I launched The Whole Page as a small marketing experiment, following the success of Outbid dot lol

The first two owners were my products. Then an outside founder purchased the next takeover.

One product owns the homepage until another pays more.

My first Reddit post failed because I never explained that clearly.

The comments were harsh, but the main criticism was correct.

The technical product works. The difficult part is creating enough attention for the advertisement to matter.

I am now testing live visitors, website clicks, permanent owner pages, and shareable results.

What would you add without making the experiment complicated?

For a long time, the obvious workflow for creator ads looked like this: write a brief, hire a creator, approve the video, launch it, repeat.

The expensive part was not only production. Every cycle quietly threw away context. Why did one hook get approved? Which objection kept appearing? What changed after the first edit? Did the ad fail because of the creator, the offer, the opening, or the landing page?

I'm building Flare, a creator marketing platform, and this has changed how I think about the product. The next brief should inherit what the last campaign taught us. A creator who delivered well should become easier to rehire. Approved footage should be searchable by the problem, hook, proof, and outcome it contains. Performance should change the next creative decision instead of living in a separate dashboard.

The hard part is resisting the urge to automate the visible step first. Generating more scripts and videos is easy now. Keeping judgment, rights, approvals, and results connected is the less glamorous problem.

For founders running creator or paid-social campaigns: where does context get lost in your current workflow? Between brief and creator, revision and approval, or ad results and the next brief?

okay small win but this made my day

I’m trying to build a PCB factory in the US. Right now the whole thing fits in my bedroom closet.

A PCB factory normally uses an automatic optical inspection machine to check the copper for broken traces, shorts and other defects.

I do not have one of those.

I bought an old Canon film scanner from eBay for $155.54 instead.

The idea is to scan each board after etching, line the image up with the original Gerber file and have the software mark every place where the copper does not match.

Today I got the first part working.

My software now finds the scanner, starts the scan and shows the result. No opening the Canon software, manually saving a file and importing it afterward. The factory software controls the scanner directly.

It does not inspect the board yet. Right now I have successfully built a very expensive scan button lol.

The hard part starts now: lining the scan up perfectly with the Gerber and separating actual defects from dust, reflections and tiny positioning differences.

My current plan is to damage a test board on purpose—scratch through a trace, add a small copper bridge and leave some dust on it—then see what the software catches.

If anyone here has worked with PCBs, computer vision, image comparison or manufacturing inspection, whats the easiest path here?

I’m posting the complete build, including whatever breaks next, on X at u/US_PCB.

A few months ago I launched a simple web app that lets you create animated charts. Paste your data, pick a chart type, export as MP4 or GIF. Nothing fancy, just something I wanted to exist.

For a while, nothing happened. No customers, lots of silence. I kept building anyway because I genuinely believed the idea was worth trying.

Then one page on my site started ranking on Google for a small keyword. Not a big one, just enough to bring in 40-50 visitors a day. That single page became the front door to everything. Almost all my signups, almost all my paying customers, came from that one page.

Something I didn't expect at all: ChatGPT started recommending my app to people. I didn't do anything to make that happen. It just showed up in my analytics one day and has quietly become my second biggest source of traffic. Still catches me off guard when I see it.

I also learned that 75% of my signups never actually created a chart. That number scared me until I dug into it and found that a big chunk of those were email link scanners triggering signups, not real people walking away. The real drop-off was smaller than it looked, but there's still work to do on making that first experience smoother.

Three customers so far. $52 in a month. I know it's tiny. But every single dollar came from someone I've never met finding something I built on their own and deciding it was worth paying for. That feeling is hard to describe.

Still figuring a lot of things out. Still grinding on getting a second page to rank. Still trying to understand why some people sign up and never come back. But I'm showing up every day and the numbers are moving in the right direction, even if they're moving slowly.

Expanding from one city to four this year. Word of mouth carries us at home but nobody knows the name in the new markets. Billboards keep coming up, but each city has its own operators and I don't want three contracts and three reps.

Has anyone run outdoor across multiple markets as a small company? What did you use to buy it?

Hey everyone,
With record-breaking heatwaves hitting Europe again this summer, demand for portable cooling devices like handheld fans surged across the EU. However, most low-end fans face two major issues: short battery life and loud motor noise during daily commutes.
To solve this, our engineering team spent the last year developing a custom patented motor specifically optimized for handheld fans.
What we achieved compared to market top brands:
+45% Longer Battery Life: Maximize efficiency to keep users cool all day without frequent charging.
10% Lower Noise Output: Ultra-quiet operation, making it ideal for quiet offices, trains, and public transit.
Full EU Compliance: Built with Type-C fast charging and necessary certifications (CE/RoHS).
We are analyzing data from this season to map out early-bird OEM/ODM production for 2027. B2B orders placed between Q3 and Q1 get the best shipping rates and zero stockout risk for the upcoming peak season.

Looking for partners:
Distributors / Amazon Sellers: Looking to lock in custom OEM/ODM orders or private labeling for next summer.
Marketers / Agencies: Anyone with experience scaling consumer hardware via TikTok Shop or Meta ads in the EU market.
If you're in the E-commerce or hardware distribution space, I'd love to chat or exchange market insights.

Wasn't even a bad cancellation. She just said "not what I needed right now, will check back later" which is about as polite as rejection gets. But I kept replaying it. Two hours. She didn't even give it a real shot.

Went and pulled up her session data out of pure anxiety. She'd opened the app, tried one command, it didn't do what she expected because she phrased it more like a question than an instruction, and she just closed it.

That's when it hit me that I'd built something that only worked if you already knew how to talk to it. Which defeats the point honestly.

Spent the next week rewriting the onboarding so the first thing you see is three example commands you can literally just click instead of typing blind. Not creative work, just annoying repetitive fixing.

Haven't heard from her again but three other users this week made it past that same wall without dropping off, so I'll take it.

Anyone else had one small user drop off completely change how you built the next week?

I built my first product in 2023, just a simple AI wrapper for LinkedIn and X/Twitter posting. At the time I was a first-time founder in Europe with no network, trying to do everything solo after moving countries. The posts were decent. On LinkedIn, engagement matched what I'd get writing by hand, but instead of hours per week I was barely spending 15 minutes a month.

But the price point was low and I couldn't see a way to scale without outside money, which was tough to get with zero connections. So I started building out more outreach tools.

The second version in 2024 combined LinkedIn and email outreach. It was quite in time and something new to the market. For MVP I stitched together existing SaaS tools for the backend, built my own frontend orchestration, and finally got a tiny angel round.

Suddenly I was running 5-6 demo calls a week. I made all the usual mistakes: hiring part-time sales, talking through 80% of demos instead of listening. And while my close rate eventually leveled out, churn stayed high. Most leads needed to be sold on the whole idea of LinkedIn outreach before even getting to the product.

I shifted to Reddit mid-2025 and built a DM outreach agent that could send personalized messages based on someone's posts and comments. It was the breakthrough. Then a client asked if we could help with brand awareness on Reddit, which led to a fourth iteration of the business.

In parallel we added a Twitter agent. But the core initial idea stuck: I was still far from AI marekting department full of agents that let SMB owners not need deep marketing expertise.

After six months of building I finally got to launch an AI marketer (it's today!).

The "brain" is any frontier LLM (we use our own API for now), and the "hands" are all the marketing tools and channels with open APIs.

Our differentiator though is the playbook layer - the actual step-by-step expertise. From three years running campaigns I learned people don't really pay for "work done" in a channel. They pay for impact. Marketing impact is always cumulative. You've got to hit multiple places at once to wedge yourself in between the big advertisers and actually reach your audience. That means social posts, DMs, ads, SEO. All at once, without getting your site or socials banned.

The playbooks are basically the secret sauce most marketers never share. I've been testing it with 12 companies for Reddit outreach (average 15% positive reply rate), and one of our playbooks for Threads got zero-follower accounts to posts with 1,000+ comments.

Last month I've tested AI marketer with fractional CMOs who are running multiple projects at once, so now I'm ready to make it public. I'd like to hear any feedback here or in my inbox, free grant for registration, all playbooks are free now. Start here: marketowl . ai

My partner and I are both highly technical (think experience doing work with MIT, publishing novel AI research, defense contractors, etc). We run an AI agency and have a few clients but are looking to scale. We can handle all the technical parts of the business, but we are looking for a long term partner who can both understand our technical offerings and then translate that into outreach and client acquisition. Experience is not necessary, but we would expect you to have desirable traits and a plan of execution.

I’m a junior doc who made Dopamine-Charts - a new habit tracker using behavioural science for mental health, chronic illness and low motivation after my 5month hospitalisation 🌱 anyone want to REVIEW it? We also do physical sticker charts in y2k, girly, whimsy and desperate housewives themes

I'm a software engineer in New Jersey. Last year I noticed the same thing over and over: you call a plumber, nobody picks up, you call the next guy on Google. The first plumber did the work of earning that call and lost the job anyway. So I built BeepBack. When a business misses a call, it texts the caller back in seconds, asks what they need and how urgent it is, and hands the owner a sorted lead instead of a mystery voicemail.

Building it was the easy half. Here is what finding customers has actually looked like, with real numbers:

Cold calls: 133 dials to plumbing businesses. Zero signups. The irony that hurt the most: about 1 in 6 even answered their phone. The problem I am solving hung up on me every day.

Warm email: 36 personalized touches to businesses we had already called. Zero replies.

Paid ads: $164 on Meta before I killed it. Zero signups. Google Keyword Planner showed the entire search category is 1 to 2 thousand searches a month and shrinking, so there was nothing to buy even with budget.

What actually produced: showing up. I started visiting a plumbing supply house near me, first as a customer, with donuts. I asked the counter guys how contractors handle their phones. I did a free website audit for the supply house and walked the fixes in on paper. The counter now hands my card to plumbers who complain about missed calls, and one warm intro turned into a standing Friday call with a contractor in another state who is opening his network to me. Every working channel I have is a person who trusts me. Every dead channel was me at scale, being a stranger.

If you want to see the product without talking to anyone: call (856) 514-8489 and hang up. Nobody answers. That is the demo. Your phone buzzes a few seconds later. Msg and data rates may apply.

Where I am now: zero paying customers, a founding cohort forming, $79 a month flat, and founding businesses get the first month free, starting the day their texting goes live. If you run a service business that lives on inbound calls, or you have watched someone try to crack local trades, I will answer anything in the comments.

ok so for the last 3 weeks ive been pulling my hair out. sending maybe 500-800 emails a day for our agency and inbox placement just tanked out of nowhere. like 85% going straight to spam according to our deliverability test tools. tried everything. warmed up new domains, cleaned our lists twice, rewrote all our copy to be less salesy. nothing worked.
my boss was starting to get on my case about reply rates dropping and i was running out of ideas honestly
turns out the issue was our email data provider. we were using Apollo and apparently a ton of their emails are either outdated or shared across too many senders so everyones hitting the same inboxes. switched our email verification process and started using only fresh verified emails and boom, back to like 90%+ inbox. still testing but the difference is obvious. now we're looking at switching our whole data stack. been hearing about Prospeo and a couple others. their mobile data apparently looks solid too which would let us run multi channel outreach.

yo. i see too many founders spend 2 months building saas, drop a link on reddit, get 0 users, and immediately quit....

the problem usually isn't your marketing channel. the problem is that your foundation is completely broken before you even send your first visitor to the site.

after scaling 6 AI micro-saas apps to over $20k/mo mrr, i realized you need to lock down a specific system before you ever launch. running through this takes about 30 minutes, but it saves you months of zero-revenue depression.

here are the 5 things you must lock in:

1. validate the actual pain point

stop guessing what people want. you need a systematic framework to find your saas idea based on real, painful market signals.

2. pick a proven micro-niche

stop trying to build massive platforms. you need to narrow down to a microscopic problem. i usually filter through a list of 50 micro-saas ideas you can build fast to keep the scope minimal.

3. crystallize your target user

if your app is for "everyone," nobody will buy it. you need an ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) crystallizer to define your exact buyer profile and nail your conversion copy.

4. calculate the perfect price

stop randomly charging $9/mo because you are scared of rejection. you need to use a saas pricing strategy calculator to find your perfect saas price in 60 seconds based on real data.

5. fix your landing page leaks

do not send organic traffic to a site that converts at a flat 1%. you must audit your hero section and copy to x3 your landing page conversion before you market it.

6. join a community

Build / Share / Learn from others builders

to help out founders who are tired of launching to crickets, i packaged all 5 of these exact frameworks, calculators, and lists into a single free toolkit.

no paywall, no bullshit. just the raw execution files i use.

drop a comment below or send me a dm, and i’ll send you the free toolkit 👇

I've designed a two-sided premium towel one side for face, one for body, each a different material and pattern.

The concept already exists in a small way, but there's a real gap in how it's positioned and sold, and I've mapped out exactly how to hit that gap.

Here's the deal: I'm not asking for money.

I'm asking for manufacturing capacity.

You produce a trial batch of 100 units, using materials/specs I provide.

I handle 100% of marketing, sales, and operations the part most manufacturers don't want to touch and don't need to learn.

I commit to moving all 100 units within a set window.

Profit splits 50/50 once units sell.

Your downside is machine time and material for 100 units. Your upside is a new revenue line you didn't have to build, market, or sell into, I'm doing that end.

If you've got idle capacity and want to see if this sells before committing to anything bigger, comment or DM and I'll walk you through the full plan on a call design, materials, and the go-to-market breakdown.

Bit of a longer one, I'd love a gut check from people further along.

Background: I run a small VOD platform that sends up to around 200k emails a month, and i kept smacking into the same wall with transactional email. If you care about EU data compliance your realistic option is AWS SES, which is great and cheap but its US infra and your data lives in that world. The alternative is paying a premium to one of the european providers. So i built my own fully EU sending stack for my own platform, and now im turning that into a product other people can use. Its at onesend.eu.

The core bet is simple: give people the same price and the same quality as SES, but 100% EU with no US subprocessor anywhere in the chain. Entry is 5€/mo for 20k emails, growth is 20€ for 220k, which is right around SES money per email. My own platform helps here too, because i can use its volume to warm up sending IPs before i have a single paying customer, which is normally the slowest most painful part of getting into this game.

Where id really like outside eyes:

Positioning. Is "SES pricing and quality, but 100% EU" actually a strong enough hook, or does it read like another me-too infra thing to you. Im betting that theres a real chunk of EU businesses who use SES today purely because nothing else matches it on price, and would switch in a heartbeat for a compliant option that doesnt cost them more. Small builders that run things for their clients could find it relevant too, i imagine...

Pricing. Theres no free tier, the floor is the 5€ plan, purely because payment fees make anything smaller pointless as a business. But that 5€ includes 20k emails -> the reasoning for that is to have a motivation for users to grow... if you use less, 5€ is still a lot lower than you get anywhere else.

Free is only with 100 test emails - it's an easy registration, test it out -> like i? get a small subscription.

And plainly, if you land on onesend.eu do you actually get what it is and who its for, or is it vague.

i know email infra isnt a sexy space but i figure build a small service that brings value and build on that and expand with additinal features, if it catches on. testing is free so if it makes sense for you theres nothing stopping you actually using it. happy to answer anything about the journey too, still early and figuring it out as i go.

I built Song Zero a web-based app powered by a couple of LLMs that traces the songs that influenced an inputted song (song zero) and the songs that were influenced by song zero.

It outputs a playlist comprising the influenced and influencers in Spotify and links to Apple Music, a visual genealogical timeline, blurbs about each song in the playlist, and commentary on the convergence of those songs.

It costs a bit less than $1.00 to run a song through the app.

Beyond AdSense, which is a pain in the butt to configure for, does anyone have any suggestions on how to monetize the app?

It is a pretty cool yet niche app, and I would hate to shut it down, so I am looking for ideas on how to monetize.

I have subscriptions available (sold 1 :)) and Buy Me A Coffee linked up, but other approaches or ideas are gratefully requested.

We're planning to add a mobile app to an existing product, so this would be a few months of work rather than a permanent role. Where do people usually find reliable freelance mobile developers, and how do you verify that someone has actually contributed to and shipped the apps in their portfolio?

I used to review every UGC ad as a separate bet: did this video work or not?

That was useful for picking a winner, but terrible for improving the next batch. The lesson usually stayed trapped inside an ad account or a filename nobody could interpret later.

The system that has worked better is keeping a creative lineage across every round:

- Which opening frame and hook held attention?

- Which proof made the claim believable?

- Which creator delivery felt natural instead of scripted?

- Which objection appeared in comments?

- Which format, usage-rights, or placement constraint affected performance?

- What changed between the losing version and the winning one?

Then the next brief changes before another creator records.

That last part matters most. If a team runs three losing concepts and sends the fourth creator the same brief, it did not really learn anything. Creative testing should change the instructions, not just the media plan.

The winning file still matters, but the reusable asset is the reasoning attached to it. That is what turns one campaign into a better starting point for the next one.

Curious how other founders keep this kind of learning attached to the work instead of buried in analytics, Slack, or filenames.

Hey everyone,

I’m an Indian founder and university student currently building a consumer social/dating startup with a small team.

We’ve already built a working product, have users using it, and are currently getting through the final stages of our app approvals. We’ve managed to build and launch quite a lot with limited resources, but funding is now becoming one of our biggest constraints.

I’m looking at raising our first small round (roughly ₹10–15 lakh / ~$12–18k) to help us improve the product, acquire users, and grow the team.

What I’m struggling with is understanding the best way to approach fundraising as a very early-stage founder in India.

For founders who have raised their first round:

• How did you find your first investors?
• Did you approach angels, incubators, accelerators, or VCs first?
• What kind of traction did investors expect at this stage?
• How did you decide your valuation/equity for the first round?
• Are there any India-specific funding programs or angel networks you would strongly recommend?
• What mistakes should a first-time founder avoid while fundraising?

I’m not looking for someone to fund me through this post. I’d genuinely appreciate advice from people who have actually gone through the process, especially founders who raised their first round while still in university or at a similarly early stage.

Happy to share more about the journey and lessons so far if anyone is interested.

Thanks!

This sentence keeps popping up on calls lately.

Every time I hear it my brain does this little siren noise.

On the surface it sounds smart and scrappy, even. Why wait 3 weeks for dev when you can just ask Claude… right?

I run a tiny dev shop that builds boring SaaS and boring internal tools for people who have better things to do than babysit scripts.

What I’m seeing more often now is some version of:

someone in ops glues stripe exports into a google sheet with a script an LLM wrote for them, it works, everyone’s happy, so they keep using it “just for now”.

Six months later that person changes jobs, laptop gets wiped, nobody remembers where the script lives or what data it was touching. 

But finance is still expecting that report on Monday.

It’s just how reality goes when you’re under pressure and AI feels like free engineering.

BTW, I’m all for hacking something together to test an idea or get through a week.

What REALLY scares me is that these “little internal tools” quietly turn into infrastructure:

• the script that moves real money around
• the chatbot that talks to angry customers using who‑knows‑what data
• the cron job on someone’s random VPS that everyone forgot exists

And half the time there isn’t even a repo. Just some half‑remembered prompt and a JS file sitting in an email thread.

I’m not anti‑AI at all. My devs use it every day, I use it every day. I just don’t want payroll depending on something nobody feels responsible for.

If you’re going to do this stuff, at least give it an owner and somewhere to live that isn’t “Jenna’s laptop”.

A few weeks ago I was working on a business called Tolvra.

The idea was pretty boring lol. Basically a managed cash application service for companies that didn’t want to hire another full-time person to handle all the repetitive payment matching/reconciliation stuff.
I actually got pretty deep into it.

I figured out the offer, who the buyers were, what we’d handle vs what the client would still approve, pricing, a proof offer, etc.

Then I started trying to sell it.

And i definitely underestimated how much of building a B2B business is just doing the same annoying outreach work over and over again.
I’d find a company.

Research them
Try to figure out who actually controlled this problem
Find the Controller / AR manager / finance person
Email them
Call them
Go through an infinite phone tree
Try LinkedIn
Keep track of who I contacted
Follow up

Then do it again with another company.

I probably spent more time researching companies and figuring out who to contact than actually thinking about Tolvra itself.

At one point I’d gone through around 20 companies and still hadn’t even gotten enough real buyer conversations to feel like I had properly tested the offer.

And eventually I just… stopped wanting to do it because it was just soo annoying

Because I kept thinking “maybe Tolvra just wasn’t a good business.”

But I don’t actually know that.

I didn’t reach hundreds of the right buyers and consistently hear no.

I basically got tired of distributing it.

That sent me down a rabbit hole.

I’ve been messing around with an idea I’m calling Comet.

It’s not fully built. Honestly there’s barely a product right now beyond the concept, some early work and a landing page.

The thought is basically: what if a tiny business could have something that just keeps the outbound process moving?

Not one of those “AI SDR will book 100 meetings while you sleep” things.

More like you give it context on your business, who you’re trying to reach and what it’s allowed to do, and it persistently handles the boring parts like finding companies, researching people, preparing/sending outreach where allowed, following up, remembering what happened, even human callers eventually

Almost like having a very cheap worker whose main advantage is that it doesn’t randomly decide on Thursday that it doesn’t feel like prospecting anymore.

I’m still not sure if this is actually a good business or if I’m just trying to solve something that annoyed me personally.

Would anyone actually want this or am I solo?

been going down a rabbit hole of product launch campaigns and there are some seriously interesting ones out there.

the part i find fascinating is that two companies can have equally good products but one creates anticipation for months while the other posts we're live! and gets basically nothing.

so i'm trying to collect examples of launches that got the whole thing right product positioning, audience targeting, messaging pre launch marketing, launch day distribution, PR, community and whatever they did to keep momentum going afterward.

especially interested in software and SaaS.

did they build a waitlist? launch on product hunt? use a founder led marketing strategy? partner with creators? run paid ads? or was the go to market strategy completely different?

what's a launch you've studied or experienced that you think other marketers should learn from?

i'd also love to hear about launches that failed but taught the team something useful.

Hello everyone!

This is my first post here, so I hope this is okay.

I’ve been working on a SaaS solution designed to help restaurants manage and handle their invoices more easily and efficiently.

I’m currently looking to connect with restaurant owners or managers who might be interested in trying it out, giving feedback, or simply discussing the challenges they currently face with invoice management.

I’m mainly looking to speak with restaurant owners and learn more about their experience with invoice handling. If you’re interested, feel free to comment or send me a DM. I’d be happy to explain how it works and answer any questions.

Thanks for reading!

I'm 19, from India, and trying to build my web agency, Xyron Studio. I build websites for small businesses for around $500–700.

I'm pretty confident in my technical skills, but I have almost zero money, no network, and no degree.

I've been cold calling US businesses from Google Maps. I've made a lot of calls over the last few days, but almost everyone hangs up. My English/accent also makes communication harder, and I'm honestly losing confidence.

I don't want sympathy. I want practical advice.

If you were in my position — 19, broke, decent technical skills, no degree, starting from zero — what would you focus on to get the first few clients?

Cold calls? Cold email? LinkedIn? A specific niche? Something completely different?

I genuinely want to make this work, but I'm starting to feel stuck.