Time and time again I have read about how boring businesses make the most money, what businesses have you heard of or are involved in that you would never think would make that much.

A year ago, if you told me I'd take a pay cut and be happier, I would've said you were crazy.

I spent years chasing bigger jobs, more money, and growing businesses.

Now I manage a recycling business that employs around 50 people with disabilities.

Honestly... I've never been happier.

I still love business. I still mentor people, build businesses on the side, and I still get excited talking about growth.

But I realised something.

Money pays the bills.

Purpose makes you want to get out of bed.

I'm curious...

I run a handful of tech companies. Some local some cloud and they're all better than competitors, cheaper and everything else. Once we retain customers they stay for life. Also once I get my foot in the door i close basically everyone. Almost all my business has been just word of mouth and its worked well for 15 years.

The problem is I need to scale and haven't been able to sell. I have everything completely built and ready to scale 10x, whole infrastructure and everything just sitting idle. I really need someone to work on commission and help ramp up sales, handle leads and just keep grinding.

Commission only is the best way as I need them to be hungry and work on their own, I really need a sales entrepreneur. They can easily make 6 figures and easily work remote. I'm just unsure how to find someone or how to properly explain that its a legit opportunity.

Also its a wide array of types of products, some a few bucks a month and others are tens of thousands a month. My goal is for them to sell 500k+ a year in new sales and they'd net 150k+/year.

Where's the best spot to find people like this? I haven't really tried but it seems a bit hard to list

I’m manifesting this amount and I’m trying to understand how it would feel to make this each month.

I imagine extreme joy, but what else? Are you genuinely happy? Wanting more? Does it change how you feel and see yourself? Are you still motivated to work? Are there any new opportunities for you?

This might be relevant for anyone here building an online store, marketplace, or even just testing a physical product:

ChatGPT now shows product listings directly in conversations - things like:
→ “best gifts for tea lovers”
→ “affordable standing desk for small apartments”
→ “eco-friendly baby products under $50”

Users see products, prices, reviews - and with one click can buy directly from retailers like Walmart or brand sites.

What’s surprising: it’s not ads.
The products come from websites that are properly set up - meaning they allow ChatGPT’s crawler, use structured data (like JSON-LD), and describe their items in a way real people search.

No ad account. No spend. Just clean SEO and schema.

From what I understand, it ranks listings based on:
→ relevance (title + description that match search intent)
→ schema markup (product name, price, images, reviews)
→ freshness (is it in stock? is price up-to-date?)
→ external data (Google Merchant Center, reviews, etc.)

It’s early days, but this feels like a shift in how products will be discovered through AI tools - and a chance for smaller players to show up next to big brands.

I’d be curious if anyone here is already testing this or thinking about it strategically.
Feels like one of those early moments worth paying attention to.

I won a contract that could potentially double my revenue, but I don’t have the staff in place yet. I don’t want to hire too early and carry payroll, but I also don’t want to wait and end up scrambling when the account starts.

For anyone who’s been through this, did you hire ahead, use part-time help, or cover some of the work yourself at first? What would you do differently now?

Sorry people, I am back to ask another question for feedback.
I make $140K WFH, comfortable life, but I keep thinking: "What if I built something?"
I have the capital, a box truck, and operational discipline.

Idea: Hauling services (turnovers, junk removal, maintenance, cleaning) B2b, residential.

Location: Northern VIrginia and target is the DMV.

Real question: Am I overthinking this or is this actually a solid path?

Honest feedback appreciated. Not looking for hype, just real talk.

This has happened to me way too many times. A potential buyer asks for pricing, product details, MOQ, lead time... sometimes we even go back and forth for a few days
Everything seems pretty normal. Then I send the quote and suddenly... nothing. No reply, no “too expensive”, no “we went with someone else”. Just silence....
I know sometimes they’re comparing suppliers or the project gets put on hold, but it’s still frustrating when you’ve spent time preparing everything and have no idea what happened
for people running a business, how do you usually handle it when someone goes quiet after asking for a quote?
Do you follow up a few times, leave it alone or try to figure out what happened first?? and how often do these leads actually come back later?

List where you’re located and what kind of gig you are working on. Are you being affected by AI at all or are you using AI as part of your business?

Built multiple businesses past $10k per month. Decided to be useful to society today.

If you have a business idea but no actual customers or revenue yet, drop it below.

Tell me what your idea is, who you want to serve, and I will give you a custom game plan to get your first paying customers.

This is only for people who have not launched yet or are still stuck at the starting line.

If that is you, let us make today the day you finally move forward.

Let’s go

Hi, currently freelancing and making nearly as much as my salary with only 1/10 of hours worked.

It’s 3am, I got work tomorrow and have to commute to city but my motivation, my drive , my passion is slowly fading for this once prestige corporate job I loved.

I’m resigning this Friday and going all into my business.

Scary, but I’ve always wanted to do this.

Any tips or advice?

Over the past 2 years I have grown a nice interview prep company to an annual profit of $400-500k. I have hired a few people helping to disperse the workload as we grew but overwhelmingly people are insisting on working with me. My team is phenomenal, our success rates are pretty much identical but people are always constantly requesting me. I’m currently work 5a - 10p with about few hours sleep in on the weekends, and an evening off when I can catch it. I’ve made it so scheduling divides up the workload but so often people email or call and ask for me.

I’m hoping over the next few months to launch the sister company and let me team so the prep on the original company - but I’m not sure how to break away.

Keep going or chill?

It's difficult to sustain shit like that, unless you something that I don't.

No sleep/eat/train/socialize BS. Something more unorthodox, not meat-and-potatoes.

For me it's Huberman's morning light routine. Not sure how well-known he's here, but that shit's a blessing. Since i started getting sunlight (or staring at a lamp) my overall capacity and stability levels have increased dramatically.

Also, 1 hour "buffer" time - my time, first thing in the morning. Walk alone in silence with my own thoughts, meditate, journal a bit. Clear my head, reorient on what matters the most, while trying to avoid obsessing about it (yeah, I know). If I start skipping this or cutting it short, my performance and quality of life start inching down. 100%.

No gadgets, obviously, but if I were you I'd push gadgets at least until noon, if not even past 1-2pm. If there's something truly critical or urgent they will get a hold of, don't worry. Shield your damn energy and focus, that's the only things you've truly got. Time has no value if you have attention span of a toddler.

Share your experience.

If you have always wanted to start a business or even have an idea, what's stopping you from making it happen?

so i run an agency, inagiffy, and was undercharging for 2 years. afraid of losing clients....finally raised prices. 2x for new clients. 1.5x for existing.

lost: 3 clients (the complainers) kept: 12 clients (the ones who valued us) gained: 5 new clients at higher price

revenue 3x. stress down. client quality way better.

the cheap clients were also most demanding. funny how that works.

should have done this years ago.

wdyt?

TL;DR: I'm lost, defeated, burnt out. I could keep going and hope for the best/luck or quit and build a stable career as long as that's still possible.

After finishing my Bachelor's in Comp. Sci. in Germany I started working and tried out some startup ideas here and there. I wanted to run my own business no matter what. I hated working on tickets for someone else. Obviously all my ideas where pretty techy, had no market and thus failed.

Then an opportunity opened to freelance as IT-Support for the company my father worked at (a machine shop). I talked about it with my buddy I did the startup projects with and we agreed we'd give this a shot but handle it like a business from the start.

We founded a C-Corp and startet working on our business model. We had stuff to do, infrastructure needed to be built, tools to be evaluated. During that phase almost all our still existing and best paying customers came in through word of mouth.

Then it became quite.

We tried marketing with flyers and banner ads (physical PVC ones) and even ended up trying cold calling and D2D. It was a miserable time. We stopped the cold stuff but kept the banners since they worked okay but still: Customers dripped in one by one month after month. The customers we got also where the opposite of spending happy. I had to look at someone decide against investing 200 bucks for a WiFi router and just accepting to have no WiFi in his office instead.

So here we are. Numbers:

Y1: 40k revenue, a few thousand losses

Y2: 100k revenue, about 15k profit

Y3 (now): Probably between 100k and 150k revenue

We came by until now mostly without paying us a huge salary or by working part time in the first year. Now my partner had to go back to working almost full time as a dev since the money coming in just isn't cutting it for the both of us. I basically have nothing to go back to and need to support my wife and two small children.

I stopped working _on_ the business a few weeks ago and am rn just keeping it alive basically. This sums up to less than 15h/week. I use the rest of my time to reflect on my situation. So far I think that I am where I am because of multiple factors: We had no network to start with and are both not especially extroverted. We had little money to spend on marketing. We have no sales background. Our market is saturated and the overall economy here is in shambles. We could go over and over talking about how to change the offering, we have no one to offer it to.

Options: I could just coast by and see what happens, enjoy seeing my kids grow up, spend time outside, idk. Or I could quit and start over on my career. The thought of having to ask for permission to spend my toddlers birthday at home with him haunts me though.

If you have ANY questions, feel free to ask.

Hey hey!

I feel like one crucial and immensely important thing is seldom mentioned here, and I wanted to start a topic around it because I literally just did a deep overview of all my clients this year and realized that I recently gained 10 new ones from past client recommendations, or just people who valued my work and mentioned it to other people. So, relationships.

To be absolutely honest, this overview was long overdue and should have happened earlier this year. But I was buried in work and didn’t have time to go through each client individually, analyze their position, do all the data matching and whatnot, etc. Plus I hate doing that, like absolutely will postpone the boring data analysis until it’s absolutely necessary, and now was the time for that. So, in the words of our favorite bots “The one thing I learned” (and I really did learn one important thing) was this:

In February this year, I had 5 remaining clients. The reason was - I had spent about 4 months prior to that working on AI systems to try and automate the manual work in my company with the sole goal of easing the burden for my guys. They were working their asses off, and I wanted to at least help them put their energy where it matters instead of wasting it on manually writing templated sequences, sending messages, posting, etc. This meant that our entire outbound sales was paused for about 5-6 months.

In May this year (last month), I had 14 clients. 10 of them being new (1 of those 5 went after the campaign was fully finished), and out of these 10, 8 came from my past relationships. Very interestingly - two came from a recommendation by the clients I’ve worked with more than 2 years ago, and the first thing they said on the call was “X said that they were very satisfied with your work and that you are a great guy” and I was like damn that’s so nice. Like, imagine someone remembering you after more than 2 years and I guess many business deals, and still speaking actively and fondly of you. That’s what we’re in this for.

Naturally, I wanted to inquire deeper into this phenomenon because it really felt good knowing that people remember you by your good work and (I’d hope) interesting personality with a good sense of humor. This is the data:

• 5 came from recommendations by past clients
• 2 came from recommendations by associates/friends in the industry
• 2 were old clients working on new projects and coming back to us
• 1 was a recommendation from a business partner

This was huge for me, as my agency operates on high-end, high-ticket campaigns, meaning that we usually don’t go above 10 clients at a time. Having 40% more is absolutely huge for us.

There’s one more very important thing to note here, and that is - all of these are good clients with high-quality products. I’m sure most of you know the shitty experience of having to deal with a bad client or a bad product, and having to invest 200% time and energy to do anything with it because nothing clicks. Of course, it will be blamed on you if over-the-top results are not there.

Well, nothing like that happened with any of these. The worst of them has a mid-quality product that I’d otherwise consider a very good campaign if it came from outbound, because the quality there is much lower.

To put my money where my mouth is, I devised a strategy for when I have more client slots open. Since we’ve worked with over 200 clients so far and have exceptional relationships with most of them (with some I still keep in touch even though we finished our collaboration years ago), I was thinking about reaching out to all of them and asking if they know someone who might have use of our services. Just a casual message to touch base again and see where that takes us. This is the workflow:

1. I’ll pull all the data from our past collaboration and their product into one shared Google Doc, with a different tab for each past client. Claude Code will go through all these documents where we kept track of our work for them and pull them to that one tab, with some extra info about the product, their current stage, or anything that can be a good icebreaker after a long time of no talk.
2. Another Claude Code agent who specializes in writing sales messages will use this info to craft a personalized message. Nothing too fancy, just a friendly check in like:

(if Claude Code finds out they’ve been featured in a news outlet or a magazine)
Hey!

I just saw you guys got featured in X. It’s amazing how much you’ve grown in just X years.

Where only the I just saw you guys got featured in X is the variable. You can essentially put anything you find out about them here - a conference they attended (I saw you guys were at X), a new feature they added (I saw you guys added X), or even something general like I’m seeing you guys everywhere nowadays. It’s amazing how much you’ve grown. The point is - the latter part of this message It’s amazing how much you’ve grown in just X years goes well with anything because it’s just a casual compliment.

Another option is, if there’s really nothing new to mention at all:

Hey, long time no talk!

I was just going through the campaigns we’ve done and remembered how enjoyable it was working with you. We’re currently expanding and looking for more interesting projects to work on - if you know anyone who’d be a good fit, let me know!

Again, keep that friendly, non-invasive tone and keep it light. People who already hold you in high regard do not expect or want you to annoy them by just asking something from them. It kind of taints the relationship.

1. For all my LinkedIn connections and people I keep in contact with there, I’ll loop this through Expandi. I already exported my first-degree connections from Expandi and already gave them to Claude Code. Then Claude Code bounced that with the list of my past clients and figured out the profiles of all we’ve worked with. I manually filtered out the ones we have no relationship with, or the ones who’re not in business anymore. Once I start running the campaign, Claude will create a custom message for each client based on the templates above, and we’ll push all of the profiles to Expandi + a custom placeholder message for each one.
2. I’m also still part of many Slack workspaces, and for these, I’ll just manually shoot them a Slack message. Some are on WhatsApp, and I’ll do the same there. With some, I even played games with and have them on Discord, so in a weird twist of reality, I’ll talk business with them over Discord. But, I believe over 70% are on LinkedIn, so most of this will be automated through Expandi to save time.
3. After the response to the first message, namely: Hey!

I just saw you guys got featured in X. It’s amazing how much you’ve grown in just X years.

My SDRs or I will take over the chat and eventually ask if they know anyone they could recommend us to. I’m emphasizing the same point from before - do not be too aggressive with your ask. Do it only when it genuinely feels right.

That’s the plan. Now, I won’t be running this right away because we’re stacked with work atm, but I figured it might be useful to someone here since the age of AI made it incredibly harder to find clients. This approach differs from the usual spray-and-pray outbound strategy because it focuses on existing relationships that are very likely to bring in new clients. Plus, the quality of the clients is remarkably higher than with outbound, meaning that you’d spend less time and energy per client, deliver better results, and ultimately be able to take in more of them, increasing the overall revenue. Win-win-win.

PS: If you’re dealing with a high number of clients, try to automate Slack, Discord, and WhatsApp with Claude Code agents. I’m sure there’s a way to do that at least for Discord. For LinkedIn, you can use any of the automation tools, they all work fine. For emails, I forgot to mention in the text, but Instantly is pretty cool (I’m saying this because it’s the only tool I used). My friend swears in Lemlist, but idk the UI is just not my thing.

i was researching a new market recently and at first it looked like there was plenty of information to work with. Company websites, industry reports, search results, social media.... evrything seemed easy to find but the deeper I looked, the harder it became to tell what was actually happening
some companies had a huge online presence but didn’t seem to be making the biggest moves. meanwhile, a few smaller companies with barely any visibility seemed much more active behind the scenes
It made me realize how easy it is to confuse online attention with an actual market opportunity
for anyone here who’s expanded into a new market or researched one before launching, what signals do you trust most before putting time or money into it??

I always overcomplicated obvious things in my life, especially when it came to finances thinking there's some secret way or a smart way to do it. Like if it's not that simple when it actually is extremely simple.

You just spend your entire life around it until it works out.

Yes, there's probably other ways as well but this one is very simple and straightforward.

You build and adapt your lifestyle the way so there's as much time possible that can be spent on work.

I had to remove things that where truly not required - meeting with people unless its actually important (the right ones stuck around), eliminate anything that was causing me less progress, changing my mindset, understanding that only possible way I can achieve everything I need is to work on my business and my mental state. That's it.

I haven't had a day for years where I haven't worked 14 hours a day unless I was sick or didn't have access to the internet.

And now I can genuinely stop, but to be honest, the work became fun and more enjoyable so I see no point in doing so.

I was told by many people on the way that I'm not living if im working so much but to be fair I didn't even live before when I spent time hoping my life will somehow get better. Now it's really different.

I wish everything the best to all of you, and if you put in the work there's no chance you won't find success. Good luck!

I own a business near a university that does well , a space opened up about 900 sq ft . What’s a good business to start I was thinking t shirt printing and embroidery

not because I had to but because I had a 7:30am board meeting in front of the CEO CFO senior ops and eight board members of a 500 person not for profit and I wanted to be ready, at the same time I was still actioning quotes going through notes and keeping stuff moving in my own business. It was probably one of the most intense professional mornings ive had in a long time and weirdly enough I loved it. Thats the bit I keep coming back to, I genuinely love business, I love pulling problems apart, figuring out why something isnt working, looking at an idea and going alright how do we make this better. I think thats probably the biggest thing ive learnt about myself over the years, I actually enjoy the process more than the outcome sometimes. The pressure, the problem solving, the mistakes, the little wins, all of it. Today was a good reminder that even after a massive day I still found myself thinking about business ideas, other peoples problems and how things could be improved. Im definatley not a guru and ive made plenty of mistakes but I think thats probably why I enjoy these conversations so much, everyone is trying to work something out and none of us really have it all figured out. Curious what part of business you guys actually enjoy the most? Is it the growth, the problem solving, the sales, the freedom, building something from nothing or something else entirely?

But the wife is at work, I’ve got just over an hour free and I’d rather spend it talking to someone trying to build something than watching shit on Netflix.

Quick background because apparently Reddit quite rightly wants receipts

I started in asphalt/civil. My old boss passed away, I bought a $30k truck and had a crack myself. Within a few years we’d built the business into seven figures.

It definitely wasn’t some straight line to success.

I’ve made money, lost money, hired the wrong people, chased shit ideas, tried ecommerce and failed, had cashflow scares and learned plenty of lessons the expensive way.

These days I still run businesses and work a normal job because apparently I enjoy having absolutely no spare time

I don’t have all the answers. I’m not a business coach and I’m not selling a course.

But I’ve spent a long time in the trenches and sometimes another set of eyes helps.

So if you’re starting something, business is going to shit, you’ve got an idea you want challenged, or you’re sitting there thinking “what the fuck do I do next?”

I’ve got an hour.

Happy to jump on a call and throw some ideas around.

Worst case we waste 20 minutes.

Best case one of us learns something.

I don't know if I am the only one to have experienced that as a 30-40k/ month entrepreneur (I don't think so)...

- Being in a 4* hotel swimming in the pool and feeling empty.

- Mind stucked with fear of missing or fear of earning less.

- Lost the sense of what I am doing.

- Decided to be entrepreneur for the freedom but being a slave to my clients / team

- Doing most of the day things that I don't like.

- Being in a low state vibe.

- Feeling lonely like hell.

I am curious to know who experienced that and if yes if they were conscious about it or too much in the pride to admit?

Thanks!

A few weeks ago I was pretty pissed that my call agents weren't converting anything. After getting some advice from this sub, I decided to take on calls myself. While I haven't actually landed any bookings yet, I did manage to land some "follow up in x months" which is better than I was doing before.

That aside, I do have this one client, who had been dragging the process. Now, that's kinda my bad, but he was so far for along in the process and I knew as soon as I closed him he would give me a testimonial. And he did! He even gave me referrals to call, super cool on his part.

Now I have a new monthly payment of $500.

I thought I'd be excited, but I'm not. It barely covers the service costs, and assuming he'll want unlimited calling (which he likely will) then I'll probably still be in the red. Obviously as I scale I can charge more, but for now I'm stuck where I am, and I've come too far to give up.

Which leads to my initial question: how long do I have to wait? I really, really want to just start making money already.