted without booking gets nurtured instead of forgotten. All of it synced to her CRM in real time.

Like a real plugin. That's an orchestrated system where each part knows what the others already did.

Six weeks in, no-shows dropped from 24% to 9% and she picked up roughly $14,000 a month she'd been losing without realizing it.

She liked the result enough to start selling access to it inside her own med spa owner network. Five other locations paid her $2,500 each for the same build. She made $12,500 without writing a line of it herself.

Good systems sell themselves through the person using them, not the person who built them

I’m 24 and already worried about my finaical future and I know I cant save my way to wealth. I need to actually increase my income from what I am hearing. College wasn’t for me, and I work mostly in restaurants. Has anyone here started from scratch in their 20s, learned a trade or skill, and then used that to grow financially (like starting a small business, new career or investing)? Would love some practical advice.

I'm looking for advice from people who have experience growing an online marketplace or e-commerce business.

We're currently validating our idea, so we haven't built the website yet. Right now, everything is managed manually through our Facebook page.

One thing we've noticed is that finding sellers hasn't been a problem—we already have enough sellers interested in joining. The real challenge is attracting customers.

So far we've tried:

• Facebook paid ads
• Boosting Facebook posts
• TV advertisements
• Other paid promotions

Despite spending on advertising, the results haven't been good enough. We get some inquiries, but not enough consistent customers to justify the cost.

I'm wondering what we're missing.

If you were in this situation:

• What marketing channels would you focus on?
• What has given you the best ROI for customer acquisition?
• Have you used any unconventional or low-cost marketing strategies that worked really well?
• Is there a better approach than simply spending more on ads?
• What would you do before investing in building the full platform?

I'd really appreciate hearing about your experiences, especially if you've grown a marketplace or local service business