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40% Of SMBs Still Can't Pay Their Rent, Extending High Delinquency From September Into October
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Aegidius25This week

40% Of SMBs Still Can't Pay Their Rent, Extending High Delinquency From September Into October

https://www.alignable.com/forum/q4s-off-to-a-rough-start-40-of-smbs-still-cant-pay-their-rent October 31, 2023: While the federal government reported a surge in economic growth for the U.S. last week, that news doesn't hold true for many small business owners. In fact, in October polling by Alignable, only 12% said their companies are experiencing significant growth this month. Beyond that, Alignable’s October Rent Report, released today, shows that a whopping 40% of SMBs couldn't even pay their October rent in full and on time. This marks the second consecutive month of a 40% rent delinquency rate -- extending 2023's record high from September through October. These findings are based on responses from 4,246 randomly selected small business owners surveyed from 10/1/23 to 10/30/23, as well as input from 44,000+ other respondents over the past year. As the chart below shows, October's SMB rent delinquency rate is 10 percentage points higher than it was in January, reflecting cumulative economic struggles: increased rents, high interest rates, still-stifling inflation, rising labor costs, and revenues that have declined since this time last year. Rent delinquency rates among small businesses during 2023 based on Alignable surveys So, Why's Rent Delinquency At 40% For A 2nd Month? Here’s the current list of problems contributing to two months' worth of the highest delinquency rate 2023 has seen so far: Consumer Spending Declines On Main Street: Quarterly, we ask about customer spending habits at retailers. This month, 45% of independent Mom and Pop Shops said spending has been down over the last 30 days. Some said it was due to more people spending money online with big retailers like Amazon. This figure is quite high, especially considering that back in July, only 24% reported a drop in consumer spending -- 21 percentage points less severe than it is now. Revenue Troubles: 42% are making half or less of the income they generated monthly prior to COVID. For businesses that are less than three years old, this situation is even worse: 53% of this group reports making half or less of what they generated this time last year. High Interest Rates: Over half of all SMB owners polled said the past 19 months of high interest rates have hurt their margins, reduced revenues, and put their expansion plans on hold, as they don't want to apply for loans. Increased Rent Prices: 50% say they’re being charged more for rent now than they were six months ago, with 15% saying rent has increased by 20% or more. At present, only 37% of pre-COVID businesses have recovered financially from the pandemic era, leaving 63% still striving to make up for time they lost due to COVID, inflationary pressures, and high interest rates. There's a slight silver lining here, though, as the 37% figure is three percentage points higher than it was in September. But, with that said, a recovery rate of 37% after more than three and a half years is still very low and speaks volumes about the ongoing list of troubles small business owners face looking into the rest of 2023. Tech, Manufacturing, Gyms, Beauty & Retail Struggle Examining the rent delinquency landscape in terms of sectors, there's quite a negative shift occurring among some industries in October. Let's look at the charts below to see what's really happening. Sectors most affected by rent delinquency include tech and retail Details on sectors affected by rent delinquency in October This is alarming for a few reasons: The countless technology layoffs at larger companies over the past year appear to be affecting the small companies now, too, who are often dependent on the larger ones as clients. Right now, 54% of science/technology small companies couldn't pay their October rent, up 10 percentage points from September and 16 percentage points since August. There are also some comments in the surveys of technology roles being reduced or replaced by ChatGPT and other AI, which can write software programs. Gyms have been struggling now for a while and now 50% of them can't afford the rent, up 8 percentage points from September. The biggest shift between October and September occurred among manufacturers, partially due to ongoing fluctuation in the price of gas and other inflationary issues. For quite some time, manufacturers were improving a lot in terms of their rent delinquency rates, but in October, they jumped 25 percentage points, doubling their rate, which is now 50%. This is also a record high for manufacturers in 2023. We hope this is just a blip, but we'll see in November. Also due, in part, to fluctuating gas prices and costs of vehicles, 45% of transportation companies couldn't pay October rent in full and on time. That's up 6 percentage points from last month. Sadly, 47% of salon owners couldn't cover October rent, after showing a lot of stability over the past few months. But that stability ended this month, as salons' rent delinquency rates jumped nine percentage points. Though rates have dropped three percentage points in October, a high percentage of retailers are still having trouble paying the rent. Last month, it was 47%. This month, it's better, but is still over 40%, landing at 44%. This is worrisome, especially since Q4 is a "make it or break it" time for many Main Street merchants. Looking more closely at the industries, there was some good news, in that a few others experienced lower delinquency rates in October, including restaurants, which dipped to 40% from 44% in September. Travel/lodging dropped seven percentage points to 38% (from 45% last month), as did education, which is also at 38%, down from 43%. When looking at rent delinquency from the vantage point of the states that are most affected, many surges can be seen between October and September, while a few states saw some dramatic, encouraging declines, too. Rent Troubles Increase For IL, VA, TX, MA, FL, & CO Looking at the states' charts, you can see how tumultuous the rent story has become this fall. Let's first talk about those with significant jumps in their delinquency rates. Here's the rundown: Illinois leads the list once again. After having a better month in September, its delinquency rate has soared, once more, landing at 54% for October (up from 46% last month). In fact, the 54% figure is the highest rate IL-based SMBs have seen in 2023. Virginia was in great shape last month, with a delinquency rate of just 19%. But Virginia-based small business owners have had a very rough month, at least in terms of rent. Now, 50% of them who took our poll say they couldn't cover rent (an increase of 31 percentage points). Texas is third on the list, with an 11-percentage-point lift from 38% in September to 49% in October. MA is next up at 48%, which marks the largest jump on the chart -- 32 percentage points from a low of just 16% in September. Small businesses in Florida have also experienced two challenging months in terms of rent delinquency. Right now, 45% of SMBs there couldn't afford to pay, up nine percentage points from September and 15 percentage points from August. Colorado's businesses regressed in October, hitting a new record high of 40%. That rent delinquency rate jumped 13 percentage points from September to October. While we just covered states with some very high delinquency rates, there were also several more positive swings that have occurred in October. Though encouraging, we'll have to see how long those delinquency rates continue. Here are the most remarkable: New York -- After reaching a record rate of 55% last month, New York's small business owners now report a more stable number: just 29%. That's down 26 percentage points. New Jersey -- New York's neighbor has an even more impressive story in October: only 20% of New Jersey's SMBs couldn't pay rent this month, a record low over at least the past 14 months, down 34 percentage points from a record high of 54%. Michigan -- Similarly, Michigan's small business owners boast a rate of just 20%, down from 45% in September.

[D] Why can't you guys comment your fucking code?
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didntfinishhighschooThis week

[D] Why can't you guys comment your fucking code?

Seriously. I spent the last few years doing web app development. Dug into DL a couple months ago. Supposedly, compared to the post-post-post-docs doing AI stuff, JavaScript developers should be inbred peasants. But every project these peasants release, even a fucking library that colorizes CLI output, has a catchy name, extensive docs, shitloads of comments, fuckton of tests, semantic versioning, changelog, and, oh my god, better variable names than ctxh or langhs or fuckyoufortryingto_understand. The concepts and ideas behind DL, GANs, LSTMs, CNNs, whatever – it's clear, it's simple, it's intuitive. The slog is to go through the jargon (that keeps changing beneath your feet - what's the point of using fancy words if you can't keep them consistent?), the unnecessary equations, trying to squeeze meaning from bullshit language used in papers, figuring out the super important steps, preprocessing, hyperparameters optimization that the authors, oops, failed to mention. Sorry for singling out, but look at this - what the fuck? If a developer anywhere else at Facebook would get this code for a review they would throw up. Do you intentionally try to obfuscate your papers? Is pseudo-code a fucking premium? Can you at least try to give some intuition before showering the reader with equations? How the fuck do you dare to release a paper without source code? Why the fuck do you never ever add comments to you code? When naming things, are you charged by the character? Do you get a bonus for acronyms? Do you realize that OpenAI having needed to release a "baseline" TRPO implementation is a fucking disgrace to your profession? Jesus christ, who decided to name a tensor concatenation function cat?

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience
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Consistent_Access844This week

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

So, you want to be a CEO?
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avtgesThis week

So, you want to be a CEO?

I used to post here occasionally with business advice. But it turns out most of you in this sub have a dream, but seemingly no execution. You want to be rich sure, but without understanding what it takes to be a founder, run a startup, create a team around an idea and a strategy, and push them to their limits without burning them out, to win in a market that's never heard of you - not to mention the pressures on your personal life. So, I'm going to post a new game called, "So, You Want to Be A CEO?" The game: Each week I will post a reasonably complex challenge that a startup founder has to overcome, between inception of the company until it goes bust or series A. You respond with your best course of action - that is, what would you do in the situation provided? YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THE WORK! The rules: One response per person Your upvotes are your score for the week I will track them in the OP Scores are calculated on the Friday of that week You must answer the prompt completely, if you don't you lose half your points earned that week. ChatGPT is allowed, but it may not provide sufficient advice to win the game Prompt 1: "Boomerang" You are an HR executive turned entrepreneur. You have identified a significant issue: professionals over the age of 55 are struggling to re-enter the workforce and you also believe corporations are missing out on a wealth of institutional knowledge in retirement. You believe you can help solve this problem by creating Boomerang, a platform dedicated to empowering these individuals and corporate partners by connecting them with the best candidates aged 55 and older. Objective: Your goal is to validate your concept, develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and balance your personal responsibilities while laying the foundation for Boomerang’s success. This Week's Key Challenges and Decisions: Market Research Challenge 1: You need to validate the market need for Boomerang. This involves understanding the pain points of older job seekers and potential employers. This will take 4 days (non-sequential) How do you get started? Developing an MVP Challenge 2: With limited resources, you need to create an MVP that effectively demonstrates Boomerang’s value. This will take 2 days. Can be combined with other challenges. How do you get started? Dealing with Personal Health Issues Challenge 3: Your doctor mentioned your bloodwork is irregular, but can't pinpoint the cause. They recommend you see a specialist before Friday. This will take 1 day. Give it a shot! There's no right answer, just answer what your plan to do and try to optimize the use of your time to the best of your ability. EDIT: Scoreboard (I realize now the top post generally gets the most upvotes, so I may change the points system): u/conscious_border3019 - 22 u/inBoulderForSummer - 4 u/that_whey-or-the-lee - 3 u/AgencySaas - 3 u/Gold-Ad-8211 - 2 u/93024662 - 2 u/DeusExBam - 2 u/njm19920 - 2 u/SilentEconomist9265 - 2 u/ai_servant - 2 u/Background-Term2759 - 2 u/Insane_squirrel - 2 u/kiss_thechef - 2 u/codeyman2 - 2 u/Xentoxus - 2 u/LongComplex4395 - 2

Upselling from $8/mo to $2k/mo
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Afraid-Astronomer130This week

Upselling from $8/mo to $2k/mo

I just closed a client for $1947/mo. But 5 months ago he was spending only $8/mo. Most customers have way more purchasing power than you think. Unlock it with the power of stacking. Here's my 3-steps stacking formula: Step 1 - Build trust with a low-ticket product In a world full of scams and deceit, building trust is damn hard. The best way to combat skepticism is through a free or low-ticket product, where you can go above and beyond to demonstrate your credibility. When I first onboarded this client onto my SaaS, an AI to help you with HARO link-building, my product was at a very early stage with many rough edges. He gave me lots of great feedback. I implemented his suggestions the same day and got more feedback from him. After a couple of back-and-forths, I established myself as a trustworthy hustler, instead of just a stranger online. This is easy to do for an agile startup but impossible for big companies, so make good use of opportunities like this to build long-term relationships. Turn your customers into raving fans. Step 2 - Validate a mid-ticket offer Three months into his subscription, he told me he wanted to cancel. When digging into the why, he suggested a performance-based DFY service to remove all the work on his end. Inspired by his suggestion, I took on him and 6 other clients for $237, a one-time package for 1 backlink. It's sold through my newsletter email blast to 300 subscribers, with a total CAC of $0. I wrote about the details of this launch in another long form. At this price range, impulsive purchases can still happen if you have a strong offer and good copywriting. Use this mid-ticket offer to validate your offer and positioning, build out a team, and establish trust. We went beyond the 1 link for almost all our clients, including this one in particular. For $237, we got him on Forbes, HubSpot, 2 DR50+ sites, and a few other smaller media outlets. By doing this, we further built trust into the relationship and established authority in what we do. Step 3 - Create a high-ticket subscription-based offer By now, you'll hopefully have built enough trust to get through the skepticism filter for something high-ticket. Now, it's time to develop an offer that amplifies your previous one. Something that allows you to let your clients achieve their goals to the maximum extent. For me, this is pitching every relevant media query on every platform for this client every day, to leverage HARO link-building to its full extent, all for a fixed price of $1947/mo. This customized offer is based on direct client feedback, isn't publicized on our website, but we're confident it will directly contribute to achieving this client's goal. A subscription-based offer is much superior because it allows you to create a stable source of revenue, especially at the early stage. That's how I created 3 different offers to solve the same problem for one client. By stacking each offer on top of the previous one, I was able to guide clients from one option to the next. This formula isn't some new rocket science I came up with. It's proven over and over again by other agency owners building in public, like Nick from Baked Design who started with a $9 design kit and now sells $9k/mo design subscriptions at $1M ARR. By stacking offers, you position yourself as a committed partner in your client's long-term success. Lastly, I want to address a common objection: "My customers can't afford $2k/month." But consider this: most people are reading your site on their $3000 MacBook or $1000 iPhone. It's not that they lack the funds, it's more likely that your service isn't meeting their expectations. Talk to them to discover the irresistible offer they'll gladly pay for. Update: lots of DM asking about more specifics so I wrote about it here. https://coldstartblueprint.com/p/ai-agent-email-list-building

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

Lessons from 139 YC AI startups (S23)
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minophenThis week

Lessons from 139 YC AI startups (S23)

YC's Demo Day was last week, and with it comes another deluge of AI companies. A record-breaking 139 startups were in some way related to AI or ML - up from 112 in the last batch. Here are 5 of my biggest takeaways: AI is (still) eating the world. It's remarkable how diverse the industries are - over two dozen verticals were represented, from materials science to social media to security. However, the top four categories were: AI Ops: Tooling and platforms to help companies deploy working AI models. We'll discuss more below, but AI Ops has become a huge category, primarily focused on LLMs and taming them for production use cases. Developer Tools: Apps, plugins, and SDKs making it easier to write code. There were plenty of examples of integrating third-party data, auto-generating code/tests, and working with agents/chatbots to build and debug code. Healthcare + Biotech: It seems like healthcare has a lot of room for automation, with companies working on note-taking, billing, training, and prescribing. And on the biotech side, there are some seriously cool companies building autonomous surgery robots and at-home cancer detection. Finance + Payments: Startups targeting banks, fintechs, and compliance departments. This was a wide range of companies, from automated collections to AI due diligence to "Copilot for bankers." Those four areas covered over half of the startups. The first two make sense: YC has always filtered for technical founders, and many are using AI to do what they know - improve the software developer workflow. But it's interesting to see healthcare and finance not far behind. Previously, I wrote: Large enterprises, healthcare, and government are not going to send sensitive data to OpenAI. This leaves a gap for startups to build on-premise, compliant \[LLMs\] for these verticals. And we're now seeing exactly that - LLMs focused on healthcare and finance and AI Ops companies targeting on-prem use cases. It also helps that one of the major selling points of generative AI right now is cost-cutting - an enticing use case for healthcare and finance. Copilots are king. In the last batch, a lot of startups positioned themselves as "ChatGPT for X," with a consumer focus. It seems the current trend, though, is "Copilot for X" - B2B AI assistants to help you do everything from KYC checks to corporate event planning to chip design to negotiate contracts. Nearly two dozen companies were working on some sort of artificial companion for businesses - and a couple for consumers. It's more evidence for the argument that AI will not outright replace workers - instead, existing workers will collaborate with AI to be more productive. And as AI becomes more mainstream, this trend of making specialized tools for specific industries or tasks will only grow. That being said - a Bing-style AI that lives in a sidebar and is only accessible via chat probably isn't the most useful form factor for AI. But until OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google change their approach (or until another company steps up), we'll probably see many more Copilots. AI Ops is becoming a key sector. "AI Ops" has been a term for only a few years. "LLM Ops" has existed for barely a year. And yet, so many companies are focused on training, fine-tuning, deploying, hosting, and post-processing LLMs it's quickly becoming a critical piece of the AI space. It's a vast industry that's sprung up seemingly overnight, and it was pretty interesting to see some of the problems being solved at the bleeding edge. For example: Adding context to language models with as few as ten samples. Pausing and moving training runs in real-time. Managing training data ownership and permissions. Faster vector databases. Fine-tuning models with synthetic data. But as much ~~hype~~ enthusiasm and opportunity as there might be, the size of the AI Ops space also shows how much work is needed to really productionalize LLMs and other models. There are still many open questions about reliability, privacy, observability, usability, and safety when it comes to using LLMs in the wild. Who owns the model? Does it matter? Nine months ago, anyone building an LLM company was doing one of three things: Training their own model from scratch. Fine-tuning a version of GPT-3. Building a wrapper around ChatGPT. Thanks to Meta, the open-source community, and the legions of competitors trying to catch up to OpenAI, there are now dozens of ways to integrate LLMs. However, I found it interesting how few B2B companies mentioned whether or not they trained their own model. If I had to guess, I'd say many are using ChatGPT or a fine-tuned version of Llama 2. But it raises an interesting question - if the AI provides value, does it matter if it's "just" ChatGPT behind the scenes? And once ChatGPT becomes fine-tuneable, when (if ever) will startups decide to ditch OpenAI and use their own model instead? "AI" isn't a silver bullet. At the end of the day, perhaps the biggest lesson is that "AI" isn't a magical cure-all - you still need to build a defensible company. At the beginning of the post-ChatGPT hype wave, it seemed like you just had to say "we're adding AI" to raise your next round or boost your stock price. But competition is extremely fierce. Even within this batch, there were multiple companies with nearly identical pitches, including: Solving customer support tickets. Negotiating sales contracts. Writing drafts of legal documents. Building no-code LLM workflows. On-prem LLM deployment. Automating trust and safety moderation. As it turns out, AI can be a competitive advantage, but it can't make up for a bad business. The most interesting (and likely valuable) companies are the ones that take boring industries and find non-obvious use cases for AI. In those cases, the key is having a team that can effectively distribute a product to users, with or without AI. Where we’re headed I'll be honest - 139 companies is a lot. In reviewing them all, there were points where it just felt completely overwhelming. But after taking a step back, seeing them all together paints an incredibly vivid picture of the current AI landscape: one that is diverse, rapidly evolving, and increasingly integrated into professional and personal tasks. These startups aren't just building AI for the sake of technology or academic research, but are trying to address real-world problems. Technology is always a double-edged sword - and some of the startups felt a little too dystopian for my taste - but I'm still hopeful about AI's ability to improve productivity and the human experience.

So, you want to be a CEO?
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So, you want to be a CEO?

I used to post here occasionally with business advice. But it turns out most of you in this sub have a dream, but seemingly no execution. You want to be rich sure, but without understanding what it takes to be a founder, run a startup, create a team around an idea and a strategy, and push them to their limits without burning them out, to win in a market that's never heard of you - not to mention the pressures on your personal life. So, I'm going to post a new game called, "So, You Want to Be A CEO?" The game: Each week I will post a reasonably complex challenge that a startup founder has to overcome, between inception of the company until it goes bust or series A. You respond with your best course of action - that is, what would you do in the situation provided? YOU DON’T HAVE TO DO THE WORK! The rules: One response per person Your upvotes are your score for the week I will track them in the OP Scores are calculated on the Friday of that week You must answer the prompt completely, if you don't you lose half your points earned that week. ChatGPT is allowed, but it may not provide sufficient advice to win the game Prompt 1: "Boomerang" You are an HR executive turned entrepreneur. You have identified a significant issue: professionals over the age of 55 are struggling to re-enter the workforce and you also believe corporations are missing out on a wealth of institutional knowledge in retirement. You believe you can help solve this problem by creating Boomerang, a platform dedicated to empowering these individuals and corporate partners by connecting them with the best candidates aged 55 and older. Objective: Your goal is to validate your concept, develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and balance your personal responsibilities while laying the foundation for Boomerang’s success. This Week's Key Challenges and Decisions: Market Research Challenge 1: You need to validate the market need for Boomerang. This involves understanding the pain points of older job seekers and potential employers. This will take 4 days (non-sequential) How do you get started? Developing an MVP Challenge 2: With limited resources, you need to create an MVP that effectively demonstrates Boomerang’s value. This will take 2 days. Can be combined with other challenges. How do you get started? Dealing with Personal Health Issues Challenge 3: Your doctor mentioned your bloodwork is irregular, but can't pinpoint the cause. They recommend you see a specialist before Friday. This will take 1 day. Give it a shot! There's no right answer, just answer what your plan to do and try to optimize the use of your time to the best of your ability. EDIT: Scoreboard (I realize now the top post generally gets the most upvotes, so I may change the points system): u/conscious_border3019 - 22 u/inBoulderForSummer - 4 u/that_whey-or-the-lee - 3 u/AgencySaas - 3 u/Gold-Ad-8211 - 2 u/93024662 - 2 u/DeusExBam - 2 u/njm19920 - 2 u/SilentEconomist9265 - 2 u/ai_servant - 2 u/Background-Term2759 - 2 u/Insane_squirrel - 2 u/kiss_thechef - 2 u/codeyman2 - 2 u/Xentoxus - 2 u/LongComplex4395 - 2

Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience
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Finally Launched My First App Without Any Coding Experience

About Myself I am a structural engineer that are taught to design buildings in the day and I have been dreaming forever to build a SaaS business to get out of the rat race. However, as a structural engineer, coding is definitely not something I am capable of doing (I have some simple knowledge, but its no way close to building an app) The Journey As I've mentioned, I always wanted to build a SaaS business because in my mind the business model is most attractive to me, where you only need to build once and can sell to millions. So I started off searching and exploring on the internet and my first ever "SaaS" was from Wordpress. I am buying plugin from other user and then pluggin into my own Wordpress website. It was a project management tool SaaS. I was so excited about the website and can't even sleep well at night because I'm just so hype about it. But, the reality is because this is my first ever business, I totally didn't realise about the importance of UI UX or my business differentiation, thinking that everyone will be as excited as I am. Then, I went deeper and deeper into the journey (I can write more about this in another post if anyone is interested) and finally landed on Flutterflow to create my first ever app. No Code Journey Thanks to no code builder, I never thought that a non-coder like me can ever create an app and got accepted by the App Store/Play Store. Since that I am using a low-code builder, for any specific requirement that I need that are not covered natively, I will just talk to ChatGPT and boom I pretty much got most of the answer I needed. About The App As someone that always try to keep track of my expenses, I never able to find an app that are simple and interesting enough for me to continue on the journey. I realise that I could have incorporate AI into this journey and hence there go, I created an AI Money Tracker. Let me introduce Rolly: AI Money Tracker - a new AI expense tracker where you can easily record your transactions just by chatting with our bot Rolly and it will automatically record and categorise the transaction into the most suitable category (you can also create any of your own category and it will also take care of it in consideration). I am not sharing the app link here to avoid getting ban, but feel free to search up Rolly: AI Money Tracker on either App Store on Play Store. My Learnings As someone that can't code and never imagine that I could create a production app by myself and publish it on to the App Store and Play Store. Since I am not making any money yet and just at the beginning of my entrepreneur journey, I can't give any substantial advice, all I can say is just my own learnings and feelings. My advice is if you have a dream of building a business, just go for it, don't worry about all the problems that you can think of to convince yourself not making the start at all. From my point of view, as long as you're not giving up everything (eg, putting yourself in huge debt etc), why don't just go for it and you've got nothing much to lose. You'll only lose if you never even get started. And also, I believe that creating an app is always the easiest step out of the entreprenuership journey, marketing and distribution is the key to success. Even though you've spent days and nights on it and it might mean everything to you, the truth is people don't really cares and you'll need to market for it. I am still in journey to learn how to do marketing, content, building a business and everything. I think this is just a very beginning of my journey and hopefully there's more interesting one to share further down the road.

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

How to start online business in 7 days ?
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Prior-Inflation8755This week

How to start online business in 7 days ?

Easy to do now. There are several tips that I can give you to start your own digital business. 1) Solve your own problem. If you use the Internet, you know that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved. But focus on your problem first. Once you can figure it out and solve your problem. You can move on to solving people's problems. Ideally, to use tools and technology you know. If you don't know, use NO-CODE tools to build it. For example, if you need to create a website, use landing page builder. If you want to automate your own work, like booking meetings, use Zapier to automate tasks. If you want to create a game, sure, use AI Tools to solve it. I don't care what you will use. Use whatever you want. All I want from you is to solve that problem. 2) After solving your own problem. You can focus on people's problems. Because if you can't solve your own shit, why do you want to solve others problems? Remember that always. If you need to build e-commerce, use Shopify. If you need to build a directory, use directory builder. If you need to build landing pages, use landing page builders. Rule of thumb: Niche, Niche, Niche. Try to focus on a specific niche, solve their problem, and make money on it. Then only thinking about exploring new opportunities. You can use No-Code builders or AI tools or hire developers or hire agencies to do it. It depends on your choice. If you are good at coding, build on your own or delegate to a developer or agency. If you have enough time, use AI Tools to build your own thing. If you want to solve a common problem but with a different perspective, yeah, sure, use No-Code builders for that. 3) Digital business works exactly the same as offline business with one difference. You can move a lot faster, build a lot faster, risk a lot faster, fail a lot faster, earn a lot faster, sell a lot faster, and scale a lot faster. In one week, you can build e-commerce. In the second week, you can build SaaS. In the third week, you can build an AI agent. In the fourth week, you can build your own channel on social media. 4) It gives more power. With great power comes great responsibility. From day one, invest in SEO, social media presence, traffic, and acquiring customers. Don't focus on tech stuff. Don't focus on tools. Focus on the real problem: • Traffic • Marketing • Sales • Conversion rate

Why you should consider using small open source fine-tuned models
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hamada0001This week

Why you should consider using small open source fine-tuned models

Context I want to start off by giving some context on what fine-tuning is, why it's useful and who it would be useful for: What is fine-tuning? When controlling the output of an LLM there are, broadly, three levels. Prompt engineering, RAG and fine-tuning. Most of you are likely familiar with the first two. Prompt engineering is when you try to optimize the prompt to get the model to do what you want better. RAG (retrieval augmented generation) is when you first do a search on some data (usually stored in a vector database which allows you to search by similarity), then you insert the results into the prompt so that the model can use that context to more accurately answer any questions. It's like letting the LLM access external information right before answering, using that additional context to improve its response Fine-tuning is when you want to fundamentally teach a model something new or teach it to behave in a particular way. You would provide the model with high quality data (i.e. inputs and outputs) which it will train on. Why is it useful? At the moment, many of you use the largest and best LLMs because they give the best results. However, for a lot of use cases you are likely using a sledgehammer for a small nail. Does it do a great job? Damn yeah! Well... why not use a smaller hammer? Because it might miss or hit your finger. The solution shouldn't be to use a sledgehammer, but rather to learn how to use a smaller hammer properly so you never miss! That's exactly what fine-tuning a smaller model is like. Once you fine-tune it on a specific task with good high quality data, it can surpass even the best models at that specific task. It'll be 10x cheaper to run, much faster and, if you use an open source model, you'll own the model (no vendor lock-in!). If you run a SaaS and your biggest expense is AI costs then you should definitely consider fine-tuning. It'll take some time to set up but it'll be well worth it in the medium/long term (a bit like SEO). You can always resort to the best models for more complex tasks. How to fine-tune? I'm going to give you a breakdown of the process from beginning to end. You do need to be (a bit) technical in order to do this. Getting the data Let's suppose we want to fine-tune a model to make high-quality SEO content. At the moment, you might be using a large sophisticated prompt or using multiple large LLMs to write different parts or utilizing RAG. This is all slow and expensive but might be giving you great results. Our goal is to replace this with a fine-tuned model that is great at one thing: writing high-quality SEO content quickly at a much lower cost. The first step is gathering the appropriate data. If you want the model to write 3 or 4 paragraphs based on a prompt that contains the topic and a few keywords, then your data should match that. There are a few way you can do this: You can manually gather high-quality SEO content. You'd write the prompt and the response that the model should give. You can use a larger more powerful LLM to generate the content for you (also known as synthetic data). It'll be expensive but remember that it'll be a larger one-off cost to get the data. If you already have a pipeline that works great then you can use the prompts and the generated content that you already have from that pipeline. You can buy a high-quality dataset or get someone to make it for you. The data is the most important part of this process. Remember, garbage in garbage out. Your data needs to have a good variety and should not contain any bad examples. You should aim for around 1000 examples. The more the better! The actual fine-tuning. At this stage you are now ready to choose a model and setup the fine-tuning. If you are unsure I'd stick to the Llama 3.1 family of models. They are great and reliable. There are three models: 8b, 70b and 405b. Depending on the complexity of the task you should select an appropriate size. However, to really reap the cost saving benefits and the speed you should try to stick with the 8b model or the the 70b model if the 8b is not good enough. For our SEO example, let's use the 8b model. Important note on selecting a model: You might see multiple models with the 8b flag. You might see 4bit-bnb or instruct. The instruct version of the models have basically been trained to be chatbots. So if you want to keep the chatbot-like instruction-following functionality then you should use the instruct version as the base. The non-instruct version simply generates text. It won't 'act' like a chatbot which is better for use cases like creative writing. The 4bit-bnb means that the model has been 'quantized'. Basically it has been made 4x smaller (the original is in 16 bits) so that it is faster to download and faster to fine-tune. This slightly reduces the accuracy of the model but it's usually fine for most use cases :) Fine-tuning should be done on a good GPU. CPU aren't good enough. So you can't spin up a droplet on digital ocean and use that. You'll specifically need to spin up a GPU. One website that I think is great is Runpod .io (I am not affiliated with them). You simply pay for the GPU by the hour. If you want the training to be fast you can use the H100, if you want something cheaper but slower you can use the A40. Although the A40 won't be good enough to run the 70b parameter model. For the 405b model you'll need multiple H100s but let's leave that for more advanced use cases. Once you've spun up your H100 and ssh-ed into it. I would recommend using the unsloth open source library to do the fine-tuning. They have great docs and good boilerplate code. You want to train using a method called QLoRA. This won't train the entire model but only "part of it". I don't want to get into the technical details as t3hat isn't important but essentially it's a very efficient and effective way of fine-tuning models. When fine-tuning you can provide something called a 'validation set'. As your model is training it will be tested against the 'validation set' to see how well it's doing. You'll get an 'eval loss' which basically means how well is your model doing when compared with the unseen validation data. If you have 1000 training examples I'd recommend taking out 100-200 so it can act as the validation set. Your model may start off with an eval loss of 1.1 and by the end of the training (e.g. 3 epochs - the number of epochs is the number of times your model will be trained on the entire dataset. It's like reading a book more than once so you can understand it better. Usually 3-5 epochs is enough) the eval loss would drop to 0.6 or 0.7 which means your model has made great progress in learning your dataset! You don't want it to be too low as that means it is literally memorizing which isn't good. Post fine-tuning You'll want to save the model with the best eval loss. You actually won't have the whole model, just something called the "QLoRA adapters". These are basically like the new neurons that contain the "understanding" of the data you trained the model on. You can combine these with the base model (using unsloth again) to prompt the model. You can also (and I recommend this) convert the model to GGUF format (using unsloth again). This basically packages the QLoRA adapters and model together into an optimized format so you can easily and efficiently run it and prompt it (using unsloth again... lol). I would then recommend running some evaluations on the new model. You can do this by simply prompting the new model and a more powerful model (or using your old pipeline) and then asking a powerful model e.g. Claude to judge which is better. If your model consistently does better then you've hit a winner! You can then use runpod again to deploy the model to their serverless AI endpoint so you only pay when it's actually being inferenced. (Again, I'm not affiliated with them) I hope this was useful and you at least got a good idea of what fine-tuning is and how you might go about doing it. By the way, I've just launched a website where you can easily fine-tune Llama 3.1 models. I'm actually hoping to eventually automate this entire process as I believe small fine-tuned models will be much more common in the future. If you want more info, feel free to DM me :)

36 startup ideas found by analyzing podcasts (problem, solution & source episode)
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joepigeonThis week

36 startup ideas found by analyzing podcasts (problem, solution & source episode)

Hey, I've been a bit of a podcast nerd for a long time. Around a year ago I began experimenting with transcription of podcasts for a SaaS I was running. I realized pretty quickly that there's a lot of knowledge and value in podcast discussions that is for all intents and purposes entirely unsearchable or discoverable to most people. I ended up stopping work on that SaaS product (party for lack of product/market fit, and partly because podcasting was far more interesting), and focusing on the podcast technology full-time instead. I'm a long-time lurker and poster of r/startups and thought this would make for some interesting content and inspiration for folks. Given I'm in this space, have millions of transcripts, and transcribe thousands daily... I've been exploring fun ways to expose some of the interesting knowledge and conversations taking place that utilize our own data/API. I'm a big fan of the usual startup podcasts (My First Million, Greg Isenberg, etc. etc.) and so I built an automation that turns all of the startup ideas discussed into a weekly email digest. I always struggle to listen to as many episodes as I'd actually like to, so I thought I'd summarise the stuff I care about instead (startup opportunities being discussed). I thought it would be interesting to post some of the ideas extracted so far. They range from being completely whacky and blue sky, to pretty boring but realistic. A word of warning before anyone complains – this is a big mixture of tech, ai, non-tech, local services, etc. ideas: Some of the ideas are completely mundane, but realistic (e.g. local window cleaning service) Some of the ideas are completely insane, blue sky, but sound super interesting Here's the latest 36 ideas: |Idea Name|Problem|Solution|Source| |:-|:-|:-|:-| |SalesForce-as-a-Service - White Label Enterprise Sales Teams|White-label enterprise sales teams for B2B SaaS. Companies need sales but can't hire/train. Recruit retail sellers, train for tech, charge 30% of deals closed.|Create a white-label enterprise sales team by recruiting natural salespeople from retail and direct sales backgrounds (e.g. mall kiosks, cutco knives). Train them specifically in B2B SaaS sales techniques and processes. Offer this trained sales force to tech companies on a contract basis.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |TechButler - Mobile Device Maintenance Service|Mobile tech maintenance service. Clean/optimize devices, improve WiFi, basic support. $100/visit to homes. Target affluent neighborhoods.|Mobile tech support service providing in-home device cleaning, optimization, and setup. Focus on common issues like WiFi improvement, device maintenance, and basic tech support.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |MemoryBox - At-Home Video Digitization Service|Door-to-door VHS conversion service. Parents have boxes of old tapes. Pick up, digitize, deliver. $30/tape with minimum order. Going extinct.|Door-to-door VHS to digital conversion service that handles everything from pickup to digital delivery. Make it extremely convenient for customers to preserve their memories.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |Elite Match Ventures - Success-Based Luxury Matchmaking|High-end matchmaking for 50M+ net worth individuals. Only charge $1M+ when they get married. No upfront fees. Extensive vetting process.|Premium matchmaking service exclusively for ultra-high net worth individuals with a pure contingency fee model - only get paid ($1M+) upon successful marriage. Focus on quality over quantity with extensive vetting and personalized matching.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |LocalHost - Simple Small Business Websites|Simple WordPress sites for local businesses. $50/month includes hosting, updates, security. Target restaurants and shops. Recurring revenue play.|Simplified web hosting and WordPress management service targeting local small businesses. Focus on basic sites with standard templates, ongoing maintenance, and reliable support for a fixed monthly fee.|My First Million - "Life Hacks From The King of Introverts + 7 Business Ideas| |VoiceJournal AI - Voice-First Smart Journaling|Voice-to-text journaling app with AI insights. 8,100 monthly searches. $15/month subscription. Partners with journaling YouTubers.|AI-powered journaling app that combines voice recording, transcription, and intelligent insights. Users can speak their thoughts, which are automatically transcribed and analyzed for patterns, emotions, and actionable insights.|Where It Happens - "7 $1M+ AI startup ideas you can launch tomorrow with $0"| |AIGenAds - AI-Generated UGC Content Platform|AI platform turning product briefs into UGC-style video ads. Brands spending $500/video for human creators. Generate 100 variations for $99/month.|AI platform that generates UGC-style video ads using AI avatars and scripting. System would allow rapid generation of multiple ad variations at a fraction of the cost. Platform would use existing AI avatar technology combined with script generation to create authentic-looking testimonial-style content.|Where It Happens - "7 $1M+ AI startup ideas you can launch tomorrow with $0"| |InfographAI - Automated Infographic Generation Platform|AI turning blog posts into branded infographics. Marketers spending hours on design. $99/month unlimited generation.|AI-powered platform that automatically converts blog posts and articles into visually appealing infographics. System would analyze content, extract key points, and generate professional designs using predefined templates and brand colors.|Where It Happens - "7 $1M+ AI startup ideas you can launch tomorrow with $0"| |KidFinance - Children's Financial Education Entertainment|Children's media franchise teaching financial literacy. Former preschool teacher creating 'Dora for money'. Books, videos, merchandise potential.|Character-driven financial education content for kids, including books, videos, and potentially TV show. Focus on making money concepts fun and memorable.|The Side Hustle Show - "How a Free Challenge Turned Into a $500,000 a Year Business (Greatest Hits)"| |FinanceTasker - Daily Financial Task Challenge|Free 30-day financial challenge with daily action items. People overwhelmed by money management. Makes $500k/year through books, speaking, and premium membership.|A free 30-day financial challenge delivering one simple, actionable task per day via email. Each task includes detailed scripts and instructions. Participants join a Facebook community for support and accountability. The program focuses on quick wins to build momentum. Automated delivery allows scaling.|The Side Hustle Show - "How a Free Challenge Turned Into a $500,000 a Year Business (Greatest Hits)"| |FinanceAcademy - Expert Financial Training Platform|Premium financial education platform. $13/month for expert-led courses and live Q&As. 4000+ members generating $40k+/month.|Premium membership site with expert-led courses, live Q&As, and community support. Focus on specific topics like real estate investing, business creation, and advanced money management.|The Side Hustle Show - "How a Free Challenge Turned Into a $500,000 a Year Business (Greatest Hits)"| |SecurityFirst Compliance - Real Security + Compliance Platform|Security-first compliance platform built by hackers. Companies spending $50k+ on fake security. Making $7M/year showing why current solutions don't work.|A compliance platform built by security experts that combines mandatory compliance requirements with real security measures. The solution includes hands-on security testing, expert guidance, and a focus on actual threat prevention rather than just documentation. It merges traditional compliance workflows with practical security implementations.|In the Pit with Cody Schneider| |LinkedInbound - Automated Professional Visibility Engine|LinkedIn automation for inbound job offers. Professionals spending hours on manual outreach. $99/month per job seeker.|Automated system for creating visibility and generating inbound interest on LinkedIn through coordinated profile viewing and engagement. Uses multiple accounts to create visibility patterns that trigger curiosity and inbound messages.|In the Pit with Cody Schneider| |ConvoTracker - Community Discussion Monitoring Platform|Community discussion monitoring across Reddit, Twitter, HN. Companies missing sales opportunities. $499/month per brand tracked.|Comprehensive monitoring system that tracks competitor mentions and industry discussions across multiple platforms (Reddit, Twitter, Hacker News, etc.) with automated alerts and engagement suggestions.|In the Pit with Cody Schneider| |ContentAds Pro - Smart Display Ad Implementation|Display ad implementation service for content creators. Bloggers losing thousands in ad revenue monthly. Makes $3-5k per site setup plus ongoing optimization fees.|Implementation of professional display advertising through networks like Mediavine that specialize in optimizing ad placement and revenue while maintaining user experience. Include features like turning off ads for email subscribers and careful placement to minimize impact on core metrics.|The Side Hustle Show - "636: Is Business Coaching Worth It? A Look Inside the last 12 months of Side Hustle Nation"| |MoneyAppReviews - Professional Side Hustle App Testing|Professional testing service for money-making apps. People wasting time on low-paying apps. Makes $20k/month from affiliate commissions and ads.|Professional app testing service that systematically reviews money-making apps and creates detailed, honest reviews including actual earnings data, time investment, and practical tips.|The Side Hustle Show - "636: Is Business Coaching Worth It? A Look Inside the last 12 months of Side Hustle Nation"| |LightPro - Holiday Light Installation Service|Professional Christmas light installation service. Homeowners afraid of ladders. $500-2000 per house plus storage.|Professional Christmas light installation service targeting residential and commercial properties. Full-service offering including design, installation, maintenance, removal and storage. Focus on safety and premium aesthetic results.|The Side Hustle Show - "639: 30 Ways to Make Extra Money for the Holidays"| |FocusMatch - Research Participant Marketplace|Marketplace connecting companies to paid research participants. Companies spending weeks finding people. $50-150/hour per study.|Online platform connecting companies directly with paid research participants. Participants create detailed profiles and get matched to relevant studies. Companies get faster access to their target demographic while participants earn money sharing opinions.|The Side Hustle Show - "639: 30 Ways to Make Extra Money for the Holidays"| |SolarShine Pro - Specialized Solar Panel Cleaning Service|Solar panel cleaning service using specialized equipment. Panels lose 50% efficiency when dirty. $650 per job, automated scheduling generates $18k/month from repeat customers.|Professional solar panel cleaning service using specialized deionized water system and European cleaning equipment. Includes automated 6-month scheduling, professional liability coverage, and warranty-safe cleaning processes. Service is bundled with inspection and performance monitoring.|The UpFlip Podcast - "156. $18K/Month with This ONE Service — Niche Business Idea"| |ExteriorCare Complete - One-Stop Exterior Maintenance Service|One-stop exterior home cleaning service (solar, windows, gutters, bird proofing). Automated scheduling. $650 average ticket. 60% repeat customers on 6-month contracts.|All-in-one exterior cleaning service offering comprehensive maintenance packages including solar, windows, gutters, roof cleaning and bird proofing. Single point of contact, consistent quality, and automated scheduling for all services.|The UpFlip Podcast - "156. $18K/Month with This ONE Service — Niche Business Idea"| |ContentMorph - Automated Cross-Platform Content Adaptation|AI platform converting blog posts into platform-optimized social content. Marketing teams spending 5hrs/post on manual adaptation. $199/mo per brand with 50% margins.|An AI-powered platform that automatically transforms long-form content (blog posts, podcasts, videos) into platform-specific formats (Instagram reels, TikToks, tweets). The system would preserve brand voice while optimizing for each platform's unique requirements and best practices.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Digital Threads: The Entrepreneur Playbook for Digital-First Marketing with Neal Schaffer"| |MarketerMatch - Verified Digital Marketing Talent Marketplace|Marketplace for pre-vetted digital marketing specialists. Entrepreneurs spending 15hrs/week on marketing tasks. Platform takes 15% commission averaging $900/month per active client.|A specialized marketplace exclusively for digital marketing professionals, pre-vetted for specific skills (video editing, social media, SEO, etc.). Platform includes skill verification, portfolio review, and specialization matching.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Digital Threads: The Entrepreneur Playbook for Digital-First Marketing with Neal Schaffer"| |Tiger Window Cleaning - Premium Local Window Service|Local window cleaning service targeting homeowners. Traditional companies charging 2x market rate. Making $10k/month from $200 initial investment.|Local window cleaning service combining competitive pricing ($5/pane), excellent customer service, and quality guarantees. Uses modern tools like water-fed poles for efficiency. Implements systematic approach to customer communication and follow-up.|The Side Hustle Show - "630: How this College Student’s Side Hustle Brings in $10k a Month"| |RealViz3D - Real Estate Visualization Platform|3D visualization service turning architectural plans into photorealistic renderings for real estate agents. Agents struggling with unbuilt property sales. Making $30-40k/year per operator.|Professional 3D modeling and rendering service that creates photorealistic visualizations of properties before they're built or renovated. The service transforms architectural plans into immersive 3D representations that show lighting, textures, and realistic details. This helps potential buyers fully understand and connect with the space before it physically exists.|Side Hustle School - "#2861 - TBT: An Architect’s Side Hustle in 3D Real Estate Modeling"| |Somewhere - Global Talent Marketplace|Platform connecting US companies with vetted overseas talent. Tech roles costing $150k locally filled for 50% less. Grew from $15M to $52M valuation in 9 months.|Platform connecting US companies with pre-vetted overseas talent at significantly lower rates while maintaining high quality. Handles payments, contracts, and quality assurance to remove friction from global hiring.|My First Million - "I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months| |GymLaunch - Rapid Gym Turnaround Service|Consultants flying to struggling gyms to implement proven member acquisition systems. Gym owners lacking sales expertise. Made $100k in first 21 days.|Expert consultants fly in to implement proven member acquisition systems, train staff, and rapidly fill gyms with new members. The service combines sales training, marketing automation, and proven conversion tactics to transform struggling gyms into profitable businesses within weeks.|My First Million - "I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months| |PublishPlus - Publishing Backend Monetization|Backend monetization system for publishing companies. One-time customers becoming recurring revenue. Grew business from $2M to $110M revenue.|Add complementary backend products and services to increase customer lifetime value. Develop software tools and additional services that natural extend from initial publishing product. Focus on high-margin recurring revenue streams.|My First Million - "I Lost Everything Twice… Then Made $26M In 18 Months| |WelcomeBot - Automated Employee Onboarding Platform|Automated employee welcome platform. HR teams struggling with consistent onboarding. $99/month per 100 employees.|An automated onboarding platform that creates personalized welcome experiences through pre-recorded video messages, scheduled check-ins, and automated swag delivery. The platform would ensure consistent high-quality onboarding regardless of timing or location.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Free Training on Building Systems and Processes to Scale Your Business with Chris Ronzio: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |ProcessBrain - Business Knowledge Documentation Platform|SaaS platform turning tribal knowledge into documented processes. Business owners spending hours training new hires. $199/month per company.|A software platform that makes it easy to document and delegate business processes and procedures. The platform would include templates, guided documentation flows, and tools to easily share and update procedures. It would help businesses create a comprehensive playbook of their operations.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "Free Training on Building Systems and Processes to Scale Your Business with Chris Ronzio: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |TradeMatch - Modern Manufacturing Job Marketplace|Modern job board making manufacturing sexy again. Factory jobs paying $40/hr but can't recruit. $500 per successful referral.|A specialized job marketplace and recruitment platform focused exclusively on modern manufacturing and trade jobs. The platform would combine TikTok-style content marketing, referral programs, and modern UX to make manufacturing jobs appealing to Gen Z and young workers. Would leverage existing $500 referral fees and industry demand.|My First Million - "He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s"| |GroundLevel - Executive Immersion Program|Structured program putting CEOs in front-line jobs. Executives disconnected from workers. $25k per placement.|A structured program that places executives and founders in front-line jobs (retail, warehouse, service) for 2-4 weeks with documentation and learning framework. Similar to Scott Heiferman's McDonald's experience but productized.|My First Million - "He Sold His Company For $15M, Then Got A Job At McDonald’s"| |OneStepAhead - Micro-Mentorship Marketplace|Marketplace for 30-min mentorship calls with people one step ahead. Professionals seeking specific guidance. Takes 15% of session fees.|MicroMentor Marketplace - Platform connecting people with mentors who are just one step ahead in their journey for focused, affordable micro-mentorship sessions.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |VulnerableLeader - Leadership Authenticity Training Platform|Leadership vulnerability training platform. Leaders struggling with authentic communication. $2k/month per company subscription.|Leadership Vulnerability Platform - A digital training platform combining assessment tools, guided exercises, and peer support to help leaders develop authentic communication skills. The platform would include real-world scenarios, video coaching, and measurable metrics for tracking leadership growth through vulnerability.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |NetworkAI - Smart Network Intelligence Platform|AI analyzing your network to find hidden valuable connections. Professionals missing opportunities in existing contacts. $49/month per user.|AI Network Navigator - Smart tool that analyzes your professional network across platforms, identifies valuable hidden connections, and suggests specific actionable ways to leverage relationships for mutual benefit.|Entrepreneurs on Fire - "How to Create an Unbroken Business with Michael Unbroken: An EOFire Classic from 2021"| |Porch Pumpkins - Seasonal Decoration Service|Full-service porch pumpkin decoration. Homeowners spend $300-1350 per season. One operator making $1M in 8 weeks seasonal revenue.|Full-service seasonal porch decoration service focused on autumn/Halloween, including design, installation, maintenance, and removal. Offering premium curated pumpkin arrangements with various package tiers.|My First Million - "The guy who gets paid $80K/yr to do nothing"| |Silent Companion - Professional Presence Service|Professional silent companions for lonely people. Huge problem in Japan/globally. $68/session, $80k/year per companion. Non-sexual, just presence.|A professional companion service where individuals can rent a non-judgmental, quiet presence for various activities. The companion provides silent company without the pressure of conversation or social performance. They accompany clients to events, meals, or just sit quietly together.|My First Million - "The guy who gets paid $80K/yr to do nothing"| Hope this is useful. If anyone would like to ensure I include any particular podcasts or episodes etc. in future posts, very happy to do so. I'll generally send \~5 ideas per week in a short weekly digest format (you can see the format I'd usually use in here: podcastmarketwatch.beehiiv.com). I find it mindblowing that the latest models with large context windows make it even possible to analyze full transcripts at such scale. It's a very exciting time we're living through! Would love some feedback on this stuff, happy to iterate and improve the analysis/ideas... or create a new newsletter on a different topic if anyone would like. Cheers!

A Structured Approach to Ideation and Validation (I will not promote)
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Royal_Rest8409This week

A Structured Approach to Ideation and Validation (I will not promote)

Hi all, I used to work in VC and wanted to share some startup knowledge and insights from startup founders I know. Recently, I interviewed a friend of mine who built an AI Robotics startup ("Hivebotics") that creates automated toilet-cleaning robots. I can't post the full article because of Reddit's word limit, so I'll be posting it in sections here instead. This first section of the transcript goes through his approach to ideation and validation. Enjoy and let me know what you think! (I will not promote) \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ (1) Ideation and Validation Problem-Market-Solution Framework I like to think of startup ideation and validation using this framework: Problem– What exactly are you solving? Observation– How you identify a problem to work on User Research– How you further understand that problem Market– Is there a large enough market for solving this problem? Size– How many people experience this same problem? Demand– How many of those people are willing to pay for the solution? Solution– Your answer to the problem Desirability– Whether people actually want your solution Feasibility– Whether building the solution is practical and realistic Viability– Whether your solution can generate revenue Problem You always need to start problem-first, which is something that was really drilled into me during my time at Stanford. Too often, founders rush to build solutions first—apps or products they find exciting—without confirming whether there's any real demand for it. The first step is always to identify a specific problem, then further understand its scale, urgency and further details by talking to potential users. Observation– To find problems, observation is key. People may not even realise the inefficiencies in their processes until you point them out. That’s why interviews and field research are so important. There are problems all around us, so it's simply a matter of going out, paying attention and being attuned to them as they occur. User Research– To further understand the problem, conducting user research by interviewing potential customers is essential. Personally, I like to use the "Mom Test" when I conduct interviews to avoid biased and generic feedback. Don’t just ask theoretical questions and avoid being too specific—observe how your potential users work, ask about pain points, and use broad, open-ended questions to ensure you aren't leading them to a specific answer. Market Once you've found an actual problem and talked to enough potential users to really understand its specific pain points, the next step is to determine the market size and demand for a solution. Size– Determining the market size is essential because it determines whether or not it's commercially worthwhile to pursue the problem and develop a solution for it. You need to determine if there are enough potential customers out there experiencing this problem to gauge the market size. There's no secret strategy for this; you have to interview as many potential users as possible to confirm that it's a widespread problem in the industry. Demand– Make sure that you're working on a problem that people will gladly pay to have solved. Even if the problem is large enough, you have to make sure it's painful enough to warrant a paid solution. If many people experience the same problem, but aren't willing to pay for a solution, then you don't have a market and should look for a different problem to validate. Another way of looking at it is that your true market size is the number of potential customers actually willing to pay* for the solution to the problem, not the number of people simply experiencing the same problem. Solution When validating a potential solution to the problem, I would look at the 3 factors of desirability, feasibility and viability. Desirability– the degree to which a solution appeals to people and fulfills their wants and needs. Without strong desirability, even the most technically advanced or economically practical product is unlikely to succeed. The best way to test this is to secure financial commitments early on during the proof-of-concept stage. Most people are polite, so they may simply tell you that your startup's product is good even if it's not. However, if they're actually willing to pay for the solution, this is actual evidence of your product's desirability. Don't just ask people if they would pay for it; actually see whether they will pay for it. Feasibility– whether a product can be built using existing technical capabilities. A lack of feasibility makes it challenging or impossible to develop the product, no matter how appealing it might be to users or how promising its financial prospects are. This is just a matter of conducting initial research and actually trying to build a prototype, which will inform you whether the fully-realised product is truly feasible. Viability– the product's ability to generate sustainable financial returns. Without financial viability, the business supporting the product cannot endure, even if the product is highly appealing to users and technically achievable. Here, you need to look at your unit economics, development costs and other expenses to determine the viability of your solution. \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ Hope you enjoyed reading this; let me know your honest thoughts in the comments and I'll try to improve how I interview founders based on those!

After building an AI Co-founder to solve my startup struggles, I realized we might be onto something bigger. What problems would you want YOUR AI Co-founder to solve?
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Consistent_Yak6765This week

After building an AI Co-founder to solve my startup struggles, I realized we might be onto something bigger. What problems would you want YOUR AI Co-founder to solve?

A few days ago, I shared my entrepreneurial journey and the endless loop of startup struggles I was facing. The response from the community was overwhelming, and it validated something I had stumbled upon while trying to solve my own problems. In just a matter of days, we've built out the core modules I initially used for myself, deep market research capabilities, automated outreach systems, and competitor analysis. It's surreal to see something born out of personal frustration turning into a tool that others might actually find valuable. But here's where it gets interesting (and where I need your help). While we're actively onboarding users for our alpha test, I can't shake the feeling that we're just scratching the surface. We've built what helped me, but what would help YOU? When you're lying awake at 3 AM, stressed about your startup, what tasks do you wish you could delegate to an AI co-founder who actually understands context and can take meaningful action? Of course, it's not a replacement for an actual AI cofounder, but using our prior entrepreneurial experience and conversations with other folks, we understand that OUTREACH and SALES might actually be a big problem statement we can go deeper on as it naturally helps with the following: Idea Validation - Testing your assumptions with real customers before building Pricing strategy - Understanding what the market is willing to pay Product strategy - Getting feedback on features and roadmap Actually revenue - Converting conversations into real paying customers I'm not asking you to imagine some sci-fi scenario, we've already built modules that can: Generate comprehensive 20+ page market analysis reports with actionable insights Handle customer outreach Monitor competitors and target accounts, tracking changes in their strategy Take supervised actions based on the insights gathered (Manual effort is required currently) But what else should it do? What would make you trust an AI co-founder with parts of your business? Or do you think this whole concept is fundamentally flawed? I'm committed to building this the right way, not just another AI tool or an LLM Wrapper, but an agentic system that can understand your unique challenges and work towards overcoming them. Whether you think this is revolutionary or ridiculous, I want to hear your honest thoughts. But more importantly, I want to hear your unfiltered feedback in the comments. What would make this truly valuable for YOU? Edit 1: The AI cofounder will take no equity in your startup.

I started a Tech Startup, and I feel totally STUCK.
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I started a Tech Startup, and I feel totally STUCK.

I made "Visual Love," a Computer Vision/AI-driven matchmaking platform. The idea is that although appearance is one of the biggest factors for starting a relationship, current matchmaking services and dating apps do not have the capability to search for people based on appearance. On Visual Love, you can find your ideal match simply by uploading a picture of your "ideal type." Also, you can connect with someone who thinks of you as their ideal type, simply by uploading your own picture. Or, there might be a perfect (mutually ideal) match. I made this CV/AI algorithm to scan faces, retrieve facial features, and make it possible to find the closest match among millions of others in a second. On average, regular dating app users swipe 8000 times over 8 months until they find their love. On Visual Love, users can find one in a million just in a second. You can try the tech demo on the website if you want to (find the link through my LinkedIn at the bottom of the post; I have to follow the "I will not promote" rule.) I thought this app would have the best chance in Asia, as people care a lot more about appearance in Asia (especially Korea and Japan). Also, my nationality is Korean, and I speak both Korean and Japanese as fluently as I speak English. So I came to Korea, and pitched to a number of VC/AC firms in Korea and Japan, and two of them were typically intersted in making investment. However, they both required me to provide market validation: how much it would cost per user acquisition, how much each user would pay on average, and etc, even after I provided them with a 3-years financial projection including market research based on other dating apps. &#x200B; Everything might be going just as expected, or even better than anticipated, but I'm feeling very stuck now. I am not a business expert, and I don't have much idea on how to proceed from here. The problem is, it wouldn't quite work as expected when there are not many users. If I start with a small group of users, it's not any better than any other dating app. Matching users within a small group doesn't quite reflect the values of Visual Love. So I figured a way around: making a game version of Visual Love targeting 100k to 500k users to work as an initial distribution channel. This version will include finding look-alike celebrities, and solving look-alike face puzzles, and etc. But now, the problem is, I cannot continue this project by myself. I have no social/financial support, and I'm running low on cash. Also, although I'm from Korea, I lived in many different countries. I did my undergraduate in New York (Columbia University) and all my friends are in the US. I don't feel very included here. I can't stop feeling frustrated and distressed :( I'm sure Visual Love can reshape the future of the matchmaking market. But, only if I can continue this project by getting the fund I require. I'm open to any advice, and if you're interested in providing any help or working with me, please contact me through LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/don-lee-3853b1264/

We received 25k investment offer, need advice [I will not promote]
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Agreeable_Ad6424This week

We received 25k investment offer, need advice [I will not promote]

We received a $25k for 2.5% on a convertible note offer from a US based investor. The note matures in 18 months with an interest rate of 5%, but the investor said they can extend it further. It’s an AI SaaS in graphic design. We have been bootstrapping till now, and we feel that this money could help us hire better engineers and marketeers, we want to grow it to a good revenue, but don't see it becoming a billion dollar startup as such. Our initial plans were to build it like an indie-hacker, grow it a decent revenue and sell it to someone who can take better care of it. We built it as a side project with full time jobs. We already have decent traction with 10k+ signups and $600+ in revenue per month with <100 dollars spent on marketing. But our AI model costs are high, 0.2 USD per user that we onboard and provide free credits. But we as founders are more interested in another idea that we have been thinking about and see a bigger potential + founder market fit in. The current product is good, and we can foresee that with better hiring and marketing, we can grow our revenue to about 10-20k a month, like a regular online business. What should we do? We don't want to simply let go of the product because it's not that it doesn't work, it's just that we as founders are better fit for something else. We can't sell it yet as the revenue isn't too high and we haven't even incorporated. Is it okay if we think of growing it to 10-20k+ a month and then intend to sell it to someone who can take better care of it? Should we take the investment in such a case, given this investment is definitely gonna help us grow? Process of incorporation will also help us in selling this business later I think?

I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on building a tool, and got 0 zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product, Summ, that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

After building an AI Co-founder to solve my startup struggles, I realized we might be onto something bigger. What problems would you want YOUR AI Co-founder to solve?
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Consistent_Yak6765This week

After building an AI Co-founder to solve my startup struggles, I realized we might be onto something bigger. What problems would you want YOUR AI Co-founder to solve?

A few days ago, I shared my entrepreneurial journey and the endless loop of startup struggles I was facing. The response from the community was overwhelming, and it validated something I had stumbled upon while trying to solve my own problems. In just a matter of days, we've built out the core modules I initially used for myself, deep market research capabilities, automated outreach systems, and competitor analysis. It's surreal to see something born out of personal frustration turning into a tool that others might actually find valuable. But here's where it gets interesting (and where I need your help). While we're actively onboarding users for our alpha test, I can't shake the feeling that we're just scratching the surface. We've built what helped me, but what would help YOU? When you're lying awake at 3 AM, stressed about your startup, what tasks do you wish you could delegate to an AI co-founder who actually understands context and can take meaningful action? Of course, it's not a replacement for an actual AI cofounder, but using our prior entrepreneurial experience and conversations with other folks, we understand that OUTREACH and SALES might actually be a big problem statement we can go deeper on as it naturally helps with the following: Idea Validation - Testing your assumptions with real customers before building Pricing strategy - Understanding what the market is willing to pay Product strategy - Getting feedback on features and roadmap Actually revenue - Converting conversations into real paying customers I'm not asking you to imagine some sci-fi scenario, we've already built modules that can: Generate comprehensive 20+ page market analysis reports with actionable insights Handle customer outreach Monitor competitors and target accounts, tracking changes in their strategy Take supervised actions based on the insights gathered (Manual effort is required currently) But what else should it do? What would make you trust an AI co-founder with parts of your business? Or do you think this whole concept is fundamentally flawed? I'm committed to building this the right way, not just another AI tool or an LLM Wrapper, but an agentic system that can understand your unique challenges and work towards overcoming them. Whether you think this is revolutionary or ridiculous, I want to hear your honest thoughts. But more importantly, I want to hear your unfiltered feedback in the comments. What would make this truly valuable for YOU? Edit 1: The AI cofounder will take no equity in your startup.

I am considering starting a SaaS business that automates the creation of long-form SEO-optimized blog posts. Is this something you would find useful, as a business owner?
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What_The_HexThis week

I am considering starting a SaaS business that automates the creation of long-form SEO-optimized blog posts. Is this something you would find useful, as a business owner?

Trying to gauge the general interest level, from other entrepreneurs/business owners. The idea is, a tool that automates the process of creating long-form SEO optimized blog posts to promote your business -- perhaps creating entire batches of such posts, all from just one button click. Like if you could just describe your business, click a button, and BAM, it just outputs like an entire month's worth of absolutely fire SEO-optimized long-form blog posts? That would be super fucking convenient. Yes you can use ChatGPT for this, but the character limits make it so it can only output very short posts. Otherwise it requires first asking for an outline, then getting the different sections piecemeal and pasting it all together yourself. Still super time-consuming to do it that way. A GPT-based solution could probably automate the process I've hit upon in my own SEO blog-posting workflow -- where I output not just finished long-form blog posts, but also convert them into SEO-optimized HTML code so you can just paste it into your blog post website and have all the header tags etc set up for optimal SEO/keyword ranking purposes. Biggest counter-argument I make against this is, there are undoubtedly lots of companies already offering this. Doesn't mean I can't make money doing it. I just don't like entering super crowded marketplaces. Other main argument I have is, if I used my OpenAI account for this, there's the risk of some malicious/idiot user firing prompts that violate the OpenAI ToS and get me banned. I COULD have them input their own OpenAI API tokens, but that just adds adoption/usage barriers that would make it way harder to market/acquire initial customers. I guess I could sanitize the user inputs as a pre-processing step to block any obscene prompts or anything like that, but still, it's a risk. Let me know your thoughts on this idea. ASSUMING it worked effectively -- and made it very easy for you to just describe your business offerings / value propositions / target market(s), then get genuinely useful long-form SEO-optimized blog posts, is this something you'd be willing to pay for? If so, what dollar amount, to you, would seem reasonable? It would probably just be hosted on a website. Then you'd just copy the outputted final result for use as needed on your website. That would be the simplest way to do it. Technically it could function as like, a plugin for specific websites that maybe auto-posts them for you too -- it would be simpler, on my end, to start out doing this on a standalone website. (Might also make it easier to allow users to try it out, on first visit.) One last point -- MAYBE it would have an optional intermediate step, where it would first output the planned outline for the blog post, allowing you to pop in, quickly modify that, add your own thoughts / valuable ideas (to help make the blog post more unique, truly useful for readers, more your own) -- THEN you could finalize it and hit submit. Again, that's the workflow I've hit upon in my own semi-automated blog-posting workflow, and it's led to some pretty useful long-form content that isn't just, boring garbage, but contains lots of genuinely useful ideas that I would include in my own uniquely-created blog posts on the subject. But instead of me taking the time to write it, I just kinda toss in a few quickly typed out ideas to expand upon, and ChatGPT does the rest. Imagine that kind of optional / customizable workflow, but the rest of it is fully automated. OR you could just get the fully automated blog posts with no revisions on your part. Thanks!

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

Looking for Feedback on this Idea
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Looking for Feedback on this Idea

Hey everyone, I’d love some honest feedback on an idea I’ve been working on (currently just in paper). A little about me: I started in hospitality across South America and Asia, then moved into social entrepreneurship in a rural area, and eventually ecommerce using WordPress. Now, I’m deep into programming here in Europe, which I’ve really come to enjoy. So yes, I understand the perspective of businesses, entrepreneurs and programmers.  Back when I had tons of ideas for businesses and optimizing processes, I always hit the same drama: "You need a developer." But hiring one was too expensive or unreliable or shady business practice, and partnering with a programmer, someone I barely knew often felt too risky (I've learned the hard way that partnerships can feel like marriages). Now, as a programmer, I get a lot of requests from small businesses needing help and sometimes with very simple ideas. And while I can do it, I often don’t have the time, so I have to tell them I can't. And when I do have time, I know the cost can be too much for their budget. This got me thinking: What if I created a course to teach business owners just enough programming to solve their own problems? Not to become full time coders, but to gain enough knowledge to build simple tools or, better yet, understand code enough to ask the right questions whether it's to AI or a future developer. The course would focus on programming but talking business language, starting with building more flexible websites, managing your own content and creating custom tools without the limitations of templates or paid widgets. I’m thinking of creating a supportive community where we learn and grow together (maybe using your business as an example), and I’d be available to help along the way, plus I will be adding tools that you could reuse for your business (mostly because you will be able to read it and understand it → that's the goal). Talking about money, I can only tell you will be way more affordable compared to multiple payments in different places. So, does this resonate with you? I’d really appreciate your honest thoughts. Do you feel you have the time to learn or you still prefer looking for a developer? Feel free to share any frustrations or ideas. And if this sounds interesting, write me a PM, and I’ll keep you updated. Thanks for reading. I'm excited to hear what you think! :)

I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on building a web product, and got zero users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I have stuff to post on Reddit very rarely, but I share how my project is going on, random stuff, and memes on X. Just in case few might want to keep in touch 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2C products beats building B2B products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

What Reinforcement Learning Method Should I Use for Poker AI with LLMs?
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godlover123451This week

What Reinforcement Learning Method Should I Use for Poker AI with LLMs?

Hey everyone, I’m working on a poker AI project, where I’m training a large language model (LLM) to predict poker actions from given game states (check, call, bet, raise, etc.). My end goal is to create a model that can play poker at a high level, primarily by self-play and opponent modeling. However, I’m running into some challenges that I hope you can help me with! Here's the situation: Training Method: I’m using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on real poker hand history data to initially teach the LLM how to predict poker actions from game states. This means that the model learns from examples of past games, predicting the actions that players took in various situations. Self-Play Setup: I plan to eventually move to self-play, where the LLM will play against itself (or other types of models that I create to simulate different play styles). I’ll use these self-play sessions to improve the model over time. Opponent Pool: I’m creating 6 types of poker players (Loose Aggressive, Loose Passive, Tight Aggressive, Tight Passive, Maniac, and Nit), each trained at 5 different skill levels (Novice, Beg\*nner, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert). This gives me a decent range of opponent behavior for training. The problem: Here’s the catch: The LLM I’m using only outputs discrete actions (e.g., bet 3BB, raise to 10BB, etc.) with no access to the probabilities of actions, so I can't directly use methods like policy gradients or Q-learning that rely on action probabilities or continuous action spaces. This makes applying traditional RL methods a bit tricky. My question: Given that I don't have access to action probabilities, what RL method or strategy should I pursue to improve my model? Specifically, I’m looking for a way to: Incorporate self-play with reward-based learning. Refine the model through reinforcement learning, without the need for continuous probabilities. Ensure the model doesn’t just overfit to its own prior behavior but learns to adapt and exploit different strategies in poker. I’ve considered a few approaches like reward-weighted supervised fine-tuning or using simpler RL techniques like Monte Carlo updates, but I’m not sure which would work best with the LLM setup I have. I've also considered Q-learning or Deep Q-learning. Any advice or suggestions on which RL approach I should take given my situation would be greatly appreciated! Yes I used AI to write this queston. But it captures everything I want to say, and I suck at writing.

Finally launched my own app in the app store!
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ranftThis week

Finally launched my own app in the app store!

After reading on the sidelines here for about a year I just launched Kalo. My app is the 100th million ai powered calorie-counting app, hahaha. I know I know. Here it comes: Kalo Screenshots Despite being in a crowded space, Kalo has some caveats I am a bit proud of: \- I am a daily user of my app. Everything that bugs me will be gone ASAP. \- I have already lost 10kg with Kalo. I can't do any sports due to an energy-debilitating sickness (hello my me/cfs friends 👋), so this is huge. \- I HATE nudging. Hence, Kalo has no streaks, no notifications to rip off your valuable time. It’s just a tool to track calories and learn to get a feel for it. \- Ease of daily use and doing anything so it doesn't feel like a grind is Kalo's mission. I already implemented a lot of ways to quickly access tracking and leaving the app. \- Next feature will be tracking your own progress with some proper research based analytics is the one next step, that Im working on. \- Data: Minimal footprint as possible. Anything is currently saved only on the device, especially all health data. Check Kalo out here: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/kalo/id6739449751?l=en-GB Tech used to make it possible: There are some terrific security functions in here, and a robust paywall integration, both of which I could never have done without the MVP help of \- Claude and GPT \- Claude's Project function was basically my base project folder here. Claude is perfect when it comes to traditional features. Anything more recent than iOS14 can become a very difficult endeavour \- GPT 4o was great for error logging overview and general sorting measures. Claude's message restriction could be fended of many times here. \- GPT 1o became available more recently and its coding is a lot more robust than 4o. This helped me to not clog Claude with tedious bug fixing. Also it helped when Claude ran away in terrible directions Pre knowledge: I was a digital product designer way back, so I know a thing or two about making things easier to use, especially when it comes to the ease of daily use. Marketing: Will be my biggest focus now. I am quite shit at it, which means It can only get better. It's gonna be some rough weather to get eyes on my app. If anyone thinks they can help or knows how to, any tips are appreciated. Thats it for now. I'll try and keep you updated. I am happy. Let's see if this app will make me happy on a nicer bed, or a jet ski. Again, happy to get your impression of Kalo: https://apps.apple.com/de/app/kalo/id6739449751?l=en-GB

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.
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GDbuildsGDThis week

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I very rarely have stuff to post on Reddit, but I share how my project is going on, just random stuff, and memes on X. In case few might want to keep up 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2B products beats building B2C products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

Things I did to promote my product, and how they turned out
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laike9mThis week

Things I did to promote my product, and how they turned out

(I will share more updates in the future, you can find me on Twitter and/or Mastodon) Ask any ten indie developers about the toughest part of their job, and nine will likely say "marketing." I recently got a taste of this firsthand when I launched Xylect. Here's a rundown of my promotional attempts - hopefully, my experiences can help fellow developers out there. Podcast Community (✅ Success) I kicked things off by promoting Xylect in my podcast listener group. It wasn't a blockbuster, but I managed to sell a few copies and got some invaluable feedback from friends. Shoutout to those early supporters! Reddit r/macapps (✅ Success) Having had some luck promoting open-source projects on Reddit before, I decided to make r/macapps my first stop in the English-speaking world. I made an app to help you automate boring tasks with one click This post turned out to be a hit! I sold about ten copies and got a ton of useful feedback. Users pointed out compatibility issues with PopClip and suggested improvements for the website. One Italian user even requested localization, which I happily added. https://preview.redd.it/y4fuwh6hleqd1.png?width=959&format=png&auto=webp&s=7bb1b68cbf8a4f94998999e0832b9b7bd85bac67 https://preview.redd.it/8uu4cmyhleqd1.png?width=683&format=png&auto=webp&s=8f1744636aee8074b0e7491a334ef06076b143b0 I also got an intriguing email from a French user - more on that later. More Reddit Posts (❌ Failure) Riding high on my r/macapps success, I branched out to r/SideProject, r/Entrepreneur, and r/indiehackers. These subreddits frown upon direct self-promotion, so I took a softer approach with an article: The unexpected emotional cost of being an indiehacker While the article was heartfelt, it fell flat. Across all three posts, I got a grand total of three comments - two of which were complaints about the font size on mobile. Needless to say, I didn't sell a single copy. Hacker News (❌ Failure) As one of the tech world's major forums, I had to give Hacker News a shot. I wasn't too optimistic, given my past experiences there. Posting on HN feels like a mix of luck and dark magic. As expected, my post vanished without a trace - no comments, no sales. I might give it another go someday. If you're curious, you can check out my previous HN submissions. Tools Directory Websites (❌ Failure) These sites have a simple premise: you list your app, they display it. Seemed like an easy way to get some backlinks, right? Well, I learned the hard way that it's not that simple. I stumbled upon a Reddit post where someone claimed to have made a killing with their directory site in just a few days. The catch? Each listing cost $19. The site had a handful of apps listed, so I thought, "Why not? Early bird gets the worm." I paid up and listed Xylect. Spoiler alert: all I got was $19 poorer 🥲 Lesson learned: These directory sites won't magically sell your product. At best, they're just glorified backlinks. There might be some value in paid promotions on these platforms, but I can't speak to that from experience. V2EX (❌ Failure) After striking out in the English-speaking world, I turned my attention to the Chinese market, starting with V2EX (think of it as China's hybrid of HN and Reddit). This turned out to be my most unexpected flop. Here's the post: [\[Launch Discount\] Mac's most powerful AI search (Perplexity + Wikipedia + Google), boost your efficiency tenfold with one click. No API key required, no prompt needed, no token limit 🔥 - V2EX](https://www.v2ex.com/t/1064930?p=1#reply36) I'd seen decent engagement on other promo posts, so I had high hopes. I posted late at night (US time) and went to bed dreaming of waking up to a flood of comments. Reality check: The next morning, I had exactly one reply - from Kilerd, a loyal podcast listener showing some love. I was baffled. After re-reading my post, I realized I'd missed a crucial element: promo codes. A quick scan of popular posts confirmed my suspicion. Nearly every successful promo post was offering codes, and most comments were just base64-encoded email addresses. Talk about a facepalm moment. I scrambled to add a note about an upcoming free trial and invited users to drop their emails. This got the ball rolling with some code requests, but by then, the damage was done. The post fizzled out, and I didn't sell a single copy 🫠 A French Friend's Newsletter (✅ Success) At this point, my promotional efforts were looking pretty grim. My sales chart had a depressing stretch of flatline. But then, a glimmer of hope appeared in my inbox. Remember that French user I mentioned earlier? He ran a newsletter called vvmac and offered to feature Xylect if I added French support and sent him a free license. It was an offer I couldn't refuse. What followed was a crash course in French localization (thank you, Claude!) and the start of an incredible partnership. This guy was the most thorough beta tester I've ever encountered. We exchanged over sixty emails, covering everything from translations to UI tweaks to bug fixes. His response time was lightning-fast - I'd fix a bug, and five minutes later, he'd confirm it was sorted. The result? A much-improved Xylect and a glowing feature in his newsletter. https://preview.redd.it/ylcq2wxoleqd1.png?width=991&format=png&auto=webp&s=ee395110f50417d5c7f61318f27bf3dc30247809 I'm still in awe of his dedication. He single-handedly transformed Xylect from a buggy mess into a polished product. I'll be forever grateful for his help. The newsletter feature led to a few more sales, but honestly, that felt like a bonus at that point. Influencers (❌ Failure) I knew from the start that to really make waves, I'd need influencer backing. So, I added a note offering free licenses to content creators willing to collaborate. https://preview.redd.it/tyb2m1rqleqd1.png?width=799&format=png&auto=webp&s=56eabf126e772515322595613c546e6ba69fb431 I did get one taker: Hey, I'll be honest, I am not a huge content creator but I think I put a lot of effort in evaluating and figuring out which apps work... So I was wondering if I could get a license in case you are willing to share it. Thank you for considering. Have a great weekend. But I knew I needed to aim higher. With the new French localization, I thought I'd try my luck with some French-speaking Mac YouTubers. I crafted emails highlighting how Xylect could help their French audience with English content. https://preview.redd.it/07oqzemrleqd1.png?width=542&format=png&auto=webp&s=3d160c1d149f28e9029816a277c6ab2496fcd57e After days of silence, I got one reply. It was... not what I was hoping for: Hi, Thank you for your proposal. I can help you to promote your service on Tiktok, Instagram et YouTube, with unique short video. Price for this project is 3500€. Unless I've completely lost my marbles, there's no way I'm dropping 3500€ on promotion. Sure, given their follower count (YouTube: 348K, TikTok: 2.7M, Instagram: 400K), it's not an outrageous ask. For some products, it might even be worth it. But for Xylect? No way. I also reached out to a Chinese influencer on Xiaohongshu, but they weren't interested. Back to the drawing board. Conclusion If you've made it this far, you've probably realized this isn't exactly a success story. My search for effective promotional channels came up largely empty-handed. I'd naively thought that my success with open-source projects would translate seamlessly to the indie dev world. Boy, was I wrong. As I mentioned in my previous article, open-source projects create a dynamic where users feel indebted to developers for their free labor. But in the commercial world of indie development, that dynamic completely flips. While this experience was often frustrating, it was also enlightening - which was kind of the point. As my first foray into indie development, my main goal was to learn the ropes and understand the process. Making money would've been nice, sure, but it wasn't my primary focus. Thanks for sticking with me through this post. I will share more updates in the future, you can follow me on  Twitter and/or Mastodon.

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5
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How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.
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I spent 6 months on a web app as a side project, and got 0 users. Here is my story.

Edit Thank you all so much for your time reading my story. Your support, feedback, criticism, and skepticism; all helped me a lot, and I couldn't appreciate it enough \^\_\^ I very rarely have stuff to post on Reddit, but I share how my project is going on, just random stuff, and memes on X. In case few might want to keep up 👀 TL;DR I spent 6 months on a tool that currently has 0 users. Below is what I learned during my journey, sharing because I believe most mistakes are easily avoidable. Do not overestimate your product and assume it will be an exception to fundamental principles. Principles are there for a reason. Always look for validation before you start. Avoid building products with a low money-to-effort ratio/in very competitive fields. Unless you have the means, you probably won't make it. Pick a problem space, pick your target audience, and talk to them before thinking about a solution. Identify and match their pain points. Only then should you think of a solution. If people are not overly excited or willing to pay in advance for a discounted price, it might be a sign to rethink. Sell one and only one feature at a time. Avoid everything else. If people don't pay for that one core feature, no secondary feature will change their mind. Always spend twice as much time marketing as you do building. You will not get users if they don't know it exists. Define success metrics ("1000 users in 3 months" or "$6000 in the account at the end of 6 months") before you start. If you don't meet them, strongly consider quitting the project. If you can't get enough users to keep going, nothing else matters. VALIDATION, VALIDATION, VALIDATION. Success is not random, but most of our first products will not make a success story. Know when to admit failure, and move on. Even if a product of yours doesn't succeed, what you learned during its journey will turn out to be invaluable for your future. My story So, this is the story of a product that I’ve been working on for the last 6 months. As it's the first product I’ve ever built, after watching you all from the sidelines, I have learned a lot, made many mistakes, and did only a few things right. Just sharing what I’ve learned and some insights from my journey so far. I hope that this post will help you avoid the mistakes I made — most of which I consider easily avoidable — while you enjoy reading it, and get to know me a little bit more 🤓. A slow start after many years Summ isn’t the first product I really wanted to build. Lacking enough dev skills to even get started was a huge blocker for so many years. In fact, the first product I would’ve LOVED to build was a smart personal shopping assistant. I had this idea 4 years ago; but with no GPT, no coding skills, no technical co-founder, I didn’t have the means to make it happen. I still do not know if such a tool exists and is good enough. All I wanted was a tool that could make data-based predictions about when to buy stuff (“buy a new toothpaste every three months”) and suggest physical products that I might need or be strongly interested in. AFAIK, Amazon famously still struggles with the second one. Fast-forward a few years, I learned the very basics of HTML, CSS, and Vanilla JS. Still was not there to build a product; but good enough to code my design portfolio from scratch. Yet, I couldn’t imagine myself building a product using Vanilla JS. I really hated it, I really sucked at it. So, back to tutorial hell, and to learn about this framework I just heard about: React.React introduced so many new concepts to me. “Thinking in React” is a phrase we heard a lot, and with quite good reasons. After some time, I was able to build very basic tutorial apps, both in React, and React Native; but I have to say that I really hated coding for mobile. At this point, I was already a fan of productivity apps, and had a concept for a time management assistant app in my design portfolio. So, why not build one? Surely, it must be easy, since every coding tutorial starts with a todo app. ❌ WRONG! Building a basic todo app is easy enough, but building one good enough for a place in the market was a challenge I took and failed. I wasted one month on that until I abandoned the project for good. Even if I continued working on it, as the productivity landscape is overly competitive, I wouldn’t be able to make enough money to cover costs, assuming I make any. Since I was (and still am) in between jobs, I decided to abandon the project. 👉 What I learned: Do not start projects with a low ratio of money to effort and time. Example: Even if I get 500 monthly users, 200 of which are paid users (unrealistically high number), assuming an average subscription fee of $5/m (such apps are quite cheap, mostly due to the high competition), it would make me around $1000 minus any occurring costs. Any founder with a product that has 500 active users should make more. Even if it was relatively successful, due to the high competition, I wouldn’t make any meaningful money. PS: I use Todoist today. Due to local pricing, I pay less than $2/m. There is no way I could beat this competitive pricing, let alone the app itself. But, somehow, with a project that wasn’t even functional — let alone being an MVP — I made my first Wi-Fi money: Someone decided that the domain I preemptively purchased is worth something. By this point, I had already abandoned the project, certainly wasn’t going to renew the domain, was looking for a FT job, and a new project that I could work on. And out of nowhere, someone hands me some free money — who am I not to take it? Of course, I took it. The domain is still unused, no idea why 🤔. Ngl, I still hate the fact that my first Wi-Fi money came from this. A new idea worth pursuing? Fast-forward some weeks now. Around March, I got this crazy idea of building an email productivity tool. We all use emails, yet we all hate them. So, this must be fixed. Everyone uses emails, in fact everyone HAS TO use emails. So, I just needed to build a tool and wait for people to come. This was all, really. After all, the problem space is huge, there is enough room for another product, everyone uses emails, no need for any further validation, right? ❌ WRONG ONCE AGAIN! We all hear from the greatest in the startup landscape that we must validate our ideas with real people, yet at least some of us (guilty here 🥸) think that our product will be hugely successful and prove them to be an exception. Few might, but most are not. I certainly wasn't. 👉 Lesson learned: Always validate your ideas with real people. Ask them how much they’d pay for such a tool (not if they would). Much better if they are willing to pay upfront for a discount, etc. But even this comes later, keep reading. I think the difference between “How much” and “If” is huge for two reasons: (1) By asking them for “How much”, you force them to think in a more realistic setting. (2) You will have a more realistic idea on your profit margins. Based on my competitive analysis, I already had a solution in my mind to improve our email usage standards and email productivity (huge mistake), but I did my best to learn about their problems regarding those without pushing the idea too hard. The idea is this: Generate concise email summaries with suggested actions, combine them into one email, and send it at their preferred times. Save as much as time the AI you end up with allows. After all, everyone loves to save time. So, what kind of validation did I seek for? Talked with only a few people around me about this crazy, internet-breaking idea. The responses I got were, now I see, mediocre; no one got excited about it, just said things along the lines of “Cool idea, OK”. So, any reasonable person in this situation would think “Okay, not might not be working”, right? Well, I did not. I assumed that they were the wrong audience for this product, and there was this magical land of user segments waiting eagerly for my product, yet unknowingly. To this day, I still have not reached this magical place. Perhaps, it didn’t exist in the first place. If I cannot find it, whether it exists or not doesn’t matter. I am certainly searching for it. 👉 What I should have done: Once I decide on a problem space (time management, email productivity, etc.), I should decide on my potential user segments, people who I plan to sell my product to. Then I should go talk to those people, ask them about their pains, then get to the problem-solving/ideation phase only later. ❗️ VALIDATION COMES FROM THE REALITY OUTSIDE. What validation looks like might change from product to product; but what invalidation looks like is more or less the same for every product. Nico Jeannen told me yesterday “validation = money in the account” on Twitter. This is the ultimate form of validation your product could get. If your product doesn’t make any money, then something is invalidated by reality: Your product, you, your idea, who knows? So, at this point, I knew a little bit of Python from spending some time in tutorial hell a few years ago, some HTML/CSS/JS, barely enough React to build a working app. React could work for this project, but I needed easy-to-implement server interactivity. Luckily, around this time, I got to know about this new gen of indie hackers, and learned (but didn’t truly understand) about their approach to indie hacking, and this library called Nextjs. How good Next.js still blows my mind. So, I was back to tutorial hell once again. But, this time, with a promise to myself: This is the last time I would visit tutorial hell. Time to start building this "ground-breaking idea" Learning the fundamentals of Next.js was easier than learning of React unsurprisingly. Yet, the first time I managed to run server actions on Next.js was one of the rarest moments that completely blew my mind. To this day, I reject the idea that it is something else than pure magic under its hood. Did I absolutely need Nextjs for this project though? I do not think so. Did it save me lots of time? Absolutely. Furthermore, learning Nextjs will certainly be quite helpful for other projects that I will be tackling in the future. Already got a few ideas that might be worth pursuing in the head in case I decide to abandon Summ in the future. Fast-forward few weeks again: So, at this stage, I had a barely working MVP-like product. Since the very beginning, I spent every free hour (and more) on this project as speed is essential. But, I am not so sure it was worth it to overwork in retrospect. Yet, I know I couldn’t help myself. Everything is going kinda smooth, so what’s the worst thing that could ever happen? Well, both Apple and Google announced their AIs (Apple Intelligence and Google Gemini, respectively) will have email summarization features for their products. Summarizing singular emails is no big deal, after all there were already so many similar products in the market. I still think that what truly matters is a frictionless user experience, and this is why I built this product in a certain way: You spend less than a few minutes setting up your account, and you get to enjoy your email summaries, without ever visiting its website again. This is still a very cool concept I really like a lot. So, at this point: I had no other idea that could be pursued, already spent too much time on this project. Do I quit or not? This was the question. Of course not. I just have to launch this product as quickly as possible. So, I did something right, a quite rare occurrence I might say: Re-planned my product, dropped everything secondary to the core feature immediately (save time on reading emails), tried launching it asap. 👉 Insight: Sell only one core feature at one time. Drop anything secondary to this core feature. Well, my primary occupation is product design. So one would expect that a product I build must have stellar design. I considered any considerable time spent on design at this stage would be simply wasted. I still think this is both true and wrong: True, because if your product’s core benefits suck, no one will care about your design. False, because if your design looks amateurish, no one will trust you and your product. So, I always targeted an average level design with it and the way this tool works made it quite easy as I had to design only 2 primary pages: Landing page and user portal (which has only settings and analytics pages). However, even though I knew spending time on design was not worth much of my time, I got a bit “greedy”: In fact, I redesigned those pages three times, and still ended up with a so-so design that I am not proud of. 👉 What I would do differently: Unless absolutely necessary, only one iteration per stage as long as it works. This, in my mind, applies to everything. If your product’s A feature works, then no need to rewrite it from scratch for any reason, or even refactor it. When your product becomes a success, and you absolutely need that part of your codebase to be written, do so, but only then. Ready to launch, now is th etime for some marketing, right? By July 26, I already had a “launchable” product that barely works (I marked this date on a Notion docs, this is how I know). Yet, I had spent almost no time on marketing, sales, whatever. After all, “You build and they will come”. Did I know that I needed marketing? Of course I did, but knowingly didn’t. Why, you might ask. Well, from my perspective, it had to be a dev-heavy product; meaning that you spend most of your time on developing it, mostly coding skills. But, this is simply wrong. As a rule of thumb, as noted by one of the greatests, Marc Louvion, you should spend at least twice of the building time on marketing. ❗️ Time spent on building \* 2 people don’t know your product > they don’t use your product > you don’t get users > you don’t make money Easy as that. Following the same reasoning, a slightly different approach to planning a project is possible. Determine an approximate time to complete the project with a high level project plan. Let’s say 6 months. By the reasoning above, 2 months should go into building, and 4 into marketing. If you need 4 months for building instead of 2, then you need 8 months of marketing, which makes the time to complete the project 12 months. If you don’t have that much time, then quit the project. When does a project count as completed? Well, in reality, never. But, I think we have to define success conditions even before we start for indie projects and startups; so we know when to quit when they are not met. A success condition could look like “Make $6000 in 12 months” or “Have 3000 users in 6 months”. It all depends on the project. But, once you set it, it should be set in stone: You don’t change it unless absolutely necessary. I suspect there are few principles that make a solopreneur successful; and knowing when to quit and when to continue is definitely one of them. Marc Louvion is famously known for his success, but he got there after failing so many projects. To my knowledge, the same applies to Nico Jeannen, Pieter Levels, or almost everyone as well. ❗️ Determining when to continue even before you start will definitely help in the long run. A half-aed launch Time-leap again. Around mid August, I “soft launched” my product. By soft launch, I mean lazy marketing. Just tweeting about it, posting it on free directories. Did I get any traffic? Surely I did. Did I get any users? Nope. Only after this time, it hit me: “Either something is wrong with me, or with this product” Marketing might be a much bigger factor for a project’s success after all. Even though I get some traffic, not convincing enough for people to sign up even for a free trial. The product was still perfect in my eyes at the time (well, still is ^(\_),) so the right people are not finding my product, I thought. Then, a question that I should have been asking at the very first place, one that could prevent all these, comes to my mind: “How do even people search for such tools?” If we are to consider this whole journey of me and my so-far-failed product to be an already destined failure, one metric suffices to show why. Search volume: 30. Even if people have such a pain point, they are not looking for email summaries. So, almost no organic traffic coming from Google. But, as a person who did zero marketing on this or any product, who has zero marketing knowledge, who doesn’t have an audience on social media, there is not much I could do. Finally, it was time to give up. Or not… In my eyes, the most important element that makes a founder (solo or not) successful (this, I am not by any means) is to solve problems. ❗️ So, the problem was this: “People are not finding my product by organic search” How do I make sure I get some organic traffic and gets more visibility? Learn digital marketing and SEO as much as I can within very limited time. Thankfully, without spending much time, I came across Neil Patel's YT channel, and as I said many times, it is an absolute gold mine. I learned a lot, especially about the fundamentals, and surely it will be fruitful; but there is no magic trick that could make people visit your website. SEO certainly helps, but only when people are looking for your keywords. However, it is truly a magical solution to get in touch with REAL people that are in your user segments: 👉 Understand your pains, understand their problems, help them to solve them via building products. I did not do this so far, have to admit. But, in case you would like to have a chat about your email usage, and email productivity, just get in touch; I’d be delighted to hear about them. Getting ready for a ProductHunt launch The date was Sept 1. And I unlocked an impossible achievement: Running out of Supabase’s free plan’s Egres limit while having zero users. I was already considering moving out of their Cloud server and managing a Supabase CLI service on my Hetzner VPS for some time; but never ever suspected that I would have to do this quickly. The cheapest plan Supabase offers is $25/month; yet, at that point, I am in between jobs for such a long time, basically broke, and could barely afford that price. One or two months could be okay, but why pay for it if I will eventually move out of their Cloud service? So, instead of paying $25, I spent two days migrating out of Supabase Cloud. Worth my time? Definitely not. But, when you are broke, you gotta do stupid things. This was the first time that I felt lucky to have zero users: I have no idea how I would manage this migration if I had any. I think this is one of the core tenets of an indie hacker: Controlling their own environment. I can’t remember whose quote this is, but I suspect it was Naval: Entrepreneurs have an almost pathological need to control their own fate. They will take any suffering if they can be in charge of their destiny, and not have it in somebody else’s hands. What’s truly scary is, at least in my case, we make people around us suffer at the expense of our attempting to control our own fates. I know this period has been quite hard on my wife as well, as I neglected her quite a bit, but sadly, I know that this will happen again. It is something that I can barely help with. Still, so sorry. After working the last two weeks on a ProductHunt Launch, I finally launched it this Tuesday. Zero ranking, zero new users, but 36 kind people upvoted my product, and many commented and provided invaluable feedback. I couldn't be more grateful for each one of them 🙏. Considering all these, what lies in the future of Summ though? I have no idea, to be honest. On one hand, I have zero users, have no job, no income. So, I need a way to make money asap. On the other hand, the whole idea of it revolves around one core premise (not an assumption) that I am not so willing to share; and I couldn’t have more trust in it. This might not be the best iteration of it, however I certainly believe that email usage is one of the best problem spaces one could work on. 👉 But, one thing is for certain: I need to get in touch with people, and talk with them about this product I built so far. In fact, this is the only item on my agenda. Nothing else will save my brainchild <3. Below are some other insights and notes that I got during my journey; as they do not 100% fit into this story, I think it is more suitable to list them here. I hope you enjoyed reading this. Give Summ a try, it comes with a generous free trial, no credit card required. Some additional notes and insights: Project planning is one of the most underestimated skills for solopreneurs. It saves you enormous time, and helps you to keep your focus up. Building B2B products beats building B2C products. Businesses are very willing to pay big bucks if your product helps them. On the other hand, spending a few hours per user who would pay $5/m probably is not worth your time. It doesn’t matter how brilliant your product is if no one uses it. If you cannot sell a product in a certain category/niche (or do not know how to sell it), it might be a good idea not to start a project in it. Going after new ideas and ventures is quite risky, especially if you don’t know how to market it. On the other hand, an already established category means that there is already demand. Whether this demand is sufficient or not is another issue. As long as there is enough demand for your product to fit in, any category/niche is good. Some might be better, some might be worse. Unless you are going hardcore B2B, you will need people to find your product by means of organic search. Always conduct thorough keyword research as soon as possible.

How I Automated Amazon Affiliate Marketing: A Developer's Journey
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How I Automated Amazon Affiliate Marketing: A Developer's Journey

From Manual Labor to 1000x Efficiency As a developer who ventured into affiliate marketing, I discovered a significant gap between technical possibilities and current practices. This revelation led me to create AutoPin, a tool that's now helping hundreds of affiliate marketers reclaim their time. The Problem: A Time-Consuming Reality Every affiliate marketer knows this scenario: you spend hours copying and pasting links, checking prices, and updating product information. I found myself dedicating 4-6 hours daily to these repetitive tasks. As a programmer, this felt fundamentally wrong. The typical affiliate marketing workflow looked like this: Find promising products Generate affiliate links one by one Monitor price changes manually Check product availability regularly Update content when things change Repeat this process daily This manual process had several critical issues: Time Waste: 20-30 hours weekly on repetitive tasks Missed Opportunities: Unable to scale beyond 100 products Human Error: Inevitable mistakes in manual updates Delayed Updates: Lost commissions due to outdated information The Solution: Building AutoPin After three months of development and six months of testing, I created a system that could: Generate hundreds of affiliate links in minutes Monitor price changes automatically Update product availability in real-time Export data in multiple formats Scale infinitely without additional effort Real Results, Real Impact The impact was immediate and significant: 📊 Efficiency Metrics: Link generation: From 2 minutes per link to 0.1 seconds Monitoring capacity: From 50 to 5000+ products Update frequency: From daily to real-time Error rate: Reduced by 99.9% 💡 User Success Stories: "Increased my product portfolio by 10x without adding work hours" "Revenue grew 300% in the first month" "Finally able to focus on content creation instead of link management" Technical Insights The system architecture focuses on three core components: Data Extraction Engine Efficient web scraping Rate limiting and proxy management Data validation and cleaning Real-time Monitoring System Websocket connections for instant updates Queue management for large-scale monitoring Smart scheduling based on price volatility Export Framework Multiple format support (CSV, HTML, Markdown) Custom templating engine Batch processing capabilities The Future of Affiliate Marketing Automation We're currently developing AI capabilities to: Generate product descriptions automatically Optimize link placement for conversion Predict price trends and best promotion times Create content variations for different platforms Key Learnings Automation is Essential The future of affiliate marketing lies in automation. Manual processes simply can't compete with automated systems in terms of efficiency and accuracy. Focus on Value Creation When marketers spend less time on repetitive tasks, they can focus on strategy and content quality. Scale Matters With automation, the difference between managing 10 products and 1000 products becomes minimal. Getting Started If you're an affiliate marketer spending hours on manual tasks, it's time to automate. Here's what you can do: Analyze your current workflow Identify repetitive tasks Start with basic automation Scale gradually Monitor and optimize Conclusion The transformation from manual to automated affiliate marketing isn't just about saving time—it's about unlocking potential. When you remove the tedious aspects of affiliate marketing, you create space for creativity, strategy, and growth. Want to experience the difference? Visit AutoPin at autopin.pro and join the automation revolution. Remember: The best time to automate was yesterday. The second best time is now. About the Author: A developer turned affiliate marketer who believes in the power of automation to transform digital marketing. #AffiliateMarketing #Automation #Programming #DigitalMarketing #SaaS #ProductivityTools

How to start online business in 7 days ?
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How to start online business in 7 days ?

Easy to do now. There are several tips that I can give you to start your own digital business. 1) Solve your own problem. If you use the Internet, you know that there are a lot of problems that need to be solved. But focus on your problem first. Once you can figure it out and solve your problem. You can move on to solving people's problems. Ideally, to use tools and technology you know. If you don't know, use NO-CODE tools to build it. For example, if you need to create a website, use landing page builder. If you want to automate your own work, like booking meetings, use Zapier to automate tasks. If you want to create a game, sure, use AI Tools to solve it. I don't care what you will use. Use whatever you want. All I want from you is to solve that problem. 2) After solving your own problem. You can focus on people's problems. Because if you can't solve your own shit, why do you want to solve others problems? Remember that always. If you need to build e-commerce, use Shopify. If you need to build a directory, use directory builder. If you need to build landing pages, use landing page builders. Rule of thumb: Niche, Niche, Niche. Try to focus on a specific niche, solve their problem, and make money on it. Then only thinking about exploring new opportunities. You can use No-Code builders or AI tools or hire developers or hire agencies to do it. It depends on your choice. If you are good at coding, build on your own or delegate to a developer or agency. If you have enough time, use AI Tools to build your own thing. If you want to solve a common problem but with a different perspective, yeah, sure, use No-Code builders for that. 3) Digital business works exactly the same as offline business with one difference. You can move a lot faster, build a lot faster, risk a lot faster, fail a lot faster, earn a lot faster, sell a lot faster, and scale a lot faster. In one week, you can build e-commerce. In the second week, you can build SaaS. In the third week, you can build an AI agent. In the fourth week, you can build your own channel on social media. 4) It gives more power. With great power comes great responsibility. From day one, invest in SEO, social media presence, traffic, and acquiring customers. Don't focus on tech stuff. Don't focus on tools. Focus on the real problem: • Traffic • Marketing • Sales • Conversion rate

[P] Building an Reinforcement Learning Agent to play The Legend of Zelda
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[P] Building an Reinforcement Learning Agent to play The Legend of Zelda

A year go I started trying to use PPO to play the original Legend of Zelda, and I was able to train a model to beat the first boss after a few months of work. I wanted to share the project just for show and tell. I'd love to hear feedback and suggestions as this is just a hobby project. I don't do this for a living. The code for that lives in the original-design branch of my Triforce repo. I'm currently tinkering with new designs so the main branch is much less stable. Here's a video of the agent beating the first dungeon, which was trained with 5,000,000+ steps. At 38 seconds, you can see it learned that it's invulnerable at the screen edge, and it exploits that to avoid damage from a projectile. At 53 seconds it steps up to avoid damage from an unblockable projectile, even though it takes a -0.06 penalty for moving the wrong way (taking damage would be a larger penalty.) At 55 seconds it walks towards the rock projectile to block it. And so on, lots of little things the model does is easy to miss if you don't know the game inside and out. As a TLDR, here's an early version of my new (single) model. This doesn't make it quite as far, but if you watch closely it's combat is already far better, and is only trained on 320,000 steps (~6% of the steps the first model was trained on). This is pretty far along from my very first model. Original Design I got the original project working using stable-baselines's PPO and default neural network (Shared NatureCNN, I believe). SB was great to get started but ultimately stifling. In the new version of the project I've implemented PPO from scratch with torch with my own simple neural network similar to stable-baseline's default. I'm playing with all kinds of changes and designs now that I have more flexibility and control. Here is my rough original design: Overall Strategy My first pass through this project was basically "imagine playing Zelda with your older sibling telling you where to go and what to do". I give the model an objective vector which points to where I want it to go on the screen (as a bird flies, the agent still had to learn path finding to avoid damage and navigate around the map). This includes either point at the nearest enemy I want it to kill or a NSEW vector if it's supposed to move to the next room. Due a few limitations with stable-baselines (especially around action masking), I ended up training unique models for traversing the overworld vs the dungeon (since they have entirely different tilesets). I also trained a different model for when we have sword beams vs not. In the video above you can see what model is being used onscreen. In my current project I've removed this objective vector as it felt too much like cheating. Instead I give it a one-hot encoded objective (move north to the next room, pickup items, kill enemies, etc). So far it's working quite well without that crutch. The new project also does a much better job of combat even without multiple models to handle beams vs not. Observation/Action Space Image - The standard neural network had a really tough time being fed the entire screen. No amount of training seemed to help. I solved this by creating a viewport around Link that keeps him centered. This REALLY helped the model learn. I also had absolutely zero success with stacking frames to give Link a way to see enemy/projectile movement. The model simply never trained with stable-baselines when I implemented frame stacking and I never figured out why. I just added it to my current neural network and it seems to be working... Though my early experiments show that giving it 3 frames (skipping two in between, so frames curr, curr-3, curr-6) doesn't really give us that much better performance. It might if I took away some of the vectors. We'll see. Vectors - Since the model cannot see beyond its little viewport, I gave the model a vector to the closest item, enemy, and projectile onscreen. This made it so the model can shoot enemies across the room outside of its viewport. My new model gives it multiple enemies/items/projectiles and I plan to try to use an attention mechanism as part of the network to see if I can just feed it all of that data. Information - It also gets a couple of one-off datapoints like whether it currently has sword beams. The new model also gives it a "source" room (to help better understand dungeons where we have to backtrack), and a one-hot encoded objective. Action Space My original project just has a few actions, 4 for moving in the cardinal directions and 4 for attacking in each direction (I also added bombs but never spent any time training it). I had an idea to use masking to help speed up training. I.E. if link bumps into a wall, don't let him move in that direction again until he moves elsewhere, as the model would often spend an entire memory buffer running headlong straight into a wall before an update...better to do it once and get a huge negative penalty which is essentially the same result but faster. Unfortunately SB made it really annoying architecturally to pass that info down to the policy layer. I could have hacked it together, but eventually I just reimplemented PPO and my own neural network so I could properly mask actions in the new version. For example, when we start training a fresh model, it cannot attack when there aren't enemies on screen and I can disallow it from leaving certain areas. The new model actually understands splitting swinging the sword short range vs firing sword beams as two different actions, though I haven't yet had a chance to fully train with the split yet. Frameskip/Cooldowns - In the game I don't use a fixed frame skip for actions. Instead I use the internal ram state of game to know when Link is animation locked or not and only allow the agent to take actions when it's actually possible to give meaningful input to the game. This greatly sped up training. We also force movement to be between tiles on the game map. This means that when the agent decides to move it loses control for longer than a player would...a player can make more split second decisions. This made it easier to implement movement rewards though and might be something to clean up in the future. Other interesting details Pathfinding - To facilitate rewards, the original version of this project used A* to pathfind from link to what he should be doing. Here's a video of it in action. This information wasn't giving to the model directly but instead the agent would only be given the rewards if it exactly followed that path or the transposed version of it. It would also pathfind around enemies and not walk through them. This was a nightmare though. The corner cases were significant, and pushing Link towards enemies but not into them was really tricky. The new verison just uses a wavefront algorithm. I calculate a wave from the tiles we want to get to outwards, then make sure we are following the gradient. Also calculating the A* around enemies every frame (even with caching) was super slow. Wavefront was faster, especially because I give the new model no special rewards for walking around enemies...faster to compute and it has to learn from taking damage or not. Either way, the both the old and new models successfully learned how to pathfind around danger and obstacles, with or without the cheaty objective vector. Rewards - I programmed very dense rewards in both the old and new model. At basically every step, the model is getting rewarded or punished for something. I actually have some ideas I can't wait to try out to make the rewards more sparse. Or maybe we start with dense rewards for the first training, then fine-tune the model with sparser rewards. We'll see. Predicting the Future - Speaking of rewards. One interesting wrinkle is that the agent can do a lot of things that will eventually deal damage but not on that frame. For example, when Link sets a bomb it takes several seconds before it explodes, killing things. This can be a massive reward or penalty since he spent an extremely valuable resource, but may have done massive damage. PPO and other RL propagates rewards backwards, of course, but that spike in reward could land on a weird frame where we took damage or moved in the wrong direction. I probably could have just not solved that problem and let it shake out over time, but instead I used the fact that we are in an emulator to just see what the outcome of every decision is. When planting a bomb, shooting sword beams, etc, we let the game run forward until impact, then rewind time and reward the agent appropriately, continuing on from when we first paused. This greatly speeds up training, even if it's expensive to do this savestate, play forward, restore state. Neural Networks - When I first started this project (knowing very little about ML and RL), I thought most of my time would be tuning the shape of the neural network that we are using. In reality, the default provided by stable-baselines and my eventual reimplemnentation has been enough to make massive progress. Now that I have a solid codebase though, I really want to revisit this. I'd like to see if trying CoordConvs and similar networks might make the viewport unncessary. Less interesting details/thoughts Hyperparameters - Setting the entropy coefficinet way lower helped a TON in training stable models. My new PPO implementation is way less stable than stable-baselines (ha, imagine that), but still converges most of the time. Infinite Rewards - As with all reinforcement learning, if you give some way for the model to get infinite rewards, it will do just that and nothing else. I spent days, or maybe weeks tweaking reward functions to just get it to train and not find a spot on the wall it could hump for infinite rewards. Even just neutral rewards, like +0.5 moving forward and -0.5 for moving backwards, would often result in a model that just stepped left, then right infinitely. There has to be a real reward or punishment (non-neutral) for forward progress. Debugging Rewards - In fact, building a rewards debugger was the only way I made progress in this project. If you are tackling something this big, do that very early. Stable-Retro is pretty great - Couldn't be happier with the clean design for implementing emulation for AI. Torch is Awesome - My early versions heavily used numpy and relied on stable-baselines, with its multiproc parallelization support. It worked great. Moving the project over to torch was night and day though. It gave me so much more flexibility, instant multithreading for matrix operations. I have a pretty beefy computer and I'm almost at the same steps per second as 20 proc stable-retro/numpy. Future Ideas This has already gone on too long. I have some ideas for future projects, but maybe I'll just make them another post when I actually do them. Special Thanks A special thanks to Brad Flaugher for help with the early version of this, Fiskbit from the Zelda1 speedrunning community for help pulling apart the raw assembly to build this thing, and MatPoliquin for maintaining Stable-Retro. Happy to answer any questions, really I just love nerding out about this stuff.

[D] Why I'm Lukewarm on Graph Neural Networks
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[D] Why I'm Lukewarm on Graph Neural Networks

TL;DR: GNNs can provide wins over simpler embedding methods, but we're at a point where other research directions matter more I also posted it on my blog here, has footnotes, a nicer layout with inlined images, etc. I'm only lukewarm on Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). There, I said it. It might sound crazy GNNs are one of the hottest fields in machine learning right now. [There][1] were at least [four][2] [review][3] [papers][4] just in the last few months. I think some progress can come of this research, but we're also focusing on some incorrect places. But first, let's take a step back and go over the basics. Models are about compression We say graphs are a "non-euclidean" data type, but that's not really true. A regular graph is just another way to think about a particular flavor of square matrix called the [adjacency matrix][5], like this. It's weird, we look at run-of-the-mill matrix full of real numbers and decide to call it "non-euclidean". This is for practical reasons. Most graphs are fairly sparse, so the matrix is full of zeros. At this point, where the non-zero numbers are matters most, which makes the problem closer to (computationally hard) discrete math rather than (easy) continuous, gradient-friendly math. If you had the full matrix, life would be easy If we step out of the pesky realm of physics for a minute, and assume carrying the full adjacency matrix around isn't a problem, we solve a bunch of problems. First, network node embeddings aren't a thing anymore. A node is a just row in the matrix, so it's already a vector of numbers. Second, all network prediction problems are solved. A powerful enough and well-tuned model will simply extract all information between the network and whichever target variable we're attaching to nodes. NLP is also just fancy matrix compression Let's take a tangent away from graphs to NLP. Most NLP we do can be [thought of in terms of graphs][6] as we'll see, so it's not a big digression. First, note that Ye Olde word embedding models like [Word2Vec][7] and [GloVe][8] are [just matrix factorization][9]. The GloVe algorithm works on a variation of the old [bag of words][10] matrix. It goes through the sentences and creates a (implicit) [co-occurence][11] graph where nodes are words and the edges are weighed by how often the words appear together in a sentence. Glove then does matrix factorization on the matrix representation of that co-occurence graph, Word2Vec is mathematically equivalent. You can read more on this in my [post on embeddings][12] and the one (with code) on [word embeddings][13]. Even language models are also just matrix compression Language models are all the rage. They dominate most of the [state of the art][14] in NLP. Let's take BERT as our main example. BERT predicts a word given the context of the rest of the sentence. This grows the matrix we're factoring from flat co-occurences on pairs of words to co-occurences conditional on the sentence's context, like this We're growing the "ideal matrix" we're factoring combinatorially. As noted by [Hanh & Futrell][15]: [...] human language—and language modelling—has infinite statistical complexity but that it can be approximated well at lower levels. This observation has two implications: 1) We can obtain good results with comparatively small models; and 2) there is a lot of potential for scaling up our models. Language models tackle such a large problem space that they probably approximate a compression of the entire language in the [Kolmogorov Complexity][16] sense. It's also possible that huge language models just [memorize a lot of it][17] rather than compress the information, for what it's worth. Can we upsample any graph like language models do? We're already doing it. Let's call a first-order embedding of a graph a method that works by directly factoring the graph's adjacency matrix or [Laplacian matrix][18]. If you embed a graph using [Laplacian Eigenmaps][19] or by taking the [principal components][20] of the Laplacian, that's first order. Similarly, GloVe is a first-order method on the graph of word co-occurences. One of my favorites first order methods for graphs is [ProNE][21], which works as well as most methods while being two orders of magnitude faster. A higher-order method embeds the original matrix plus connections of neighbours-of-neighbours (2nd degree) and deeper k-step connections. [GraRep][22], shows you can always generate higher-order representations from first order methods by augmenting the graph matrix. Higher order method are the "upsampling" we do on graphs. GNNs that sample on large neighborhoods and random-walk based methods like node2vec are doing higher-order embeddings. Where are the performance gain? Most GNN papers in the last 5 years present empirical numbers that are useless for practitioners to decide on what to use. As noted in the [OpenGraphsBenchmark][4] (OGB) paper, GNN papers do their empirical section on a handful of tiny graphs (Cora, CiteSeer, PubMed) with 2000-20,000 nodes. These datasets can't seriously differentiate between methods. Recent efforts are directly fixing this, but the reasons why researchers focused on tiny, useless datasets for so long are worth discussing. Performance matters by task One fact that surprises a lot of people is that even though language models have the best performance in a lot of NLP tasks, if all you're doing is cram sentence embeddings into a downstream model, there [isn't much gained][23] from language models embeddings over simple methods like summing the individual Word2Vec word embeddings (This makes sense, because the full context of the sentence is captured in the sentence co-occurence matrix that is generating the Word2Vec embeddings). Similarly, [I find][24] that for many graphs simple first-order methods perform just as well on graph clustering and node label prediction tasks than higher-order embedding methods. In fact higher-order methods are massively computationally wasteful for these usecases. Recommended first order embedding methods are ProNE and my [GGVec with order=1][25]. Higher order methods normally perform better on the link prediction tasks. I'm not the only one to find this. In the BioNEV paper, they find: "A large GraRep order value for link prediction tasks (e.g. 3, 4);a small value for node classification tasks (e.g.1, 2)" (p.9). Interestingly, the gap in link prediction performance is inexistant for artificially created graphs. This suggests higher order methods do learn some of the structure intrinsic to [real world graphs][26]. For visualization, first order methods are better. Visualizations of higher order methods tend to have artifacts of their sampling. For instance, Node2Vec visualizations tend to have elongated/filament-like structures which come from the embeddings coming from long single strand random walks. See the following visualizations by [Owen Cornec][27] created by first embedding the graph to 32-300 dimensions using a node embedding algorithm, then mapping this to 2d or 3d with the excellent UMAP algorithm, like this Lastly, sometimes simple methods soundly beat higher order methods (there's an instance of it in the OGB paper). The problem here is that we don't know when any method is better than another and we definitely don't know the reason. There's definitely a reason different graph types respond better/worse to being represented by various methods. This is currently an open question. A big part of why is that the research space is inundated under useless new algorithms because... Academic incentives work against progress Here's the cynic's view of how machine learning papers are made: Take an existing algorithm Add some new layer/hyperparameter, make a cute mathematical story for why it matters Gridsearch your hyperparameters until you beat baselines from the original paper you aped Absolutely don't gridsearch stuff you're comparing against in your results section Make a cute ACRONYM for your new method, put impossible to use python 2 code on github (Or no code at all!) and bask in the citations I'm [not][28] the [only one][29] with these views on the state reproducible research. At least it's gotten slightly better in the last 2 years. Sidebar: I hate Node2Vec A side project of mine is a [node embedding library][25] and the most popular method in it is by far Node2Vec. Don't use Node2Vec. [Node2Vec][30] with p=1; q=1 is the [Deepwalk][31] algorithm. Deepwalk is an actual innovation. The Node2Vec authors closely followed the steps 1-5 including bonus points on step 5 by getting word2vec name recognition. This is not academic fraud -- the hyperparameters [do help a tiny bit][32] if you gridsearch really hard. But it's the presentable-to-your-parents sister of where you make the ML community worse off to progress your academic career. And certainly Node2Vec doesn't deserve 7500 citations. Progress is all about practical issues We've known how to train neural networks for well over 40 years. Yet they only exploded in popularity with [AlexNet][33] in 2012. This is because implementations and hardware came to a point where deep learning was practical. Similarly, we've known about factoring word co-occurence matrices into Word embeddings for at least 20 years. But word embeddings only exploded in 2013 with Word2Vec. The breakthrough here was that the minibatch-based methods let you train a Wikipedia-scale embedding model on commodity hardware. It's hard for methods in a field to make progress if training on a small amount of data takes days or weeks. You're disincentivized to explore new methods. If you want progress, your stuff has to run in reasonable time on commodity hardware. Even Google's original search algorithm [initially ran on commodity hardware][34]. Efficiency is paramount to progress The reason deep learning research took off the way it did is because of improvements in [efficiency][35] as well as much better libraries and hardware support. Academic code is terrible Any amount of time you spend gridsearching Node2Vec on p and q is all put to better use gridsearching Deepwalk itself (on number of walks, length of walks, or word2vec hyperparameters). The problem is that people don't gridsearch over deepwalk because implementations are all terrible. I wrote the [Nodevectors library][36] to have a fast deepwalk implementation because it took 32 hours to embed a graph with a measly 150,000 nodes using the reference Node2Vec implementation (the same takes 3min with Nodevectors). It's no wonder people don't gridsearch on Deepwalk a gridsearch would take weeks with the terrible reference implementations. To give an example, in the original paper of [GraphSAGE][37] they their algorithm to DeepWalk with walk lengths of 5, which is horrid if you've ever hyperparameter tuned a deepwalk algorithm. From their paper: We did observe DeepWalk’s performance could improve with further training, and in some cases it could become competitive with the unsupervised GraphSAGE approaches (but not the supervised approaches) if we let it run for >1000× longer than the other approaches (in terms of wall clock time for prediction on the test set) I don't even think the GraphSAGE authors had bad intent -- deepwalk implementations are simply so awful that they're turned away from using it properly. It's like trying to do deep learning with 2002 deep learning libraries and hardware. Your architectures don't really matter One of the more important papers this year was [OpenAI's "Scaling laws"][38] paper, where the raw number of parameters in your model is the most predictive feature of overall performance. This was noted even in the original BERT paper and drives 2020's increase in absolutely massive language models. This is really just [Sutton' Bitter Lesson][39] in action: General methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin Transformers might be [replacing convolution][40], too. As [Yannic Kilcher said][41], transformers are ruining everything. [They work on graphs][6], in fact it's one of the [recent approaches][42], and seems to be one of the more succesful [when benchmarked][1] Researchers seem to be putting so much effort into architecture, but it doesn't matter much in the end because you can approximate anything by stacking more layers. Efficiency wins are great -- but neural net architectures are just one way to achieve that, and by tremendously over-researching this area we're leaving a lot of huge gains elsewhere on the table. Current Graph Data Structure Implementations suck NetworkX is a bad library. I mean, it's good if you're working on tiny graphs for babies, but for anything serious it chokes and forces you to rewrite everything in... what library, really? At this point most people working on large graphs end up hand-rolling some data structure. This is tough because your computer's memory is a 1-dimensional array of 1's and 0's and a graph has no obvious 1-d mapping. This is even harder when we take updating the graph (adding/removing some nodes/edges) into account. Here's a few options: Disconnected networks of pointers NetworkX is the best example. Here, every node is an object with a list of pointers to other nodes (the node's edges). This layout is like a linked list. Linked lists are the [root of all performance evil][43]. Linked lists go completely against how modern computers are designed. Fetching things from memory is slow, and operating on memory is fast (by two orders of magnitude). Whenever you do anything in this layout, you make a roundtrip to RAM. It's slow by design, you can write this in Ruby or C or assembly and it'll be slow regardless, because memory fetches are slow in hardware. The main advantage of this layout is that adding a new node is O(1). So if you're maintaining a massive graph where adding and removing nodes happens as often as reading from the graph, it makes sense. Another advantage of this layout is that it "scales". Because everything is decoupled from each other you can put this data structure on a cluster. However, you're really creating a complex solution for a problem you created for yourself. Sparse Adjacency Matrix This layout great for read-only graphs. I use it as the backend in my [nodevectors][25] library, and many other library writers use the [Scipy CSR Matrix][44], you can see graph algorithms implemented on it [here][45]. The most popular layout for this use is the [CSR Format][46] where you have 3 arrays holding the graph. One for edge destinations, one for edge weights and an "index pointer" which says which edges come from which node. Because the CSR layout is simply 3 arrays, it scales on a single computer: a CSR matrix can be laid out on a disk instead of in-memory. You simply [memory map][47] the 3 arrays and use them on-disk from there. With modern NVMe drives random seeks aren't slow anymore, much faster than distributed network calls like you do when scaling the linked list-based graph. I haven't seen anyone actually implement this yet, but it's in the roadmap for my implementation at least. The problem with this representation is that adding a node or edge means rebuilding the whole data structure. Edgelist representations This representation is three arrays: one for the edge sources, one for the edge destinations, and one for edge weights. [DGL][48] uses this representation internally. This is a simple and compact layout which can be good for analysis. The problem compared to CSR Graphs is some seek operations are slower. Say you want all the edges for node #4243. You can't jump there without maintaining an index pointer array. So either you maintain sorted order and binary search your way there (O(log2n)) or unsorted order and linear search (O(n)). This data structure can also work on memory mapped disk array, and node append is fast on unsorted versions (it's slow in the sorted version). Global methods are a dead end Methods that work on the entire graph at once can't leverage computation, because they run out of RAM at a certain scale. So any method that want a chance of being the new standard need to be able to update piecemeal on parts of the graph. Sampling-based methods Sampling Efficiency will matter more in the future Edgewise local methods. The only algorithms I know of that do this are GloVe and GGVec, which they pass through an edge list and update embedding weights on each step. The problem with this approach is that it's hard to use them for higher-order methods. The advantage is that they easily scale even on one computer. Also, incrementally adding a new node is as simple as taking the existing embeddings, adding a new one, and doing another epoch over the data Random Walk sampling. This is used by deepwalk and its descendants, usually for node embeddings rather than GNN methods. This can be computationally expensive and make it hard to add new nodes. But this does scale, for instance [Instagram][49] use it to feed their recommendation system models Neighbourhood sampling. This is currently the most common one in GNNs, and can be low or higher order depending on the neighborhood size. It also scales well, though implementing efficiently can be challenging. It's currently used by [Pinterest][50]'s recommendation algorithms. Conclusion Here are a few interesting questions: What is the relation between graph types and methods? Consolidated benchmarking like OGB We're throwing random models at random benchmarks without understanding why or when they do better More fundamental research. Heree's one I'm curious about: can other representation types like [Poincarre Embeddings][51] effectively encode directed relationships? On the other hand, we should stop focusing on adding spicy new layers to test on the same tiny datasets. No one cares. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2003.00982.pdf [2]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2002.11867.pdf [3]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1812.08434.pdf [4]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.00687.pdf [5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjacency_matrix [6]: https://thegradient.pub/transformers-are-graph-neural-networks/ [7]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word2vec [8]: https://nlp.stanford.edu/pubs/glove.pdf [9]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/2014/file/feab05aa91085b7a8012516bc3533958-Paper.pdf [10]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bag-of-words_model [11]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Co-occurrence [12]: https://www.singlelunch.com/2020/02/16/embeddings-from-the-ground-up/ [13]: https://www.singlelunch.com/2019/01/27/word-embeddings-from-the-ground-up/ [14]: https://nlpprogress.com/ [15]: http://socsci.uci.edu/~rfutrell/papers/hahn2019estimating.pdf [16]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity [17]: https://bair.berkeley.edu/blog/2020/12/20/lmmem/ [18]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplacian_matrix [19]: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download;jsessionid=1F03130B02DC485C78BF364266B6F0CA?doi=10.1.1.19.8100&rep=rep1&type=pdf [20]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principalcomponentanalysis [21]: https://www.ijcai.org/Proceedings/2019/0594.pdf [22]: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2806416.2806512 [23]: https://openreview.net/pdf?id=SyK00v5xx [24]: https://github.com/VHRanger/nodevectors/blob/master/examples/link%20prediction.ipynb [25]: https://github.com/VHRanger/nodevectors [26]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1310.2636.pdf [27]: http://byowen.com/ [28]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1807.03341.pdf [29]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kee4ch3miVA [30]: https://cs.stanford.edu/~jure/pubs/node2vec-kdd16.pdf [31]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1403.6652.pdf [32]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.11726.pdf [33]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlexNet [34]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googledatacenters#Original_hardware [35]: https://openai.com/blog/ai-and-efficiency/ [36]: https://www.singlelunch.com/2019/08/01/700x-faster-node2vec-models-fastest-random-walks-on-a-graph/ [37]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1706.02216.pdf [38]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2001.08361.pdf [39]: http://incompleteideas.net/IncIdeas/BitterLesson.html [40]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.11929 [41]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrdevFK_am4 [42]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.10903.pdf [43]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHNmRkzxHWs [44]: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.sparse.csr_matrix.html [45]: https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/sparse.csgraph.html [46]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sparsematrix#Compressedsparserow(CSR,CRSorYaleformat) [47]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mmap [48]: https://github.com/dmlc/dgl [49]: https://ai.facebook.com/blog/powered-by-ai-instagrams-explore-recommender-system/ [50]: https://medium.com/pinterest-engineering/pinsage-a-new-graph-convolutional-neural-network-for-web-scale-recommender-systems-88795a107f48 [51]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1705.08039.pdf

[D] The Rants of an experienced engineer who glimpsed into AI Academia (Briefly)
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donkey_strom16001This week

[D] The Rants of an experienced engineer who glimpsed into AI Academia (Briefly)

Background I recently graduated with a master's degree and was fortunate/unfortunate to glimpse the whole "Academic" side of ML. I took a thesis track in my degree because as an immigrant it's harder to get into a good research lab without having authorship in a couple of good papers (Or so I delude myself ). I worked as a Full-stack SWE for a startup for 4+ years before coming to the US for a master’s degree focused on ML and AI. I did everything in those years. From project management to building fully polished S/W products to DevOps to even dabbled in ML. I did my Batchelor’s degree from a university whose name is not even worth mentioning. The university for my master’s degree is in the top 20 in the AI space. I didn't know much about ML and the curiosity drove me to university. Come to uni and I focused on learning ML and AI for one 1-1.5 years after which I found advisors for a thesis topic. This is when the fun starts. I had the most amazing advisors but the entire peer review system and the way we assess ML/Science is what ticked me off. This is where the rant begins. Rant 1:Acadmia follows a Gated Institutional Narrative Let's say you are a Ph.D. at the world's top AI institution working under the best prof. You have a way higher likelihood of you getting a good Postdoc at a huge research lab vs someone's from my poor country doing a Ph.D. with a not-so-well-known advisor having published not-so-well-known papers. I come from a developing nation and I see this many times here. In my country academics don't get funding as they do at colleges in the US. One of the reasons for this is that colleges don't have such huge endowments and many academics don't have wealthy research sponsors. Brand names and prestige carry massive weight to help get funding in US academic circles. This prestige/money percolates down to the students and the researchers who work there. Students in top colleges get a huge advantage and the circles of top researchers keep being from the same sets of institutions. I have nothing against top researchers from top institutions but due to the nature of citations and the way the money flows based on them, a vicious cycle is created where the best institutions keep getting better and the rest don't get as much of a notice. Rant 2: Peer Review without Code Review in ML/AI is shady I am a computer scientist and I was appalled when I heard that you don't need to do code reviews for research papers. As a computer scientist and someone who actually did shit tons of actual ML in the past year, I find it absolutely garbage that code reviews are not a part of this system. I am not saying every scientist who reads a paper should review code but at least one person should for any paper's code submission. At least in ML and AI space. This is basic. I don't get why people call themselves computer scientists if they don't want to read the fucking code. If you can't then make a grad student do it. But for the collective of science, we need this. The core problem lies in the fact that peer review is free. : There should be better solutions for this. We ended up creating Git and that changed so many lives. Academic Research needs something similar. Rant 3: My Idea is Novel Until I see Someone Else's Paper The volume of scientific research is growing exponentially. Information is being created faster than we can digest. We can't expect people to know everything and the amount of overlap in the AI/ML fields requires way better search engines than Google Scholar. The side effect of large volumes of research is that every paper is doing something "novel" making it harder to filter what the fuck was novel. I have had so many experiences where I coded up something and came to realize that someone else has done something symbolically similar and my work just seems like a small variant of that. That's what fucks with my head. Is what I did in Novel? What the fuck is Novel? Is stitching up a transformer to any problem with fancy embeddings and tidying it up as a research paper Novel? Is just making a transformer bigger Novel? Is some new RL algorithm tested with 5 seeds and some fancy fucking prior and some esoteric reasoning for its success Novel? Is using an over parameterized model to get 95% accuracy on 200 sample test set Novel? Is apply Self-supervised learning for some new dataset Novel? If I keep on listing questions on novelty, I can probably write a novel asking about what the fuck is "Novel". Rant 4: Citation Based Optimization Promotes Self Growth Over Collective Growth Whatever people may say about collaboration, Academia intrinsically doesn't promote the right incentive structures to harbor collaboration. Let me explain, When you write a paper, the position of your name matters. If you are just a Ph.D. student and a first author to a paper, it's great. If you are an nth author Not so great. Apparently, this is a very touchy thing for academics. And lots of egos can clash around numbering and ordering of names. I distinctly remember once attending some seminar in a lab and approaching a few students on research project ideas. The first thing that came out of the PhD student's mouth was the position in authorship. As an engineer who worked with teams in the past, this was never something I had thought about. Especially because I worked in industry, where it's always the group over the person. Academia is the reverse. Academia applauds the celebration of the individual's achievements. All of this is understandable but it's something I don't like. This makes PhDs stick to their lane. The way citations/research-focus calibrate the "hire-ability" and "completion of Ph.D. thesis" metrics, people are incentivized to think about themselves instead of thinking about collaborations for making something better. Conclusion A Ph.D. in its most idealistic sense for me is the pursuit of hard ideas(I am poetic that way). In a situation like now when you have to publish or perish and words on paper get passed off as science without even seeing the code that runs it, I am extremely discouraged to go down that route. All these rants are not to diss on scientists. I did them because "we" as a community need better ways to addressing some of these problems. P.S. Never expected so many people to express their opinions about this rant. U shouldn’t take this seriously. As many people have stated I am an outsider with tiny experience to give a full picture. I realize that my post as coming out as something which tries to dichotomize academia and industry. I am not trying to do that. I wanted to highlight some problems I saw for which there is no one person to blame. These issues are in my opinion a byproduct of the economics which created this system. Thank you for gold stranger.

[D] Overwhelmed by fast advances in recent weeks
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iamx9000againThis week

[D] Overwhelmed by fast advances in recent weeks

I was watching the GTC keynote and became entirely overwhelmed by the amount of progress achieved from last year. I'm wondering how everyone else feels. &#x200B; Firstly, the entire ChatGPT, GPT-3/GPT-4 chaos has been going on for a few weeks, with everyone scrambling left and right to integrate chatbots into their apps, products, websites. Twitter is flooded with new product ideas, how to speed up the process from idea to product, countless promp engineering blogs, tips, tricks, paid courses. &#x200B; Not only was ChatGPT disruptive, but a few days later, Microsoft and Google also released their models and integrated them into their search engines. Microsoft also integrated its LLM into its Office suite. It all happenned overnight. I understand that they've started integrating them along the way, but still, it seems like it hapenned way too fast. This tweet encompases the past few weeks perfectly https://twitter.com/AlphaSignalAI/status/1638235815137386508 , on a random Tuesday countless products are released that seem revolutionary. &#x200B; In addition to the language models, there are also the generative art models that have been slowly rising in mainstream recognition. Now Midjourney AI is known by a lot of people who are not even remotely connected to the AI space. &#x200B; For the past few weeks, reading Twitter, I've felt completely overwhelmed, as if the entire AI space is moving beyond at lightning speed, whilst around me we're just slowly training models, adding some data, and not seeing much improvement, being stuck on coming up with "new ideas, that set us apart". &#x200B; Watching the GTC keynote from NVIDIA I was again, completely overwhelmed by how much is being developed throughout all the different domains. The ASML EUV (microchip making system) was incredible, I have no idea how it does lithography and to me it still seems like magic. The Grace CPU with 2 dies (although I think Apple was the first to do it?) and 100 GB RAM, all in a small form factor. There were a lot more different hardware servers that I just blanked out at some point. The omniverse sim engine looks incredible, almost real life (I wonder how much of a domain shift there is between real and sim considering how real the sim looks). Beyond it being cool and usable to train on synthetic data, the car manufacturers use it to optimize their pipelines. This change in perspective, of using these tools for other goals than those they were designed for I find the most interesting. &#x200B; The hardware part may be old news, as I don't really follow it, however the software part is just as incredible. NVIDIA AI foundations (language, image, biology models), just packaging everything together like a sandwich. Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe will use the generative models to create images. Again, already these huge juggernauts are already integrated. &#x200B; I can't believe the point where we're at. We can use AI to write code, create art, create audiobooks using Britney Spear's voice, create an interactive chatbot to converse with books, create 3D real-time avatars, generate new proteins (?i'm lost on this one), create an anime and countless other scenarios. Sure, they're not perfect, but the fact that we can do all that in the first place is amazing. &#x200B; As Huang said in his keynote, companies want to develop "disruptive products and business models". I feel like this is what I've seen lately. Everyone wants to be the one that does something first, just throwing anything and everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. &#x200B; In conclusion, I'm feeling like the world is moving so fast around me whilst I'm standing still. I want to not read anything anymore and just wait until everything dies down abit, just so I can get my bearings. However, I think this is unfeasible. I fear we'll keep going in a frenzy until we just burn ourselves at some point. &#x200B; How are you all fairing? How do you feel about this frenzy in the AI space? What are you the most excited about?

[D] I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore
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MrAcuriteThis week

[D] I don't really trust papers out of "Top Labs" anymore

I mean, I trust that the numbers they got are accurate and that they really did the work and got the results. I believe those. It's just that, take the recent "An Evolutionary Approach to Dynamic Introduction of Tasks in Large-scale Multitask Learning Systems" paper. It's 18 pages of talking through this pretty convoluted evolutionary and multitask learning algorithm, it's pretty interesting, solves a bunch of problems. But two notes. One, the big number they cite as the success metric is 99.43 on CIFAR-10, against a SotA of 99.40, so woop-de-fucking-doo in the grand scheme of things. Two, there's a chart towards the end of the paper that details how many TPU core-hours were used for just the training regimens that results in the final results. The sum total is 17,810 core-hours. Let's assume that for someone who doesn't work at Google, you'd have to use on-demand pricing of $3.22/hr. This means that these trained models cost $57,348. Strictly speaking, throwing enough compute at a general enough genetic algorithm will eventually produce arbitrarily good performance, so while you can absolutely read this paper and collect interesting ideas about how to use genetic algorithms to accomplish multitask learning by having each new task leverage learned weights from previous tasks by defining modifications to a subset of components of a pre-existing model, there's a meta-textual level on which this paper is just "Jeff Dean spent enough money to feed a family of four for half a decade to get a 0.03% improvement on CIFAR-10." OpenAI is far and away the worst offender here, but it seems like everyone's doing it. You throw a fuckton of compute and a light ganache of new ideas at an existing problem with existing data and existing benchmarks, and then if your numbers are infinitesimally higher than their numbers, you get to put a lil' sticker on your CV. Why should I trust that your ideas are even any good? I can't check them, I can't apply them to my own projects. Is this really what we're comfortable with as a community? A handful of corporations and the occasional university waving their dicks at everyone because they've got the compute to burn and we don't? There's a level at which I think there should be a new journal, exclusively for papers in which you can replicate their experimental results in under eight hours on a single consumer GPU.

[D] Playing big league at home on a budget?
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ballerburg9005This week

[D] Playing big league at home on a budget?

I am a hobbyist and my Nvidia 660 is 10 years old and only has 2GB. Obviously that isn't going to cut it nowadays anymore. I am thinking about options here. I don't have thousands and thousands of dollars. And I highly doubt that spending close to a thousand dollars on a brand new card is still viable in 2020-2022. I wanted to use Wavenet today and then found out about Melnet. I mean, maybe I could run Wavenet but nobody in their right mind wants to after hearing Melnet results. On Github this one guy complained he couldn't get his implementation to work due to OOM with 2x 2080 RTX, which he bought solely for this purpose. Then on the other repo the guy casually mentioned that tier XY doesn't fit with some 10 year old lowfi dataset, even with batch size 1, on a 16GB Tesla P100. The wisdom for OOM has always been "decrease batch size". But as far as I can tell, for most of any of the interesting stuff in the last 8 years or so you simply can't decrease batch size. Either because batch sizes are already so tiny, or because the code is written in a way that would require you to somehow turn it inside out, probably involving extreme knowledge of higher mathematics. I am a hobbyist, not a researcher. I am happy if I crudely can grasp what is going on. Most of anything in the field suffers from exactly the same issue: It simply won't run without utterly absurd amounts of VRAM. So what about buying shitty cheapo AMD GPUs with lots of VRAM? This seems to be the sensible choice if you want to be able to run anything noteworthy at all that comes up in the next 2 years and maybe beyond. People say, don't but AMD its slow and it sucks, but those are apparently the same people that buy a 16GB Titan GPU for $1500 three times on Ebay without hesitation, when there are also 16GB AMD GPUs for $300. How much slower are AMD GPUs really? Let's say they are 5 times cheaper so they could be just 5 times slower. So I have to train my model over night instead of seeing the result in the afternoon. That would be totally awesome!; given that the alternative is to buy a $300 Nvidia GPU, which has maybe 4 or 6GB and simply can't run the code without running out of memory. And say $300 is not enough, let's buy a $700 RTX 3080. It still only has 10GB of VRAM not even 16GB. Then its just as useless! What's the point of buying a fast GPU if it can't even run the code? I don't know how much slower AMD GPUs really are. Maybe they are not 5x but 50x slower. Then of course training a model that was developed on some 64GB Tesla might take month and years. But maybe speed is not the issue, only memory. I have seen some stuff even being optimized for CPU, apparently because there weren't any big enough GPUs around. I don't really know how viable that can be (it seems rarely if ever it is), I have no experience. And what about renting AWS? Let's say, I am a beginner and I want to toy around for a week and probably max out 4 Teslas like 80% of the time without really getting anywhere. How expensive is that? $25, $50, $100, $500? (Found the answer: fucking $2000 https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/p3/ ) Ok, so AWS is bullshit, here its 6x cheaper: https://vast.ai/console/create/ . They don't really have 4x 16GB V100 though, just one V100. $0.5 per hour 24 7 = $84 per month (there are more hidden cost like bandwidth, it doesn't seem to be huge but I never used this so don't take it at face value). On AWS the same is over $3 per hour. So a day is $12, this could be viable! (look at calculation below). There really isn't much info on the net about hardware requirements and performance for machine learning stuff. What bothers me the most is that people seem to be very ignorant of the VRAM issue. Either because they aren't looking ahead of what might come in 1-2 years. Or because they are simply so rich they have no issue spending thousands and thousands of dollars every year instead of just 500 every couple of years. Or maybe they are both. So, yeah, what are your thoughts? Here is what I found out just today: Until 2 years ago, tensorflow and pytorch wouldn't work with AMD cards, but this has changed. https://rocmdocs.amd.com/en/latest/Deep_learning/Deep-learning.html For older cards though, ROCm only works with certain CPUs: it needs PCIe 3.0 with atomics (see: https://github.com/RadeonOpenCompute/ROCm ). So you can't simply buy any 16GB card for $300 on Ebay like I suggested, even if it supports ROCm, because it will only work for "newer" PCs. The newer GFX9 AMD cards (like Radeon VII and Vega) don't suffer from this problem and work with PCIe 2.0 again... Although I have seen 16GB Vega cards for like $350 on Ebay, I think that is a pretty rare catch. However looking 1-2 years in the future, this is great because Radeon VII prices will be hugely inflated by Nvidia 3000 series hype (maybe down to $180 even) and maybe the next gen cards from AMD even have 24 or 32GB for $500-$1000 and can still run on old machines. According to this https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.06842.pdf Radeon VII 16GB performs only half as good as Tesla V100 16GB, whereas V100 should be roughly along the lines of 11GB RTX 2080 Ti. So you could say that you get half the RAM, double the speed, double the price. I am not sure though if that holds. I think they were putting 16GB in those cards trying to push it for ML with ROCm, clearly addressing the problem of the time, but no one really jumped on the train and now Resnet shrinks RAM but needs more processing power. So they released 8GB cards again with slightly better performance, and I guess we are lucky if the next generation even has 16GB because games probably don't need it at all. Still though with Revnets and everything said in the comments, I think on a budget you are better on the safe side buying the card with the most amount of VRAM, rather than the most performance. Tomorrow some paper might come out that uses another method, then you can't trick-shrink your network anymore and then everyone needs to buy big ass cards again like it used to be and can do nothing but throw their fancy faster cards in the dumpster. Also the huge bulk of ML currently focuses on image processing, while sound has only been gaining real momentum recently and this will be followed by video processing and eventually human-alike thought processes that sit atop of all that and have not even been tackled yet. Its a rapidly evolving field, hard to predict what will come and stay. Running out of VRAM means total hardware failure, running slower just means waiting longer. If you just buy the newest card every year, its probably save to buy the fast card because things won't change that fast after all. If you buy a new card every 4 years or longer then just try to get as much VRAM as possible. Check this out: https://www.techspot.com/news/86811-gigabyte-accidentally-reveals-rtx-3070-16gb-rtx-3080.html There will be a 3070 16GB version! Let's compare renting one V100 at $12/day vs. buying a 3070 Ti 16GB: The 2080 Ti was 1.42x the price of the regular 2080 and released the next summer. So let's assume the same will be true to the 3070 Ti so it will cost $700. That is $30/month & $1.88/day for two years - $15/month & $0.94/day in four years (by which time you can probably rent some 32GB Tesla card for the same price and nothing recent runs on less anymore). If you max out your setup 24/7 all year, then power cost obviously becomes a huge factor to that figure. In my country running at 500W cost $4.21/day, or $1.60 / 9hrs overnight. If you live elsewhere it might be as much as a quarter of that price. Of course your PC may run 10h a day anyway, so its maybe just 300W plus, and an older graphics card is inefficient for games it eats more Watts to do the same things so you save some there as well. There is a lot to take into account if comparing. Anyway, factoring in power cost, to break even with buying the card vs. renting within two years, you would have to use it for at least 4 days a month, or almost 2 weeks every 3 month. If you use it less than that, you maybe have a nice new graphics card and less hassle with pushing stuff back and forth onto servers all the time. But it would have been more economic to rent. So renting isn't that bad after all. Overall if you are thinking about having this as your hobby, you could say that it will cost you at least $30 per month, if not $50 or more (when keeping up to date with cards every 2 instead of 4 years + using it more cost more power). I think that is quite hefty. Personally I am not even invested enough into this even if it wasn't over my finances. I want a new card of course and also play some new games, but I don't really need to. There are a lot of other (more) important things I am interested in, that are totally free.

[P] I created a package implementing a SOTA technique for XAI ( Explainable AI)
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PressureDry1111This week

[P] I created a package implementing a SOTA technique for XAI ( Explainable AI)

This is the package https://github.com/mfumagalli68/xi-method Follow the README and install directly from pypi. From the paper: " \[..\]To bridge this gap we propose a family of measures of statistical association whose definition is well-posed also for nonordered data. Our intuition is to rely on separation measurements between probability mass functions. Here, by separation measurement we mean any distance or divergence between probability mass functions that is positive, and that is null if and only if the probability mass functions coincide. Then, we show that the new class of sensitivity indices complies with Renyi’s postulate D of measures of statistical dependence (Renyi, 1959). This postulate, called zero-independence property in the following, requires that a measure of association is null if and only if the two random variables are statistically independent. We address the estimation of this new class of indicators for generic samples, and discuss their asymptotic convergence. We then use these probabilistic sensitivity measures in the context of explainability. A relevant aspect related to measures of statistical association is that they can be computed directly on the original dataset without the need of actually fitting a machine learning model. Thus, not only are they model agnostic in explaining the behavior of a black box, but they also provide pre-hoc explanations. Our intuition is then to compare explanations provided by measures of statistical association first calculated on the original data (the pre-hoc explanations) and then on the forecasts of the machine learning model fitted to the data (post-hoc explanations). This comparison provides an indication on whether the ML model predictions capture the statistical dependence originally present in the data. We call the resulting approach Xi-method\[...\] " The paper can't be shared freely, but as always with a little bit of research you can find it online. If you find it interesting, star the repo. &#x200B; Thanks

looking for ML aficionado in London for great chats and maybe a startup
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MLstartupLondonThis week

looking for ML aficionado in London for great chats and maybe a startup

TL;DR? Here's the gist: Me: 3 startups under my belt. Started as a programmer, then trainer, then entrepreneur, now CTO & Board member for a leading customer insight company part of large bank. Large system and infrastructure specialist. Extensive & practical experience in raising funds and successfully managing both startup and established businesses. Fascinated by the power of data. Can't imagine myself spending the rest of my life being a cog in the machine. You: Machine learning specialist, programmer, analyst, understands how to navigate and crunch large datasets, from BI to predictive analytics. Interested in implementing applications from fraud detection to margin improvements through better clustering regardless of industry. Fascinated by the power of data. Can't imagine himself spending the rest of his or her life being a cog in the machine. The startup: The core idea it to build platforms and systems around the progressively larger datasets held by various sized companies, helping them solve big issues - cost reduction, profitability and reducing risk. I’m an infrastructure and software specialist and have access to 1) systems, 2) datasets 3) extensive practical in certain industry segments, namely web-scale companies and tier 1 retailers. This project is in the very early planning stages. I'm looking forward to discuss the form it could take with like-minded individuals but with complementary skills sets, namely: predictive analytics & AI as it applies to machine learning on large datasets. Want more specifics ideas? I have plenty of these, but I’m sure you do to, so let’s meet face to face and discuss them. Ultimately the goal is to crystallize on a specific concept, develop together a minimum viable product and get the company bootstrapped or angel-funded (something I also have plenty of experience with), all via a lean startup model. My philosophy on startups: Startups built in one’s free time often fail because they drag on, ending up as little more than side projects you can’t quite get rid of (due to co-founder guilt, or perhaps the little money they bring in every month). The core idea for this project is based on lean, that is, to launch a minimum viable product as early as possible. Getting feedback. Measuring results (important!). Pivot if it’s not working. This helps tremendously in staying motivated, limits the dreaded paralyzing fear of failure, and more importantly, keep the time from inception to first client/funding to a minimum. If it sounds interesting please message me and we can exchange contact details! Worst that can happen is we have a great chat!

[D] Should We Be Concerned About The Failure Of Evolutionary Algorithms, And Its Implications?
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mystikaldangerThis week

[D] Should We Be Concerned About The Failure Of Evolutionary Algorithms, And Its Implications?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6287292/ &#x200B; A number of possible explanations for \[why we can't evolve complex software\] could be considered. We tried to be as comprehensive as possible in this section, but it is possible that we have not considered some plausible explanations: Incompetent programmers—It is theoretically possible, but is highly unlikely, that out of thousands of scientists working on evolutionary computation, all failed to correctly implement the Darwinian algorithm. Nonrepresentative algorithms—Some have suggested that EAs do not accurately capture the theory of evolution, but of course that would imply that the theory itself is not specified in sufficient detail to make falsifiable predictions. If, however, such more detailed specifications are available to GP believers, it is up to them to implement them as computer simulations for testing purposes, but no successful examples of such work are known and the known ones have not been successful in evolving software. Inadequate fitness functions—Fitness function for a complex software product is difficult to outline and specify and may be as complex (or even more complex) as the software we want to evolve as it has to consider all the possible use cases and pass all unit tests. This may be the Achilles heel of GP, but it is also an objection to feasibility of programming in general and GP in particular, as both have to convert software specification into the source code. If human programmers and biological evolution succeed with such constraints, so should Darwinian simulations. The Halting problem—Turing proved that it is impossible to determine whether an arbitrary program halts, but this is also a problem for human programmers and could be easily addressed by placing time limits on considered solutions. Program correctness—If we require evolved software to be provably correct, this would present a problem as GP does not verify produced designs but only tests them against specific unit tests. Likewise, we cannot rely on automated software verification as it is still an unsolved problem in the general case. This is not really a problem as most of the human-written software is never proven to be correct and only a small portion of software engineering process relies of formal specification and Test Driven Development. Inappropriate solutions—Literature on EA is full of examples of surprising creativity of Darwinian algorithm resulting in solutions which match the letter of design specifications but not the spirit. This is similar to human-produced software and numerous examples of ways in which such software fails the goals of the initial design. Insufficient complexity of the environment (not enough data, poor fitness functions)—It is possible that the simulated environment is not complex enough to generate high complexity outputs in evolutionary simulations. This does not seem correct as Internet presents a highly complex landscape in which many self-modifying computer viruses roam. Likewise, virtual world such as Second Life and many others present close approximations to the real world and are certainly more complex than early Earth was: A skeptic might insist that an abstract environment would be inadequate for the evolution . . ., believing instead that the virtual environment would need to closely resemble the actual biological environment in which our ancestors evolved. Creating a physically realistic virtual world would require a far greater investment of computational resources than the simulation of a simple toy world or abstract problem domain (whereas evolution had access to a physically realistic real world “for free”). In the limiting case, if complete microphysical accuracy were insisted upon, the computational requirements would balloon to utterly infeasible proportions. Requiring more realistic environmental conditions may result in an increase in necessary computational resources, a problem addressed in the next bullet. Insufficient resources (compute, memory)—From the history of computer science, we know of many situations (speech recognition, NN training), where we had a correct algorithm but insufficient computational resources to run it to success. It is possible that we simply do not have hardware powerful enough to emulate evolution. We will address this possibility in section “Computational Complexity of Biological Evolution and Available Compute.” Software design is not amenable to evolutionary methods—Space of software designs may be discrete with no continuous path via incremental fitness to the desired solutions. This is possible, but this implies that original goals of GP are unattainable and misguided. In addition, because a clear mapping exists between solutions to problems and animals as solutions to environmental problems, this would also imply that current explanation for the origin of the species is incorrect. Darwinian algorithm is incomplete or wrong—Finally, we have to consider the possibility that the inspiration behind evolutionary computation, the Darwinian algorithm itself is wrong or at least partially incomplete. If that was true, computer simulations of such algorithm would fail to produce results comparable with observations we see in nature and a search for an alternative algorithm would need to take place. This would be an extraordinary claim and would require that we discard all the other possible explanations from this list. We challenge EA community to prove us wrong by producing an experiment, which evolves nontrivial software from scratch and without human help. That would be the only way in which our findings could be shown to be incorrect. Perhaps, reframing the problem in terms of maximizing negentropy of digital organisms, as suggested by Schrödinger, Michaelian, and Ulanowicz and Hannon, with respect to negative energy being a fundamental property of all life-forms may produce better results. On a positive side, the fact that it seems impossible to evolve complex software implies that we are unlikely to be able to evolve highly sophisticated artificially intelligent agents, which may present significant risk to our safety and security. Just imagine what would have happened, if the very first time we ran a simulation of evolution on a computer, it produced a superintelligent agent. Yampolskiy has shown that programming as a problem is AI-complete; if GP can solve programming that would imply that GP = AGI (artificial general intelligence), but we see no experimental evidence for such claim. In fact, it is more likely that once we have AGI, it could be used to create an intelligent fitness function for GP and so evolve software. Genetic programming will not be the cause of AI, but a product of it. However, neuroevolution methods for optimizing deep learning architectures and parameters remain a strong possibility for creation of AGI.

[D] Overwhelmed by fast advances in recent weeks
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iamx9000againThis week

[D] Overwhelmed by fast advances in recent weeks

I was watching the GTC keynote and became entirely overwhelmed by the amount of progress achieved from last year. I'm wondering how everyone else feels. &#x200B; Firstly, the entire ChatGPT, GPT-3/GPT-4 chaos has been going on for a few weeks, with everyone scrambling left and right to integrate chatbots into their apps, products, websites. Twitter is flooded with new product ideas, how to speed up the process from idea to product, countless promp engineering blogs, tips, tricks, paid courses. &#x200B; Not only was ChatGPT disruptive, but a few days later, Microsoft and Google also released their models and integrated them into their search engines. Microsoft also integrated its LLM into its Office suite. It all happenned overnight. I understand that they've started integrating them along the way, but still, it seems like it hapenned way too fast. This tweet encompases the past few weeks perfectly https://twitter.com/AlphaSignalAI/status/1638235815137386508 , on a random Tuesday countless products are released that seem revolutionary. &#x200B; In addition to the language models, there are also the generative art models that have been slowly rising in mainstream recognition. Now Midjourney AI is known by a lot of people who are not even remotely connected to the AI space. &#x200B; For the past few weeks, reading Twitter, I've felt completely overwhelmed, as if the entire AI space is moving beyond at lightning speed, whilst around me we're just slowly training models, adding some data, and not seeing much improvement, being stuck on coming up with "new ideas, that set us apart". &#x200B; Watching the GTC keynote from NVIDIA I was again, completely overwhelmed by how much is being developed throughout all the different domains. The ASML EUV (microchip making system) was incredible, I have no idea how it does lithography and to me it still seems like magic. The Grace CPU with 2 dies (although I think Apple was the first to do it?) and 100 GB RAM, all in a small form factor. There were a lot more different hardware servers that I just blanked out at some point. The omniverse sim engine looks incredible, almost real life (I wonder how much of a domain shift there is between real and sim considering how real the sim looks). Beyond it being cool and usable to train on synthetic data, the car manufacturers use it to optimize their pipelines. This change in perspective, of using these tools for other goals than those they were designed for I find the most interesting. &#x200B; The hardware part may be old news, as I don't really follow it, however the software part is just as incredible. NVIDIA AI foundations (language, image, biology models), just packaging everything together like a sandwich. Getty, Shutterstock and Adobe will use the generative models to create images. Again, already these huge juggernauts are already integrated. &#x200B; I can't believe the point where we're at. We can use AI to write code, create art, create audiobooks using Britney Spear's voice, create an interactive chatbot to converse with books, create 3D real-time avatars, generate new proteins (?i'm lost on this one), create an anime and countless other scenarios. Sure, they're not perfect, but the fact that we can do all that in the first place is amazing. &#x200B; As Huang said in his keynote, companies want to develop "disruptive products and business models". I feel like this is what I've seen lately. Everyone wants to be the one that does something first, just throwing anything and everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. &#x200B; In conclusion, I'm feeling like the world is moving so fast around me whilst I'm standing still. I want to not read anything anymore and just wait until everything dies down abit, just so I can get my bearings. However, I think this is unfeasible. I fear we'll keep going in a frenzy until we just burn ourselves at some point. &#x200B; How are you all fairing? How do you feel about this frenzy in the AI space? What are you the most excited about?

I tested hundreds of marketing tools in the last three years and these 50 made it to the list. I'll sum up my top 50 marketing tools with one or two sentences + give you pricings.
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SpicyCopyThis week

I tested hundreds of marketing tools in the last three years and these 50 made it to the list. I'll sum up my top 50 marketing tools with one or two sentences + give you pricings.

Hey guys, I'm working in a growth marketing agency. Marketing tools are 30% of what we do, so we use them a lot and experiment with the new ones as much as possible. There are thousands of tools and it's easy to get lost, so I wanted to share the tools we use most on a daily basis. And divide the list into 14 categories. I thought this could be handy for Entrepreneurs subreddit. Why adopt tools? I see marketing tools as tireless colleagues. If you can't hire an employee, choosing the right tool can solve your problems, because they Are super cheap. Work 7/24 for you. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t need management. (or needless management) Help you to automate the majority of your lead gen process. Onwards to the list. (With the pricings post ended up quite long, you can find a link in the end if you want to check the prices) Email marketing tools #1 ActiveCampaign is armed with the most complicated email automation features and has the most intuitive user experience. It feels like you already know how to use it. \#2 Autopilot is visual marketing automation and customer journey tool that helps you acquire, nurture based on behaviors, interest etc. #3 Mailjet: This is the tool we use to send out bulky email campaigns such as newsletters. It doesn't have sexy features like others but does its job for a cheap price. Email address finders #4 Skrapp finds email of your contacts by name and company. It also works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and can extract thousands of emails in bulk + have a browser add-on. #5 Hunter: Similar to Skrapp but doesn't work with LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly. In addition, there are email templates and you can set up email campaigns. Prospecting and outreach tools #6 Prospect combines the personal emails, follow-up calls, other social touches and helps you create multichannel campaigns.  #7 Reply is a more intuitive version of Prospect. It is easy to learn and use; their UX makes you feel good and sufficient.  CRM tools #8 Salesflare helps you to stop managing your data and start managing your customers. Not yet popular as Hubspot and etc but the best solution for smaller B2B businesses. (we're fans) \#9 Hubspot: The most popular CRM for good reason and has a broader product range you can adopt in your next steps. Try this if you have a bulky list of customers because it is free. #10 Pardot: Pardot is by Salesforce, it's armed with features that can close the gap between marketing and sales. Sales Tools #11 Salesforce is the best sales automation and lead management software. It helps you to create complicated segmentations and run, track, analyze campaigns from the same dashboard. #12 LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you full access to LinkedIn's user database. You can even find a kidnapped CEO if you know how to use it with other marketing automation tools like Skrapp. #13 Pipedrive is a simple tool and excels in one thing. It tracks your leads and tells you when to take the next action. It makes sales easier. #14 Qwilr creates great-looking docs, at speed. You can design perfect proposals, quotes, client updates, and more in a flash. We use it a lot to close deals, it's effective. #15 Crystalknows is an add-on that tells you anyone’s personality on LinkedIn and gives you a detailed approach specific to that person. It's eerily accurate. #16 Leadfeeder shows you the companies that visited your website. Tells how they found you and what they’re interested in. It has a free version. Communication Tools #17 Intercom is a sweet and smart host that welcomes your visitors when you’re not home. It’s one of the best chatbot tools in the market. #18 Drift is famous for its conversational marketing features and more sales-focused than Intercom. #19 Manychat is a chatbot that helps you create high converting Facebook campaigns. #20 Plann3r helps you create your personalized meeting page. You can schedule meetings witch clients, candidates, and prospects. #21 Loom is a video messaging tool, it helps you to be more expressive and create closer relationships. #22 Callpage collects your visitors’ phone number and connects you with them in seconds. No matter where you are. Landing page tools #23 Instapage is the best overall landing page builder. It has a broad range of features and even squirrel can build a compelling landing page with templates. No coding needed. #24 Unbounce can do everything that Instapage does and lets you build a great landing page without a developer. But it's less intuitive. Lead generation / marketing automation tools #25 Phantombuster is by far the most used lead generation software in our tool kit. It extracts data, emails, sends requests, customized messages, and does many things on autopilot in any platform. You can check this, this and this if you want to see it in action. #26 Duxsoup is a Google Chrome add-on and can also automate some of LinkedIn lead generation efforts like Phantombuster. But not works in the cloud. #27 Zapier is a glue that holds all the lead generation tools together. With Zapier, You can connect different marketing tools and no coding required. Conversion rate optimization tools #28 Hotjar tracks what people are doing on your website by recording sessions and capturing mouse movements. Then it gives you a heatmap. #29 UsabilityHub shows your page to a digital crowd and measures the first impressions and helps you to validate your ideas. #30 Optinmonster is a top tier conversion optimization tool. It helps you to capture leads and enables you to increase conversions rates with many features. #31 Notifia is one mega tool of widgets that arms your website with the wildest social proof and lead capturing tactics. #32 Sumo is a much simpler version of Notifia. But Sumo has everything to help you capture leads and build your email lists. Web scrapers #33 Data Miner is a Google Chrome browser extension that helps you scrape data from web pages and into a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet. #34 Webscraper does the same thing as Data Miner; however, it is capable of handling more complex tasks. SEO and Content #35 Grammarly: Your English could be your first language and your grammar could be better than Shakespeare. Grammarly still can make your writing better. #36 Hemingwayapp is a copywriting optimization tool that gives you feedback about your copy and improves your readability score, makes your writing bolder and punchier. Free. #37 Ahrefs is an all-rounder search engine optimization tool that helps you with off-page, on-page or technical SEO. #38 SurferSEO makes things easier for your on-page SEO efforts. It’s a tool that analyzes top Google results for specific keywords and gives you a content brief based on that data. Video editing and design tools #39 Canva is a graphic design platform that makes everything easy. It has thousands of templates for anything from Facebook ads, stylish presentations to business cards.  #40 Kapwing is our go-to platform for quick video edits. It works on the browser and can help you to create stylish videos, add subtitles, resize videos, create memes, or remove backgrounds. #41 Animoto can turn your photos and video clip into beautiful video slideshows. It comes handy when you want to create an advertising material but don’t have a budget. Advertising tools #42 AdEspresso lets you create and test multiple ads with few clicks. You can optimize your FB, IG, and Google ads from this tool and measure your ads with in-depth analytics. #43 AdRoll is an AI-driven platform that connects and coordinates marketing efforts across ads, email, and online stores. Other tools #44 Replug helps you to shorten, track, optimize your links with call-to-actions, branded links, and retargeting pixels #45 Draw.io = Mindmaps, schemes, and charts. With Draw.io, you can put your brain in a digital paper in an organized way. #46 Built With is a tool that finds out what websites are built with. So you can see what tools they're using and so on. #47 Typeform can turn data collection into an experience with Typeform. This tool helps you to engage your audience with conversational forms or surveys and help you to collect more data. #48 Livestorm helped us a lot, especially in COVID-19 tiles. It’s a webinar software that works on your browser, mobile, and desktop. #49 Teachable \- If you have an online course idea but hesitating because of the production process, Teachable can help you. It's easy to configure and customizable for your needs. #50 Viral Loops provides a revolutionary referral marketing solution for modern marketers. You can create and run referral campaigns in a few clicks with templates. Remember, most of these tools have a free trial or free version. Going over them one by one can teach you a lot and help you grow your business with less work power in the early stages of your business. I hope you enjoyed the read and can find some tools to make things easier! Let me know about your favorite tools in the comments, so I can try them out. \------ If you want to check the prices and see a broader explanation about the tools, you can go here.

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.
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dams96This week

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

If only someone told me this before my first startup
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johnrushxThis week

If only someone told me this before my first startup

If only someone told me this before my first startup: Validate idea first. I wasted a decade building stuff nobody needed. Incubators and VCs served to me as a validation, but I was so wrong. Kill my EGO. It’s not about me, but the user. I must want what the user wants, not what I want. My taste isn't important. The user has expectations, and I must fulfill them. Don’t chaise investors. Chase users, and then investors will be chasing me. I've never had more incoming interest from VC than now when I'm the least interested in them. Never hire managers. Only hire doers until PMF. So many people know how to manage people and so few can actually get sh\*t done barehand. Landing page is the least important thing in a startup. Pick a simple template, edit texts with a no-code website builder in less than an hour and that's it! At the early stage, I win traffic outside of my website, people are already interested, so don't make them search for the signup button among the texts! Focus on conversion optimization only when the traffic is consistent. Keep it to one page. Nobody gonna browse this website. Hire only fullstack devs. There is nothing less productive in this world than a team of developers for an early-stage product. One full stack dev building the whole product. That’s it. Chase global market from day 1. If the product and marketing are good, it will work on the global market too, if it’s bad, it won’t work on the local market too. So better go global from day 1, so that if it works, the upside is 100x bigger. I launched all startups for the Norwegian market, hoping we will scale to international at some point. I wish I launched to international from day 1 as I do now. The size of the market is 10000x bigger. I can validate and grow products in days, not in years as it used to be. Do SEO from day 2. As early as I can. I ignored this for 14 years. It’s my biggest regret. It takes just 5 minutes to get it done on my landing page. I go to Google Keyword Planner, enter a few keywords around my product, sort them by traffic, filter out high competition kws, pick the top 10, and place them natively on my home page and meta tags. Add one blog article every week. Either manually or by paying for an AI blogging tool. Sell features, before building them. Ask existing users if they want this feature. I run DMs with 10-20 users every day, where I chat about all my ideas and features I wanna add. I clearly see what resonates with me most and only go build those. If I don't have followers, try HN, Reddit, or just search on X for posts and ask it in the replies. People are helpful, they will reply if the question is easy to understand. Hire only people I would wanna hug. My cofounder, an old Danish man said this to me in 2015. And it was a big shift. I realized that if I don’t wanna hug the person, it means I dislike them on a chemical/animal level. Even if I can’t say why, but that’s the fact. Sooner or later, we would have a conflict and eventually break up. It takes up to 10 years to build a startup, make sure I do it with people I have this connection with. Invest all money into my startups and friends. Not crypt0, not stockmarket, not properties. I did some math, if I kept investing all my money into all my friends’ startups, that would be about 70 investments. 3 of them turned into unicorns eventually. Even 1 would have made the bank. Since 2022, I have invested all my money into my products, friends, and network. If I don't have friends who do startups, invest it in myself. Post on Twitter daily. I started posting here in March last year. It’s my primary source of new connections and growth. I could have started it earlier, I don't know why I didn't. Don’t work/partner with corporates. Corporations always seem like an amazing opportunity. They’re big and rich, they promise huge stuff, millions of users, etc. But every single time none of this happens. Because I talk to a regular employees there. They waste my time, destroy focus, shift priorities, and eventually bring in no users/money. Don’t get ever distracted by hype e.g. crypt0. I lost 1.5 years of my life this way. I met the worst people along the way. Fricks, scammers, thieves. Some of my close friends turned into thieves along the way, just because it was so common in that space. I wish this didn’t happen to me. I wish I was stronger and stayed on my mission. Don’t build consumer apps. Only b2b. Consumer apps are so hard, like a lottery. It’s just 0.00001% who make it big. The rest don’t. Even if I got many users, then there is a monetization challenge. I’ve spent 4 years in consumer apps and regret it. Don’t hold on bad project for too long, max 1 year. Some projects just don’t work. In most cases, it’s either the idea that’s so wrong that I can’t even pivot it or it’s a team that is good one by one but can’t make it as a team. Don’t drag this out for years. Tech conferences are a waste of time. They cost money, take energy, and time and I never really meet anyone there. Most people there are the “good” employees of corporations who were sent there as a perk for being loyal to the corporation. Very few fellow makers. Scrum is a Scam. For small teams and bootstrapped teams. If I had a team that had to be nagged every morning with questions as if they were children in kindergarten, then things would eventually fail. The only good stuff I managed to do happened with people who were grownups and could manage their stuff on their own. We would just do everything over chat as a sync on goals and plans. Outsource nothing at all until PMF. In a startup, almost everything needs to be done in a slightly different way, more creative, and more integrated into the vision. When outsourcing, the external members get no love and no case for the product. It’s just yet another assignment in their boring job. Instead of coming up with great ideas for my project they will be just focusing on ramping up their skills to get a promotion or a better job offer. Bootstrap. I spent way too much time raising money. I raised more than 10 times, preseed, seeded, and series A. But each time it was a 3-9 month project, meetings every week, and lots of destruction. I could afford to bootstrap, but I still went the VC-funded way, I don’t know why. To be honest, I didn’t know bootstrapping was a thing I could do or anyone does. It may take a decade. When I was 20, I was convinced it takes a few years to build and succeed with a startup. So I kept pushing my plans forward, to do it once I exited. Family, kids. I wish I married earlier. I wish I had kids earlier. No Free Tier. I'd launch a tool with a free tier, and it'd get sign-ups, but very few would convert. I'd treat free sign-ups as KPIs and run on it for years. I'd brag about signups and visitors. I'd even raise VC money with these stats. But eventually, I would fail to reach PMF. Because my main feedback would come from free users and the product turned into a perfect free product. Once I switched to "paid only" until I validated the product, things went really well. Free and paid users often need different products. Don't fall into this trap as I did. Being To Cheap. I always started by checking all competitors and setting the lowest price. I thought this would be one of the key advantages of my product. But no, I was wrong. The audience on $5 and $50 are totally different. $5: pain in the \*ss, never happy, never recommend me to a friend, leave in 4 months. $50: polite, give genuine feedback, happy, share with friends, become my big fan if I solve their request. I will fail. When I started my first startup. I thought if I did everything right, it would work out. But it turned out that almost every startup fails. I wish I knew that and I tried to fail faster, to get to the second iteration, then to the third, and keep going on, until I either find out nothing works or make it work. Use boilerplates. I wasted years of dev time and millions of VC money to pay for basic things. To build yet another sidebar, yet another dashboard, and payment integration... I had too much pride, I couldn't see myself taking someone else code as a basis for my product. I wanted it to be 100% mine, original, from scratch. Because my product seems special to me. Spend more time with Family & Friends. I missed the weddings of all my best friends and family. I was so busy. I thought if I didn't do it on time, the world would end. Looking back today, it was so wrong. I meet my friends and can't share those memories with them, which makes me very sad. I realized now, that spending 10% of my time with family and friends would practically make no negative impact on my startups. Build Products For Audiences I Love. I never thought of this. I'd often build products either for corporates, consumers, or for developers. It turns out I have no love for all 3. But I deeply love indie founders. Because they are risk-takers and partly kids in their hearts. Once I switched the focus to indie makers on my products, my level of joy increased by 100x for me. Ignore Badges and Awards I was chasing those awards just like everyone else. Going to ceremonies, signing up for events and stuff. I've won tons of awards, but none of those were eventually useful to my business. I better focused on my business and users. Write Every Single Day. When I was a kid, I loved writing stories. In school, they would give an assignment, and I'd often write a long story for it, however, the teacher would put an F on it. The reason was simple, I had an issue with the direction of the letters and the sequence of letters in the words. I still have it, it's just the Grammarly app helping me to correct these issues. So the teacher would fail my stories because almost every sentence had a spelling mistake that I couldn't even see. It made me think I'm made at writing. So I stopped, for 15 years. But I kept telling stories all these years. Recently I realized that in any group, the setup ends up turning into me telling stories to everyone. So I tried it all again, here on X 10 months ago. I love it, the process, the feedback from people. I write every day. I wish I had done it all these years. The End. \ this is an updated version of my post on the same topic from 2 months ago. I've edited some of the points and added 9 new ones.* \\ This is not advice, it's my self-reflection that might help you avoid same mistakes if you think those were mistakes

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model
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I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Jinxed - $0 month after bragging about my first $10k month here. (PROGRESS UPDATE)
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Jinxed - $0 month after bragging about my first $10k month here. (PROGRESS UPDATE)

A month ago I made a post in this sub about my first $10k month. It went viral. And guess what - I didn't make another dollar since. Honestly, I shouldn't have made any money that first month also. Because I didn't have an offer. If you're familiar with Alex Hormozi you know that the offer is what makes or breaks a business. And I simply didn't have it. I managed to close my first clients just because I rode the AI hype train and managed to capture a couple of CEOs who were riding it too. Took whatever I could get for installment without thinking about the future. (It also helped that I wasn't bullshitting and had a legit enterprise-grade custom GPT framework ready). But that's not a business strategy at all. You can't base your business solely off hype. So the last month was dedicated to crafting a proper offer. No selling involved. Purely discovery chats with as many people as possible. The viral post helped because I connected with some badass people I wouldn't have reached otherwise. Even managed to add a new team member from Reddit. But most importantly, we now have the offer: Enterprise-grade AI assistant trained on your data for a fraction of the market cost. Basically a custom GPT for companies that want a secure assistant "trained" on their data but are not willing to spend millions on OpenAI's Custom Models or hundreds of thousands on Enterprise ChatGPT. (OpenAI's introduction of exclusive business GPTs for $2-3M is an incredibly good leverage for this offer). Also got rid of the big installment fee and switched to a $1k/month starting price for attractiveness and simplicity for companies (that covers their Azure fees also). The key offer points here are: Data security (as there are cheap, but not enterprise-grade tools like PDF.ai) Good price (as not all businesses can afford to pay 6 figure premiums for their data security) So the lesson here (I suppose) is that it's okay to take a step back sometimes. Reevaluate your direction. It's not worth sprinting when you're running in circles. P.S. finally made a website https://jongri.tech

How a Small Startup in Asia Secured a Contract with the US Department of Homeland Security
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How a Small Startup in Asia Secured a Contract with the US Department of Homeland Security

Uzair Javaid, a Ph.D. with a passion for data privacy, co-founded Betterdata to tackle one of AI's most pressing challenges: protecting privacy while enabling innovation. Recently, Betterdata secured a lucrative contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, 1 of only 4 companies worldwide to do so and the only one in Asia. Here's how he did it: The Story So what's your story? I grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan, excelling in coding despite studying electrical engineering. Inspired by my professors, I set my sights on studying abroad and eventually earned a Ph.D. scholarship at NUS Singapore, specializing in data security and privacy. During my research, I ethically hacked Ethereum and published 15 papers—three times the requirement. While wrapping up my Ph.D., I explored startup ideas and joined Entrepreneur First, where I met Kevin Yee. With his expertise in generative models and mine in privacy, we founded Betterdata. Now, nearly three years in, we’ve secured a major contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—one of only four companies globally and the only one from Asia. The Startup In a nutshell, what does your startup do? Betterdata is a startup that uses AI and synthetic data generation to address two major challenges: data privacy and the scarcity of high-quality data for training AI models. By leveraging generative models and privacy-enhancing technologies, Betterdata enables businesses, such as banks, to use customer data without breaching privacy regulations. The platform trains AI on real data, learns its patterns, and generates synthetic data that mimics the real thing without containing any personal or sensitive information. This allows companies to innovate and develop AI solutions safely and ethically, all while tackling the growing need for diverse, high-quality data in AI development. How did you conduct ideation and validation for your startup? The initial idea for Betterdata came from personal experience. During my Ph.D., I ethically hacked Ethereum’s blockchain, exposing flaws in encryption-based data sharing. This led me to explore AI-driven deep synthesis technology—similar to deepfakes but for structured data privacy. With GDPR impacting 28M+ businesses, I saw a massive opportunity to help enterprises securely share data while staying compliant. To validate the idea, I spoke to 50 potential customers—a number that strikes the right balance. Some say 100, but that’s impractical for early-stage founders. At 50, patterns emerge: if 3 out of 10 mention the same problem, and this repeats across 50, you have 10–15 strong signals, making it a solid foundation for an MVP. Instead of outbound sales, which I dislike, we used three key methods: Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—targeting technically savvy users with solutions for niche problems, like scaling synthetic data for banks. Targeted Content Marketing—regular customer conversations shaped our thought leadership and outreach. Raising Awareness Through Partnerships—collaborating with NUS, Singapore’s PDPC, and Plug and Play to build credibility and educate the market. These strategies attracted serious customers willing to pay, guiding Betterdata’s product development and market fit. How did you approach the initial building and ongoing product development? In the early stages, we built synthetic data generation algorithms and a basic UI for proof-of-concept, using open-source datasets to engage with banks. We quickly learned that banks wouldn't share actual customer data due to privacy concerns, so we had to conduct on-site installations and gather feedback to refine our MVP. Through continuous consultation with customers, we discovered real enterprise data posed challenges, such as missing values, which led us to adapt our prototype accordingly. This iterative approach of listening to customer feedback and observing their usage allowed us to improve our product, enhance UX, and address unmet needs while building trust and loyalty. Working closely with our customers also gives us a data advantage. Our solution’s effectiveness depends on customer data, which we can't fully access, but bridging this knowledge gap gives us a competitive edge. The more customers we test on, the more our algorithms adapt to diverse use cases, making it harder for competitors to replicate our insights. My approach to iteration is simple: focus solely on customer feedback and ignore external noise like trends or advice. The key question for the team is: which customer is asking for this feature or solution? As long as there's a clear answer, we move forward. External influences, such as AI hype, often bring more confusion than clarity. True long-term success comes from solving real customer problems, not chasing trends. Customers may not always know exactly what they want, but they understand their problems. Our job is to identify these problems and solve them in innovative ways. While customers may suggest specific features, we stay focused on solving the core issue rather than just fulfilling their exact requests. The idea aligns with the quote often attributed to Henry Ford: "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." The key is understanding their problems, not just taking requests at face value. How do you assess product-market fit? To assess product-market fit, we track two key metrics: Customers' Willingness to Pay: We measure both the quantity and quality of meetings with potential customers. A high number of meetings with key decision-makers signals genuine interest. At Betterdata, we focused on getting meetings with people in banks and large enterprises to gauge our product's resonance with the target market. How Much Customers Are Willing to Pay: We monitor the price customers are willing to pay, especially in the early stages. For us, large enterprises, like banks, were willing to pay a premium for our synthetic data platform due to the growing need for privacy tech. This feedback guided our product refinement and scaling strategy. By focusing on these metrics, we refined our product and positioned it for scaling. What is your business model? We employ a structured, phase-driven approach for out business model, as a B2B startup. I initially struggled with focusing on the core value proposition in sales, often becoming overly educational. Eventually, we developed a product roadmap with models that allowed us to match customer needs to specific offerings and justify our pricing. Our pricing structure includes project-based pilots and annual contracts for successful deployments. At Betterdata, our customer engagement unfolds across three phases: Phase 1: Trial and Benchmarking \- We start with outreach and use open-source datasets to showcase results, offering customers a trial period to evaluate the solution. Phase 2: Pilot or PoC \- After positive trial results, we conduct a PoC or pilot using the customer’s private data, with the understanding that successful pilots lead to an annual contract. Phase 3: Multi-Year Contracts \- Following a successful pilot, we transition to long-term commercial contracts, focusing on multi-year agreements to ensure stability and ongoing partnerships. How do you do marketing for your brand? We take a non-conventional approach to marketing, focusing on answering one key question: Which customers are willing to pay, and how much? This drives our messaging to show how our solution meets their needs. Our strategy centers around two main components: Building a network of lead magnets \- These are influential figures like senior advisors, thought leaders, and strategic partners. Engaging with institutions like IMDA, SUTD, and investors like Plug and Play helps us gain access to the right people and foster warm introductions, which shorten our sales cycle and ensure we’re reaching the right audience. Thought leadership \- We build our brand through customer traction, technology evidence, and regulatory guidelines. This helps us establish credibility in the market and position ourselves as trusted leaders in our field. This holistic approach has enabled us to navigate diverse market conditions in Asia and grow our B2B relationships. By focusing on these areas, we drive business growth and establish strong trust with stakeholders. What's your advice for fundraising? Here are my key takeaways for other founders when it comes to fundraising: Fundraise When You Don’t Need To We closed our seed round in April 2023, a time when we weren't actively raising. Founders should always be in fundraising mode, even when they're not immediately in need of capital. Don’t wait until you have only a few months of runway left. Keep the pipeline open and build relationships. When the timing is right, execution becomes much easier. For us, our investment came through a combination of referrals and inbound interest. Even our lead investor initially rejected us, but after re-engaging, things eventually fell into place. It’s crucial to stay humble, treat everyone with respect, and maintain those relationships for when the time is right. Be Mindful of How You Present Information When fundraising, how you present information matters a lot. We created a comprehensive, easily digestible investment memo, hosted on Notion, which included everything an investor might need—problem, solution, market, team, risks, opportunities, and data. The goal was for investors to be able to get the full picture within 30 minutes without chasing down extra details. We also focused on making our financial model clear and meaningful, even though a 5-year forecast might be overkill at the seed stage. The key was clarity and conciseness, and making it as easy as possible for investors to understand the opportunity. I learned that brevity and simplicity are often the best ways to make a memorable impact. For the pitch itself, keep it simple and focus on 4 things: problem, solution, team, and market. If you can summarize each of these clearly and concisely, you’ll have a compelling pitch. Later on, you can expand into market segments, traction, and other metrics, but for seed-stage, focus on those four areas, and make sure you’re strong in at least three of them. If you do, you'll have a compelling case. How do you run things day-to-day? i.e what's your operational workflow and team structure? Here's an overview of our team structure and process: Internally: Our team is divided into two main areas: backend (internal team) and frontend (market-facing team). There's no formal hierarchy within the backend team. We all operate as equals, defining our goals based on what needs to be developed, assigning tasks, and meeting weekly to share updates and review progress. The focus is on full ownership of tasks and accountability for getting things done. I also contribute to product development, identifying challenges and clearing obstacles to help the team move forward. Backend Team: We approach tasks based on the scope defined by customers, with no blame or hierarchy. It's like a sports team—sometimes someone excels, and other times they struggle, but we support each other and move forward together. Everyone has the creative freedom to work in the way that suits them best, but we establish regular meetings and check-ins to ensure alignment and progress. Frontend Team: For the market-facing side, we implement a hierarchy because the market expects this structure. If I present myself as "CEO," it signals authority and credibility. This distinction affects how we communicate with the market and how we build our brand. The frontend team is split into four main areas: Business Product (Software Engineering) Machine Learning Engineering R&D The C-suite sits at the top, followed by team leads, and then the executors. We distill market expectations into actionable tasks, ensuring that everyone is clear on their role and responsibilities. Process: We start by receiving market expectations and defining tasks based on them. Tasks are assigned to relevant teams, and execution happens with no communication barriers between team members. This ensures seamless collaboration and focused execution. The main goal is always effectiveness—getting things done efficiently while maintaining flexibility in how individuals approach their work. In both teams, there's an emphasis on accountability, collaboration, and clear communication, but the structure varies according to the nature of the work and external expectations.

[CASE STUDY] From 217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months - Sold for $59,000; I grow and monetise web traffic of 5, 6, 7 figures USD valued passive income content sites [AMA]
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jamesackerman1234This week

[CASE STUDY] From 217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months - Sold for $59,000; I grow and monetise web traffic of 5, 6, 7 figures USD valued passive income content sites [AMA]

Hello Everyone (VERY LONG CASE STUDY AHEAD) - 355% return in 9 months Note: I own a 7-figures USD valued portfolio of 41+ content sites that generates 5-6 figures USD a month in passive income. This is my first time posting in this sub and my goal is to NOT share generic advice but precise numbers, data and highly refined processes so you can also get started with this business yourself or if you already have an existing business, drive huge traffic to it and scale it substantially (get more customers). I will use a case study to explain the whole process. As most of us are entrepreneurs here, explaining an actual project would be more meaningful. In this case study I used AI assisted content to grow an existing site from $217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months (NO BACKLINKS) and sold it for $59,000. ROI of 3 months: 355% Previous case studies (before I give an overview of the model) Amazon Affiliate Content Site: $371/m to $19,263/m in 14 MONTHS - $900K CASE STUDY \[AMA\] Affiliate Website from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months (CASE STUDY - Amazon?) \[AMA\] Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+) Note: You can check pinned posts on my profile. Do go through the comments as well as a lot of questions are answered in those. However, if you still have any questions, feel free to reach out. This is an \[AMA\]. Quick Overview of the Model Approach: High traffic, niche specific, informative content websites that monetise its traffic through highly automated methods like display ads and affiliate. The same model can be applied to existing businesses to drive traffic and get customers. Main idea: Make passive income in a highly automated way Easy to understand analogy You have real estate (here you have digital asset like a website) You get rental income (here you get ads and affiliate income with no physical hassle, in case you have a business like service, product etc. then you can get customers for that too but if not, it's alright) Real estate has value (this digital asset also has value that can be appreciated with less effort) Real estate can be sold (this can be sold too but faster) IMPORTANT NOTE: Search traffic is the BEST way to reach HUGE target audience and it's important when it comes to scaling. This essentially means that you can either monetise that via affiliate, display etc. or if you have a business then you can reach a bigger audience to scale. Overview of this website's valuation (then and now: Oct. 2022 and June 2023) Oct 2022: $217/m Valuation: $5,750.5 (26.5x) - set it the same as the multiple it was sold for June 2023: $2,836/m Traffic and revenue trend: growing fast Last 3 months avg: $2,223 Valuation now: $59,000 (26.5x) Description: The domain was registered in 2016, it grew and then the project was left unattended. I decided to grow it again using properly planned AI assisted content. Backlink profile: 500+ Referring domains (Ahrefs). Backlinks mean the sites linking back to you. This is important when it comes to ranking. Summary of Results of This Website - Before and After Note: If the terms seem technical, do not worry. I will explain them in detail later. Still if you have any questions. Feel free to comment or reach out. |Metric|Oct 2022|June 2023|Difference|Comments| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Articles|314|804|\+490|AI Assisted content published in 3 months| |Traffic|9,394|31,972|\+22,578|Organic| |Revenue|$217|$2,836|\+$2,619|Multiple sources| |RPM (revenue/1000 web traffic)|23.09|$88.7|\+$65.61|Result of Conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You make changes to the site for better conversions| |EEAT (expertise, experience, authority and trust of website)|2 main authors|8 authors|6|Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations| |CRO|Nothing|Tables, video ads |Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations || &#x200B; Month by Month Growth |Month|Revenue|Steps| |:-|:-|:-| |Sept 2022|NA|Content Plan| |Oct 2022|$217|Content Production| |Nov 2022|$243|Content production + EEAT authors| |Dec 2022|$320|Content production + EEAT authors| |Jan 2023|$400|Monitoring| |Feb 2023|$223|Content production + EEAT authors| |Mar 2023|$2,128|CRO & Fixations| |April 2023|$1,609|CRO & Fixations| |May 2023|$2,223|Content production + EEAT authors| |June 2023|$2,836|CRO and Fixations| |Total|$10,199|| &#x200B; What will I share Content plan and Website structure Content Writing Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Faster indexing Conversion rate optimisation Guest Posting EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) Costing ROI The plans moving forward with these sites &#x200B; Website Structure and Content Plan This is probably the most important important part of the whole process. The team spends around a month just to get this right. It's like defining the direction of the project. Description: Complete blueprint of the site's structure in terms of organisation of categories, subcategories and sorting of articles in each one of them. It also includes the essential pages. The sorted articles target main keyword, relevant entities and similar keywords. This has to be highly data driven and we look at over 100 variables just to get it right. It's like beating Google's algorithm to ensure you have a blueprint for a site that will rank. It needs to be done right. If there is a mistake, then even if you do everything right - it's not going to work out and after 8-16 months you will realise that everything went to waste. Process For this project, we had a niche selected already so we didn't need to do a lot of research pertaining to that. We also knew the topic since the website was already getting good traffic on that. We just validated from Ahrefs, SEMRUSH and manual analysis if it would be worth it to move forward with that topic. &#x200B; Find entities related to the topic: We used Ahrefs and InLinks to get an idea about the related entities (topics) to create a proper topical relevance. In order to be certain and have a better idea, we used ChatGPT to find relevant entities as well \> Ahrefs (tool): Enter main keyword in keywords explorer. Check the left pain for popular topics \> Inlinks (tool): Enter the main keyword, check the entity maps \> ChatGPT (tool): Ask it to list down the most important and relevant entities in order of their priority Based on this info, you can map out the most relevant topics that are semantically associated to your main topic Sorting the entities in topics (categories) and subtopics (subcategories): Based on the information above, cluster them properly. The most relevant ones must be grouped together. Each group must be sorted into its relevant category. \> Example: Site about cycling. \> Categories/entities: bicycles, gear and equipment, techniques, safety, routes etc. \> The subcategories/subentities for let's say "techniques" would be: Bike handling, pedaling, drafting etc. Extract keywords for each subcategory/subentity: You can do this using Ahrefs or Semrush. Each keyword would be an article. Ensure that you target the similar keywords in one article. For example: how to ride a bicycle and how can I ride a bicycle will be targeted by one article. Make the more important keyword in terms of volume and difficulty as the main keyword and the other one(s) as secondary Define main focus vs secondary focus: Out of all these categories/entities - there will be one that you would want to dominate in every way. So, focus on just that in the start. This will be your main focus. Try to answer ALL the questions pertaining to that. You can extract the questions using Ahrefs. \> Ahrefs > keywords explorer \> enter keyword \> Questions \> Download the list and cluster the similar ones. This will populate your main focus category/entity and will drive most of the traffic. Now, you need to write in other categories/subentities as well. This is not just important, but crucial to complete the topical map loop. In simple words, if you do this Google sees you as a comprehensive source on the topic - otherwise, it ignores you and you don't get ranked Define the URLs End result: List of all the entities and sub-entities about the main site topic in the form of categories and subcategories respectively. A complete list of ALL the questions about the main focus and at around 10 questions for each one of the subcategories/subentities that are the secondary focus Content Writing So, now that there's a plan. Content needs to be produced. Pick out a keyword (which is going to be a question) and... Answer the question Write about 5 relevant entities Answer 10 relevant questions Write a conclusion Keep the format the same for all the articles. Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Ensure the following is taken care of: H1 Permalink H2s H3s Lists Tables Meta description Socials description Featured image 2 images in text \\Schema Relevant YouTube video (if there is) Note: There are other pointers link internal linking in a semantically relevant way but this should be good to start with. Faster Indexing Indexing means Google has read your page. Ranking only after this step has been done. Otherwise, you can't rank if Google hasn't read the page. Naturally, this is a slow process. But, we expedite it in multiple ways. You can use RankMath to quickly index the content. Since, there are a lot of bulk pages you need a reliable method. Now, this method isn't perfect. But, it's better than most. Use Google Indexing API and developers tools to get indexed. Rank Math plugin is used. I don't want to bore you and write the process here. But, a simple Google search can help you set everything up. Additionally, whenever you post something - there will be an option to INDEX NOW. Just press that and it would be indexed quite fast. Conversion rate optimisation Once you get traffic, try adding tables right after the introduction of an article. These tables would feature a relevant product on Amazon. This step alone increased our earnings significantly. Even though the content is informational and NOT review. This still worked like a charm. Try checking out the top pages every single day in Google analytics and add the table to each one of them. Moreover, we used EZOIC video ads as well. That increased the RPM significantly as well. Both of these steps are highly recommended. Overall, we implemented over 11 fixations but these two contribute the most towards increasing the RPM so I would suggest you stick to these two in the start. Guest Posting We made additional income by selling links on the site as well. However, we were VERY careful about who we offered a backlink to. We didn't entertain any objectionable links. Moreover, we didn't actively reach out to anyone. We had a professional email clearly stated on the website and a particularly designated page for "editorial guidelines" A lot of people reached out to us because of that. As a matter of fact, the guy who bought the website is in the link selling business and plans to use the site primarily for selling links. According to him, he can easily make $4000+ from that alone. Just by replying to the prospects who reached out to us. We didn't allow a lot of people to be published on the site due to strict quality control. However, the new owner is willing to be lenient and cash it out. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) This is an important ranking factor. You need to prove on the site that your site has authors that are experienced, have expertise, authority and trust. A lot of people were reaching out to publish on our site and among them were a few established authors as well. We let them publish on our site for free, added them on our official team, connected their socials and shared them on all our socials. In return, we wanted them to write 3 articles each for us and share everything on all the social profiles. You can refer to the tables I shared above to check out the months it was implemented. We added a total of 6 writers (credible authors). Their articles were featured on the homepage and so were their profiles. Costing Well, we already had the site and the backlinks on it. Referring domains (backlinks) were already 500+. We just needed to focus on smart content and content. Here is the summary of the costs involved. Articles: 490 Avg word count per article: 1500 Total words: 735,000 (approximately) Cost per word: 2 cents (includes research, entities, production, quality assurance, uploading, formatting, adding images, featured image, alt texts, onsite SEO, publishing/scheduling etc.) Total: $14,700 ROI (Return on investment) Earning: Oct 22 - June 23 Earnings: $10,199 Sold for: $59,000 Total: $69,199 Expenses: Content: $14,700 Misc (hosting and others): $500 Total: $15,200 ROI over a 9 months period: 355.25% The plans moving forward This website was a part of a research and development experiment we did. With AI, we wanted to test new waters and transition more towards automation. Ideally, we want to use ChatGPT or some other API to produce these articles and bulk publish on the site. The costs with this approach are going to be much lower and the ROI is much more impressive. It's not the the 7-figures projects I created earlier (as you may have checked the older case studies on my profile), but it's highly scalable. We plan to refine this model even further, test more and automate everything completely to bring down our costs significantly. Once we have a model, we are going to scale it to 100s of sites. The process of my existing 7-figures websites portfolio was quite similar. I tested out a few sites, refined the model and scaled it to over 41 sites. Now, the fundamentals are the same however, we are using AI in a smarter way to do the same but at a lower cost, with a smaller team and much better returns. The best thing in my opinion is to run numerous experiments now. Our experimentation was slowed down a lot in the past since we couldn't write using AI but now it's much faster. The costs are 3-6 times lower so when it used to take $50-100k to start, grow and sell a site. Now you can pump 3-6 more sites for the same budget. This is a good news for existing business owners as well who want to grow their brand. Anyway, I am excited to see the results of more sites. In the meantime, if you have any questions - feel free to let me know. Best of luck for everything. Feel free to ask questions. I'd be happy to help. This is an AMA.

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.
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dams96This week

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

I've been building stuff for years, I can build your idea
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Minute-Line2712This week

I've been building stuff for years, I can build your idea

If anyone is interested at all, I'm a college student whose been massively passionate for entrepreneur and business stuff for years and can build anything from a marketplace to a social network, a booking app, a live streaming app, AI app*, what not. I'm really flexible in general and I'm also very reasonable with pricing. I like this community so I'd like to work on something I enjoy... (indeed... get out of my tabs please). Im a little passionate in general let's say, and I build all the time for fun. But I need money. So I'm here. Viola! Since I'm a college student, and this is my first time ever offering my services as well, chances are I won't expect anything past $500. I might even do it for cheaper if it looks doable for me. If you're generous that's up to you (lol). I'm happy to share my work and live previews you can interact with before we start. And, I'm happy to build things before you pay, so you can see it literally working :) THE "NEGATIVE"/catch: There will be no code from scratch as we'd build using no-code (www.bubble.io) and implement code as needed. This means you will not have the source code ever (even if we wanted to) and if you ever want your own from scratch platform/app you will have to find someone/a team to do it from scratch, as there's no option to export source code out. If you plan to grow past 1 million users, you may consider migrating to something built from scratch at this point scaling wise (and you can't get your source code - so you'll have to pay an entire dev team separately. If you have an app, you'll need a website developed, and Android and iOS developers for the app). For an MVP however, I personally think it's a faster, easier and cheaper way to get things running without investing a lot. THE GOOD: No-code/low-code will be a thousand times more easy, cheap, and fast to maintain. And if you're a startup, chances are you WILL need to tweak things... possibly a lot (100s vs. 1,000s difference in my opinion..). We can still build almost anything and also turn it into a mobile app for iOS / Android, though I'm more comfortable with getting a web app up first and the main posting here. But it depends on the complexity so just ask. Maintenance is likely to end up FAR cheaper and you can even do it free yourself if you decided to learn (which you could totally do in some days, and master in some weeks/months fully). I can build and document everything to be as beginner friendly as possible for you to be able to maintain it yourself if you wanted to learn. Send me a message describing what you need if you're interested. I will give you an estimate on price, time, and can send you some live previews. If we agree, I will start to build before any down payments to a (reasonable) point!:)

How To Learn About AI Agents (A Road Map From Someone Who's Done It)
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laddermanUSThis week

How To Learn About AI Agents (A Road Map From Someone Who's Done It)

If you are a newb to AI Agents, welcome, I love newbies and this fledgling industry needs you! You've hear all about AI Agents and you want some of that action right?  You might even feel like this is a watershed moment in tech, remember how it felt when the internet became 'a thing'?  When apps were all the rage?  You missed that boat right?   Well you may have missed that boat, but I can promise you one thing..... THIS BOAT IS BIGGER !  So if you are reading this you are getting in just at the right time.  Let me answer some quick questions before we go much further: Q: Am I too late already to learn about AI agents? A: Heck no, you are literally getting in at the beginning, call yourself and 'early adopter' and pin a badge on your chest! Q: Don't I need a degree or a college education to learn this stuff?  I can only just about work out how my smart TV works! A: NO you do not.  Of course if you have a degree in a computer science area then it does help because you have covered all of the fundamentals in depth... However 100000% you do not need a degree or college education to learn AI Agents.  Q: Where the heck do I even start though?  Its like sooooooo confusing A: You start right here my friend, and yeh I know its confusing, but chill, im going to try and guide you as best i can. Q: Wait i can't code, I can barely write my name, can I still do this? A: The simple answer is YES you can. However it is great to learn some basics of python.  I say his because there are some fabulous nocode tools like n8n that allow you to build agents without having to learn how to code...... Having said that, at the very least understanding the basics is highly preferable. That being said, if you can't be bothered or are totally freaked about by looking at some code, the simple answer is YES YOU CAN DO THIS. Q: I got like no money, can I still learn? A: YES 100% absolutely.  There are free options to learn about AI agents and there are paid options to fast track you.  But defiantly you do not need to spend crap loads of cash on learning this.  So who am I anyway? (lets get some context)  I am an AI Engineer and I own and run my own AI Consultancy business where I design, build and deploy AI agents and AI automations.  I do also run a small academy where I teach this stuff, but I am not self promoting or posting links in this post because im not spamming this group.  If you want links send me a DM or something and I can forward them to you.  Alright so on to the good stuff, you're a newb, you've already read a 100 posts and are now totally confused and every day you consume about 26 hours of youtube videos on AI agents.....I get you, we've all been there.  So here is my 'Worth Its Weight In Gold' road map on what to do: \[1\]  First of all you need learn some fundamental concepts.  Whilst you can defiantly jump right in start building, I strongly recommend you learn some of the basics.  Like HOW to LLMs work, what is a system prompt, what is long term memory, what is Python, who the heck is this guy named Json that everyone goes on about?  Google is your old friend who used to know everything, but you've also got your new buddy who can help you if you want to learn for FREE.  Chat GPT is an awesome resource to create your own mini learning courses to understand the basics. Start with a prompt such as: "I want to learn about AI agents but this dude on reddit said I need to know the fundamentals to this ai tech, write for me a short course on Json so I can learn all about it. Im a beginner so keep the content easy for me to understand. I want to also learn some code so give me code samples and explain it like a 10 year old" If you want some actual structured course material on the fundamentals, like what the Terminal is and how to use it, and how LLMs work, just hit me, Im not going to spam this post with a hundred links. \[2\] Alright so let's assume you got some of the fundamentals down.  Now what? Well now you really have 2 options.  You either start to pick up some proper learning content (short courses) to deep dive further and really learn about agents or you can skip that sh\*t and start building!  Honestly my advice is to seek out some short courses on agents, Hugging Face have an awesome free course on agents and DeepLearningAI also have numerous free courses. Both are really excellent places to start.  If you want a proper list of these with links, let me know.  If you want to jump in because you already know it all, then learn the n8n platform!   And no im not a share holder and n8n are not paying me to say this.  I can code, im an AI Engineer and I use n8n sometimes.   N8N is a nocode platform that gives you a drag and drop interface to build automations and agents.  Its very versatile and you can self host it.  Its also reasonably easy to actually deploy a workflow in the cloud so it can be used by an actual paying customer.  Please understand that i literally get hate mail from devs and experienced AI enthusiasts for recommending no code platforms like n8n.  So im risking my mental wellbeing for you!!!    \[3\] Keep building!   ((WTF THAT'S IT?????))  Yep. the more you build the more you will learn.  Learn by doing my young Jedi learner.  I would call myself pretty experienced in building AI Agents, and I only know a tiny proportion of this tech.  But I learn but building projects and writing about AI Agents.  The more you build the more you will learn.  There are more intermediate courses you can take at this point as well if you really want to deep dive (I was forced to - send help) and I would recommend you do if you like short courses because if you want to do well then you do need to understand not just the underlying tech but also more advanced concepts like Vector Databases and how to implement long term memory.  Where to next? Well if you want to get some recommended links just DM me or leave a comment and I will DM you, as i said im not writing this with the intention of spamming the crap out of the group. So its up to you.  Im also happy to chew the fat if you wanna chat, so hit me up.  I can't always reply immediately because im in a weird time zone, but I promise I will reply if you have any questions. THE LAST WORD (Warning - Im going to motivate the crap out of you now) Please listen to me:  YOU CAN DO THIS.  I don't care what background you have, what education you have, what language you speak or what country you are from..... I believe in you and anyway can do this.  All you need is determination, some motivation to want to learn and a computer (last one is essential really, the other 2 are optional!) But seriously you can do it and its totally worth it.  You are getting in right at the beginning of the gold rush, and yeh I believe that.   AI Agents are going to be HUGE. I believe this will be the new internet gold rush.

Recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic for a B2C SaaS website. Here's the 40 tips that helped me make that happen.
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DrJigsawThis week

Recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic for a B2C SaaS website. Here's the 40 tips that helped me make that happen.

Hey guys! So as title says, we recently hit 6,600,000 monthly organic traffic / month for a B2C SaaS website (screenshot. Can't give name publicly, but can show testimonial to a mod). Here's 40 tips that "helped" me make this happen. If you get some value of the post, I write an SEO tip every other day on /r/seogrowth. There's around 10 more tips already up there other than the ones I mention here. If you want to give back for all my walls of text, I'd appreciate a sub <3 Also, there are a bunch of free stuff I mention in the article: content outline, writer guidelines, SEO checklist, and other stuff. Here's the Google Doc with all that! Tip #1. Take SEO With a Grain of Salt A lot of the SEO advice and best practices on the internet are based on 2 things: Personal experiences and case studies of companies that managed to make SEO work for them. Google or John Mueller (Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst). And, unfortunately, neither of these sources are always accurate. Personal SEO accounts are simply about what worked for specific companies. Sometimes, what worked for others, won’t work for you. For example, you might find a company that managed to rank with zero link-building because their website already had a very strong backlink profile. If you’re starting with a fresh website, chances are, you won’t be able to get the same results. At the same time, information from Google or John Mueller is also not 100% accurate. For example, they’ve said that guest posting is against Google’s guidelines and doesn’t work… But practically, guest posting is a very effective link-building strategy. So the takeaway is this: Take all information you read about SEO with a grain of salt. Analyze the information yourself, and make your conclusions. SEO Tip #2. SEO Takes Time You’ve already heard this one before, but considering how many people keep asking, thought I'd include this anyway. On average, it’s going to take you 6 months to 2 years to get SEO results, depending on the following factors: Your backlink profile. The more quality backlinks you have (or build), the faster you’ll rank. Age of your website. If your website is older (or you purchased an aged website), you can expect your content to rank faster. Amount of content published. The more quality content you publish on your website, the more “authoritative” it is in the eyes of Google, and thus more likely to rank faster. SEO work done on the website. If a lot of your pages are already ranking on Google (page 2-3), it’s easier to get them to page #1 than if you just published the content piece. Local VS global SEO. Ranking locally is (sometimes) easier and faster than ranking globally. That said, some marketing agencies can use “SEO takes time” as an excuse for not driving results. Well, fortunately, there is a way to track SEO results from month #2 - #3 of work. Simply check if your new content pieces/pages are getting more and more impressions on Google Search Console month-to-month. While your content won’t be driving traffic for a while after being published, they’ll still have a growing number of impressions from month #2 or #3 since publication. SEO Tip #3. SEO Might Not Be The Best Channel For You In theory, SEO sounds like the best marketing channel ever. You manage to rank on Google and your marketing seemingly goes on auto-pilot - you’re driving new leads every day from existing content without having to lift a finger… And yet, SEO is not for everyone. Avoid SEO as a marketing channel if: You’re just getting started with your business and need to start driving revenue tomorrow (and not in 1-2 years). If this is you, try Google ads, Facebook ads, or organic marketing. Your target audience is pretty small. If you’re selling enterprise B2B software and have around 2,000 prospects in total worldwide, then it’s simply easier to directly reach out to these prospects. Your product type is brand-new. If customers don’t know your product exists, they probably won’t be Googling it. SEO Tip #4. Traffic Can Be a Vanity Metric I've seen hundreds of websites that drive 6-7 digits of traffic but generate only 200-300 USD per month from those numbers. “What’s the deal?” You might be thinking. “How can you fail to monetize that much traffic?” Well, that brings us to today’s tip: traffic can be a vanity metric. See, not all traffic is created equal. Ranking for “hormone balance supplement” is a lot more valuable than ranking for “Madagascar character names.” The person Googling the first keyword is an adult ready to buy your product. Someone Googling the latter, on the other hand, is a child with zero purchasing power. So, when deciding on which keywords to pursue, always keep in mind the buyer intent behind and don’t go after rankings or traffic just because 6-digit traffic numbers look good. SEO Tip #5. Push Content Fast Whenever you publish a piece of content, you can expect it to rank within 6 months to a year (potentially less if you’re an authority in your niche). So, the faster you publish your content, the faster they’re going to age, and, as such, the faster they’ll rank on Google. On average, I recommend you publish a minimum of 10,000 words of content per month and 20,000 to 30,000 optimally. If you’re not doing link-building for your website, then I’d recommend pushing for even more content. Sometimes, content velocity can compensate for the lack of backlinks. SEO Tip #6. Use Backlink Data to Prioritize Content You might be tempted to go for that juicy, 6-digit traffic cornerstone keyword right from the get-go... But I'd recommend doing the opposite. More often than not, to rank for more competitive, cornerstone keywords, you’ll need to have a ton of supporting content, high-quality backlinks, website authority, and so on. Instead, it’s a lot more reasonable to first focus on the less competitive keywords and then, once you’ve covered those, move on to the rest. Now, as for how to check keyword competitiveness, here are 2 options: Use Mozbar to see the number of backlinks for top-ranking pages, as well as their Domain Authority (DA). If all the pages ranking on page #1 have <5 backlinks and DA of 20 - 40, it’s a good opportunity. Use SEMrush or Ahrefs to sort your keywords by difficulty, and focus on the less difficult keywords first. Now, that said, keep in mind that both of these metrics are third-party, and hence not always accurate. SEO Tip #7. Always Start With Competitive Analysis When doing keyword research, the easiest way to get started is via competitive analysis. Chances are, whatever niche you’re in, there’s a competitor that is doing great with SEO. So, instead of having to do all the work from scratch, run their website through SEMrush or Ahrefs and steal their keyword ideas. But don’t just stop there - once you’ve borrowed keyword ideas from all your competitors, run the seed keywords through a keyword research tool such as UberSuggest or SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool. This should give you dozens of new ideas that your competitors might’ve missed. Finally, don’t just stop at borrowing your competitor’s keyword ideas. You can also borrow some inspiration on: The types of graphics and images you can create to supplement your blog content. The tone and style you can use in your articles. The type of information you can include in specific content pieces. SEO Tip #8. Source a LOT of Writers Content writing is one of those professions that has a very low barrier to entry. Anyone can take a writing course, claim to be a writer, and create an UpWork account… This is why 99% of the writers you’ll have to apply for your gigs are going to be, well, horrible. As such, if you want to produce a lot of content on the reg, you’ll need to source a LOT of writers. Let’s do the math: If, by posting a job ad, you source 100 writers, you’ll see that only 5 of them are a good fit. Out of the 5 writers, 1 has a very high rate, so they drop out. Another doesn’t reply back to your communication, which leaves you with 3 writers. You get the 3 writers to do a trial task, and only one turns out to be a good fit for your team. Now, since the writer is freelance, the best they can do is 4 articles per month for a total of 5,000-words (which, for most niches, ain’t all that much). So, what we’re getting at here is, to hire quality writers, you should source a LOT of them. SEO Tip #9. Create a Process for Filtering Writers If you follow the previous tip, you'll end up with a huge database of hundreds of writers. This creates a whole new problem: You now have a database of 500+ writers waiting for you to sift through them and decide which ones are worth the hire. It would take you 2-3 days of intense work to go through all these writers and vet them yourself. Let’s be real - you don’t have time for that. Here’s what you can do instead: When sourcing writers, always get them to fill in a Google form (instead of DMing or emailing you). In this form, make sure to ask for 3 relevant written samples, a link to the writer’s portfolio page, and the writer’s rate per word. Create a SOP for evaluating writers. The criteria for evaluation should be: Level of English. Does the writer’s sample have any English mistakes? If so, they’re not a good fit. Quality of Samples. Are the samples long-form and engaging content or are they boring 500-word copy-pastes? Technical Knowledge. Has the writer written about a hard-to-explain topic before? Anyone can write about simple topics like traveling—you want to look for someone who knows how to research a new topic and explain it in a simple and easy-to-read way. If someone’s written about how to create a perfect cover letter, they can probably write about traveling, but the opposite isn’t true. Get your VA to evaluate the writer’s samples as per the criteria above and short-list writers that seem competent. If you sourced 500 writers, the end result of this process should be around 50 writers. You or your editor goes through the short-list of 50 writers and invites 5-10 for a (paid) trial task. The trial task is very important - you’ll sometimes find that the samples provided by the writer don’t match their writing level. SEO Tip #10. Use the Right Websites to Find Writers Not sure where to source your writers? Here are some ideas: ProBlogger \- Our #1 choice - a lot of quality writers frequent this website. LinkedIn \- You can headhunt content writers in specific locations. Upwork \- If you post a content gig, most writers are going to be awful. Instead, I recommend headhunting top writers instead. WeWorkRemotely \- Good if you’re looking to make a full-time remote hire. Facebook \- There are a ton of quality Facebook groups for writers. Some of our faves are Cult of Copy Job Board and Content Marketing Lounge. SEO Tip #11. Always Use Content Outlines When giving tasks to your writing team, you need to be very specific about the instructions you give them. Don’t just provide a keyword and tell them to “knock themselves out.” The writer isn’t a SEO expert; chances are, they’re going to mess it up big-time and talk about topics that aren’t related to the keyword you’re targeting. Instead, when giving tasks to writers, do it through content outlines. A content outline, in a nutshell, is a skeleton of the article they’re supposed to write. It includes information on: Target word count (aim for the same or 50% more the word count than that of the competition). Article title. Article structure (which sections should be mentioned and in what order). Related topics of keywords that need to be mentioned in the article. Content outline example in the URL in the post intro. SEO Tip #12. Focus on One Niche at a Time I used to work with this one client that had a SaaS consisting of a mixture of CRM, Accounting Software, and HRS. I had to pick whether we were going to focus on topics for one of these 3 niches or focus on all of them at the same time. I decided to do the former. Here’s why: When evaluating what to rank, Google considers the authority of your website. If you have 60 articles about accounting (most of which link to each other), you’re probably an authority in the niche and are more likely to get good rankings. If you have 20 sales, 20 HR, and 20 accounting articles, though, none of these categories are going to rank as well. It always makes more sense to first focus on a single niche (the one that generates the best ROI for your business), and then move on to the rest. This also makes it easier to hire writers - you hire writers specialized in accounting, instead of having to find writers who can pull off 3 unrelated topics. SEO Tip #13. Just Hire a VA Already It’s 2021 already guys—unless you have a virtual assistant, you’re missing out big-time. Since a lot of SEO tasks are very time-consuming, it really helps to have a VA around to take over. As long as you have solid SOPs in place, you can hire a virtual assistant, train them, and use them to free up your time. Some SEO tasks virtual assistants can help with are: Internal linking. Going through all your blog content and ensuring that they link to each other. Backlink prospecting. Going through hundreds of websites daily to find link opportunities. Uploading content on WordPress and ensuring that the content is optimized well for on-page SEO. SEO Tip #14. Use WordPress (And Make Your Life Easier) Not sure which CMS platform to use? 99% of the time, you’re better off with WordPress. It has a TON of plugins that will make your life easier. Want a drag & drop builder? Use Elementor. It’s cheap, efficient, extremely easy to learn, and comes jam-packed with different plugins and features. Wix, SiteGround, and similar drag & drops are pure meh. SEO Tip #15. Use These Nifty WordPress Plugins There are a lot of really cool WordPress plugins that can make your (SEO) life so much easier. Some of our favorites include: RankMath. A more slick alternative to YoastSEO. Useful for on-page SEO. Smush. App that helps you losslessly compress all images on your website, as well as enables lazy loading. WP Rocket. This plugin helps speed up your website pretty significantly. Elementor. Not a techie? This drag & drop plugin makes it significantly easier to manage your website. WP Forms. Very simple form builder. Akismet Spam Protection. Probably the most popular anti-spam WP plugin. Mammoth Docx. A plugin that uploads your content from a Google doc directly to WordPress. SEO Tip #16. No, Voice Search Is Still Not Relevant Voice search is not and will not be relevant (no matter what sensationalist articles might say). Sure, it does have its application (“Alexa, order me toilet paper please”), but it’s pretty niche and not relevant to most SEOs. After all, you wouldn’t use voice search for bigger purchases (“Alexa, order me a new laptop please”) or informational queries (“Alexa, teach me how to do accounting, thanks”). SEO Tip #17. SEO Is Obviously Not Dead I see these articles every year - “SEO is dead because I failed to make it work.” SEO is not dead and as long as there are people looking up for information/things online, it never will be. And no, SEO is not just for large corporations with huge budgets, either. Some niches are hypercompetitive and require a huge link-building budget (CBD, fitness, VPN, etc.), but they’re more of an exception instead of the rule. SEO Tip #18. Doing Local SEO? Focus on Service Pages If you’re doing local SEO, you’re better off focusing on local service pages than blog content. E.g. if you’re an accounting firm based in Boston, you can make a landing page about /accounting-firm-boston/, /tax-accounting-boston/, /cpa-boston/, and so on. Or alternatively, if you’re a personal injury law firm, you’d want to create pages like /car-accident-law-firm/, /truck-accident-law-firm/, /wrongful-death-law-firm/, and the like. Thing is, you don’t really need to rank on global search terms—you just won’t get leads from there. Even if you ranked on the term “financial accounting,” it wouldn’t really matter for your bottom line that much. SEO Tip #19. Engage With the SEO Community The SEO community is (for the most part) composed of extremely helpful and friendly people. There are a lot of online communities (including this sub) where you can ask for help, tips, case studies, and so on. Some of our faves are: This sub :) SEO Signals Lab (FB Group) Fat Graph Content Ops (FB Group) Proper SEO Group (FB Group) BigSEO Subreddit SEO Tip #20. Test Keywords Before Pursuing Them You can use Google ads to test how profitable any given keyword is before you start trying to rank for it. The process here is: Create a Google Ads account. Pick a keyword you want to test. Create a landing page that corresponds to the search intent behind the keyword. Allocate an appropriate budget. E.g. if you assume a conversion rate of 2%, you’d want to buy 100+ clicks. If the CPC is 2 USD, then the right budget would be 200 USD plus. Run the ads! If you don’t have the budget for this, you can still use the average CPC for the keyword to estimate how well it’s going to convert. If someone is willing to bid 10 USD to rank for a certain keyword, it means that the keyword is most probably generating pretty good revenue/conversions. SEO Tip #21. Test & Improve SEO Headlines Sometimes, you’ll see that you’re ranking in the top 3 positions for your search query, but you’re still not driving that much traffic. “What’s the deal?” you might be asking. Chances are, your headline is not clickable enough. Every 3-4 months, go through your Google Search Console and check for articles that are ranking well but not driving enough traffic. Then, create a Google sheet and include the following data: Targeted keyword Page link CTR (for the last 28 days) Date when you implemented the new title Old title New title New CTR (for the month after the CTR change was implemented) From then on, implement the new headline and track changes in the CTR. If you don’t reach your desired result, you can always test another headline. SEO Tip #22. Longer Content Isn’t Always Better Content You’ve probably heard that long-form content is where it’s at in 2021. Well, this isn’t always the case. Rather, this mostly depends on the keyword you’re targeting. If, for example, you’re targeting the keyword “how to tie a tie,” you don’t need a long-ass 5,000-word mega-guide. In such a case, the reader is looking for something that can be explained in 200-300 words and if your article fails to do this, the reader will bounce off and open a different page. On the other hand, if you’re targeting the keyword “how to write a CV,” you’ll need around 4,000 to 5,000 words to adequately explain the topic and, chances are, you won’t rank with less. SEO Tip #23. SEO is Not All About Written Content More often than not, when people talk about SEO they talk about written blog content creation. It’s very important not to forget, though, that blog content is not end-all-be-all for SEO. Certain keywords do significantly better with video content. For example, if the keyword is “how to do a deadlift,” video content is going to perform significantly better than blog content. Or, if the keyword is “CV template,” you’ll see that a big chunk of the rankings are images of the templates. So, the lesson here is, don’t laser-focus on written content—keep other content mediums in mind, too. SEO Tip #24. Write For Your Audience It’s very important that your content resonates well with your target audience. If, for example, you’re covering the keyword “skateboard tricks,” you can be very casual with your language. Heck, it’s even encouraged! Your readers are Googling the keyword in their free time and are most likely teens or in their early 20s. Meaning, you can use informal language, include pop culture references, and avoid complicated language. Now, on the other hand, if you’re writing about high-level investment advice, your audience probably consists of 40-something suit-and-ties. If you include Rick & Morty references in your article, you'll most likely lose credibility and the Googler, who will go to another website. Some of our best tips on writing for your audience include: Define your audience. Who’s the person you’re writing for? Are they reading the content at work or in their free time? Keep your reader’s level of knowledge in mind. If you’re covering an accounting 101 topic, you want to cover the topic’s basics, as the reader is probably a student. If you’re writing about high-level finance, though, you don’t have to teach the reader what a balance sheet is. More often than not, avoid complicated language. The best practice is to write on a 6th-grade level, as it’s understandable for anyone. Plus, no one wants to read Shakespeare when Googling info online (unless they’re looking for Shakespeare's work, of course). SEO Tip #25. Create Compelling Headlines Want to drive clicks to your articles? You’ll need compelling headlines. Compare the following headline: 101 Productivity Tips \[To Get Things Done in 2021\] With this one: Productivity Tips Guide Which one would you click? Data says it’s the first! To create clickable headlines, I recommend you include the following elements: Keyword. This one’s non-negotiable - you need to include the target keyword in the headline. Numbers. If Buzzfeed taught us anything, it’s that people like to click articles with numbers in their titles. Results. If I read your article, what’s going to be the end result? E.g. “X Resume tips (to land the job)”.* Year (If Relevant). Adding a year to your title shows that the article is recent (which is relevant for some specific topics). E.g. If the keyword is “Marketing Trends,” I want to know marketing trends in 2021, not in 2001. So, adding a year in the title makes the headline more clickable. SEO Tip #26. Make Your Content Visual How good your content looks matters, especially if you're in a competitive niche. Here are some tips on how to make your content as visual as possible: Aim for 2-4 sentences per paragraph. Avoid huge blocks of text. Apply a 60-65% content width to your blog pages. Pick a good-looking font. I’d recommend Montserrat, PT Sans, and Roboto. Alternatively, you can also check out your favorite blogs, see which fonts they’re using, and do the same. Use a reasonable font size. Most top blogs use font sizes ranging from 16 pt to 22 pt. Add images when possible. Avoid stock photos, though. No one wants to see random “office people smiling” scattered around your blog posts. Use content boxes to help convey information better. Content boxes example in the URL in the intro of the post. SEO Tip #27. Ditch the Skyscraper Technique Already Brian Dean’s skyscraper technique is awesome and all, but the following bit really got old: “Hey \[name\], I saw you wrote an article. I, too, wrote an article. Please link to you?” The theory here is, if your content is good, the person will be compelled to link to it. In practice, though, the person really, really doesn’t care. At the end of the day, there’s no real incentive for the person to link to your content. They have to take time out of their day to head over to their website, log in to WordPress, find the article you mentioned, and add a link... Just because some stranger on the internet asked them to. Here’s something that works much better: Instead of fake compliments, be very straightforward about what you can offer them in exchange for that link. Some things you can offer are: A free version of your SaaS. Free product delivered to their doorstep. Backlink exchange. A free backlink from your other website. Sharing their content to your social media following. Money. SEO Tip #28. Get the URL Slug Right for Seasonal Content If you want to rank on a seasonal keyword, there are 2 ways to do this. If you want your article to be evergreen (i.e. you update it every year with new information), then your URL should not contain the year. E.g. your URL would be /saas-trends/, and you simply update the article’s contents+headline each year to keep it timely. If you’re planning on publishing a new trends report annually, though, then you can add a year to the URL. E.g. /saas-trends-2020/ instead of /saas-trends/. SEO Tip #29. AI Content Tools Are a Mixed Bag Lots of people are talking about AI content tools these days. Usually, they’re either saying: “AI content tools are garbage and the output is horrible,” Or: “AI content tools are a game-changer!” So which one is it? The truth is somewhere in-between. In 2021, AI content writing tools are pretty bad. The output you’re going to get is far from something you can publish on your website. That said, some SEOs use such tools to get a very, very rough draft of the article written, and then they do intense surgery on it to make it usable. Should you use AI content writing tools? If you ask me, no - it’s easier to hire a proficient content writer than spend hours salvaging AI-written content. That said, I do believe that such tools are going to get much better years down the line. This one was, clearly, more of a personal opinion than a fact. I’d love to hear YOUR opinion on AI content tools! Are they a fad, or are they the future of content creation? Let me know in the comments. SEO Tip #30. Don’t Overdo it With SEO Tools There are a lot of SEO tools out there for pretty much any SEO function. Keyword research, link-building, on-page, outreach, technical SEO, you name it! If you were to buy most of these tools for your business, you’d easily spend 4-figures on SEO tools per month. Luckily, though, you don’t actually need most of them. At the end of the day, the only must-have SEO tools are: An SEO Suite (Paid). Basically SEMrush or Ahrefs. Both of these tools offer an insane number of features - backlink analysis, keyword research, and a ton of other stuff. Yes, 99 USD a month is expensive for a tool. But then again, if you value your time 20 USD/hour and this tool saves you 6 hours, it's obviously worth it, right? On-Page SEO Tool (Free). RankMath or Yoast. Basically, a tool that's going to help you optimize web pages or blog posts as per SEO best practices. Technical SEO Tool (Freemium). You can use ScreamingFrog to crawl your entire website and find technical SEO problems. There are probably other tools that also do this, but ScreamingFrog is the most popular option. The freemium version of the tool only crawls a limited number of pages (500 URLs, to be exact), so if your website is relatively big, you'll need to pay for the tool. Analytics (Free). Obviously, you'll need Google Analytics (to track website traffic) and Google Search Console (to track organic traffic, specifically) set up on your website. Optionally, you can also use Google Track Manager to better track how your website visitors interact with the site. MozBar (Free). Chrome toolbar that lets you simply track the number of backlinks on Google Search Queries, Domain Authority, and a bunch of other stuff. Website Speed Analysis (Free). You can use Google Page Speed Insights to track how fast your website loads, as well as how mobile-friendly it is. Outreach Tool (Paid). Tool for reaching out to prospects for link-building, guest posting, etc. There are about a dozen good options for this. Personally, I like to use Snov for this. Optimized GMB Profile (Free). Not a tool per se, but if you're a local business, you need to have a well-optimized Google My Business profile. Google Keyword Planner (Free). This gives you the most reliable search volume data of all the tools. So, when doing keyword research, grab the search volume from here. Tool for Storing Keyword Research (Free). You can use Google Sheets or AirTable to store your keyword research and, at the same time, use it as a content calendar. Hemingway App (Free). Helps keep your SEO content easy to read. Spots passive voice, complicated words, etc. Email Finder (Freemium). You can use a tool like Hunter to find the email address of basically anyone on the internet (for link-building or guest posting purposes). Most of the tools that don’t fit into these categories are 100% optional. SEO Tip #31. Hiring an SEO? Here’s How to Vet Them Unless you’re an SEO pro yourself, hiring one is going to be far from easy. There’s a reason there are so many “SEO experts” out there - for the layman, it’s very hard to differentiate between someone who knows their salt and a newbie who took an SEO course, like, last week. Here’s how you can vet both freelance and full-time SEOs: Ask for concrete traffic numbers. The SEO pro should give you the exact numbers on how they’ve grown a website in the past - “100% SEO growth in 1 year” doesn’t mean much if the growth is from 10 monthly traffic to 20. “1,000 to 30,000” traffic, on the other hand, is much better. Ask for client names. While some clients ask their SEOs to sign an NDA and not disclose their collaboration, most don’t. If an SEO can’t name a single client they’ve worked with in the past, that’s a red flag. Make sure they have the right experience. Global and local SEO have very different processes. Make sure that the SEO has experience with the type of SEO you need. Make sure you’re looking for the right candidate. SEO pros can be content writers, link-builders, web developers, or all of the above simultaneously. Make sure you understand which one you need before making the hire. If you’re looking for someone to oversee your content ops, you shouldn’t hire a technical SEO expert. Look for SEO pros in the right places. Conventional job boards are overrated. Post your job ads on SEO communities instead. E.g. this sub, bigseo, SEO Signals Facebook group, etc. SEO Tip #32. Blog Post Not Ranking? Follow This Checklist I wanted to format the post natively for Reddit, but it’s just SO much better on Notion. Tl;dr, the checklist covers every reason your post might not be ranking: Search intent mismatch. Inferior content. Lack of internal linking. Lack of backlinks. And the like. Checklist URL at the intro of the post. SEO Tip #33. Avoid BS Link-Building Tactics The only type of link-building that works is building proper, quality links from websites with a good backlink profile and decent organic traffic. Here’s what DOESN’T work: Blog comment links Forum spam links Drive-by Reddit comment/post links Web 2.0 links Fiverr “100 links for 10 bucks” bs If your “SEO agency” says they’re doing any of the above instead of actually trying to build you links from quality websites, you’re being scammed. SEO Tip #34. Know When to Use 301 and 302 Redirects When doing redirects, it’s very important to know the distinction between these two. 301 is a permanent page redirect and passes on link juice. If you’re killing off a page that has backlinks, it’s better to 301 it to your homepage so that you don’t lose the link juice. If you simply delete a page, it’s going to be a 404, and the backlink juice is lost forever. 302 is a temporary page redirect and doesn’t pass on link juice. If the redirect is temporary, you do a 302. E.g. you want to test how well a new page is going to perform w/ your audience. SEO Tip #35. Social Signals Matter (But Not How You Think) Social signals are NOT a ranking factor. And yet, they can help your content rank on Google’s front page. Wondering what the hell am I talking about? Here’s what’s up: As I said, social signals are not a ranking factor. It’s not something Google takes into consideration to decide whether your article should rank or not. That said, social signals CAN lead to your article ranking better. Let’s say your article goes viral and gets around 20k views within a week. A chunk of these viewers are going to forget your domain/link and they’re going to look up the topic on Google via your chosen keyword + your brand name. The amount of people looking for YOUR keyword and exclusively picking your result over others is going to make Google think that your content is satisfying search intent better than the rest, and thus, reward you with better ranking. SEO Tip #36. Run Remarketing Ads to Lift Organic Traffic Conversions Not satisfied with your conversion rates? You can use Facebook ads to help increase them. Facebook allows you to do something called “remarketing.” This means you can target anyone that visited a certain page (or multiple pages) on your website and serve them ads on Facebook. There are a TON of ways you can take advantage of this. For example, you can target anyone that landed on a high buyer intent page and serve them ads pitching your product or a special offer. Alternatively, you can target people who landed on an educational blog post and offer them something to drive them down the funnel. E.g. free e-book or white paper to teach them more about your product or service. SEO Tip #37. Doing Local SEO? Follow These Tips Local SEO is significantly different from global SEO. Here’s how the two differ (and what you need to do to drive local SEO results): You don’t need to publish content. For 95% of local businesses, you only want to rank for keywords related to your services/products, you don’t actually need to create educational content. You need to focus more on reviews and citation-building. One of Google Maps’ biggest ranking factors is the of reviews your business has. Encourage your customers to leave a review if they enjoyed your product/service through email or real-life communication. You need to create service pages for each location. As a local business, your #1 priority is to rank for keywords around your service. E.g. If you're a personal injury law firm, you want to optimize your homepage for “personal injury law firm” and then create separate pages for each service you provide, e.g. “car accident lawyer,” “motorcycle injury law firm,” etc. Focus on building citations. Being listed on business directories makes your business more trustworthy for Google. BrightLocal is a good service for this. You don’t need to focus as much on link-building. As local SEO is less competitive than global, you don’t have to focus nearly as much on building links. You can, in a lot of cases, rank with the right service pages and citations. SEO Tip #38. Stop Ignoring the Outreach Emails You’re Getting (And Use Them to Build Your Own Links) Got a ton of people emailing you asking for links? You might be tempted to just send them all straight to spam, and I don’t blame you. Outreach messages like “Hey Dr Jigsaw, your article is A+++ amazing! ...can I get a backlink?” can get hella annoying. That said, there IS a better way to deal with these emails: Reply and ask for a link back. Most of the time, people who send such outreach emails are also doing heavy guest posting. So, you can ask for a backlink from a 3rd-party website in exchange for you mentioning their link in your article. Win-win! SEO Tip #39. Doing Internal Linking for a Large Website? This’ll Help Internal linking can get super grueling once you have hundreds of articles on your website. Want to make the process easier? Do this: Pick an article you want to interlink on your website. For the sake of the example, let’s say it’s about “business process improvement.” Go on Google and look up variations of this keyword mentioned on your website. For example: Site:\[yourwebsite\] “improve business process” Site:\[yourwebsite\] “improve process” Site:\[yourwebsite\] “process improvement” The above queries will find you the EXACT articles where these keywords are mentioned. Then, all you have to do is go through them and include the links. SEO Tip #40. Got a Competitor Copying Your Content? File a DMCA Notice Fun fact - if your competitors are copying your website, you can file a DMCA notice with Google. That said, keep in mind that there are consequences for filing a fake notice.

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.
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dams96This week

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model
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AI_Scout_OfficialThis week

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

How a Small Startup in Asia Secured a Contract with the US Department of Homeland Security
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Royal_Rest8409This week

How a Small Startup in Asia Secured a Contract with the US Department of Homeland Security

Uzair Javaid, a Ph.D. with a passion for data privacy, co-founded Betterdata to tackle one of AI's most pressing challenges: protecting privacy while enabling innovation. Recently, Betterdata secured a lucrative contract with the US Department of Homeland Security, 1 of only 4 companies worldwide to do so and the only one in Asia. Here's how he did it: The Story So what's your story? I grew up in Peshawar, Pakistan, excelling in coding despite studying electrical engineering. Inspired by my professors, I set my sights on studying abroad and eventually earned a Ph.D. scholarship at NUS Singapore, specializing in data security and privacy. During my research, I ethically hacked Ethereum and published 15 papers—three times the requirement. While wrapping up my Ph.D., I explored startup ideas and joined Entrepreneur First, where I met Kevin Yee. With his expertise in generative models and mine in privacy, we founded Betterdata. Now, nearly three years in, we’ve secured a major contract with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—one of only four companies globally and the only one from Asia. The Startup In a nutshell, what does your startup do? Betterdata is a startup that uses AI and synthetic data generation to address two major challenges: data privacy and the scarcity of high-quality data for training AI models. By leveraging generative models and privacy-enhancing technologies, Betterdata enables businesses, such as banks, to use customer data without breaching privacy regulations. The platform trains AI on real data, learns its patterns, and generates synthetic data that mimics the real thing without containing any personal or sensitive information. This allows companies to innovate and develop AI solutions safely and ethically, all while tackling the growing need for diverse, high-quality data in AI development. How did you conduct ideation and validation for your startup? The initial idea for Betterdata came from personal experience. During my Ph.D., I ethically hacked Ethereum’s blockchain, exposing flaws in encryption-based data sharing. This led me to explore AI-driven deep synthesis technology—similar to deepfakes but for structured data privacy. With GDPR impacting 28M+ businesses, I saw a massive opportunity to help enterprises securely share data while staying compliant. To validate the idea, I spoke to 50 potential customers—a number that strikes the right balance. Some say 100, but that’s impractical for early-stage founders. At 50, patterns emerge: if 3 out of 10 mention the same problem, and this repeats across 50, you have 10–15 strong signals, making it a solid foundation for an MVP. Instead of outbound sales, which I dislike, we used three key methods: Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—targeting technically savvy users with solutions for niche problems, like scaling synthetic data for banks. Targeted Content Marketing—regular customer conversations shaped our thought leadership and outreach. Raising Awareness Through Partnerships—collaborating with NUS, Singapore’s PDPC, and Plug and Play to build credibility and educate the market. These strategies attracted serious customers willing to pay, guiding Betterdata’s product development and market fit. How did you approach the initial building and ongoing product development? In the early stages, we built synthetic data generation algorithms and a basic UI for proof-of-concept, using open-source datasets to engage with banks. We quickly learned that banks wouldn't share actual customer data due to privacy concerns, so we had to conduct on-site installations and gather feedback to refine our MVP. Through continuous consultation with customers, we discovered real enterprise data posed challenges, such as missing values, which led us to adapt our prototype accordingly. This iterative approach of listening to customer feedback and observing their usage allowed us to improve our product, enhance UX, and address unmet needs while building trust and loyalty. Working closely with our customers also gives us a data advantage. Our solution’s effectiveness depends on customer data, which we can't fully access, but bridging this knowledge gap gives us a competitive edge. The more customers we test on, the more our algorithms adapt to diverse use cases, making it harder for competitors to replicate our insights. My approach to iteration is simple: focus solely on customer feedback and ignore external noise like trends or advice. The key question for the team is: which customer is asking for this feature or solution? As long as there's a clear answer, we move forward. External influences, such as AI hype, often bring more confusion than clarity. True long-term success comes from solving real customer problems, not chasing trends. Customers may not always know exactly what they want, but they understand their problems. Our job is to identify these problems and solve them in innovative ways. While customers may suggest specific features, we stay focused on solving the core issue rather than just fulfilling their exact requests. The idea aligns with the quote often attributed to Henry Ford: "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." The key is understanding their problems, not just taking requests at face value. How do you assess product-market fit? To assess product-market fit, we track two key metrics: Customers' Willingness to Pay: We measure both the quantity and quality of meetings with potential customers. A high number of meetings with key decision-makers signals genuine interest. At Betterdata, we focused on getting meetings with people in banks and large enterprises to gauge our product's resonance with the target market. How Much Customers Are Willing to Pay: We monitor the price customers are willing to pay, especially in the early stages. For us, large enterprises, like banks, were willing to pay a premium for our synthetic data platform due to the growing need for privacy tech. This feedback guided our product refinement and scaling strategy. By focusing on these metrics, we refined our product and positioned it for scaling. What is your business model? We employ a structured, phase-driven approach for out business model, as a B2B startup. I initially struggled with focusing on the core value proposition in sales, often becoming overly educational. Eventually, we developed a product roadmap with models that allowed us to match customer needs to specific offerings and justify our pricing. Our pricing structure includes project-based pilots and annual contracts for successful deployments. At Betterdata, our customer engagement unfolds across three phases: Phase 1: Trial and Benchmarking \- We start with outreach and use open-source datasets to showcase results, offering customers a trial period to evaluate the solution. Phase 2: Pilot or PoC \- After positive trial results, we conduct a PoC or pilot using the customer’s private data, with the understanding that successful pilots lead to an annual contract. Phase 3: Multi-Year Contracts \- Following a successful pilot, we transition to long-term commercial contracts, focusing on multi-year agreements to ensure stability and ongoing partnerships. How do you do marketing for your brand? We take a non-conventional approach to marketing, focusing on answering one key question: Which customers are willing to pay, and how much? This drives our messaging to show how our solution meets their needs. Our strategy centers around two main components: Building a network of lead magnets \- These are influential figures like senior advisors, thought leaders, and strategic partners. Engaging with institutions like IMDA, SUTD, and investors like Plug and Play helps us gain access to the right people and foster warm introductions, which shorten our sales cycle and ensure we’re reaching the right audience. Thought leadership \- We build our brand through customer traction, technology evidence, and regulatory guidelines. This helps us establish credibility in the market and position ourselves as trusted leaders in our field. This holistic approach has enabled us to navigate diverse market conditions in Asia and grow our B2B relationships. By focusing on these areas, we drive business growth and establish strong trust with stakeholders. What's your advice for fundraising? Here are my key takeaways for other founders when it comes to fundraising: Fundraise When You Don’t Need To We closed our seed round in April 2023, a time when we weren't actively raising. Founders should always be in fundraising mode, even when they're not immediately in need of capital. Don’t wait until you have only a few months of runway left. Keep the pipeline open and build relationships. When the timing is right, execution becomes much easier. For us, our investment came through a combination of referrals and inbound interest. Even our lead investor initially rejected us, but after re-engaging, things eventually fell into place. It’s crucial to stay humble, treat everyone with respect, and maintain those relationships for when the time is right. Be Mindful of How You Present Information When fundraising, how you present information matters a lot. We created a comprehensive, easily digestible investment memo, hosted on Notion, which included everything an investor might need—problem, solution, market, team, risks, opportunities, and data. The goal was for investors to be able to get the full picture within 30 minutes without chasing down extra details. We also focused on making our financial model clear and meaningful, even though a 5-year forecast might be overkill at the seed stage. The key was clarity and conciseness, and making it as easy as possible for investors to understand the opportunity. I learned that brevity and simplicity are often the best ways to make a memorable impact. For the pitch itself, keep it simple and focus on 4 things: problem, solution, team, and market. If you can summarize each of these clearly and concisely, you’ll have a compelling pitch. Later on, you can expand into market segments, traction, and other metrics, but for seed-stage, focus on those four areas, and make sure you’re strong in at least three of them. If you do, you'll have a compelling case. How do you run things day-to-day? i.e what's your operational workflow and team structure? Here's an overview of our team structure and process: Internally: Our team is divided into two main areas: backend (internal team) and frontend (market-facing team). There's no formal hierarchy within the backend team. We all operate as equals, defining our goals based on what needs to be developed, assigning tasks, and meeting weekly to share updates and review progress. The focus is on full ownership of tasks and accountability for getting things done. I also contribute to product development, identifying challenges and clearing obstacles to help the team move forward. Backend Team: We approach tasks based on the scope defined by customers, with no blame or hierarchy. It's like a sports team—sometimes someone excels, and other times they struggle, but we support each other and move forward together. Everyone has the creative freedom to work in the way that suits them best, but we establish regular meetings and check-ins to ensure alignment and progress. Frontend Team: For the market-facing side, we implement a hierarchy because the market expects this structure. If I present myself as "CEO," it signals authority and credibility. This distinction affects how we communicate with the market and how we build our brand. The frontend team is split into four main areas: Business Product (Software Engineering) Machine Learning Engineering R&D The C-suite sits at the top, followed by team leads, and then the executors. We distill market expectations into actionable tasks, ensuring that everyone is clear on their role and responsibilities. Process: We start by receiving market expectations and defining tasks based on them. Tasks are assigned to relevant teams, and execution happens with no communication barriers between team members. This ensures seamless collaboration and focused execution. The main goal is always effectiveness—getting things done efficiently while maintaining flexibility in how individuals approach their work. In both teams, there's an emphasis on accountability, collaboration, and clear communication, but the structure varies according to the nature of the work and external expectations.

Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]
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madscholarThis week

Where Do I Find Like-Minded, Unorthodox Co-founders? [Tech]

After more than 20 years in the tech industry I'm pretty fed up. I've been at it non-stop, so the burnout was building up for a while. Eventually, it's gotten so bad that it was no longer a question whether I need to take a break; I knew that I had to, for the sake of myself and loved ones. A few months ago I quit my well-paying, mid-level mgmt job to have some much-needed respite. I can't say that I've fully recovered, but I'm doing a bit better, so I'm starting to think about what's next. That said, the thoughts of going back into the rat race fill me with dread and anxiety. I've had an interesting career - I spent most of it in startups doing various roles from an SWE to a VP Eng, including having my own startup adventures for a couple of years. The last 4.5 years of my career have been in one of the fastest growing tech companies - it was a great learning experience, but also incredibly stressful, toxic and demoralizing. It's clear to me that I'm not cut out for the corporate world -- the ethos contradicts with my personality and beliefs -- but it's not just. I've accumulated "emotional scars" from practically every place I worked at and it made me loathe the industry to the degree that if I ever have another startup, it'd have to be by my own -- unorthodox -- ideals, even if it means a premature death due to lack of funding. I was young, stupid and overly confident when I had my first startup. I tried to do it "by the book" and dance to the tune of investors. While my startup failed for other, unrelated reasons, it gave me an opportunity to peak behind the curtain, experience the power dynamics, and get a better understanding to how the game is played - VCs and other person of interest have popularized the misconception that if a company doesn't scale, it would stagnate and eventually regress and die. This is nonsense. This narrative was created because it would make the capitalist pigs obsolete - they need companies to go through the entire alphabet before forcing them to sell or IPO. The sad reality is that the most entrepreneurs still believe in this paradigm and fall into the VC's honeypot traps. It's true that many businesses cannot bootstrap or scale without VC money, but it's equally true that far too many companies pivot/scale prematurely (and enshitify their product in the process) due to external pressures fueled by pure greed. This has a top-bottom effect - enshitification doesn't only effect users, but it also heavily effects the processes and structrures of companies, which can explain why the average tenure in tech is only \~2 years. I think that we live in an age where self-starting startups are more feasible than ever. It's not just the rise of AI and automation, but also the plethora of tools, services, and open-source projects that are available to all for free. On the one hand, this is fantastic, but on the other, the low barrier-to-entry creates oversaturation of companies which makes research & discovery incredibly hard - it is overwhelming to keep up with the pace and distill the signal from the noise, and there's a LOT of noise - there's not enough metaphorical real-estate for the graveyard of startups that will be defunct in the very near future. I'd like to experiment with startups again, but I don't want to navigate through this complex mine field all by myself - I want to find a like-minded co-founder who shares the same ideals as I do. It goes without saying that being on the same page isn't enough - I also want someone who's experienced, intelligent, creative, productive, well-rounded, etc. At the moment, I don't have anyone in my professional network who has/wants what it takes. I can look into startup bootcamps/accelerators like YC et al., and sure enough, I'll find talented individuals, but it'd be a mismatch from the get-go. For shits and giggles, this is (very roughly) how I envision the ideal company: Excellent work life balance: the goal is not to make a quick exit, become filthy rich, and turn into a self-absorbed asshole bragging about how they got so succesful. The goal is to generate a steady revenue stream while not succumbing to social norms that encourage greed. The entire purpose is to reach humble financial indepedence while maintaining a stress-free (as one possibly can) work environment. QOL should always be considered before ARR. Bootstraping: no external money. Not now, not later. No quid pro quo. No shady professionals or advisors. Company makes it or dies trying. Finances: very conservative to begin with - the idea is to play it safe and build a long fucking runaway before hiring. Spend every penny mindfully and frugally. Growth shouldn't be too quick & reckless. The business will be extremely efficient in spending. The only exception to the rule is crucial infrastructure and wages to hire top talent and keep salaries competitive and fair. Hiring: fully remote. Global presence, where applicable. Headcount will be limited to the absolute bare minimum. The goal is to run with a skeleton crew of the best generalists out there - bright, self-sufficient, highly motivated, autodidact, and creative individuals. Hiring the right people is everything and should be the company's top priority. Compensation & Perks: transperent and fair, incentivizing exceptional performance with revenue sharing bonuses. The rest is your typical best-in-class perks: top tier health/dental/vision insurance, generous PTO with mandatory required minimum, parental leave, mental wellness, etc. Process: processes will be extremely efficient, automated to the max, documented, unbloated, and data-driven through and through. Internal knowledge & data metrics will be accessible and transparent to all. Employees get full autonomy of their respective areas and are fully in charge of how they spend their days as long as they have agreed-upon, coherent, measurable metrics of success. Meetings will be reduced to the absolute minimum and would have to be justified and actionable - the ideal is that most communications will be done in written form, while face-to-face will be reserved for presentations/socializing. I like the Kaizen philosophy to continuously improve and optimize processes. Product: As previously stated, "data-driven through and through". Mindful approach to understand cost/benefit. Deliberate and measured atomic improvements to avoid feature creep and slow down the inevitable entropy. Most importantly, client input should be treated with the utmost attention but should never be the main driver for the product roadmap. This is a very controversial take, but sometimes it's better to lose a paying customer than to cave to their distracting/unreasonable/time-consuming demands. People Culture: ironicaly, this would be what most companies claim to have, but for realsies. Collaborative, open, blameless environment. People are treated like actual grown ups with flat structure, full autonomy, and unwavering trust. Socializing and bonding is highly encourged, but never required. Creativity and ingenuity is highly valued - people are encouraged to work on side projects one day of the week. Values: I can write a lot about it, but it really boils down to being kind and humble. We all know what happened with "don't be evil". It's incredibly hard to retain values over time, esp. when there are opposing views within a company. I don't know how to solve it, but I believe that there should be some (tried and true) internal checks & balances from the get go to ensure things are on track. I never mentioned what this hypothetical startup does. Sure, there's another very relevant layer of domain experience fit, but this mindset allows one to be a bit more fluid because the goal is not to disrupt an industry or "make the world a better place"; it's to see work for what it truly is - a mean to an end. It's far more important for me to align with a co-founder on these topics than on an actual idea or technical details. Pivoting and rebranding are so common that many VCs outweigh the make up and chemistry of the founding team (and their ability to execute) over the feasibility of their ideas.  To wrap this long-winded post, I'm not naive or disillusioned - utopias aren't real and profitable companies who operate at a 70-80% rate of what I propose are the real unicorns, but despite them being a tiny minority, I think they are the real forward thinkers of the industry. I might be wrong, but I hope that I'm right and that more and more startups will opt towards long-term sustainability over the promise of short-term gains because the status quo really stinks for most people. What do you folks think? Does anyone relate? Where can I find others like me? P.S I thought about starting a blog writing about these topics in length (everything that is wrong with tech & what can be done to improve it), but I have the Impostor Syndrom and I'm too self-conscious about how I come off. If you somehow enjoyed reading through that and would love to hear more of my thoughts and experiences in greater detail, please let me know. P.P.S If you have a company that is close to what I'm describing and you're hiring, let me know!

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero
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BalloonWheelieThis week

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero

I must preface this with a trigger warning because I make some statements in this post that might be upsetting to some. This post discusses my experience building in the new era of entrepreneurship, which is one where the founder is the center of the universe, and the consultants, overpriced SaaS, and corporate swamp creatures are replaced by single-user custom software, bots, and self-hosted automations. If you work in the legacy economy, I really don't intend to stress you out or say things you are doing are quickly becoming irrelevant, but I must share the reality of how I am operating, because I would like to hear from others who are doing the same, or desire to do the same. I am currently operating with the belief that AI-powered tools are going to make 1-person million dollar businesses much more common. Building anything digital is becoming extremely easy, cheap, and quick to implement. The value of code and digital tools is approaching zero, or at most 5% of what it currently is. Right now, the most powerful AI tools are aimed at developers, so folks who have some technical and business ability basically have nothing holding them back aside from the speed of their brain right now. I happen to be a part of the cohort, and am building like there is no tomorrow, but I don't believe this cohort is actually all that big. The next hurdle to unlock the new era of entrepreneurship is empowering every entrepreneur to build at the same pace that is currently locked behind having technical ability. This cohort is huge (millions, if the number of people in this sub is any indication). This post is aimed at them (you?). If you are part of this cohort, what is holding you back from launching a new product for near-zero cost? What is too complicated, too expensive, too unknown for you to be able to build your new/current business at maximum speed? I look forward to seeing the replies, I hope some insights shared can help the community, and be a catalyst for more tools to enable non-technical founders to launch. I will now share some of how I am testing, launching, and selling as a one-man-show. This will be a little bit technical, but if the output of any layer of my stack is something you want, please comment because maybe someone will build a cheap way of accessing it without needing to manage the code yourself. \#1 BOTS I cannot overstate how much leverage bots have created for me. I run all of my bots locally and interface with with via Telegram. Bots do things like: \- watch social media pages, forums, subreddits, etc related to my customers and notify me of what is going on, and suggest SEO blog posts that could be published to capture traffic related to the topic. with a single message, my bot will generate a blog post, send it to me for review, apply edits i suggest, and then publish it live, all from within telegram \- pay attention to all my key metrics/analytics, and attempt to find insights/corrolations (ex. there is a lot of traffic on this page, blog post, video, etc. here's why, and how we can take advantage of it to drive business goals) \- repurposing content. i have dozens of social media profiles that are 100% run by bots, they are all related to my customer niches and will do things like post news, snippets from my blogs, interact with human creators in the niche, etc. this builds my audience automatically which I can then advertise to/try to convert into paying customers, since they are interested in the things my bot is posting and become followers, it's like automated qualified lead gen 24/7 across every social platform and every niche I care about. you may be thinking by now that this post is made by a bot, but you will have to trust me that this is 100% hand-written by my sleep-deprived brain. let's continue: \#2 replacing every SaaS with a shitty version of it designed for what i need out of it it's absurd that we pay ten's of dollars per seat per month for basic digital functions like chat (slack), CRM (active camppaign, sales force, hubspot, etc), email stuff (mailchip, etc), link sharing (linktree, etc), website builders (wix, squarespace, etc), etc. all of these SaaS tools are overpriced and overbuilt. I believe many of them are going to be caught in the innovators dilemma and will go to 0. I don't use any of these anymore, I build and self-host my own shitty version of each of them that does only what i need out of the tool. for example, my CRM doesn't have a fancy drag and drop email builder and 10000 3rd party plugins, because i dont need any of that shit I just need to segment and communicate with my customers. if i need more features, i can generate them on the fly. \#3 working alone I have worked with cofounders in the past, raised money from investors, hired consultants, burned money and time, suffered sleepless nights from stress caused by other people not delivering, trying to convince others they are wrong, or they are pushing the company off a cliff, waste waste waste. no more of that. In the new age of entrepreneurship, the BUILDER (you and I) are the ones creating the value, and AI empowers us to do it alone. this might seem daunting, but there is no business problem that can't be solved with a detailed discussion sesh with chatgpt, no facts that can't be found with perplexity, and no task that can't be automated with claude. there is no need for anymore swamp creatures. you are the start and the end point, you don't need to rely on anyone else for anything. this may sound ignorant, but this is the conclusion I have come to believe, and it continues to be proven every day my businesses progress with me being the only human involved. This is getting quite long so I'll cut it here. I look forward to hearing about how you are operating in this new era and hopefully getting inspired/learning some new ideas to add to my current stack.

101 best SEO tips to help you drive traffic in 2k21
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DrJigsawThis week

101 best SEO tips to help you drive traffic in 2k21

Hey guys! I don't have to tell you how SEO can be good for your business - you can drive leads to your SaaS on autopilot, drive traffic to your store/gym/bar/whatever, etc. The thing with SEO, though, is that most SEO tips on the internet are just not that good. Most of the said tips: Are way too simple & basic (“add meta descriptions to your images”*) Are not impactful. Sure, adding that meta tag to an image is important, but that’s not what’s going to drive traffic to your website Don’t talk much about SEO strategy (which is ultimately the most important thing for SEO). Sure, on-page SEO is great, but you sure as hell won't drive much traffic if you can't hire the right writers to scale your content. And to drive serious SEO traffic, you'll need a LOT more than that. Over the past few years, my and my co-founder have helped grow websites to over 200k+ monthly traffic (check out our older Reddit post if you want to learn more about us, our process, and what we do), and we compiled all our most important SEO tips and tricks, as well as case studies, research, and experiments from the web, into this article. Hope you like it ;) If you think we missed something super important, let us know and we'll add it to the list. And btw, we also published this article on our own blog with images, smart filters, and all that good stuff. If you want to check it out, click here. That said, grab some coffee (or beer) & let's dive in - this is going to be a long one. SEO Strategy Tips Tip #1. A Lot of SEO Tips On The Internet Are NOT Necessarily Factual A lot of the SEO content you’ll read on the internet will be based on personal experiences and hearsay. Unfortunately, Google is a bit vague about SEO advice, so you have to rely more on experiments conducted by SEO pros in the community. So, sometimes, a lot of this information is questionable, wrong, or simply based on inaccurate data.  What we’re getting at here is, whenever you hear some new SEO advice, take it with a grain of salt. Google it to double-check other sources, and really understand what this SEO advice is based on (instead of just taking it at face value). Tip #2. SEO Takes Time - Get Used to It Any way you spin it, SEO takes time.  It can take around 6 months to 2 years (depending on the competition in your niche) before you start seeing some serious results.  So, don’t get disappointed if you don’t see any results within 3 months of publishing content. Tip #3. SEO Isn’t The Best Channel for Everyone That said, if you need results for your business tomorrow, you might want to reconsider SEO altogether.  If you just started your business, for example, and are trying to get to break-even ASAP, SEO is a bad idea - you’ll quit before you even start seeing any results.  If that’s the case, focus on other marketing channels that can have faster results like content marketing, PPC, outreach, etc. Tip #4. Use PPC to Validate Keywords Not sure if SEO is right for your business? Do this: set up Google Search ads for the most high-intent keywords in your niche. See how well the traffic converts and then decide if it’s worthwhile to focus on SEO (and rank on these keywords organically). Tip #5. Use GSC to See If SEO Is Working While it takes a while to see SEO results, it IS possible to see if you’re going in the right direction. On a monthly basis, you can use Search Console to check if your articles are indexed by Google and if their average position is improving over time. Tip #6. Publish a TON of Content The more content you publish on your blog, the better. We recommend a minimum of 10,000 words per month and optimally 20,000 - 30,000 (especially if your website is fresh). If an agency offers you the typical “4 500-word articles per month” deal, stay away. No one’s ever gotten results in SEO with short, once-per-week articles. Tip #7. Upgrade Your Writers Got a writer that’s performing well? Hire them as an editor and get them to oversee content operations / edit other writers’ content. Then, upgrade your best editor to Head of Content and get them to manage the entire editor / writer ops. Tip #8. Use Backlink Data to Prioritize Content When doing keyword research, gather the backlink data of the top 3 ranking articles and add it to your sheet. Then, use this data to help you prioritize which keywords to focus on first. We usually prioritize keywords that have lower competition, high traffic, and a medium to high buyer intent. Tip #9. Conduct In-Depth Keyword Research Make your initial keyword research as comprehensive as possible. This will give you a much more realistic view of your niche and allow you to prioritize content the right way. We usually aim for 100 to 300 keywords (depending on the niche) for the initial keyword research when we start working with a client. Tip #10. Start With Competitive Analysis Start every keyword research with competitive analysis. Extract the keywords your top 3 competitors are ranking on.  Then, use them as inspiration and build upon it. Use tools like UberSuggest to help generate new keyword ideas. Tip #11. Get SEMrush of Ahrefs You NEED SEMrush or Ahrefs, there’s no doubt about it. While they might seem expensive at a glance (99 USD per month billed annually), they’re going to save you a lot of manpower doing menial SEO tasks. Tip #12. Don’t Overdo It With SEO Tools Don’t overdo it with SEO tools. There are hundreds of those out there, and if you’re the type that’s into SaaS, you might be tempted to play around with dozens at a time. And yes, to be fair, most of these tools ARE helpful one way or another. To effectively do organic SEO, though, you don’t really need that many tools. In most cases, you just need the following: SEMrush/Ahrefs Screaming Frog RankMath/Yoast SEO Whichever outreach tool you prefer (our favorite is snov.io). Tip #13. Try Some of the Optional Tools In addition to the tools we mentioned before, you can also try the following 2 which are pretty useful & popular in the SEO community: Surfer SEO - helps with on-page SEO and creating content briefs for writers. ClusterAI - tool that helps simplify keyword research & save time. Tip #14. Constantly Source Writers Want to take your content production to the next level? You’ll need to hire more writers.  There is, however, one thing that makes this really, really difficult: 95 - 99% of writers applying for your gigs won’t be relevant. Up to 80% will be awful at writing, and the remainder just won’t be relevant for your niche. So, in order to scale your writing team, we recommend sourcing constantly, and not just once every few months. Tip #15. Create a Process for Writer Filtering As we just mentioned, when sourcing writers, you’ll be getting a ton of applicants, but most won’t be qualified. Fun fact \- every single time we post a job ad on ProBlogger, we get around 300 - 500 applications (most of which are totally not relevant). Trust us, you don’t want to spend your time going through such a huge list and checking out the writer samples. So, instead, we recommend you do this: Hire a virtual assistant to own the process of evaluating and short-listing writers. Create a process for evaluating writers. We recommend evaluating writers by: Level of English. If their samples aren’t fluent, they’re not relevant. Quality of Samples. Are the samples engaging / long-form content, or are they boring 500-word copy-pastes? Technical Knowledge. Has the writer written about a hard-to-explain topic before? Anyone can write about simple topics like traveling - you want to look for someone who knows how to research a new topic and explain it in a simple and easy to read way. If someone’s written about how to create a perfect cover letter, they can probably write about traveling, but the opposite isn’t true. The VA constantly evaluates new applicants and forwards the relevant ones to the editor. The editor goes through the short-listed writers and gives them trial tasks and hires the ones that perform well. Tip #16. Use The Right Websites to Source Writers “Is UpWork any good?” This question pops up on social media time and time again. If you ask us, no, UpWork is not good at all. Of course, there are qualified writers there (just like anywhere else), but from our experience, those writers are few and far in-between. Instead, here are some of our favorite ways to source writers: Cult of Copy Job Board ProBlogger Headhunting on LinkedIn If you really want to use UpWork, use it for headhunting (instead of posting a job ad) Tip #17. Hire Writers the Right Way If you want to seriously scale your content production, hire your writers full-time. This (especially) makes sense if you’re a content marketing agency that creates a TON of content for clients all the time. If you’re doing SEO just for your own blog, though, it usually makes more sense to use freelancers. Tip #18. Topic Authority Matters Google keeps your website's authoritativeness in mind. Meaning, if you have 100 articles on digital marketing, you’re probably more of an authority on the topic than someone that has just 10. Hence, Google is a lot more likely to reward you with better rankings. This is also partially why content volume really matters: the more frequently you publish content, the sooner Google will view you as an authority. Tip #19. Focus on One Niche at a Time Let’s say your blog covers the following topics: sales, accounting, and business management.  You’re more likely to rank if you have 30 articles on a single topic (e.g. accounting) than if you have 10 articles on each. So, we recommend you double-down on one niche instead of spreading your content team thin with different topics. Tip #20. Don’t Fret on the Details While technical SEO is important, you shouldn’t get too hung up on it.  Sure, there are thousands of technical tips you can find on the internet, and most of them DO matter. The truth, though, is that Google won’t punish you just because your website doesn’t load in 3 milliseconds or there’s a meta description missing on a single page. Especially if you have SEO fundamentals done right: Get your website to run as fast as possible. Create a ton of good SEO content. Get backlinks for your website on a regular basis. You’ll still rank, even if your website isn’t 100% optimized. Tip #21. Do Yourself a Favor and Hire a VA There are a TON of boring SEO tasks that your team should really not be wasting time with. So, hire a full-time VA to help with all that. Some tasks you want to outsource include gathering contacts to reach out to for link-building, uploading articles on WordPress, etc. Tip #22. Google Isn’t Everything While Google IS the dominant search engine in most parts of the world, there ARE countries with other popular search engines.  If you want to improve your SEO in China, for example, you should be more concerned with ranking on Baidu. Targeting Russia? Focus on Yandex. Tip #23. No, Voice Search is Still Not Relevant Voice search is not and will not be relevant (no matter what sensationalist articles might say). It’s just too impractical for most search queries to use voice (as opposed to traditional search). Tip #24. SEO Is Not Dead SEO is not dead and will still be relevant decades down the line. Every year, there’s a sensationalist article talking about this.  Ignore those. Tip #25. Doing Local SEO? Focus on Service Pages If you’re doing local SEO, focus on creating service-based landing pages instead of content.  E.g. if you’re an accounting firm based in Boston, you can make a landing page about /accounting-firm-boston/, /tax-accounting-boston/, /cpa-boston/, and so on. Thing is, you don’t really need to rank on global search terms - you just won’t get leads from there. Even if you ranked on the term “financial accounting,” it wouldn’t really matter for your bottom line that much. Tip #26. Learn More on Local SEO Speaking of local SEO, we definitely don’t do the topic justice in this guide. There’s a lot more you need to know to do local SEO effectively and some of it goes against the general SEO advice we talk about in this article (e.g. you don't necessarily need blog content for local SEO). We're going to publish an article on that soon enough, so if you want to check it out, DM me and I'll hit you up when it's up. Tip #27. Avoid Vanity Metrics Don’t get side-tracked by vanity metrics.  At the end of the day, you should care about how your traffic impacts your bottom line. Fat graphs and lots of traffic are nice and all, but none of it matters if the traffic doesn’t have the right search intent to convert to your product/service. Tip #28. Struggling With SEO? Hire an Expert Failing to make SEO work for your business? When in doubt, hire an organic SEO consultant or an SEO agency.  The #1 benefit of hiring an SEO agency or consultant is that they’ve been there and done that - more than once. They might be able to catch issues an inexperienced SEO can’t. Tip #29. Engage With the Community Need a couple of SEO questions answered?  SEO pros are super helpful & easy to reach! Join these Facebook groups and ask your question - you’ll get about a dozen helpful answers! SEO Signals Lab SEO & Content Marketing The Proper SEO Group. Tip #30. Stay Up to Date With SEO Trends SEO is always changing - Google is constantly pumping out new updates that have a significant impact on how the game is played.  Make sure to stay up to date with the latest SEO trends and Google updates by following the Google Search Central blog. Tip #31. Increase Organic CTR With PPC Want to get the most out of your rankings? Run PPC ads for your best keywords. Googlers who first see your ad are more likely to click your organic listing. Content & On-Page SEO Tips Tip #32. Create 50% Longer Content On average, we recommend you create an article that’s around 50% longer than the best article ranking on the keyword.  One small exception, though, is if you’re in a super competitive niche and all top-ranking articles are already as comprehensive as they can be. For example, in the VPN niche, all articles ranking for the keyword “best VPN” are around 10,000 - 11,000 words long. And that’s the optimal word count - even if you go beyond, you won’t be able to deliver that much value for the reader to make it worth the effort of creating the content. Tip #33. Longer Is Not Always Better Sometimes, a short-form article can get the job done much better.  For example, let’s say you’re targeting the keyword “how to tie a tie.”  The reader expects a short and simple guide, something under 500 words, and not “The Ultimate Guide to Tie Tying for 2021 \[11 Best Tips and Tricks\]” Tip #34. SEO is Not Just About Written Content Written content is not always best. Sometimes, videos can perform significantly better. E.g. If the Googler is looking to learn how to get a deadlift form right, they’re most likely going to be looking for a video. Tip #35. Don’t Forget to Follow Basic Optimization Tips For all your web pages (articles included), follow basic SEO optimization tips. E.g. include the keyword in the URL, use the right headings etc.  Just use RankMath or YoastSEO for this and you’re in the clear! Tip #36. Hire Specialized Writers When hiring content writers, try to look for ones that specialize in creating SEO content.  There are a LOT of writers on the internet, plenty of which are really good.  However, if they haven’t written SEO content before, chances are, they won’t do that good of a job. Tip #37. Use Content Outlines Speaking of writers - when working with writers, create a content outline that summarizes what the article should be about and what kind of topics it needs to cover instead of giving them a keyword and asking them to “knock themselves out.”   This makes it a lot more likely for the writer to create something that ranks. When creating content outlines, we recommend you include the following information: Target keyword Related keywords that should be mentioned in the article Article structure - which headings should the writer use? In what order? Article title Tip #38. Find Writers With Niche Knowledge Try to find a SEO content writer with some experience or past knowledge about your niche. Otherwise, they’re going to take around a month or two to become an expert. Alternatively, if you’re having difficulty finding a writer with niche knowledge, try to find someone with experience in technical or hard to explain topics. Writers who’ve written about cybersecurity in the past, for example, are a lot more likely to successfully cover other complicated topics (as opposed to, for example, a food or travel blogger). Tip #39. Keep Your Audience’s Knowledge in Mind When creating SEO content, always keep your audience’s knowledge in mind. If you’re writing about advanced finance, for example, you don’t need to teach your reader what an income statement is. If you’re writing about income statements, on the other hand, you’d want to start from the very barebone basics. Tip #40. Write for Your Audience If your readers are suit-and-tie lawyers, they’re going to expect professionally written content. 20-something hipsters? You can get away with throwing a Rick and Morty reference here and there. Tip #41. Use Grammarly Trust us, it’ll seriously make your life easier! Keep in mind, though, that the app is not a replacement for a professional editor. Tip #42. Use Hemingway Online content should be very easy to read & follow for everyone, whether they’re a senior profession with a Ph.D. or a college kid looking to learn a new topic. As such, your content should be written in a simple manner - and that’s where Hemingway comes in. It helps you keep your blog content simple. Tip #43. Create Compelling Headlines Want to drive clicks to your articles? You’ll need compelling headlines. Compare the two headlines below; which one would you click? 101 Productivity Tips \[To Get Things Done in 2021\] VS Productivity Tips Guide Exactly! To create clickable headlines, we recommend you include the following elements: Keyword Numbers Results Year (If Relevant) Tip #44. Nail Your Blog Content Formatting Format your blog posts well and avoid overly long walls of text. There’s a reason Backlinko content is so popular - it’s extremely easy to read and follow. Tip #45. Use Relevant Images In Your SEO Content Key here - relevant. Don’t just spray random stock photos of “office people smiling” around your posts; no one likes those.  Instead, add graphs, charts, screenshots, quote blocks, CSS boxes, and other engaging elements. Tip #46. Implement the Skyscraper Technique (The Right Way) Want to implement Backlinko’s skyscraper technique?  Keep this in mind before you do: not all content is meant to be promoted.  Pick a topic that fits the following criteria if you want the internet to care: It’s on an important topic. “Mega-Guide to SaaS Marketing” is good, “top 5 benefits of SaaS marketing” is not. You’re creating something significantly better than the original material. The internet is filled with mediocre content - strive to do better. Tip #47. Get The URL Slug Right for Seasonal Content If you want to rank on a seasonal keyword with one piece of content (e.g. you want to rank on “saas trends 2020, 2021, etc.”), don’t mention the year in the URL slug - keep it /saas-trends/ and just change the headline every year instead.  If you want to rank with separate articles, on the other hand (e.g. you publish a new trends report every year), include the year in the URL. Tip #48. Avoid content cannibalization.  Meaning, don’t write 2+ articles on one topic. This will confuse Google on which article it should rank. Tip #49. Don’t Overdo Outbound Links Don’t include too many outbound links in your content. Yes, including sources is good, but there is such a thing as overdoing it.  If your 1,000 word article has 20 outbound links, Google might consider it as spam (even if all those links are relevant). Tip #50. Consider “People Also Ask” To get the most out of SERP, you want to grab as many spots on the search result as possible, and this includes “people also ask (PAA):” Make a list of the topic’s PAA questions and ensure that your article answers them.  If you can’t fit the questions & answers within the article, though, you can also add an FAQ section at the end where you directly pose these questions and provide the answers. Tip #51. Optimize For Google Snippet Optimize your content for the Google Snippet. Check what’s currently ranking as the snippet. Then, try to do something similar (or even better) in terms of content and formatting. Tip #52. Get Inspired by Viral Content Want to create content that gets insane shares & links?  Reverse-engineer what has worked in the past. Look up content in your niche that went viral on Reddit, Hacker News, Facebook groups, Buzzsumo, etc. and create something similar, but significantly better. Tip #53. Avoid AI Content Tools No, robots can’t write SEO content.  If you’ve seen any of those “AI generated content tools,” you should know to stay away. The only thing those tools are (currently) good for is creating news content. Tip #54. Avoid Bad Content You will never, ever, ever rank with one 500-word article per week.  There are some SEO agencies (even the more reputable ones) that offer this as part of their service. Trust us, this is a waste of time. Tip #55. Update Your Content Regularly Check your top-performing articles annually and see if there’s anything you can do to improve them.  When most companies finally get the #1 ranking for a keyword, they leave the article alone and never touch it again… ...Until they get outranked, of course, by someone who one-upped their original article. Want to prevent this from happening? Analyze your top-performing content once a year and improve it when possible. Tip #56. Experiment With CTR Do your articles have low CTR? Experiment with different headlines and see if you can improve it.  Keep in mind, though, that what a “good CTR” is really depends on the keyword.  In some cases, the first ranking will drive 50% of the traffic. In others, it’s going to be less than 15%. Link-Building Tips Tip #57. Yes, Links Matter. Here’s What You Need to Know “Do I need backlinks to rank?” is probably one of the most common SEO questions.  The answer to the question (alongside all other SEO-related questions) is that it depends on the niche.  If your competitors don’t have a lot of backlinks, chances are, you can rank solely by creating superior content. If you’re in an extremely competitive niche (e.g. VPN, insurance, etc.), though, everyone has amazing, quality content - that’s just the baseline.  What sets top-ranking content apart from the rest is backlinks. Tip #58. Sometimes, You’ll Have to Pay For Links Unfortunately, in some niches, paying for links is unavoidable - e.g. gambling, CBD, and others. In such cases, you either need a hefty link-building budget, or a very creative link-building campaign (create a viral infographic, news-worthy story based on interesting data, etc.). Tip #59. Build Relationships, Not Links The very best link-building is actually relationship building.  Make a list of websites in your niche and build a relationship with them - don’t just spam them with the standard “hey, I have this amazing article, can you link to it?”.  If you spam, you risk ruining your reputation (and this is going to make further outreach much harder). Tip #60. Stick With The Classics At the end of the day, the most effective link-building tactics are the most straightforward ones:  Direct Outreach Broken Link-Building Guest Posting Skyscraper Technique Creating Viral Content Guestposting With Infographics Tip #61. Give, Don’t Just Take! If you’re doing link-building outreach, don’t just ask for links - give something in return.  This will significantly improve the reply rate from your outreach email. If you own a SaaS tool, for example, you can offer the bloggers you’re reaching out to free access to your software. Or, alternatively, if you’re doing a lot of guest posting, you can offer the website owner a link from the guest post in exchange for the link to your website. Tip #62. Avoid Link Resellers That guy DMing you on LinkedIn, trying to sell you links from a Google Sheet?  Don’t fall for it - most of those links are PBNs and are likely to backfire on you. Tip #63. Avoid Fiverr Like The Plague Speaking of spammy links, don’t touch anything that’s sold on Fiverr - pretty much all of the links there are useless. Tip #64. Focus on Quality Links Not all links are created equal. A link is of higher quality if it’s linked from a page that: Is NOT a PBN. Doesn’t have a lot of outbound links. If the page links to 20 other websites, each of them gets less link juice. Has a lot of (quality) backlinks. Is part of a website with a high domain authority. Is about a topic relevant to the page it’s linking to. If your article about pets has a link from an accounting blog, Google will consider it a bit suspicious. Tip #65. Data-Backed Content Just Works Data-backed content can get insane results for link-building.  For example, OKCupid used to publish interesting data & research based on how people interacted with their platform and it never failed to go viral. Each of their reports ended up being covered by dozens of news media (which got them a ton of easy links). Tip #66. Be Creative - SEO Is Marketing, After All Be novel & creative with your link-building initiatives.  Here’s the thing: the very best link-builders are not going to write about the tactics they’re using.  If they did, you’d see half the internet using the exact same tactic as them in less than a week! Which, as you can guess, would make the tactic cliche and significantly less effective. In order to get superior results with your link-building, you’ll need to be creative - think about how you can make your outreach different from what everyone does. Experiment it, measure it, and improve it till it works! Tip #67. Try HARO HARO, or Help a Reporter Out, is a platform that matches journalists with sources. You get an email every day with journalists looking for experts in specific niches, and if you pitch them right, they might feature you in their article or link to your website. Tip #68. No-Follow Links Aren’t That Bad Contrary to what you might’ve heard, no-follow links are not useless. Google uses no-follow as more of a suggestion than anything else.  There have been case studies that prove Google can disregard the no-follow tag and still reward you with increased rankings. Tip #69. Start Fresh With an Expired Domain Starting a new website? It might make sense to buy an expired one with existing backlinks (that’s in a similar niche as yours). The right domain can give you a serious boost to how fast you can rank. Tip #70. Don’t Overspend on Useless Links “Rel=sponsored” links don’t pass pagerank and hence, won’t help increase your website rankings.  So, avoid buying links from media websites like Forbes, Entrepreneur, etc. Tip #71. Promote Your Content Other than link-building, focus on organic content promotion. For example, you can repost your content on Facebook groups, LinkedIn, Reddit, etc. and focus on driving traffic.  This will actually lead to you getting links, too. We got around 95 backlinks to our SEO case study article just because of our successful content promotion. Tons of people saw the article on the net, liked it, and linked to it from their website. Tip #72. Do Expert Roundups Want to build relationships with influencers in your niche, but don’t know where to start?  Create an expert roundup article. If you’re in the sales niche, for example, you can write about Top 21 Sales Influencers in 2021 and reach out to the said influencers letting them know that they got featured. Trust us, they’ll love you for this! Tip #73. .Edu Links are Overhyped .edu links are overrated. According to John Mueller, .edu domains tend to have a ton of outbound links, and as such, Google ignores a big chunk of them. Tip #74. Build Relationships With Your Customers Little-known link-building hack: if you’re a SaaS company doing SEO, you can build relationships with your customers (the ones that are in the same topical niche as you are) and help each other build links! Tip #75. Reciprocal Links Aren’t That Bad Reciprocal links are not nearly as bad as Google makes them out to be. Sure, they can be bad at scale (if trading links is all you’re doing). Exchanging a link or two with another website / blog, though, is completely harmless in 99% of cases. Tip #76. Don’t Overspam Don’t do outreach for every single post you publish - just the big ones.  Most people already don’t care about your outreach email. Chances are, they’re going to care even less if you’re asking them to link to this new amazing article you wrote (which is about the top 5 benefits of adopting a puppy). Technical SEO Tips Tip #77. Use PageSpeed Insights If your website is extremely slow, it’s definitely going to impact your rankings. Use PageSpeed Insights to see how your website is currently performing. Tip #78. Load Speed Matters While load speed doesn’t impact rankings directly, it DOES impact your user experience. Chances are, if your page takes 5 seconds to load, but your competition’s loads instantly, the average Googler will drop off and pick them over you. Tip #79. Stick to a Low Crawl Depth Crawl depth of any page on your website should be lower than 4 (meaning, any given page should be possible to reach in no more than 3 clicks from the homepage).  Tip #80. Use Next-Gen Image Formats Next-gen image formats such as JPEG 2000, JPEG XR, and WebP can be compressed a lot better than PNG or JPG. So, when possible, use next-get formats for images on your website. Tip #81. De-Index Irrelevant Pages Hide the pages you don’t want Google to index (e.g: non-public, or unimportant pages) via your Robots.txt. If you’re a SaaS, for example, this would include most of your in-app pages or your internal knowledge base pages. Tip #82. Make Your Website Mobile-Friendly Make sure that your website is mobile-friendly. Google uses “mobile-first indexing.” Meaning, unless you have a working mobile version of your website, your rankings will seriously suffer. Tip #83. Lazy-Load Images Lazy-load your images. If your pages contain a lot of images, you MUST activate lazy-loading. This allows images that are below the screen, to be loaded only once the visitor scrolls down enough to see the image. Tip #84. Enable Gzip Compression Enable Gzip compression to allow your HTML, CSS and JS files to load faster. Tip #85. Clean Up Your Code If your website loads slowly because you have 100+ external javascript files and stylesheets being requested from the server, you can try minifying, aggregating, and inlining some of those files. Tip 86. Use Rel-Canonical Have duplicate content on your website? Use rel-canonical to show Google which version is the original (and should be prioritized for search results). Tip #87. Install an SSL Certificate Not only does an SSL certificate help keep your website safe, but it’s also a direct ranking factor. Google prioritizes websites that have SSL certificates over the ones that don’t. Tip #88. Use Correct Anchor Texts for Internal Links When linking to an internal page, mention the keyword you’re trying to rank for on that page in the anchor text. This helps Google understand that the page is, indeed, about the keyword you’re associating it with. Tip #89. Use GSC to Make Sure Your Content is Interlinked Internal links can have a serious impact on your rankings. So, make sure that all your blog posts (especially the new ones) are properly linked to/from your past content.  You can check how many links any given page has via Google Search Console. Tip #90. Bounce rate is NOT a Google ranking factor. Meaning, you can still rank high-up even with a high bounce rate. Tip #91. Don’t Fret About a High Bounce Rate Speaking of the bounce rate, you’ll see that some of your web pages have a higher-than-average bounce rate (70%+).  While this can sometimes be a cause for alarm, it’s not necessarily so. Sometimes, the search intent behind a given keyword means that you WILL have a high bounce rate even if your article is the most amazing thing ever.  E.g. if it’s a recipe page, the reader gets the recipe and bounces off (since they don’t need anything else). Tip #92. Google Will Ignore Your Meta Description More often than not, Google won’t use the meta description you provide - that’s normal. It will, instead, automatically pick a part of the text that it thinks is most relevant and use it as a meta description. Despite this, you should always add a meta description to all pages. Tip #93. Disavow Spammy & PBN Links Keep track of your backlinks and disavow anything that’s obviously spammy or PBNy. In most cases, Google will ignore these links anyway. However, you never know when a competitor is deliberately targeting you with too many spammy or PBN links (which might put you at risk for being penalized). Tip #94. Use The Correct Redirect  When permanently migrating your pages, use 301 redirect to pass on the link juice from the old page to the new one. If the redirect is temporary, use a 302 redirect instead. Tip #95. When A/B Testing, Do This A/B testing two pages? Use rel-canonical to show Google which page is the original. Tip #96. Avoid Amp DON’T use Amp.  Unless you’re a media company, Amp will negatively impact your website. Tip #97. Get Your URL Slugs Right Keep your blog URLs short and to-the-point. Good Example: apollodigital.io/blog/seo-case-study Bad Example: apollodigital.io/blog/seo-case-study-2021-0-to-200,000/ Tip #98. Avoid Dates in URLs An outdated date in your URL can hurt your CTR. Readers are more likely to click / read articles published recently than the ones written years back. Tip #99. Social Signals Matter Social signals impact your Google rankings, just not in the way you think. No, your number of shares and likes does NOT impact your ranking at all.  However, if your article goes viral and people use Google to find your article, click it, and read it, then yes, it will impact your rankings.  E.g. you read our SaaS marketing guide on Facebook, then look up “SaaS marketing” on Google, click it, and read it from there. Tip #100. Audit Your Website Frequently Every other month, crawl your website with ScreamingFrog and see if you have any broken links, 404s, etc. Tip #101. Use WordPress Not sure which CMS platform to use?  99% of the time, you’re better off with WordPress.  It has a TON of plugins that will make your life easier.  Want a drag & drop builder? Use Elementor. Wix, SiteGround and similar drag & drops are bad for SEO. Tip #102. Check Rankings the Right Way When checking on how well a post is ranking on Google Search Console, make sure to check Page AND Query to get the accurate number.  If you check just the page, it’s going to give you the average ranking on all keywords the page is ranking for (which is almost always going to be useless data). Conclusion Aaand that's about it - thanks for the read! Now, let's circle back to Tip #1 for a sec. Remember when we said a big chunk of what you read on SEO is based on personal experiences, experiments, and the like? Well, the tips we've mentioned are part of OUR experience. Chances are, you've done something that might be different (or completely goes against) our advice in this article. If that's the case, we'd love it if you let us know down in the comments. If you mention something extra-spicy, we'll even include it in this article.

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.
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dams96This week

Made $19.2k this month, and just surpassed $1000 the last 24 hours. What I did and what's next.

It's the first time I hit $1000+ in 24 hours and I had no one to share it with (except you guys). I'm quite proud of my journey, and I would have thought that making $1000 in a day would make me ecstatic, but actually it's not the case. Not sure if it's because my revenue has grown by increment step so I had time to "prepare" myself to achieve this at one point, or just that I'm nowhere near my goal of 100k/month so that I'm not that affected by it. But it's crazy to think that my goal was to make 100$ daily at the end of 2024. So for those who don't know me (I guess most of you), I build mobile apps and ship them as fast as I can. Most of them are in the AI space. I already made a post here on how I become a mobile app developer so you can check it for more details, but essentially here's what I did : Always loved creating my own things and solve problems Built multiple YouTube channels since I was 15 (mobile gaming actually) that all worked great (but it was too niche so not that scalable, didn't like that) Did a few businesses here and there (drop shopping, selling merch to school, etc) Finished my master's degree in engineering about 2 years ago Worked a moment in a famous watch industry company and saw my potential. The combo of health issues, fixed salary (although it was quite a lot), and me wanting to be an entrepreneur made me leave the company. Created a TikTok account in mobile tech (got 10+ million views the 1st 3 days), manage to grow it to 200k subs in about 3 months Got plenty of collabs for promoting mobile apps (between $500 - $2000 for a collab) Said fuck it I should do my own apps and market them on my TikTok instead of doing collabs Me wanting to build my own apps happened around May-June 2023. Started my TikTok in Feb 2023. At this point I had already 150k+ subs on TikTok. You guys need to know that I suck at coding big time. During my studies I tried to limit as much as I could coding because I was a lazy bast*rd, even though I knew it would come to bite me in the ass one day. But an angel appeared to me in broad daylight, that angel was called GPT-4. I subscribed for 20$/month to get access, and instantly I saw the potential of AI and how much it could help me. Last year GPT-4 was ahead of its time and could already code me basic apps. I had already a mac so I just downloaded Xcode and that was it. My 1st app was a wallpaper app, and I kid you not 90% of it was made by AI. Yes sometimes I had to try again and again with different prompts but it was still so much faster compared to if I had to learn coding from scratch and write code with my own hands. The only thing I didn't do was implement the in app purchase, from which I find a guy on Fiverr to do it for me for 50$. After about 2 months of on-off coding, my first app was ready to be launched. So it was launched, had a great successful launch without doing any videos at that point (iOS 17 was released and my app was the first one alongside another one to offer live wallpapers for iOS 17. I knew that there was a huge app potential there when iOS 17 was released in beta as Apple changed their live wallpaper feature). I Then made a video a few weeks after on my mobile tiktok channel, made about 1 million views in 48 hours, brought me around 40k additional users. Was top 1 chart in graphism and design category for a few weeks (in France, as I'm French so my TikTok videos are in French). And was top 100 in that same category in 120+ countries. Made about 500$ ? Okay that was trash, but I had no idea to monetize the app correctly at that point. It was still a huge W to me and proved me that I could successfully launch apps. Then I learned ASO (App Store Optimization) in depth, searched on internet, followed mobile app developers on Twitter, checked YouTube videos, you name it. I was eager to learn more. I needed more. Then I just iterated, build my 2nd app in less than a month, my 3rd in 3 weeks and so on. I just build my 14th app in 3 days and is now in review. Everytime I manage to reuse some of my other app's code in my new one, which is why I can build them so much faster now. I know how to monetize my app better by checking out my competitors. I learn so much by just "spying" other apps. Funnily enough, I only made this one Tiktok video on my main account to promote my app. For all my other apps, I didn't do a single video where I showcase it, the downloads has only been thanks to ASO. I still use AI everyday. I'm still not good at coding (a bit better than when I started). I use AI to create my app icons (midjourney or the new AI model Flux which is great). I use figma + midjourney to create my App Store screenshots (and they actually look quite good). I use GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to code most of my apps features. I use gpt-4o to localize my app (if you want to optimize the number of downloads I strongly suggest localizing your app, it takes me about 10 minutes thanks to AI). Now what are my next goals ? To achieve the 100k/month I need to change my strategy a little. Right now the $20k/month comes from purely organic downloads, I didn't do any paid advertising. It will be hard for me to keep on launching new apps and rely on ASO to reach the 100k mark. The best bet to reach 100k is to collab with content creators and they create a viral video showcasing your app. Depending on the app it's not that easy, luckily some of my apps can be viral so I will need to find the right content creators. Second way is to try tiktok/meta ads, I can check (have checked) all the ads that have been made by my competitors (thank you EU), so what I would do is copy their ad concept and create similar ads than them. Some of them have millions in ad budget so I know they create high converting ads, so you don't need to try to create an ad creative from scratch. My only big fear is to get banned by Apple (for no reason of mine). In just a snap of a finger they can just ban you from the platform, that shit scares me. And you pretty much can't do anything. So that's about it for me. I'm quite proud of myself not going to lie. Have been battling so many health issues these past years where I just stay in bed all day I'm surprised to be able to make it work. Anyways feel free to ask questions. I hope it was interesting for some of you at least. PS: My new app was just approved by app review, let the app gods favor me and bring me many downloads ! Also forgot to talk about a potential $100k+ acquisition of one of my apps, but if that ever happens I'll make a post on it.

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5
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jottrledThis week

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

[CASE STUDY] From 217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months - Sold for $59,000; I grow and monetise web traffic of 5, 6, 7 figures USD valued passive income content sites [AMA]
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jamesackerman1234This week

[CASE STUDY] From 217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months - Sold for $59,000; I grow and monetise web traffic of 5, 6, 7 figures USD valued passive income content sites [AMA]

Hello Everyone (VERY LONG CASE STUDY AHEAD) - 355% return in 9 months Note: I own a 7-figures USD valued portfolio of 41+ content sites that generates 5-6 figures USD a month in passive income. This is my first time posting in this sub and my goal is to NOT share generic advice but precise numbers, data and highly refined processes so you can also get started with this business yourself or if you already have an existing business, drive huge traffic to it and scale it substantially (get more customers). I will use a case study to explain the whole process. As most of us are entrepreneurs here, explaining an actual project would be more meaningful. In this case study I used AI assisted content to grow an existing site from $217/m to $2,836/m in 9 months (NO BACKLINKS) and sold it for $59,000. ROI of 3 months: 355% Previous case studies (before I give an overview of the model) Amazon Affiliate Content Site: $371/m to $19,263/m in 14 MONTHS - $900K CASE STUDY \[AMA\] Affiliate Website from $267/m to $21,853/m in 19 months (CASE STUDY - Amazon?) \[AMA\] Amazon Affiliate Website from $0 to $7,786/month in 11 months Amazon Affiliate Site from $118/m to $3,103/m in 8 MONTHS (SOLD it for $62,000+) Note: You can check pinned posts on my profile. Do go through the comments as well as a lot of questions are answered in those. However, if you still have any questions, feel free to reach out. This is an \[AMA\]. Quick Overview of the Model Approach: High traffic, niche specific, informative content websites that monetise its traffic through highly automated methods like display ads and affiliate. The same model can be applied to existing businesses to drive traffic and get customers. Main idea: Make passive income in a highly automated way Easy to understand analogy You have real estate (here you have digital asset like a website) You get rental income (here you get ads and affiliate income with no physical hassle, in case you have a business like service, product etc. then you can get customers for that too but if not, it's alright) Real estate has value (this digital asset also has value that can be appreciated with less effort) Real estate can be sold (this can be sold too but faster) IMPORTANT NOTE: Search traffic is the BEST way to reach HUGE target audience and it's important when it comes to scaling. This essentially means that you can either monetise that via affiliate, display etc. or if you have a business then you can reach a bigger audience to scale. Overview of this website's valuation (then and now: Oct. 2022 and June 2023) Oct 2022: $217/m Valuation: $5,750.5 (26.5x) - set it the same as the multiple it was sold for June 2023: $2,836/m Traffic and revenue trend: growing fast Last 3 months avg: $2,223 Valuation now: $59,000 (26.5x) Description: The domain was registered in 2016, it grew and then the project was left unattended. I decided to grow it again using properly planned AI assisted content. Backlink profile: 500+ Referring domains (Ahrefs). Backlinks mean the sites linking back to you. This is important when it comes to ranking. Summary of Results of This Website - Before and After Note: If the terms seem technical, do not worry. I will explain them in detail later. Still if you have any questions. Feel free to comment or reach out. |Metric|Oct 2022|June 2023|Difference|Comments| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |Articles|314|804|\+490|AI Assisted content published in 3 months| |Traffic|9,394|31,972|\+22,578|Organic| |Revenue|$217|$2,836|\+$2,619|Multiple sources| |RPM (revenue/1000 web traffic)|23.09|$88.7|\+$65.61|Result of Conversion rate optimisation (CRO). You make changes to the site for better conversions| |EEAT (expertise, experience, authority and trust of website)|2 main authors|8 authors|6|Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations| |CRO|Nothing|Tables, video ads |Tables, video ads and 11 other fixations || &#x200B; Month by Month Growth |Month|Revenue|Steps| |:-|:-|:-| |Sept 2022|NA|Content Plan| |Oct 2022|$217|Content Production| |Nov 2022|$243|Content production + EEAT authors| |Dec 2022|$320|Content production + EEAT authors| |Jan 2023|$400|Monitoring| |Feb 2023|$223|Content production + EEAT authors| |Mar 2023|$2,128|CRO & Fixations| |April 2023|$1,609|CRO & Fixations| |May 2023|$2,223|Content production + EEAT authors| |June 2023|$2,836|CRO and Fixations| |Total|$10,199|| &#x200B; What will I share Content plan and Website structure Content Writing Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Faster indexing Conversion rate optimisation Guest Posting EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) Costing ROI The plans moving forward with these sites &#x200B; Website Structure and Content Plan This is probably the most important important part of the whole process. The team spends around a month just to get this right. It's like defining the direction of the project. Description: Complete blueprint of the site's structure in terms of organisation of categories, subcategories and sorting of articles in each one of them. It also includes the essential pages. The sorted articles target main keyword, relevant entities and similar keywords. This has to be highly data driven and we look at over 100 variables just to get it right. It's like beating Google's algorithm to ensure you have a blueprint for a site that will rank. It needs to be done right. If there is a mistake, then even if you do everything right - it's not going to work out and after 8-16 months you will realise that everything went to waste. Process For this project, we had a niche selected already so we didn't need to do a lot of research pertaining to that. We also knew the topic since the website was already getting good traffic on that. We just validated from Ahrefs, SEMRUSH and manual analysis if it would be worth it to move forward with that topic. &#x200B; Find entities related to the topic: We used Ahrefs and InLinks to get an idea about the related entities (topics) to create a proper topical relevance. In order to be certain and have a better idea, we used ChatGPT to find relevant entities as well \> Ahrefs (tool): Enter main keyword in keywords explorer. Check the left pain for popular topics \> Inlinks (tool): Enter the main keyword, check the entity maps \> ChatGPT (tool): Ask it to list down the most important and relevant entities in order of their priority Based on this info, you can map out the most relevant topics that are semantically associated to your main topic Sorting the entities in topics (categories) and subtopics (subcategories): Based on the information above, cluster them properly. The most relevant ones must be grouped together. Each group must be sorted into its relevant category. \> Example: Site about cycling. \> Categories/entities: bicycles, gear and equipment, techniques, safety, routes etc. \> The subcategories/subentities for let's say "techniques" would be: Bike handling, pedaling, drafting etc. Extract keywords for each subcategory/subentity: You can do this using Ahrefs or Semrush. Each keyword would be an article. Ensure that you target the similar keywords in one article. For example: how to ride a bicycle and how can I ride a bicycle will be targeted by one article. Make the more important keyword in terms of volume and difficulty as the main keyword and the other one(s) as secondary Define main focus vs secondary focus: Out of all these categories/entities - there will be one that you would want to dominate in every way. So, focus on just that in the start. This will be your main focus. Try to answer ALL the questions pertaining to that. You can extract the questions using Ahrefs. \> Ahrefs > keywords explorer \> enter keyword \> Questions \> Download the list and cluster the similar ones. This will populate your main focus category/entity and will drive most of the traffic. Now, you need to write in other categories/subentities as well. This is not just important, but crucial to complete the topical map loop. In simple words, if you do this Google sees you as a comprehensive source on the topic - otherwise, it ignores you and you don't get ranked Define the URLs End result: List of all the entities and sub-entities about the main site topic in the form of categories and subcategories respectively. A complete list of ALL the questions about the main focus and at around 10 questions for each one of the subcategories/subentities that are the secondary focus Content Writing So, now that there's a plan. Content needs to be produced. Pick out a keyword (which is going to be a question) and... Answer the question Write about 5 relevant entities Answer 10 relevant questions Write a conclusion Keep the format the same for all the articles. Content Uploading, formatting and onsite SEO Ensure the following is taken care of: H1 Permalink H2s H3s Lists Tables Meta description Socials description Featured image 2 images in text \\Schema Relevant YouTube video (if there is) Note: There are other pointers link internal linking in a semantically relevant way but this should be good to start with. Faster Indexing Indexing means Google has read your page. Ranking only after this step has been done. Otherwise, you can't rank if Google hasn't read the page. Naturally, this is a slow process. But, we expedite it in multiple ways. You can use RankMath to quickly index the content. Since, there are a lot of bulk pages you need a reliable method. Now, this method isn't perfect. But, it's better than most. Use Google Indexing API and developers tools to get indexed. Rank Math plugin is used. I don't want to bore you and write the process here. But, a simple Google search can help you set everything up. Additionally, whenever you post something - there will be an option to INDEX NOW. Just press that and it would be indexed quite fast. Conversion rate optimisation Once you get traffic, try adding tables right after the introduction of an article. These tables would feature a relevant product on Amazon. This step alone increased our earnings significantly. Even though the content is informational and NOT review. This still worked like a charm. Try checking out the top pages every single day in Google analytics and add the table to each one of them. Moreover, we used EZOIC video ads as well. That increased the RPM significantly as well. Both of these steps are highly recommended. Overall, we implemented over 11 fixations but these two contribute the most towards increasing the RPM so I would suggest you stick to these two in the start. Guest Posting We made additional income by selling links on the site as well. However, we were VERY careful about who we offered a backlink to. We didn't entertain any objectionable links. Moreover, we didn't actively reach out to anyone. We had a professional email clearly stated on the website and a particularly designated page for "editorial guidelines" A lot of people reached out to us because of that. As a matter of fact, the guy who bought the website is in the link selling business and plans to use the site primarily for selling links. According to him, he can easily make $4000+ from that alone. Just by replying to the prospects who reached out to us. We didn't allow a lot of people to be published on the site due to strict quality control. However, the new owner is willing to be lenient and cash it out. EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trust) This is an important ranking factor. You need to prove on the site that your site has authors that are experienced, have expertise, authority and trust. A lot of people were reaching out to publish on our site and among them were a few established authors as well. We let them publish on our site for free, added them on our official team, connected their socials and shared them on all our socials. In return, we wanted them to write 3 articles each for us and share everything on all the social profiles. You can refer to the tables I shared above to check out the months it was implemented. We added a total of 6 writers (credible authors). Their articles were featured on the homepage and so were their profiles. Costing Well, we already had the site and the backlinks on it. Referring domains (backlinks) were already 500+. We just needed to focus on smart content and content. Here is the summary of the costs involved. Articles: 490 Avg word count per article: 1500 Total words: 735,000 (approximately) Cost per word: 2 cents (includes research, entities, production, quality assurance, uploading, formatting, adding images, featured image, alt texts, onsite SEO, publishing/scheduling etc.) Total: $14,700 ROI (Return on investment) Earning: Oct 22 - June 23 Earnings: $10,199 Sold for: $59,000 Total: $69,199 Expenses: Content: $14,700 Misc (hosting and others): $500 Total: $15,200 ROI over a 9 months period: 355.25% The plans moving forward This website was a part of a research and development experiment we did. With AI, we wanted to test new waters and transition more towards automation. Ideally, we want to use ChatGPT or some other API to produce these articles and bulk publish on the site. The costs with this approach are going to be much lower and the ROI is much more impressive. It's not the the 7-figures projects I created earlier (as you may have checked the older case studies on my profile), but it's highly scalable. We plan to refine this model even further, test more and automate everything completely to bring down our costs significantly. Once we have a model, we are going to scale it to 100s of sites. The process of my existing 7-figures websites portfolio was quite similar. I tested out a few sites, refined the model and scaled it to over 41 sites. Now, the fundamentals are the same however, we are using AI in a smarter way to do the same but at a lower cost, with a smaller team and much better returns. The best thing in my opinion is to run numerous experiments now. Our experimentation was slowed down a lot in the past since we couldn't write using AI but now it's much faster. The costs are 3-6 times lower so when it used to take $50-100k to start, grow and sell a site. Now you can pump 3-6 more sites for the same budget. This is a good news for existing business owners as well who want to grow their brand. Anyway, I am excited to see the results of more sites. In the meantime, if you have any questions - feel free to let me know. Best of luck for everything. Feel free to ask questions. I'd be happy to help. This is an AMA.

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero
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BalloonWheelieThis week

Why the value of writing code and other digital services is going to zero

I must preface this with a trigger warning because I make some statements in this post that might be upsetting to some. This post discusses my experience building in the new era of entrepreneurship, which is one where the founder is the center of the universe, and the consultants, overpriced SaaS, and corporate swamp creatures are replaced by single-user custom software, bots, and self-hosted automations. If you work in the legacy economy, I really don't intend to stress you out or say things you are doing are quickly becoming irrelevant, but I must share the reality of how I am operating, because I would like to hear from others who are doing the same, or desire to do the same. I am currently operating with the belief that AI-powered tools are going to make 1-person million dollar businesses much more common. Building anything digital is becoming extremely easy, cheap, and quick to implement. The value of code and digital tools is approaching zero, or at most 5% of what it currently is. Right now, the most powerful AI tools are aimed at developers, so folks who have some technical and business ability basically have nothing holding them back aside from the speed of their brain right now. I happen to be a part of the cohort, and am building like there is no tomorrow, but I don't believe this cohort is actually all that big. The next hurdle to unlock the new era of entrepreneurship is empowering every entrepreneur to build at the same pace that is currently locked behind having technical ability. This cohort is huge (millions, if the number of people in this sub is any indication). This post is aimed at them (you?). If you are part of this cohort, what is holding you back from launching a new product for near-zero cost? What is too complicated, too expensive, too unknown for you to be able to build your new/current business at maximum speed? I look forward to seeing the replies, I hope some insights shared can help the community, and be a catalyst for more tools to enable non-technical founders to launch. I will now share some of how I am testing, launching, and selling as a one-man-show. This will be a little bit technical, but if the output of any layer of my stack is something you want, please comment because maybe someone will build a cheap way of accessing it without needing to manage the code yourself. \#1 BOTS I cannot overstate how much leverage bots have created for me. I run all of my bots locally and interface with with via Telegram. Bots do things like: \- watch social media pages, forums, subreddits, etc related to my customers and notify me of what is going on, and suggest SEO blog posts that could be published to capture traffic related to the topic. with a single message, my bot will generate a blog post, send it to me for review, apply edits i suggest, and then publish it live, all from within telegram \- pay attention to all my key metrics/analytics, and attempt to find insights/corrolations (ex. there is a lot of traffic on this page, blog post, video, etc. here's why, and how we can take advantage of it to drive business goals) \- repurposing content. i have dozens of social media profiles that are 100% run by bots, they are all related to my customer niches and will do things like post news, snippets from my blogs, interact with human creators in the niche, etc. this builds my audience automatically which I can then advertise to/try to convert into paying customers, since they are interested in the things my bot is posting and become followers, it's like automated qualified lead gen 24/7 across every social platform and every niche I care about. you may be thinking by now that this post is made by a bot, but you will have to trust me that this is 100% hand-written by my sleep-deprived brain. let's continue: \#2 replacing every SaaS with a shitty version of it designed for what i need out of it it's absurd that we pay ten's of dollars per seat per month for basic digital functions like chat (slack), CRM (active camppaign, sales force, hubspot, etc), email stuff (mailchip, etc), link sharing (linktree, etc), website builders (wix, squarespace, etc), etc. all of these SaaS tools are overpriced and overbuilt. I believe many of them are going to be caught in the innovators dilemma and will go to 0. I don't use any of these anymore, I build and self-host my own shitty version of each of them that does only what i need out of the tool. for example, my CRM doesn't have a fancy drag and drop email builder and 10000 3rd party plugins, because i dont need any of that shit I just need to segment and communicate with my customers. if i need more features, i can generate them on the fly. \#3 working alone I have worked with cofounders in the past, raised money from investors, hired consultants, burned money and time, suffered sleepless nights from stress caused by other people not delivering, trying to convince others they are wrong, or they are pushing the company off a cliff, waste waste waste. no more of that. In the new age of entrepreneurship, the BUILDER (you and I) are the ones creating the value, and AI empowers us to do it alone. this might seem daunting, but there is no business problem that can't be solved with a detailed discussion sesh with chatgpt, no facts that can't be found with perplexity, and no task that can't be automated with claude. there is no need for anymore swamp creatures. you are the start and the end point, you don't need to rely on anyone else for anything. this may sound ignorant, but this is the conclusion I have come to believe, and it continues to be proven every day my businesses progress with me being the only human involved. This is getting quite long so I'll cut it here. I look forward to hearing about how you are operating in this new era and hopefully getting inspired/learning some new ideas to add to my current stack.

I tested hundreds of marketing tools in the last three years and these 50 made it to the list. I'll sum up my top 50 marketing tools with one or two sentences + give you pricings.
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SpicyCopyThis week

I tested hundreds of marketing tools in the last three years and these 50 made it to the list. I'll sum up my top 50 marketing tools with one or two sentences + give you pricings.

Hey guys, I'm working in a growth marketing agency. Marketing tools are 30% of what we do, so we use them a lot and experiment with the new ones as much as possible. There are thousands of tools and it's easy to get lost, so I wanted to share the tools we use most on a daily basis. And divide the list into 14 categories. I thought this could be handy for Entrepreneurs subreddit. Why adopt tools? I see marketing tools as tireless colleagues. If you can't hire an employee, choosing the right tool can solve your problems, because they Are super cheap. Work 7/24 for you. Don’t make mistakes. Don’t need management. (or needless management) Help you to automate the majority of your lead gen process. Onwards to the list. (With the pricings post ended up quite long, you can find a link in the end if you want to check the prices) Email marketing tools #1 ActiveCampaign is armed with the most complicated email automation features and has the most intuitive user experience. It feels like you already know how to use it. \#2 Autopilot is visual marketing automation and customer journey tool that helps you acquire, nurture based on behaviors, interest etc. #3 Mailjet: This is the tool we use to send out bulky email campaigns such as newsletters. It doesn't have sexy features like others but does its job for a cheap price. Email address finders #4 Skrapp finds email of your contacts by name and company. It also works with LinkedIn Sales Navigator and can extract thousands of emails in bulk + have a browser add-on. #5 Hunter: Similar to Skrapp but doesn't work with LinkedIn Sales Navigator directly. In addition, there are email templates and you can set up email campaigns. Prospecting and outreach tools #6 Prospect combines the personal emails, follow-up calls, other social touches and helps you create multichannel campaigns.  #7 Reply is a more intuitive version of Prospect. It is easy to learn and use; their UX makes you feel good and sufficient.  CRM tools #8 Salesflare helps you to stop managing your data and start managing your customers. Not yet popular as Hubspot and etc but the best solution for smaller B2B businesses. (we're fans) \#9 Hubspot: The most popular CRM for good reason and has a broader product range you can adopt in your next steps. Try this if you have a bulky list of customers because it is free. #10 Pardot: Pardot is by Salesforce, it's armed with features that can close the gap between marketing and sales. Sales Tools #11 Salesforce is the best sales automation and lead management software. It helps you to create complicated segmentations and run, track, analyze campaigns from the same dashboard. #12 LinkedIn Sales Navigator gives you full access to LinkedIn's user database. You can even find a kidnapped CEO if you know how to use it with other marketing automation tools like Skrapp. #13 Pipedrive is a simple tool and excels in one thing. It tracks your leads and tells you when to take the next action. It makes sales easier. #14 Qwilr creates great-looking docs, at speed. You can design perfect proposals, quotes, client updates, and more in a flash. We use it a lot to close deals, it's effective. #15 Crystalknows is an add-on that tells you anyone’s personality on LinkedIn and gives you a detailed approach specific to that person. It's eerily accurate. #16 Leadfeeder shows you the companies that visited your website. Tells how they found you and what they’re interested in. It has a free version. Communication Tools #17 Intercom is a sweet and smart host that welcomes your visitors when you’re not home. It’s one of the best chatbot tools in the market. #18 Drift is famous for its conversational marketing features and more sales-focused than Intercom. #19 Manychat is a chatbot that helps you create high converting Facebook campaigns. #20 Plann3r helps you create your personalized meeting page. You can schedule meetings witch clients, candidates, and prospects. #21 Loom is a video messaging tool, it helps you to be more expressive and create closer relationships. #22 Callpage collects your visitors’ phone number and connects you with them in seconds. No matter where you are. Landing page tools #23 Instapage is the best overall landing page builder. It has a broad range of features and even squirrel can build a compelling landing page with templates. No coding needed. #24 Unbounce can do everything that Instapage does and lets you build a great landing page without a developer. But it's less intuitive. Lead generation / marketing automation tools #25 Phantombuster is by far the most used lead generation software in our tool kit. It extracts data, emails, sends requests, customized messages, and does many things on autopilot in any platform. You can check this, this and this if you want to see it in action. #26 Duxsoup is a Google Chrome add-on and can also automate some of LinkedIn lead generation efforts like Phantombuster. But not works in the cloud. #27 Zapier is a glue that holds all the lead generation tools together. With Zapier, You can connect different marketing tools and no coding required. Conversion rate optimization tools #28 Hotjar tracks what people are doing on your website by recording sessions and capturing mouse movements. Then it gives you a heatmap. #29 UsabilityHub shows your page to a digital crowd and measures the first impressions and helps you to validate your ideas. #30 Optinmonster is a top tier conversion optimization tool. It helps you to capture leads and enables you to increase conversions rates with many features. #31 Notifia is one mega tool of widgets that arms your website with the wildest social proof and lead capturing tactics. #32 Sumo is a much simpler version of Notifia. But Sumo has everything to help you capture leads and build your email lists. Web scrapers #33 Data Miner is a Google Chrome browser extension that helps you scrape data from web pages and into a CSV file or Excel spreadsheet. #34 Webscraper does the same thing as Data Miner; however, it is capable of handling more complex tasks. SEO and Content #35 Grammarly: Your English could be your first language and your grammar could be better than Shakespeare. Grammarly still can make your writing better. #36 Hemingwayapp is a copywriting optimization tool that gives you feedback about your copy and improves your readability score, makes your writing bolder and punchier. Free. #37 Ahrefs is an all-rounder search engine optimization tool that helps you with off-page, on-page or technical SEO. #38 SurferSEO makes things easier for your on-page SEO efforts. It’s a tool that analyzes top Google results for specific keywords and gives you a content brief based on that data. Video editing and design tools #39 Canva is a graphic design platform that makes everything easy. It has thousands of templates for anything from Facebook ads, stylish presentations to business cards.  #40 Kapwing is our go-to platform for quick video edits. It works on the browser and can help you to create stylish videos, add subtitles, resize videos, create memes, or remove backgrounds. #41 Animoto can turn your photos and video clip into beautiful video slideshows. It comes handy when you want to create an advertising material but don’t have a budget. Advertising tools #42 AdEspresso lets you create and test multiple ads with few clicks. You can optimize your FB, IG, and Google ads from this tool and measure your ads with in-depth analytics. #43 AdRoll is an AI-driven platform that connects and coordinates marketing efforts across ads, email, and online stores. Other tools #44 Replug helps you to shorten, track, optimize your links with call-to-actions, branded links, and retargeting pixels #45 Draw.io = Mindmaps, schemes, and charts. With Draw.io, you can put your brain in a digital paper in an organized way. #46 Built With is a tool that finds out what websites are built with. So you can see what tools they're using and so on. #47 Typeform can turn data collection into an experience with Typeform. This tool helps you to engage your audience with conversational forms or surveys and help you to collect more data. #48 Livestorm helped us a lot, especially in COVID-19 tiles. It’s a webinar software that works on your browser, mobile, and desktop. #49 Teachable \- If you have an online course idea but hesitating because of the production process, Teachable can help you. It's easy to configure and customizable for your needs. #50 Viral Loops provides a revolutionary referral marketing solution for modern marketers. You can create and run referral campaigns in a few clicks with templates. Remember, most of these tools have a free trial or free version. Going over them one by one can teach you a lot and help you grow your business with less work power in the early stages of your business. I hope you enjoyed the read and can find some tools to make things easier! Let me know about your favorite tools in the comments, so I can try them out. \------ If you want to check the prices and see a broader explanation about the tools, you can go here.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model
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AI_Scout_OfficialThis week

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
AI_Scout_OfficialThis week

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5
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jottrledThis week

How I went from $27 to $3K as a solopreneur still in a 9-5

My journey started back in November 2023. I was scrolling through Twitter and YouTube and saw a word that I had never come across before. Solopreneur. The word caught my eye. Mainly because I was pretty sure I knew what it meant even though it's not a word you'll find in the dictionary. I liked what it was describing. A solo entrepreneur. A one man business. It completely resonated with me. As a software engineer by trade I'm used to working alone, especially since the pandemic hit and we were forced to work remotely. See, I always wanted to ditch the 9-5 thing but thought that was too big and too scary for a single person to do. Surely you would need a lot of money to get started, right? Surely you would need investors? The whole concept seemed impossible to me. That was until I found all the success stories. I became obsessed with the concept of solopreneurship. As I went further down the rabbit hole I found people like Justin Welsh, Kieran Drew and Marc Louvion to name a few. All of whom have one person businesses making huge money every year. So I thought, if they can do it, why can't I? People like this have cleared the pathway for those looking to escape the 9-5 grind. I decided 2024 would be the year I try this out. My main goal for the year? Build a one man business, earn my first $ online and learn a sh\*t ton along the way. My main goal in general? Build my business to $100K per year, quit my 9-5 and live with freedom. From December 2023 to February 2024 I began brainstorming ideas. I was like a lost puppy looking for his ball. How on earth did people find good ideas? I began writing everything and anything that came to mind down in my notes app on my phone. By February I would have approximately 70 ideas. Each as weird and whacky as the other. I was skeptical though. If I went through all the trouble of building a product for one of these ideas how would I know if anyone would even be interested in using it? I got scared and took a break for a week. All these ideas seemed too big and the chance that they would take off into the atmosphere was slim (in my mind anyways). I was learning more and more about solopreneurship as the weeks went on so I decided to build a product centered around everything I was learning about. The idea was simple. Enter a business idea and use AI to give the user details about how to market it, who their target customers were, what to write on their landing page, etc. All for a measly $27 per use. I quickly built it and launched on March 3rd 2024. I posted about it on Indie Hackers, Reddit and Hacker News. I was so excited about the prospect of earning my first internet $! Surely everyone wanted to use my product! Nope...all I got was crickets. I was quickly brought back down to earth. That was until 5 days later. I looked at my phone and had a new Stripe notification! Cha-ching! My first internet $. What a feeling! That was goal number 1 complete. It would be another 6 days before I would get my second sale...and then another 15 days to get my third. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I went from feeling like quitting the 9-5 was actually possible to thinking that maybe the ups and downs aren't worth it. On one hand I had made my first internet dollar so I should my ecstatic, and don't get me wrong, I was but I wanted more. More validation that I could do this long term. By May I was starting to give up on the product. I had learned so much in the past few months about marketing, SEO, building an audience, etc. and I wanted to build something that I thought could have more success so I focused on one critical thing that I had learned about. What was it? Building a product that had SEO potential. A product that I knew hundreds of people were looking for. See this was my thinking - If I could find a keyword that people were searching for on Google hundreds/thousands of times every month and it was easy to rank high on search engines then I would go all in (in SEO land this equates to a Keyword that has a Keyword Difficulty of = 500). I began researching and found that the keyword "micro saas ideas" was being searched for around 600 times each month. Micro Saas was something that really interested me. It was perfect for solopreneurs. Small software products that 1 person could build. What's not to like if you're in the game of software and solopreneurship? Researching keywords like this became like a game for me. I was hooked. I was doing it every day, finding gems that were being searched for hundreds and thousands of times every month that still had potential. That's when I came up with my next product idea. I decided to create a database of Micro Saas Ideas all with this sort of SEO potential. See if you can build a product that you know people are looking for then that's all the validation you need. So I put this theory to the test. I created a database of Micro Saas Ideas with SEO Potential and launched it in June 2024. This time it was different. I made $700 in the first week of launching. A large contrast to my previous failed attempt at becoming the worlds greatest solopreneur. Since launch I have grown the product to $3K and I couldn't be happier. I know what you're saying, $3K isn't a lot. But it's validation. It's validation that I can earn $ online. Validation that I can grow a business and it gives me hope that one day I'll be able to quit that 9-5 grind. My plan is to keep growing the business. I expect there to be a few challenges up ahead but I'll tackle them as I go and learn from the failures and successes. I have a newsletter where I share Micro Saas Ideas with SEO potential every week which I'll leave below in the first comment. Feel free to come along for the ride. If not I hope this post brings you some value If you're thinking about starting as a solopreneur, stop thinking and start doing, you won't regret it.

The best (actually free to use) AI tools for day-to-day work + productivity
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Tapedulema919This week

The best (actually free to use) AI tools for day-to-day work + productivity

I've spent an ungodly amount of time ~~procrastinating~~ trying tons of new/free AI tools from Reddit and various lists of the best AI tools for different use cases. Frankly, most free AI tools (and even paid ones) are gimmicky ChatGPT wrappers with questionable utility in everyday tasks or overpriced enterprise software that don't use AI as anything more than a marketing buzzword. My last list of free AI tools got a good response here, and I wanted to make another with the best AI tools that I actually use day-to-day now that I've spent more time with them. All these tools can be used for free, though most of them have some kind of premium offering if you need more advanced stuff or a ton of queries. To make it easy to sort through, I've also added whether each tool requires signup. ChatPDF: Free Tool to Use ChatGPT on Your Own Documents/PDFs (free no signup) Put simply, ChatPDF lets you upload any PDF and interact with it like ChatGPT. I heard about this one from my nephew who used it to automatically generate flashcards and explain concepts based on class notes and readings. There are a few similar services out there, but I found ChatPDF the easiest to use of those that don't require payment/signup. If you're a student or someone who needs to read through long PDFs regularly, the possibilities to use this are endless. It's also completely free and doesn't require signup. Key Features: Free to upload up to 3 PDFs daily, with up to 120 pages in each PDF Can be used without signing up at all Taskade: AI Task Management, Scheduling, and Notetaking Tool with GPT-4 Built-In (free with signup) Taskade is an all-in-one notetaking, task management, and scheduling platform with built-in AI workflows and templates. Like Notion, Taskade lets you easily create workspaces, documents, and templates for your workflows. Unlike Notion’s GPT-3 based AI, Taskade has built-in GPT-4 based AI that’s trained to structure your documents, create content, and otherwise help you improve your productivity. Key Features: GPT-4 is built in to their free plan and trained to help with document formatting, scheduling, content creation and answering questions through a chat interface. Its AI seems specifically trained to work seamlessly with your documents and workspaces, and understands queries specific to their interface like asking it to turn (text) notes into a mind map. One of the highest usage limits of the free tools: Taskade’s free plan comes with 1000 monthly requests, which is one of the highest I’ve seen for a tool with built-in GPT-4. Because it’s built into a document editor with database, scheduling and chat capabilities, you can use it for pretty much anything you’d use ChatGPT for but without* paying for ChatGPT Premium. Free templates to get you started with actually integrating AI into your workflows: there are a huge number of genuinely useful free templates for workflows, task management, mind mapping, etc. For example, you can add a project and have Taskade automatically map out and schedule a breakdown of the tasks that make up that overall deliverable. Plus AI for Google Slides: AI-generated (and improved) slide decks (free with signup, addon for Google Slides) I've tried out a bunch of AI presentation/slide generating tools. To be honest, most of them leave a lot to be desired and aren't genuinely useful unless you're literally paid to generate a presentation vaguely related to some topic. Plus AI is a (free!) Google Slides addon that lets you describe the kind of slide deck you're making, then generate and fine-tune it based on your exact needs. It's still not at the point where you can literally just tell it one prompt and get the entire finished product, but it saves a bunch of time getting an initial structure together that you can then perfect. Similarly, if you have existing slides made you can tell it (in natural language) how you want it changed. For example, asking it to change up the layout of text on a page, improve the writing style, or even use external data sources. Key Features: Integrates seamlessly into Google Slides: if you’re already using Slides, using Plus AI is as simple as installing the plugin. Their tutorials are easy to follow and it doesn’t require learning some new slideshow software or interface like some other options. Create and* tweak slides using natural language: Plus AI lets you create whole slideshows, adjust text, or change layouts using natural language. It’s all fairly intuitive and the best of the AI slide tools I’ve tried. FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows (free without signup-though it pushes you to signup!) FlowGPT collects prompts and collections of prompts to do various tasks, from marketing, productivity, and coding to random stuff people find interesting. It uses an upvote system similar to Reddit that makes it easy to find interesting ways to use ChatGPT. It also lets you search for prompts if you have something in mind and want to see what others have done. It's free and has a lot of cool features like showing you previews of how ChatGPT responds to the prompts. Unfortunately, it's also a bit pushy with getting you to signup, and the design leaves something to be desired, but it's the best of these tools I've found. Key Features: Lots of users that share genuinely useful and interesting prompts Upvote system similar to Reddit’s that allows you to find interesting prompts within the categories you’re interested in Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube Videos (free no signup) Summarize generates AI summaries of YouTube videos, condensing them into relatively short written notes with timestamps. All the summaries I've seen have been accurate and save significant time. I find it especially useful when looking at longer tutorials where I want to find if: &#x200B; The tutorial actually tells me what I'm looking for, and See where in the video I can find that specific part. The one downside I've seen is that it doesn't work for videos that don't have subtitles, but hopefully, someone can build something with Whisper or a similar audio transcription API to solve that. Claude: ChatGPT Alternative with ~75k Word Limit (free with signup) If you've used ChatGPT, you've probably run into the issue of its (relatively low) token limit. Put simply, it can't handle text longer than a few thousand words. It's the same reason why ChatGPT "forgets" instructions you gave it earlier on in a conversation. Claude solves that, with a \~75,000 word limit that lets you input literal novels and do pretty much everything you can do with ChatGPT. Unfortunately, Claude is currently only free in the US or UK. Claude pitches itself as the "safer" AI, which can make it a pain to use for many use cases, but it's worth trying out and better than ChatGPT for certain tasks. Currently, I'm mainly using it to summarize long documents that ChatGPT literally cannot process as a single prompt. Key Features: Much longer word limit than even ChatGPT’s highest token models Stronger guardrails than ChatGPT: if you're into this, Claude focuses a lot more on "trust and safety" than even ChatGPT does. While an AI telling me what information I can and can't have is more of an annoyance for my use cases, it can be useful if you're building apps like customer support or other use cases where it's a top priority to keep the AI from writing something "surprising." Phind: AI Search Engine That Combines Google with ChatGPT (free no signup) Like a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Like ChatGPT, it can understand complex prompts and give you detailed answers condensing multiple sources. Like Google, it shows you the most up-to-date sources answering your question and has access to everything on the internet in real time (vs. ChatGPT's September 2021 cutoff). Unlike Google, it avoids spammy links that seem to dominate Google nowadays and actually answers your question. Key Features: Accesses the internet to get you real-time information vs. ChatGPT’s 2021 cutoff. While ChatGPT is great for content generation and other tasks that you don’t really need live information for, it can’t get you any information from past its cutoff point. Provides actual sources for its claims, helping you dive deeper into any specific points and avoid hallucinations. Phind was the first to combine the best of both worlds between Google and ChatGPT, giving you easy access to actual sources the way Google does while summarizing relevant results the way ChatGPT does. It’s still one of the best places for that, especially if you have technical questions. Bing AI: ChatGPT Alternative Based on GPT-4 (with internet access!) (free no signup) For all the hate Bing gets, they've done the best job of all the major search engines of integrating AI chat to answer questions. Bing's Chat AI is very similar to ChatGPT (it's based on GPT-4). Unlike ChatGPT's base model without plugins, it has access to the internet. It also doesn't require signing in, which is nice. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, Google has really dropped the ball lately in delivering non-spammy search results that actually answer the query, and it's nice to see other search engines like Bing and Phind providing alternatives. Key Features: Similar to Phind, though arguably a bit better for non-technical questions: Bing similarly provides sourced summaries, generates content and otherwise integrates AI and search nicely. Built on top of GPT-4: like Taskade, Bing has confirmed they use GPT-4. That makes it another nice option to get around paying for GPT-4 while still getting much of the same capabilities as ChatGPT. Seamless integration with a standard search engine that’s much better than I remember it being (when it was more of a joke than anything) Honorable Mentions: These are the “rest of the best” free AI tools I've found that are simpler/don't need a whole entry to explain: PdfGPT: Alternative to ChatPDF that also uses AI to summarize and let you interact with PDF documents. Nice to have options if you run into one site’s PDF or page limit and don’t want to pay to do so. Remove.bg: One of the few image AI tools I use regularly. Remove.bg uses simple AI to remove backgrounds from your images. It's very simple, but something I end up doing surprisingly often editing product images, etc. CopyAI and Jasper: both are AI writing tools primarily built for website marketing/blog content. I've tried both but don't use them enough regularly to be able to recommend one over the other. Worth trying if you do a lot of content writing and want to automate parts of it. Let me know if you guys recommend any other free AI tools that you use day-to-day and I can add them to the list. I’m also interested in any requests you guys have for AI tools that don’t exist yet, as I’m looking for new projects to work on at the moment! TL;DR: ChatPDF: Interact with any PDF using ChatGPT without signing up, great for students and anyone who needs to filter through long PDFs. Taskade: All-in-one task management, scheduling, and notetaking with built-in GPT-4 Chat + AI assistant for improving productivity. Plus AI for Google Slides: Addon for Google Slides that generates and fine-tunes slide decks based on your description(s) in natural language. FlowGPT: Database of AI prompts and workflows. Nice resource to find interesting ChatGPT prompts. Summarize.Tech: AI summaries of YouTube videos with timestamps that makes it easier to find relevant information in longer videos. Claude: ChatGPT alternative with a \~75k word limit, ideal for handling long documents and tasks that go above ChatGPT's token limit. Phind: AI search engine similar to a combination of Google and ChatGPT. Built in internet access and links/citations for its claims. Bing AI: Bing's ChatGPT alternative based on GPT-4. Has real-time internet access + integrates nicely with their normal search engine.

My AI tools system to get things done 5x faster, after trying 100+ AI tools
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looking-everywhereThis week

My AI tools system to get things done 5x faster, after trying 100+ AI tools

Sorry for the long post, but I just had to share this with you all. After starting my own business, I realized I needed to get more work done and take my productivity to the next level. A few days ago, I asked people in this community to recommend AI tools, and that kicked off my journey to include as many AI apps in my system as possible. In my quest, I've tried over 100 AI tools to find the best ones. It wasn't easy, but thanks to the awesome suggestions from this community, I finally nailed down a setup that works for me. I am in search of more fun tools, so please share if you have some suggestions. So here's the breakdown of my whole system, totaling $194 per month: Content Creation: Text ($20): I use ChatGPT for brainstorming, content creation, marketing, and even legal work. I've been going back to it more often after their O1-preview. Video ($20): Captions Ai is my go-to for video editing. I mainly use self-recorded videos and auto-edit them with this app. Graphics ($14): I mix Gamma and Canva. I've got Gamma's Plus subscription and Canva's Pro subscription. I start by prompting my requirements in Gamma and then edit them later in Canva. Plus, Canva's templates are super handy for other stuff. Productivity: FastTrackr AI ($20): This AI assistant helps me manage emails, reply to them, set up meetings, prepare for them, transcribe notes on my phone, and even do basic research when I'm on WhatsApp. I'm thinking of upgrading to their Pro plan to add other emails. ARC Browser + Perplexity ($0): I snagged a 6-month deal for Perplexity Pro, which will cost $20 later on, including $5 credit for API. Sana AI ($0): This one's amazing for meeting assistance. I love how it understands context and key action items. Not sure when they'll start charging, but I can't recommend it enough. Wispr Flow ($15): Lets me use my voice to command apps. It's amazing how accurately it picks up complex names. Might save some cash if I switch to the annual plan. Sales and Marketing: Lead Enrichment ($67): I'm using Clay and share it with a friend to cut costs. People say there are other options, but this one's the best despite the learning curve. Instantly AI($37): I've tried other tools for cold emails, but Instantly's warm-up feature is top-notch. For other tasks like social media automation and trigger-based automations, I use a mix of Make and Perplexity APIs ($11). Total Cost: $194 per month. I know hiring someone could help me get more done, but I'm thinking of bringing someone onboard with this system already in place. That way, a new hire could potentially lead to 2x or 3x the work output. Thanks for reading through this! Hope this helps anyone looking to boost their productivity with AI tools. Feel free to ask me anything or share your own experiences! Couldn't add links as this gets flagged by mods.

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model
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AI_Scout_OfficialThis week

I run an AI automation agency (AAA). My honest overview and review of this new business model

I started an AI tools directory in February, and then branched off that to start an AI automation agency (AAA) in June. So far I've come across a lot of unsustainable "ideas" to make money with AI, but at the same time a few diamonds in the rough that aren't fully tapped into yet- especially the AAA model. Thought I'd share this post to shine light into this new business model and share some ways you could potentially start your own agency, or at the very least know who you are dealing with and how to pick and choose when you (inevitably) get bombarded with cold emails from them down the line. Foreword Running an AAA does NOT involve using AI tools directly to generate and sell content directly. That ship has sailed, and unless you are happy with $5 from Fiverr every month or so, it is not a real business model. Cry me a river but generating generic art with AI and slapping it onto a T-shirt to sell on Etsy won't make you a dime. At the same time, the AAA model will NOT require you to have a deep theoretical knowledge of AI, or any academic degree, as we are more so dealing with the practical applications of generative AI and how we can implement these into different workflows and tech-stacks, rather than building AI models from the ground up. Regardless of all that, common sense and a willingness to learn will help (a shit ton), as with anything. Keep in mind - this WILL involve work and motivation as well. The mindset that AI somehow means everything can be done for you on autopilot is not the right way to approach things. The common theme of businesses I've seen who have successfully implemented AI into their operations is the willingess to work with AI in a way that augments their existing operations, rather than flat out replace a worker or team. And this is exactly the train of thought you need when working with AI as a business model. However, as the field is relatively unsaturated and hype surrounding AI is still fresh for enterprises, right now is the prime time to start something new if generative AI interests you at all. With that being said, I'll be going over three of the most successful AI-adjacent businesses I've seen over this past year, in addition to some tips and resources to point you in the right direction. so.. WTF is an AI Automation Agency? The AI automation agency (or as some YouTubers have coined it, the AAA model) at its core involves creating custom AI solutions for businesses. I have over 1500 AI tools listed in my directory, however the feedback I've received from some enterprise users is that ready-made SaaS tools are too generic to meet their specific needs. Combine this with the fact virtually no smaller companies have the time or skills required to develop custom solutions right off the bat, and you have yourself real demand. I would say in practice, the AAA model is quite similar to Wordpress and even web dev agencies, with the major difference being all solutions you develop will incorporate key aspects of AI AND automation. Which brings me to my second point- JUST AI IS NOT ENOUGH. Rather than reducing the amount of time required to complete certain tasks, I've seen many AI agencies make the mistake of recommending and (trying to) sell solutions that more likely than not increase the workload of their clients. For example, if you were to make an internal tool that has AI answer questions based on their knowledge base, but this knowledge base has to be updated manually, this is creating unnecessary work. As such I think one of the key components of building successful AI solutions is incorporating the new (Generative AI/LLMs) with the old (programmtic automation- think Zapier, APIs, etc.). Finally, for this business model to be successful, ideally you should target a niche in which you have already worked and understand pain points and needs. Not only does this make it much easier to get calls booked with prospects, the solutions you build will have much greater value to your clients (meaning you get paid more). A mistake I've seen many AAA operators make (and I blame this on the "Get Rich Quick" YouTubers) is focusing too much on a specific productized service, rather than really understanding the needs of businesses. The former is much done via a SaaS model, but when going the agency route the only thing that makes sense is building custom solutions. This is why I always take a consultant-first approach. You can only build once you understand what they actually need and how certain solutions may impact their operations, workflows, and bottom-line. Basics of How to Get Started Pick a niche. As I mentioned previously, preferably one that you've worked in before. Niches I know of that are actively being bombarded with cold emails include real estate, e-commerce, auto-dealerships, lawyers, and medical offices. There is a reason for this, but I will tell you straight up this business model works well if you target any white-collar service business (internal tools approach) or high volume businesses (customer facing tools approach). Setup your toolbox. If you wanted to start a pressure washing business, you would need a pressure-washer. This is no different. For those without programming knowledge, I've seen two common ways AAA get setup to build- one is having a network of on-call web developers, whether its personal contacts or simply going to Upwork or any talent sourcing agency. The second is having an arsenal of no-code tools. I'll get to this more in a second, but this works beecause at its core, when we are dealing with the practical applications of AI, the code is quite simple, simply put. Start cold sales. Unless you have a network already, this is not a step you can skip. You've already picked a niche, so all you have to do is find the right message. Keep cold emails short, sweet, but enticing- and it will help a lot if you did step 1 correctly and intimately understand who your audience is. I'll be touching base later about how you can leverage AI yourself to help you with outreach and closing. The beauty of gen AI and the AAA model You don't need to be a seasoned web developer to make this business model work. The large majority of solutions that SME clients want is best done using an API for an LLM for the actual AI aspect. The value we create with the solutions we build comes with the conceptual framework and design that not only does what they need it to but integrates smoothly with their existing tech-stack and workflow. The actual implementation is quite straightforward once you understand the high level design and know which tools you are going to use. To give you a sense, even if you plan to build out these apps yourself (say in Python) the large majority of the nitty gritty technical work has already been done for you, especially if you leverage Python libraries and packages that offer high level abstraction for LLM-related functions. For instance, calling GPT can be as little as a single line of code. (And there are no-code tools where these functions are simply an icon on a GUI). Aside from understanding the capabilities and limitations of these tools and frameworks, the only thing that matters is being able to put them in a way that makes sense for what you want to build. Which is why outsourcing and no-code tools both work in our case. Okay... but how TF am I suppposed to actually build out these solutions? Now the fun part. I highly recommend getting familiar with Langchain and LlamaIndex. Both are Python libraires that help a lot with the high-level LLM abstraction I mentioned previously. The two most important aspects include being able to integrate internal data sources/knowledge bases with LLMs, and have LLMs perform autonomous actions. The two most common methods respectively are RAG and output parsing. RAG (retrieval augmented Generation) If you've ever seen a tool that seemingly "trains" GPT on your own data, and wonder how it all works- well I have an answer from you. At a high level, the user query is first being fed to what's called a vector database to run vector search. Vector search basically lets you do semantic search where you are searching data based on meaning. The vector databases then retrieves the most relevant sections of text as it relates to the user query, and this text gets APPENDED to your GPT prompt to provide extra context to the AI. Further, with prompt engineering, you can limit GPT to only generate an answer if it can be found within this extra context, greatly limiting the chance of hallucination (this is where AI makes random shit up). Aside from vector databases, we can also implement RAG with other data sources and retrieval methods, for example SQL databses (via parsing the outputs of LLM's- more on this later). Autonomous Agents via Output Parsing A common need of clients has been having AI actually perform tasks, rather than simply spitting out text. For example, with autonomous agents, we can have an e-commerce chatbot do the work of a basic customer service rep (i.e. look into orders, refunds, shipping). At a high level, what's going on is that the response of the LLM is being used programmtically to determine which API to call. Keeping on with the e-commerce example, if I wanted a chatbot to check shipping status, I could have a LLM response within my app (not shown to the user) with a prompt that outputs a random hash or string, and programmatically I can determine which API call to make based on this hash/string. And using the same fundamental concept as with RAG, I can append the the API response to a final prompt that would spit out the answer for the user. How No Code Tools Can Fit In (With some example solutions you can build) With that being said, you don't necessarily need to do all of the above by coding yourself, with Python libraries or otherwise. However, I will say that having that high level overview will help IMMENSELY when it comes to using no-code tools to do the actual work for you. Regardless, here are a few common solutions you might build for clients as well as some no-code tools you can use to build them out. Ex. Solution 1: AI Chatbots for SMEs (Small and Medium Enterprises) This involves creating chatbots that handle user queries, lead gen, and so forth with AI, and will use the principles of RAG at heart. After getting the required data from your client (i.e. product catalogues, previous support tickets, FAQ, internal documentation), you upload this into your knowledge base and write a prompt that makes sense for your use case. One no-code tool that does this well is MyAskAI. The beauty of it especially for building external chatbots is the ability to quickly ingest entire websites into your knowledge base via a sitemap, and bulk uploading files. Essentially, they've covered the entire grunt work required to do this manually. Finally, you can create a inline or chat widget on your client's website with a few lines of HTML, or altneratively integrate it with a Slack/Teams chatbot (if you are going for an internal Q&A chatbot approach). Other tools you could use include Botpress and Voiceflow, however these are less for RAG and more for building out complete chatbot flows that may or may not incorporate LLMs. Both apps are essentially GUIs that eliminate the pain and tears and trying to implement complex flows manually, and both natively incoporate AI intents and a knowledge base feature. Ex. Solution 2: Internal Apps Similar to the first example, except we go beyond making just chatbots but tools such as report generation and really any sort of internal tool or automations that may incorporate LLM's. For instance, you can have a tool that automatically generates replies to inbound emails based on your client's knowledge base. Or an automation that does the same thing but for replies to Instagram comments. Another example could be a tool that generates a description and screeenshot based on a URL (useful for directory sites, made one for my own :P). Getting into more advanced implementations of LLMs, we can have tools that can generate entire drafts of reports (think 80+ pages), based not only on data from a knowledge base but also the writing style, format, and author voice of previous reports. One good tool to create content generation panels for your clients would be MindStudio. You can train LLM's via prompt engineering in a structured way with your own data to essentially fine tune them for whatever text you need it to generate. Furthermore, it has a GUI where you can dictate the entire AI flow. You can also upload data sources via multiple formats, including PDF, CSV, and Docx. For automations that require interactions between multiple apps, I recommend the OG zapier/make.com if you want a no-code solution. For instance, for the automatic email reply generator, I can have a trigger such that when an email is received, a custom AI reply is generated by MyAskAI, and finally a draft is created in my email client. Or, for an automation where I can create a social media posts on multiple platforms based on a RSS feed (news feed), I can implement this directly in Zapier with their native GPT action (see screenshot) As for more complex LLM flows that may require multiple layers of LLMs, data sources, and APIs working together to generate a single response i.e. a long form 100 page report, I would recommend tools such as Stack AI or Flowise (open-source alternative) to build these solutions out. Essentially, you get most of the functions and features of Python packages such as Langchain and LlamaIndex in a GUI. See screenshot for an example of a flow How the hell are you supposed to find clients? With all that being said, none of this matters if you can't find anyone to sell to. You will have to do cold sales, one way or the other, especially if you are brand new to the game. And what better way to sell your AI services than with AI itself? If we want to integrate AI into the cold outreach process, first we must identify what it's good at doing, and that's obviously writing a bunch of text, in a short amount of time. Similar to the solutions that an AAA can build for its clients, we can take advantage of the same principles in our own sales processes. How to do outreach Once you've identified your niche and their pain points/opportunities for automation, you want to craft a compelling message in which you can send via cold email and cold calls to get prospects booked on demos/consultations. I won't get into too much detail in terms of exactly how to write emails or calling scripts, as there are millions of resources to help with this, but I will tell you a few key points you want to keep in mind when doing outreach for your AAA. First, you want to keep in mind that many businesses are still hesitant about AI and may not understand what it really is or how it can benefit their operations. However, we can take advantage of how mass media has been reporting on AI this past year- at the very least people are AWARE that sooner or later they may have to implement AI into their businesses to stay competitive. We want to frame our message in a way that introduces generative AI as a technology that can have a direct, tangible, and positive impact on their business. Although it may be hard to quantify, I like to include estimates of man-hours saved or costs saved at least in my final proposals to prospects. Times are TOUGH right now, and money is expensive, so you need to have a compelling reason for businesses to get on board. Once you've gotten your messaging down, you will want to create a list of prospects to contact. Tools you can use to find prospects include Apollo.io, reply.io, zoominfo (expensive af), and Linkedin Sales Navigator. What specific job titles, etc. to target will depend on your niche but for smaller companies this will tend to be the owner. For white collar niches, i.e. law, the professional that will be directly benefiting from the tool (i.e. partners) may be better to contact. And for larger organizations you may want to target business improvement and digital transformation leads/directors- these are the people directly in charge of projects like what you may be proposing. Okay- so you have your message, and your list, and now all it comes down to is getting the good word out. I won't be going into the details of how to send these out, a quick Google search will give you hundreds of resources for cold outreach methods. However, personalization is key and beyond simple dynamic variables you want to make sure you can either personalize your email campaigns directly with AI (SmartWriter.ai is an example of a tool that can do this), or at the very least have the ability to import email messages programmatically. Alternatively, ask ChatGPT to make you a Python Script that can take in a list of emails, scrape info based on their linkedin URL or website, and all pass this onto a GPT prompt that specifies your messaging to generate an email. From there, send away. How tf do I close? Once you've got some prospects booked in on your meetings, you will need to close deals with them to turn them into clients. Call #1: Consultation Tying back to when I mentioned you want to take a consultant-first appraoch, you will want to listen closely to their goals and needs and understand their pain points. This would be the first call, and typically I would provide a high level overview of different solutions we could build to tacke these. It really helps to have a presentation available, so you can graphically demonstrate key points and key technologies. I like to use Plus AI for this, it's basically a Google Slides add-on that can generate slide decks for you. I copy and paste my default company messaging, add some key points for the presentation, and it comes out with pretty decent slides. Call #2: Demo The second call would involve a demo of one of these solutions, and typically I'll quickly prototype it with boilerplate code I already have, otherwise I'll cook something up in a no-code tool. If you have a niche where one type of solution is commonly demanded, it helps to have a general demo set up to be able to handle a larger volume of calls, so you aren't burning yourself out. I'll also elaborate on how the final product would look like in comparison to the demo. Call #3 and Beyond: Once the initial consultation and demo is complete, you will want to alleviate any remaining concerns from your prospects and work with them to reach a final work proposal. It's crucial you lay out exactly what you will be building (in writing) and ensure the prospect understands this. Furthermore, be clear and transparent with timelines and communication methods for the project. In terms of pricing, you want to take this from a value-based approach. The same solution may be worth a lot more to client A than client B. Furthermore, you can create "add-ons" such as monthly maintenance/upgrade packages, training sessions for employeees, and so forth, separate from the initial setup fee you would charge. How you can incorporate AI into marketing your businesses Beyond cold sales, I highly recommend creating a funnel to capture warm leads. For instance, I do this currently with my AI tools directory, which links directly to my AI agency and has consistent branding throughout. Warm leads are much more likely to close (and honestly, much nicer to deal with). However, even without an AI-related website, at the very least you will want to create a presence on social media and the web in general. As with any agency, you will want basic a professional presence. A professional virtual address helps, in addition to a Google Business Profile (GBP) and TrustPilot. a GBP (especially for local SEO) and Trustpilot page also helps improve the looks of your search results immensely. For GBP, I recommend using ProfilePro, which is a chrome extension you can use to automate SEO work for your GBP. Aside from SEO optimzied business descriptions based on your business, it can handle Q/A answers, responses, updates, and service descriptions based on local keywords. Privacy and Legal Concerns of the AAA Model Aside from typical concerns for agencies relating to service contracts, there are a few issues (especially when using no-code tools) that will need to be addressed to run a successful AAA. Most of these surround privacy concerns when working with proprietary data. In your terms with your client, you will want to clearly define hosting providers and any third party tools you will be using to build their solution, and a DPA with these third parties listed as subprocessors if necessary. In addition, you will want to implement best practices like redacting private information from data being used for building solutions. In terms of addressing concerns directly from clients, it helps if you host your solutions on their own servers (not possible with AI tools), and address the fact only ChatGPT queries in the web app, not OpenAI API calls, will be used to train OpenAI's models (as reported by mainstream media). The key here is to be open and transparent with your clients about ALL the tools you are using, where there data will be going, and make sure to get this all in writing. have fun, and keep an open mind Before I finish this post, I just want to reiterate the fact that this is NOT an easy way to make money. Running an AI agency will require hours and hours of dedication and work, and constantly rearranging your schedule to meet prospect and client needs. However, if you are looking for a new business to run, and have a knack for understanding business operations and are genuinely interested in the pracitcal applications of generative AI, then I say go for it. The time is ticking before AAA becomes the new dropshipping or SMMA, and I've a firm believer that those who set foot first and establish themselves in this field will come out top. And remember, while 100 thousand people may read this post, only 2 may actually take initiative and start.

Hello! Seeking essential advice regarding the desire to create an "AI". One that acts as a personal musical "Composer" in response to the individual users' emotional feedback. Company Name already created, as well as Trademark name for potential AI. However, I don't know where to start...
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TheHumanAnimal-This week

Hello! Seeking essential advice regarding the desire to create an "AI". One that acts as a personal musical "Composer" in response to the individual users' emotional feedback. Company Name already created, as well as Trademark name for potential AI. However, I don't know where to start...

Title pretty much sums it up. With 0 background in computer science as well as no experience developing a company, I'm seeking professional advice (or personal) on the best approach to this potential business idea. Given the progression of Artificial Intelligence and its influence on the global population in modern day, I have now developed an interest in its potential. After creating a model for foundation, one which is relatively simple in nature, I took it upon to myself to embrace my lack of knowledge/interest in the science of AI and go directly to the source: ChatGPT. Unfortunately, I currently can't afford to engage with the "smartest model" of ChatGPT, but after discussing a plan of approach with the free OpenAI version, I was given a lot of valuable information that I most likely would have overwhelmed myself with independently. With that being said, I'm now looking to hear from individuals who have actual experience within the respective backgrounds. Any advice will help Questions: What does the development of an AI assistant require for foundation? Can it be built upon already established AI and will there require a level of knowledge regarding coding as well as the proper legal understanding of API usage? Should the focus be on app development or the AI tool specifically? What communities would you suggest, to seek individuals with the ability to bring an idea to fruition virtually? From a business perspective, given the lack of financial resources and significant model value, how would one communicate this idea to others to potentially become involved or invested? If I am asking the wrong question, feel free to advise. Any questions that require more information on the idea is welcomed.

No-code platform for Creating AI Chatbots
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ANICKINTHEUNIVERSEThis week

No-code platform for Creating AI Chatbots

Hey everyone! I've got an idea that I'm really excited about and I thought I’d share it with this community to get some feedback. I've been thinking about how chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, but the process of fine tuning and managing them can be a real hassle. The idea I am proposing is a no-code interface for creating and managing chatbots using the GPT-3 API. Think about it, imagine having the ability to create and customize your own chatbot in minutes, without any coding required. You could easily embed it into your Notion page or website and use it to provide better support or answer questions for customers. And if you're a solopreneur looking to sell access to your chatbot, this platform could be especially helpful for that This is just an idea for now, but I'm hoping to gauge interest and see if there's enough demand for such a product. Whether you're a solopreneur, a small business owner, or just someone who's curious about chatbots, your input is valuable to me. So what do you think? Would you be interested in using a no-code interface for creating and managing chatbots with GPT-3 API? Let me know in the comments and I'll keep you updated on the progress. And if you're interested in being a customer, co-founder, or just want early access, PM me your email with the word ‘Chatbot’ and I’ll make sure to keep you updated if this ever exists. Thanks for your time and I can't wait to hear from you!

Digital Analytics and Marketing
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Chou789This week

Digital Analytics and Marketing

I'm a Data Analyst with wide range of experience in this niche. Looking for partner to bring me clients and get a cut on the charges, i.e act as a agency connecting businesses with developers. Lately, I see that Developer costs in US/EU is skyrocketing and hiring a decent Data Analyst costs a fortune for companies, small companies can't even think of getting one. Already working with several small businesses and see that many small businesses have need somebody to play around their data but since it's a costly affair, mostly small businesses stick with Excel and Google Sheets as their database and don't leverage the potential of automation, now with AI/LLM, having proper data strategy is important. We can team up and provide reach these low hanging fruits. What i do: Data Reporting: Move clients current data systems from Excel, Google Sheets into Database/Datawarehouse Integrate data from different sources like Pipedrive, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Shopify etc and create automated custom reports on the data. Digital Marketing: For Shopify/Ecommernce site owners - Google Analytics Reporting Answer questions like Where is my traffic coming from, which traffic is working, how long they are staying in site, which products are working, product views to purchase ratio etc Custom Desktop Applications Custom: Have a custom idea? Let's discuss. DM me. Thanks. PS: Potential customers include ones who can't hire $50-$150/hr full time developers but want one at part time/freelancing type where they can get things done quickly/validating their ideas without burning their business.

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey
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benfromwhereThis week

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

Need help with the growth I couldn't handle
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luxendaryThis week

Need help with the growth I couldn't handle

Calling all innovators, dreamers, and disruptors! &#x200B; We're pioneering a new frontier in the world of manufacturing with our vision: "Text to Product". I'm seeking individuals passionate about AI, manufacturing, efficiency and automation. While we can't promise immediate financial rewards, we're offering equity in a venture that's setting out to redefine the way things are made and sold. If the prospect of revolutionizing the future of humanity excites you, we'd love to hear from you. &#x200B; &#x200B; P.S. I realized that I can't always use "brute force" for solving problems, so seeking "the right connections" (seasoned entrepreneurs, advisors). Here's the TLDR version of my story: Started a company with ex-boss, bought him out, grinded for 2 years, found a way to 1000x the orders.* Went full speed for a month, got overwhelmed, barely kept up with half the demand (with that production process).* Focused on this one "platform", shipped hundreds of thousands of units in one holiday season.* Next quarter "the platform" returned about 85% of products as "overstock", demanded money back, made legal threats.* I told them that I will go to court and they stopped bothering me.* Then Covid + Nasty divorce which made me put a pause to regroup.* 2 years later, with 2x the production capacity and after relocating to a friendlier state (from NYC to MIA) I'm ready to relaunch (with a clear head, knowledge of fast growth and what to avoid).*

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
benfromwhereThis week

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

Digital Analytics and Marketing
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Chou789This week

Digital Analytics and Marketing

I'm a Data Analyst with wide range of experience in this niche. Looking for partner to bring me clients and get a cut on the charges, i.e act as a agency connecting businesses with developers. Lately, I see that Developer costs in US/EU is skyrocketing and hiring a decent Data Analyst costs a fortune for companies, small companies can't even think of getting one. Already working with several small businesses and see that many small businesses have need somebody to play around their data but since it's a costly affair, mostly small businesses stick with Excel and Google Sheets as their database and don't leverage the potential of automation, now with AI/LLM, having proper data strategy is important. We can team up and provide reach these low hanging fruits. What i do: Data Reporting: Move clients current data systems from Excel, Google Sheets into Database/Datawarehouse Integrate data from different sources like Pipedrive, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Shopify etc and create automated custom reports on the data. Digital Marketing: For Shopify/Ecommernce site owners - Google Analytics Reporting Answer questions like Where is my traffic coming from, which traffic is working, how long they are staying in site, which products are working, product views to purchase ratio etc Custom Desktop Applications Custom: Have a custom idea? Let's discuss. DM me. Thanks. PS: Potential customers include ones who can't hire $50-$150/hr full time developers but want one at part time/freelancing type where they can get things done quickly/validating their ideas without burning their business.

Digital Analytics and Marketing
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
Chou789This week

Digital Analytics and Marketing

I'm a Data Analyst with wide range of experience in this niche. Looking for partner to bring me clients and get a cut on the charges, i.e act as a agency connecting businesses with developers. Lately, I see that Developer costs in US/EU is skyrocketing and hiring a decent Data Analyst costs a fortune for companies, small companies can't even think of getting one. Already working with several small businesses and see that many small businesses have need somebody to play around their data but since it's a costly affair, mostly small businesses stick with Excel and Google Sheets as their database and don't leverage the potential of automation, now with AI/LLM, having proper data strategy is important. We can team up and provide reach these low hanging fruits. What i do: Data Reporting: Move clients current data systems from Excel, Google Sheets into Database/Datawarehouse Integrate data from different sources like Pipedrive, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Shopify etc and create automated custom reports on the data. Digital Marketing: For Shopify/Ecommernce site owners - Google Analytics Reporting Answer questions like Where is my traffic coming from, which traffic is working, how long they are staying in site, which products are working, product views to purchase ratio etc Custom Desktop Applications Custom: Have a custom idea? Let's discuss. DM me. Thanks. PS: Potential customers include ones who can't hire $50-$150/hr full time developers but want one at part time/freelancing type where they can get things done quickly/validating their ideas without burning their business.

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score0.778
benfromwhereThis week

How I Made $250.000+ in a Year: A Case Study of My AI Influencer Journey

Update on February 22th: I changed my AI influencer's names because it caused some problems on my business. One year, two AI-powered influencers, and $250K in revenue. Sounds unreal? It’s not. Today, I’m pulling back the curtain on the strategies, tools, and hard-won lessons that took me from concept to a six-figure success story in the AI influencer space. Hey, I'm Ben—a 32-year-old designer who spent the past year navigating the world of AI influencers. Let me clear up any confusion right from the start: I’m not here to sell you anything. This is purely a case study to share what worked, what didn’t, and what I’ve learned along the way. I’ll also make sure to answer all your questions in the comments for free whenever I can, so don’t hesitate to ask. Links to Past Topics: If you're curious about some of the groundwork I covered, check out a few of my earlier posts here: How I Make $10,000 Monthly | AI Influencer Management How I Earned $7000+ in 15 Days | AI Influencer Business Update These earlier posts cover a lot of the backstory, so feel free to explore them before diving into this one. So if you're ready, here is the full story: \---- The idea of creating an AI influencer was one of those “what if” moments that wouldn’t leave my mind. At first, it sounded futuristic—even a bit too ambitious. It all started when I stumbled upon an AI influencer on Instagram with the handle AnnaMaes2000. Her content blew me away—the quality, the detail, and just how real everything looked. I was instantly hooked and ended up going through every post, just trying to figure out how she was pulling this off. That’s when I knew I had to learn how this was done. The next step? YouTube. I dived into videos on Stable Diffusion, soaking up everything I could about creating AI-generated images. Those tutorials taught me the basics and got me up to speed. Then, I created my first AI influencer, let's call her Mel for now. Right after that, to complete the storyline and boost engagement, I introduced Mel's “mother,” Jess. Adding Jess gave the whole project depth and a narrative that drew people in, creating a unique family dynamic that instantly elevated traffic and interest. After thousands of bad photos, hundreds of deleted posts, and months of trial and error, you can now see the quality that defines my current accounts. Here’s a rundown of the tools and checkpoints I’ve used from day one, in order: Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V8 Fooocus on RunDiffusion — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) — Juggernaut V9 Fooocus on PC (locally) —Lyuyang Mix + Juggernaut V9 Flux on PC (couple of photos only since it's so slow even on RTX 4090) Flux on Fal.ai. \---- There’s no magic Instagram hack that guarantees success, despite what everyone thinks and keeps asking me. Quality content, consistent uploads, and solid craftsmanship are what actually help your photos hit trends and show up on the Explore page. Unlike 95% of low-quality AI accounts out there, I don’t rely on faceswap videos, spam Reels, or go around liking comments on other accounts. My approach is fully organic, focused solely on creating my own unique content. By following Instagram's guidelines to the letter, I've managed to direct some of Mel and Jess' fans over to Patreon and Fanvue. There, for a small subscription fee, fans can access exclusive lingerie content. For those looking for more, higher-tier subscriptions give access to even more premium content. Some possible questions and their answers: No, you can't share hardcore NSFW content on Patreon. You can do that on Fanvue. Yes, you can create AI creators on Fanvue — OnlyFans doesn't allow it. Yes, you can use your own ID to get KYC. Yes, we're telling both Mel and Jess is (or use) AI to generate content. And yes, some people leave and some people still have fun with chatting, having a good time and get perfect content for their needs. And yes, we have a chatter team to work on these accounts. \---- This journey wasn’t all smooth sailing. I faced unexpected roadblocks, like platform restrictions that limited certain types of content, and managing fan expectations was more challenging than anticipated. Staying within guidelines while keeping fans engaged required constant adaptation. These hurdles forced me to get creative, adjust my approach, and learn fast. Once I saw Mel and Jess gaining traction, I knew it was time to scale up. Expanding meant finding new ways to keep content fresh, creating deeper narratives, and considering how to bring even more followers into the fold. My focus turned to building a sustainable model that could grow without sacrificing quality or authenticity. If you’re thinking about diving into AI content creation, here’s my advice: patience, consistency, and a focus on quality are key. Don’t cut corners or rely on quick-fix hacks. Invest time in learning the right tools, creating engaging stories, and building an audience that values what you bring to the table. This approach took me from zero to six figures, and it’s what makes the journey worth it. \---- And finally, here’s the income breakdown that everyone’s curious about: Mel on Fanvue: $82,331.58 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Mel on Patreon: $50,865.98 (Net earnings) Jess on Fanvue: $89,068.26 (Gross earnings because we have chatter cuts like 15%) Jess on Patreon: $39,040.70 And thanks to Reddit and my old posts, I got a perfect investor like after 5 months, so this is a "payback" for that. Like I said, I'll answer every question in the comments — take care and let me know.

I had over 1000 visitors in 24h thanks to a post on HN and generated 0$ revenue but here is what I learned:
reddit
LLM Vibe Score0
Human Vibe Score1
sow4codeThis week

I had over 1000 visitors in 24h thanks to a post on HN and generated 0$ revenue but here is what I learned:

I litteraly just have 39 followers ont Twitter, I don't have an audience at all and a vice that entrepreneurs and indie hackers often fall into is looking at others who have an audience and to start hating it and telling themselves that even if their products are crap they will still have traffic on their site given their number of subscribers and their audiences. This thought is just a limiting thought because. Yes, obviously it's easier for the person who already has an andience to bring traffic to their site and acquire these first users but these people have to work to build this audience, it wasn't easy, it required a lot of effort but we quickly forget that when we don't even have a tenth of what this person has and despite this facility it's not an excuse to fill up and abandon your project, telling yourself that no one will ever see my product if I don't already have a built audience. That's not an excuse ! I am proof of this on a small scale, yesterday I launched my new product (EduHunt, a site that helps you find the most relevant educational content that you are looking for to avoid paying for online courses that are worth a fortune but to be honest in the end it was rubbish, the idea seemed good but the market is what it is and there is NO need for a site like that, I still learn lessons from it, failure is necessary to succeed ! ). So I launched EduHunt on Hacker News and on Reddit but Reddit didn't bring me much in the end. 1 hour after the launch I had around fifty visitors and 3 registered (trial period), I told myself that it was going to continue like this and I hoped to have 200 visitors at the end of the day no more. I can't tell you what a surprise it was when I opened Vercel and saw 800 visitors for 50 online as I looked, I went crazy lol. My post on Hacker News "exploded", I had more than 400 people who had just come from Hacker News and other sites linked to Hacker News, I told myself that it was finally the right one but reality quickly caught up with me , I went to see my post and this is the kind of comment I had ( Above the text ) As you see, my product sucks and it's not the end of the world, I learn a lot of lessons from it, I failed in the design of the product in directly reflecting what the idea of the product is (most of the comments do not really target my basic idea, I wanted to create a site to help search for educational content on YouTube with filters that are not in the usual YouTube search and this in text format analyzed by AI, I was told that I monetize free videos, I do not appropriate the videos that I put on my site and that you have to pay to have access, what is monetized here is the means of 'access to the content, not the content itself, but yes I failed in this and in many others of this project but I come out better) Despite this, I attracted more than 1000 visitors to my site in less than 24 hours with a simple post on Hacker News, a good title, a sincere story to go with it and that was it, I have no audience nothing at all. If the product had been much better who knows where I would be today. All this to say and remind you that there are no excuses to hide behind, building an audience requires hard work and takes time ! But just because you don't have one doesn't mean you can never bring traffic to your site. Be honest in what you do, learn from your mistakes, repeat and you should find your happiness.

voicefilter
github
LLM Vibe Score0.496
Human Vibe Score0.029786815978503328
maum-aiMar 24, 2025

voicefilter

VoiceFilter Note from Seung-won (2020.10.25) Hi everyone! It's Seung-won from MINDs Lab, Inc. It's been a long time since I've released this open-source, and I didn't expect this repository to grab such a great amount of attention for a long time. I would like to thank everyone for giving such attention, and also Mr. Quan Wang (the first author of the VoiceFilter paper) for referring this project in his paper. Actually, this project was done by me when it was only 3 months after I started studying deep learning & speech separation without a supervisor in the relevant field. Back then, I didn't know what is a power-law compression, and the correct way to validate/test the models. Now that I've spent more time on deep learning & speech since then (I also wrote a paper published at Interspeech 2020 😊), I can observe some obvious mistakes that I've made. Those issues were kindly raised by GitHub users; please refer to the Issues and Pull Requests for that. That being said, this repository can be quite unreliable, and I would like to remind everyone to use this code at their own risk (as specified in LICENSE). Unfortunately, I can't afford extra time on revising this project or reviewing the Issues / Pull Requests. Instead, I would like to offer some pointers to newer, more reliable resources: VoiceFilter-Lite: This is a newer version of VoiceFilter presented at Interspeech 2020, which is also written by Mr. Quan Wang (and his colleagues at Google). I highly recommend checking this paper, since it focused on a more realistic situation where VoiceFilter is needed. List of VoiceFilter implementation available on GitHub: In March 2019, this repository was the only available open-source implementation of VoiceFilter. However, much better implementations that deserve more attention became available across GitHub. Please check them, and choose the one that meets your demand. PyTorch Lightning: Back in 2019, I could not find a great deep-learning project template for myself, so I and my colleagues had used this project as a template for other new projects. For people who are searching for such project template, I would like to strongly recommend PyTorch Lightning. Even though I had done a lot of effort into developing my own template during 2019 (VoiceFilter -> RandWireNN -> MelNet -> MelGAN), I found PyTorch Lightning much better than my own template. Thanks for reading, and I wish everyone good health during the global pandemic situation. Best regards, Seung-won Park Unofficial PyTorch implementation of Google AI's: VoiceFilter: Targeted Voice Separation by Speaker-Conditioned Spectrogram Masking. Result Training took about 20 hours on AWS p3.2xlarge(NVIDIA V100). Audio Sample Listen to audio sample at webpage: http://swpark.me/voicefilter/ Metric | Median SDR | Paper | Ours | | ---------------------- | ----- | ---- | | before VoiceFilter | 2.5 | 1.9 | | after VoiceFilter | 12.6 | 10.2 | SDR converged at 10, which is slightly lower than paper's. Dependencies Python and packages This code was tested on Python 3.6 with PyTorch 1.0.1. Other packages can be installed by: Miscellaneous ffmpeg-normalize is used for resampling and normalizing wav files. See README.md of ffmpeg-normalize for installation. Prepare Dataset Download LibriSpeech dataset To replicate VoiceFilter paper, get LibriSpeech dataset at http://www.openslr.org/12/. train-clear-100.tar.gz(6.3G) contains speech of 252 speakers, and train-clear-360.tar.gz(23G) contains 922 speakers. You may use either, but the more speakers you have in dataset, the more better VoiceFilter will be. Resample & Normalize wav files First, unzip tar.gz file to desired folder: Next, copy utils/normalize-resample.sh to root directory of unzipped data folder. Then: Edit config.yaml Preprocess wav files In order to boost training speed, perform STFT for each files before training by: This will create 100,000(train) + 1000(test) data. (About 160G) Train VoiceFilter Get pretrained model for speaker recognition system VoiceFilter utilizes speaker recognition system (d-vector embeddings). Here, we provide pretrained model for obtaining d-vector embeddings. This model was trained with VoxCeleb2 dataset, where utterances are randomly fit to time length [70, 90] frames. Tests are done with window 80 / hop 40 and have shown equal error rate about 1%. Data used for test were selected from first 8 speakers of VoxCeleb1 test dataset, where 10 utterances per each speakers are randomly selected. Update: Evaluation on VoxCeleb1 selected pair showed 7.4% EER. The model can be downloaded at this GDrive link. Run After specifying traindir, testdir at config.yaml, run: This will create chkpt/name and logs/name at base directory(-b option, . in default) View tensorboardX Resuming from checkpoint Evaluate Possible improvments Try power-law compressed reconstruction error as loss function, instead of MSE. (See #14) Author Seungwon Park at MINDsLab (yyyyy@snu.ac.kr, swpark@mindslab.ai) License Apache License 2.0 This repository contains codes adapted/copied from the followings: utils/adabound.py from https://github.com/Luolc/AdaBound (Apache License 2.0) utils/audio.py from https://github.com/keithito/tacotron (MIT License) utils/hparams.py from https://github.com/HarryVolek/PyTorchSpeakerVerification (No License specified) utils/normalize-resample.sh from https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/216475

internet-tools-collection
github
LLM Vibe Score0.236
Human Vibe Score0.009333333333333334
bogdanmosicaJan 23, 2025

internet-tools-collection

Internet Tools Collection A collection of tools, website and AI for entrepreneurs, web designers, programmers and for everyone else. Content by category Artificial Intelligence Developers Design Entrepreneur Video Editing Stock videos Stock Photos Stock music Search Engine Optimization Blog Posts Resume Interviews No code website builder No code game builder Side Hustle Browser Extensions Other Students Artificial Intelligence Jasper - The Best AI Writing Assistant [](https://www.jasper.ai/) Create content 5x faster with artificial intelligence. Jasper is the highest quality AI copywriting tool with over 3,000 5-star reviews. Best for writing blog posts, social media content, and marketing copy. AutoDraw [](https://www.autodraw.com/) Fast drawing for everyone. AutoDraw pairs machine learning with drawings from talented artists to help you draw stuff fast. Rytr - Best AI Writer, Content Generator & Writing Assistant [](https://rytr.me/) Rytr is an AI writing assistant that helps you create high-quality content, in just a few seconds, at a fraction of the cost! Neevo - Neevo [](https://www.neevo.ai/) Kinetix Tech [](https://kinetix.tech/) Kinetix is a no-code 3D creation tool powered by Artificial Intelligence. The web-based platform leverages AI motion capture to convert a video into a 3D animation and lets you customize your avatars and environments. We make 3D animation accessible to every creator so they can create engaging stories. LALAL.AI: 100% AI-Powered Vocal and Instrumental Tracks Remover [](https://www.lalal.ai/) Split vocal and instrumental tracks quickly and accurately with LALAL.AI. Upload any audio file and receive high-quality extracted tracks in a few seconds. Copy.ai: Write better marketing copy and content with AI [](https://www.copy.ai/) Get great copy that sells. Copy.ai is an AI-powered copywriter that generates high-quality copy for your business. Get started for free, no credit card required! Marketing simplified! OpenAI [](https://openai.com/) OpenAI is an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. DALL·E 2 [](https://openai.com/dall-e-2/) DALL·E 2 is a new AI system that can create realistic images and art from a description in natural language. Steve.ai - World’s fastest way to create Videos [](https://www.steve.ai/) Steve.AI is an online Video making software that helps anyone to create Videos and animations in seconds. Octie.ai - Your A.I. ecommerce marketing assistant [](https://octie.ai/) Write emails, product descriptions, and more, with A.I. Created by Octane AI. hypnogram.xyz [](https://hypnogram.xyz/) Generate images from text descriptions using AI FakeYou. Deep Fake Text to Speech. [](https://fakeyou.com/) FakeYou is a text to speech wonderland where all of your dreams come true. Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini [](https://www.craiyon.com/) Craiyon, formerly DALL-E mini, is an AI model that can draw images from any text prompt! Deck Rocks - Create Pictch Decks [](https://www.deck.rocks/) Writely | Using AI to Improve Your Writing [](https://www.writelyai.com/) Making the art of writing accessible to all Writesonic AI Writer - Best AI Writing Assistant [](https://writesonic.com/) Writesonic is an AI writer that's been trained on top-performing SEO content, high-performing ads, and converting sales copy to help you supercharge your writing and marketing efforts. Smart Copy - AI Copywriting Assistant | Unbounce [](https://unbounce.com/product/smart-copy/) Generate creative AI copy on-the-spot across your favourite tools Synthesia | #1 AI Video Generation Platform [](https://www.synthesia.io/) Create AI videos by simply typing in text. Easy to use, cheap and scalable. Make engaging videos with human presenters — directly from your browser. Free demo. NVIDIA Canvas: Turn Simple Brushstrokes into Realistic Images [](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/studio/canvas/) Create backgrounds quickly, or speed up your concept exploration so you can spend more time visualizing ideas with the help of NVIDIA Canvas. Hotpot.ai - Hotpot.ai [](https://hotpot.ai/) Hotpot.ai makes graphic design and image editing easy. AI tools allow experts and non-designers to automate tedious tasks while attractive, easy-to-edit templates allow anyone to create device mockups, social media posts, marketing images, app icons, and other work graphics. Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. Search listening tool for market, customer & content research - AnswerThePublic [](https://answerthepublic.com/) Use our free tool to get instant, raw search insights, direct from the minds of your customers. Upgrade to a paid plan to monitor for new ways that people talk & ask questions about your brand, product or topic. Topic Mojo [](https://topicmojo.com/) Discover unique & newest queries around any topic and find what your customers are searching for. Pulling data from 50+ sources to enhance your topic research. AI Image Enlarger | Enlarge Image Without Losing Quality! [](https://imglarger.com/) AI Image Enlarger is a FREE online image enlarger that could upscale and enhance small images automatically. Make jpg/png pictures big without losing quality. Midjourney [](https://www.midjourney.com/app/) Kaedim - AI for turning 2D images to 3D models [](https://www.kaedim3d.com/webapp) AI for turning 2D images, sketches and photos to 3D models in seconds. Overdub: Ultra realistic text to speech voice cloning - Descript [](https://www.descript.com/overdub) Create a text to speech model of your voice. Try a live demo. Getting Started [](https://magenta.tensorflow.org/get-started) Resources to learn about Magenta Photosonic AI Art Generator | Create Unique Images with AI [](https://photosonic.writesonic.com/) Transform your imagination into stunning digital art with Photosonic - the AI art generator. With its creative suggestions, this Writesonic's AI image generator can help unleash your inner artist and share your creations with the world. Image Computer [](https://image.computer/) Most downloaded Instagram Captions App (+more creator tools) [](https://captionplus.app/) Join 3 Million+ Instagram Creators who use CaptionPlus to find Instagram Captions, Hashtags, Feed Planning, Reel Ideas, IG Story Design and more. Writecream - Best AI Writer & Content Generator - Writecream [](https://www.writecream.com/) Sentence Rewriter is a free tool to reword a sentence, paragraph and even entire essays in a short amount of time. Hypotenuse AI: AI Writing Assistant and Text Generator [](https://www.hypotenuse.ai/) Turn a few keywords into original, insightful articles, product descriptions and social media copy with AI copywriting—all in just minutes. Try it free today. Text to Speach Listnr: Generate realistic Text to Speech voiceovers in seconds [](https://www.listnr.tech/) AI Voiceover Generator with over 600+ voiceovers in 80+ languages, go from Text to Voice in seconds. Get started for Free! Free Text to Speech: Online, App, Software, Commercial license with Natural Sounding Voices. [](https://www.naturalreaders.com/) Free text to speech online app with natural voices, convert text to audio and mp3, for personal and commercial use Developers OverAPI.com | Collecting all the cheat sheets [](https://overapi.com/) OverAPI.com is a site collecting all the cheatsheets,all! Search Engine For Devs [](https://you.com/) Spline - Design tool for 3D web browser experiences [](https://spline.design/) Create web-based 3D browser experiences Image to HTML CSS converter. Convert image to HTML CSS with AI: Fronty [](https://fronty.com/) Fronty - Image to HTML CSS code converter. Convert image to HTML powered by AI. Sketchfab - The best 3D viewer on the web [](https://sketchfab.com/) With a community of over one million creators, we are the world’s largest platform to publish, share, and discover 3D content on web, mobile, AR, and VR. Railway [](https://railway.app/) Railway is an infrastructure platform where you can provision infrastructure, develop with that infrastructure locally, and then deploy to the cloud. JSON Crack - Crack your data into pieces [](https://jsoncrack.com/) Simple visualization tool for your JSON data. No forced structure, paste your JSON and view it instantly. Locofy.ai - ship your products 3-4x faster — with low code [](https://www.locofy.ai/) Turn your designs into production-ready frontend code for mobile apps and web. Ship products 3-4x faster with your existing design tools, tech stacks & workflows. Oh Shit, Git!?! [](https://ohshitgit.com/) Carbon | Create and share beautiful images of your source code [](https://carbon.now.sh/) Carbon is the easiest way to create and share beautiful images of your source code. GPRM : GitHub Profile ReadMe Maker [](https://gprm.itsvg.in/) Best Profile Generator, Create your perfect GitHub Profile ReadMe in the best possible way. Lots of features and tools included, all for free ! HubSpot | Software, Tools, and Resources to Help Your Business Grow Better [](https://www.hubspot.com/) HubSpot’s integrated CRM platform contains the marketing, sales, service, operations, and website-building software you need to grow your business. QuickRef.ME - Quick Reference Cheat Sheet [](https://quickref.me/) Share quick reference and cheat sheet for developers massCode | A free and open source code snippets manager for developers [](https://masscode.io/) Code snippets manager for developers, developed using web technologies. Snyk | Developer security | Develop fast. Stay secure. [](https://snyk.io/) Snyk helps software-driven businesses develop fast and stay secure. Continuously find and fix vulnerabilities for npm, Maven, NuGet, RubyGems, PyPI and more. Developer Roadmaps [](https://roadmap.sh/) Community driven roadmaps, articles, guides, quizzes, tips and resources for developers to learn from, identify their career paths, know what they don't know, find out the knowledge gaps, learn and improve. CSS Generators Get Waves – Create SVG waves for your next design [](https://getwaves.io/) A free SVG wave generator to make unique SVG waves for your next web design. Choose a curve, adjust complexity, randomize! Box Shadows [](https://box-shadow.dev/) Tridiv | CSS 3D Editor [](http://tridiv.com/) Tridiv is a web-based editor for creating 3D shapes in CSS Glassmorphism CSS Generator - Glass UI [](https://ui.glass/generator/) Generate CSS and HTML components using the glassmorphism design specifications based on the Glass UI library. Blobmaker - Make organic SVG shapes for your next design [](https://www.blobmaker.app/) Make organic SVG shapes for your next design. Modify the complexity, contrast, and color, to generate unique SVG blobs every time. Keyframes.app [](https://keyframes.app/) cssFilters.co - Custom and Instagram like photo filters for CSS [](https://www.cssfilters.co/) Visual playground for generating CSS for custom and Instagram like photo filters. Experiment with your own uploaded photo or select one from the Unsplash collection. CSS Animations Animista - CSS Animations on Demand [](https://animista.net/) Animista is a CSS animation library and a place where you can play with a collection of ready-made CSS animations and download only those you will use. Build Internal apps Superblocks | Save 100s of developer hours on internal tools [](https://www.superblocks.com/) Superblocks is the fast, easy and secure way for developers to build custom internal tools fast. Connect your databases & APIs. Drag and drop UI components. Extend with Python or Javascript. Deploy in 1-click. Secure and Monitor using your favorite tools Budibase | Build internal tools in minutes, the easy way [](https://budibase.com/) Budibase is a modern, open source low-code platform for building modern internal applications in minutes. Retool | Build internal tools, remarkably fast. [](https://retool.com/) Retool is the fast way to build internal tools. Drag-and-drop our building blocks and connect them to your databases and APIs to build your own tools, instantly. Connects with Postgres, REST APIs, GraphQL, Firebase, Google Sheets, and more. Built by developers, for developers. Trusted by startups and Fortune 500s. Sign up for free. GitHub Repositories GitHub - vasanthk/how-web-works: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? [](https://github.com/vasanthk/how-web-works) What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? - GitHub - vasanthk/how-web-works: What happens behind the scenes when we type www.google.com in a browser? GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. [](https://github.com/kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap) Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. - GitHub - kamranahmedse/developer-roadmap: Interactive roadmaps, guides and other educational content to help developers grow in their careers. GitHub - apptension/developer-handbook: An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. [](https://github.com/apptension/developer-handbook) An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. - GitHub - apptension/developer-handbook: An opinionated guide on how to become a professional Web/Mobile App Developer. ProfileMe.dev | Create an amazing GitHub profile in minutes [](https://www.profileme.dev/) ProfileMe.dev | Create an amazing GitHub profile in minutes GitHub - Kristories/awesome-guidelines: A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. [](https://github.com/Kristories/awesome-guidelines) A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. - GitHub - Kristories/awesome-guidelines: A curated list of high quality coding style conventions and standards. GitHub - tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet: A list of cool features of Git and GitHub. [](https://github.com/tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet) A list of cool features of Git and GitHub. Contribute to tiimgreen/github-cheat-sheet development by creating an account on GitHub. GitHub - andreasbm/web-skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer [](https://github.com/andreasbm/web-skills) A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer - GitHub - andreasbm/web-skills: A visual overview of useful skills to learn as a web developer GitHub - Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes: Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers [](https://github.com/Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes) Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers - GitHub - Ebazhanov/linkedin-skill-assessments-quizzes: Full reference of LinkedIn answers 2022 for skill assessments (aws-lambda, rest-api, javascript, react, git, html, jquery, mongodb, java, Go, python, machine-learning, power-point) linkedin excel test lösungen, linkedin machine learning test LinkedIn test questions and answers Blockchain/Crypto Dashboards [](https://dune.com/) Blockchain ecosystem analytics by and for the community. Explore and share data from Ethereum, xDai, Polygon, Optimism, BSC and Solana for free. Introduction - The Anchor Book v0.24.0 [](https://book.anchor-lang.com/introduction/introduction.html) Crypto & Fiat Exchange Super App | Trade, Save & Spend | hi [](https://hi.com/) Buy, Trade, Send and Earn Crypto & Fiat. Deposit Bitcoin, ETH, USDT and other cryptos and start earning. Get the hi Debit Card and Multi-Currency IBAN Account. Moralis Web3 - Enterprise-Grade Web3 APIs [](https://moralis.io/) Bridge the development gap between Web2 and Web3 with Moralis’ powerful Web3 APIs. Mirror [](https://mirror.xyz/) Built on web3 for web3, Mirror’s robust publishing platform pushes the boundaries of writing online—whether it’s the next big white paper or a weekly community update. Makerdao [](https://blog.makerdao.com/) Sholi — software for Investors & Traders / Sholi MetriX [](https://sholi.io/) Sholi — software for Investors & Traders / Sholi MetriX Stock Trading Quiver Quantitative [](https://www.quiverquant.com/) Quiver Quantitative Chart Prime - The only tool you'll need for trading assets across all markets [](https://chartprime.com/) ChartPrime offers a toolkit that will take your trading game to the next level. Visit our site for a full rundown of features and helpful tutorials. Learning Hacker Rank [](https://www.hackerrank.com/) Coderbyte | Code Screening, Challenges, & Interview Prep [](https://coderbyte.com/) Improve your coding skills with our library of 300+ challenges and prepare for coding interviews with content from leading technology companies. Competitive Programming | Participate & Learn | CodeChef [](https://www.codechef.com/) Learn competitive programming with the help of CodeChef's coding competitions. Take part in these online coding contests to level up your skills Learn to Code - for Free | Codecademy [](https://www.codecademy.com/) Learn the technical skills to get the job you want. Join over 50 million people choosing Codecademy to start a new career (or advance in their current one). Free Code Camp [](https://www.freecodecamp.org/) Learn to Code — For Free Sololearn: Learn to Code [](https://www.sololearn.com/home) Join Now to learn the basics or advance your existing skills Mimo: The coding app you need to learn to code! Python, HTML, JavaScript [](https://getmimo.com/) Join more than 17 million learners worldwide. Learn to code for free. Learn Python, JavaScript, CSS, SQL, HTML, and more with our free code learning app. Free for developers [](https://free-for.dev/#/) Your Career in Web Development Starts Here | The Odin Project [](https://www.theodinproject.com/) The Odin Project empowers aspiring web developers to learn together for free Code Learning Games CheckiO - coding games and programming challenges for beginner and advanced [](https://checkio.org/) CheckiO - coding websites and programming games. Improve your coding skills by solving coding challenges and exercises online with your friends in a fun way. Exchanges experience with other users online through fun coding activities Coding for Kids | Game-Based Programming | CodeMonkey [](https://www.codemonkey.com/) CodeMonkey is a leading coding for kids program. Through its award-winning courses, millions of students learn how to code in real programming languages. Coding Games and Programming Challenges to Code Better [](https://www.codingame.com/) CodinGame is a challenge-based training platform for programmers where you can play with the hottest programming topics. Solve games, code AI bots, learn from your peers, have fun. Learn VIM while playing a game - VIM Adventures [](https://vim-adventures.com/) VIM Adventures is an online game based on VIM's keyboard shortcuts. It's the "Zelda meets text editing" game. So come have some fun and learn some VIM! CodeCombat - Coding games to learn Python and JavaScript [](https://codecombat.com/) Learn typed code through a programming game. Learn Python, JavaScript, and HTML as you solve puzzles and learn to make your own coding games and websites. Design Useberry - Codeless prototype analytics [](https://www.useberry.com/) User testing feedback & rich insights in minutes, not months! Figma: the collaborative interface design tool. [](https://www.figma.com/) Build better products as a team. Design, prototype, and gather feedback all in one place with Figma. Dribbble - Discover the World’s Top Designers & Creative Professionals [](https://dribbble.com/) Find Top Designers & Creative Professionals on Dribbble. We are where designers gain inspiration, feedback, community, and jobs. Your best resource to discover and connect with designers worldwide. Photopea | Online Photo Editor [](https://www.photopea.com/) Photopea Online Photo Editor lets you edit photos, apply effects, filters, add text, crop or resize pictures. Do Online Photo Editing in your browser for free! Toools.design – An archive of 1000+ Design Resources [](https://www.toools.design/) A growing archive of over a thousand design resources, weekly updated for the community. Discover highly useful design tools you never thought existed. All Online Tools in One Box | 10015 Tools [](https://10015.io/) All online tools you need in one box for free. Build anything online with “all-in-one toolbox”. All tools are easy-to-use, blazing fast & free. Phase - Digital Design Reinvented| Phase [](https://phase.com/) Design and prototype websites and apps visually and intuitively, in a new powerful product reworked for the digital age. Animated Backgrounds [](https://animatedbackgrounds.me/) A Collection of 30+ animated backgrounds for websites and blogs.With Animated Backgrounds, set a simple, elegant background animations on your websites and blogs. Trianglify.io · Low Poly Pattern Generator [](https://trianglify.io/) Trianglify.io is a tool for generating low poly triangle patterns that can be used as wallpapers and website assets. Cool Backgrounds [](https://coolbackgrounds.io/) Explore a beautifully curated selection of cool backgrounds that you can add to blogs, websites, or as desktop and phone wallpapers. SVG Repo - Free SVG Vectors and Icons [](https://www.svgrepo.com/) Free Vectors and Icons in SVG format. ✅ Download free mono or multi color vectors for commercial use. Search in 300.000+ Free SVG Vectors and Icons. Microcopy - Short copy text for your website. [](https://www.microcopy.me/) Search micro UX copy text: slogans, headlines, notifications, CTA, error messages, email, account preferences, and much more. 3D icons and icon paks - Free3Dicon [](https://free3dicon.com/) All 3D icons you need in one place. This is a collection of free, beautiful, trending 3D icons, that you can use in any project. Love 3D Icon [](https://free3dicons.com/) Downloads free 3D icons GIMP - GNU Image Manipulation Program [](https://www.gimp.org/) GIMP - The GNU Image Manipulation Program: The Free and Open Source Image Editor blender.org - Home of the Blender project - Free and Open 3D Creation Software [](https://www.blender.org/) The Freedom to Create 3D Design Software | 3D Modeling on the Web | SketchUp [](https://www.sketchup.com/) SketchUp is a premier 3D design software that truly makes 3D modeling for everyone, with a simple to learn yet robust toolset that empowers you to create whatever you can imagine. Free Logo Maker - Create a Logo in Seconds - Shopify [](https://www.shopify.com/tools/logo-maker) Free logo maker tool to generate custom design logos in seconds. This logo creator is built for entrepreneurs on the go with hundreds of templates, free vectors, fonts and icons to design your own logo. The easiest way to create business logos online. All your design tools in one place | Renderforest [](https://www.renderforest.com/) Time to get your brand noticed. Create professional videos, logos, mockups, websites, and graphics — all in one place. Get started now! Prompt Hero [](https://prompthero.com/) Type Scale - A Visual Calculator [](https://type-scale.com/) Preview and choose the right type scale for your project. Experiment with font size, scale and different webfonts. DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion [](https://dreamfusion3d.github.io/) DreamFusion: Text-to-3D using 2D Diffusion, 2022. The branding style guidelines documents archive [](https://brandingstyleguides.com/) Welcome to the brand design manual documents directory. Search over our worldwide style assets handpicked collection, access to PDF documents for inspiration. Super designer | Create beautiful designs with a few clicks [](https://superdesigner.co/) Create beautiful designs with a few clicks. Simple design tools to generate unique patterns, backgrounds, 3D shapes, colors & images for social media, websites and more Readymag—a design tool to create websites without coding [](https://readymag.com/) Meet the most elegant, simple and powerful web-tool for designing websites, presentations, portfolios and all kinds of digital publications. ffflux: Online SVG Fluid Gradient Background Generator | fffuel [](https://fffuel.co/ffflux/) SVG generator to make fluid gradient backgrounds that feel organic and motion-like. Perfect to add a feeling of motion and fluidity to your web designs. Generate unique SVG design assets | Haikei [](https://haikei.app/) A web-based design tool to generate unique SVG design assets for websites, social media, blog posts, desktop and mobile wallpapers, posters, and more! Our generators let you discover, customize, randomize, and export generative SVG design assets ready to use with your favorite design tools. UI/UX - Inspirational Free Website Builder Software | 10,000+ Free Templates [](https://nicepage.com/) Nicepage is your website builder software breaking limitations common for website builders with revolutionary freehand positioning. 7000+ Free Templates. Easy Drag-n-Drop. No coding. Mobile-friendly. Clean HTML. Super designer | Create beautiful designs with a few clicks [](https://superdesigner.co/) Create beautiful designs with a few clicks. Simple design tools to generate unique patterns, backgrounds, 3D shapes, colors & images for social media, websites and more Pika – Create beautiful mockups from screenshots [](https://pika.style/) Quickly create beautiful website and device mockup from screenshot. Pika lets you capture website screenshots form URL, add device and browser frames, customize background and more LiveTerm [](https://liveterm.vercel.app/) Minimal Gallery – Web design inspiration [](https://minimal.gallery/) For the love of beautiful, clean and functional websites. Awwwards - Website Awards - Best Web Design Trends [](https://www.awwwards.com/) Awwwards are the Website Awards that recognize and promote the talent and effort of the best developers, designers and web agencies in the world. Design Systems For Figma [](https://www.designsystemsforfigma.com/) A collection of Design Systems for Figma from all over the globe. Superside: Design At Scale For Ambitious Brands [](https://www.superside.com/) We are an always-on design company. Get a team of dedicated designers, speedy turnarounds, magical creative collaboration tech and the top 1% of global talent. UXArchive - Made by Waldo [](https://uxarchive.com/) UXArchive the world's largest library of mobile user flows. Be inspired to design the best user experiences. Search by Muzli [](https://search.muz.li/) Search, discover, test and create beautiful color palettes for your projects Siteinspire | Web Design Inspiration [](https://www.siteinspire.com/) SAVEE [](https://savee.it/) The best way to save and share inspiration. A little corner of the internet to find good landing page copywriting examples [](https://greatlandingpagecopy.com/) A little corner of the internet to find great landing page copywriting examples. The Best Landing Page Examples For Design Inspiration - SaaS Landing Page [](https://saaslandingpage.com/) SaaS Landing Page showcases the best landing page examples created by top-class SaaS companies. Get ideas and inspirations for your next design project. Websites Free templates Premium Bootstrap Themes and Templates: Download @ Creative Tim [](https://www.creative-tim.com/) UI Kits, Templates and Dashboards built on top of Bootstrap, Vue.js, React, Angular, Node.js and Laravel. Join over 2,014,387+ creatives to access all our products! Free Bootstrap Themes, Templates, Snippets, and Guides - Start Bootstrap [](https://startbootstrap.com/) Start Bootstrap develops free to download, open source Bootstrap 5 themes, templates, and snippets and creates guides and tutorials to help you learn more about designing and developing with Bootstrap. Free Website Templates [](https://freewebsitetemplates.com/) Get your free website templates here and use them on your website without needing to link back to us. One Page Love - One Page Website Inspiration and Templates [](https://onepagelove.com/) One Page Love is a One Page website design gallery showcasing the best Single Page websites, templates and resources. Free CSS | 3400 Free Website Templates, CSS Templates and Open Source Templates [](https://www.free-css.com/) Free CSS has 3400 free website templates, all templates are free CSS templates, open source templates or creative commons templates. Free Bootstrap Themes and Website Templates | BootstrapMade [](https://bootstrapmade.com/) At BootstrapMade, we create beautiful website templates and bootstrap themes using Bootstrap, the most popular HTML, CSS and JavaScript framework. Free and Premium Bootstrap Themes, Templates by Themesberg [](https://themesberg.com/) Free and Premium Bootstrap themes, templates, admin dashboards and UI kits used by over 38820 web developers and software companies HTML, Vue.js and React templates for startup landing pages - Cruip [](https://cruip.com/) Cruip is a gallery of premium and free HTML, Vue.js and React templates for startups and SaaS. Free Website Templates Download | WordPress Themes - W3Layouts [](https://w3layouts.com/) Want to download free website templates? W3Layouts WordPress themes and website templates are built with responsive web design techniques. Download now! Free HTML Landing Page Templates and UI Kits | UIdeck [](https://uideck.com/) Free HTML Landing Page Templates, Bootstrap Themes, React Templates, HTML Templates, Tailwind Templates, and UI Kits. Create Online Graphics Snappa - Quick & Easy Graphic Design Software [](https://snappa.com/) Snappa makes it easy to create any type of online graphic. Create & publish images for social media, blogs, ads, and more! Canva [](https://www.canva.com/) Polotno Studio - Make graphical designs [](https://studio.polotno.com) Free online design editor. Create images for social media, youtube previews, facebook covers Free Logo Maker: Design Custom Logos | Adobe Express [](https://www.adobe.com/express/create/logo) The Adobe Express logo maker is instant, intuitive, and intelligent. Use it to generate a wide range of possibilities for your own logo. Photo Editor: Fotor – Free Online Photo Editing & Image Editor [](https://www.fotor.com/) Fotor's online photo editor helps you edit photos with free online photo editing tools. Crop photos, resize images, and add effects/filters, text, and graphics in just a few clicks. Photoshop online has never been easier with Fotor's free online photo editor. VistaCreate – Free Graphic Design Software with 70,000+ Free Templates [](https://create.vista.com/) Looking for free graphic design software? Easily create professional designs with VistaCreate, a free design tool with powerful features and 50K+ ready-made templates Draw Freely | Inkscape [](https://inkscape.org/) Inkscape is professional quality vector graphics software which runs on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows desktop computers. Visual & Video Maker Trusted By 11 Million Users - Piktochart [](https://piktochart.com/) With Piktochart, you can create professional-looking infographics, flyers, posters, charts, videos, and more. No design experience needed. Start for free. The Web's Favorite Online Graphic Design Tool | Stencil [](https://getstencil.com/) Stencil is a fantastically easy-to-use online graphic design tool and image editor built for business owners, social media marketers, and bloggers. Pablo by Buffer - Design engaging images for your social media posts in under 30 seconds [](https://pablo.buffer.com/) Buffer makes it super easy to share any page you're reading. Keep your Buffer topped up and we automagically share them for you through the day. Free Online Graphic Design Software | Create stunning designs in seconds. [](https://desygner.com/) Easy drag and drop graphic design tool for anyone to use with 1000's of ready made templates. Create & print professional business cards, flyers, social posts and more. Color Pallet Color Palettes for Designers and Artists - Color Hunt [](https://colorhunt.co/) Discover the newest hand-picked color palettes of Color Hunt. Get color inspiration for your design and art projects. Coolors - The super fast color palettes generator! [](https://coolors.co/) Generate or browse beautiful color combinations for your designs. Get color palette inspiration from nature - colorpalettes.earth [](https://colorpalettes.earth/) Color palettes inspired by beautiful nature photos Color Palette Generator - Create Beautiful Color Schemes [](https://colors.muz.li/) Search, discover, test and create beautiful color palettes for your projects A Most Useful Color Picker | 0to255 [](https://0to255.com/) Find lighter and darker colors based on any color. Discover why over two million people have used 0to255 to choose colors for their website, logo, room interior, and print design projects. Colour Contrast Checker [](https://colourcontrast.cc/) Check the contrast between different colour combinations against WCAG standards Fonts Google Fonts [](https://fonts.google.com/) Making the web more beautiful, fast, and open through great typography Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world. [](https://fontsinuse.com/) A searchable archive of typographic design, indexed by typeface, format, and topic. Wordmark - Helps you choose fonts! [](https://wordmark.it/) Wordmark helps you choose fonts by quickly displaying your text with your fonts. OH no Type Company [](https://ohnotype.co/) OH no Type Co. Retail and custom typefaces. Life’s a thrill, fonts are chill! Illustrations Illustrations | unDraw [](https://undraw.co/illustrations) The design project with open-source illustrations for any idea you can imagine and create. Create beautiful websites, products and applications with your color, for free. Design Junction [](https://designjunction.xyz/) Design Junction is a one-stop resource library for Designers and Creatives with curated list of best resources handpicked from around the web Humaaans: Mix-&-Match illustration library [](https://www.humaaans.com/) Mix-&-match illustrations of people with a design library for InVIsion Studio and Sketch. Stubborn - Free Illustrations Generator [](https://stubborn.fun/) Free illustrations generator for Figma and Sketch. Get the opportunity to design your characters using symbols and styles. Open Peeps, Hand-Drawn Illustration Library [](https://www.openpeeps.com/) Open Peeps is a hand-drawn illustration library to create scenes of people. You can use them in product illustration, marketing, comics, product states, user flows, personas, storyboarding, quinceañera invitations, or whatever you want! ⠀ Reshot | Free icons & illustrations [](https://www.reshot.com/) Design freely with instant downloads of curated SVG icons and vector illustrations. All free with commercial licensing. No attribution required. Blush: Illustrations for everyone [](https://blush.design/) Blush makes it easy to add free illustrations to your designs. Play with fully customizable graphics made by artists across the globe. Mockups Angle 4 - 5000+ Device Mockups for Figma, Sketch and XD [](https://angle.sh/) Vector mockups for iPhone, iPad, Android and Mac devices, including the new iPhone 13, Pro, Pro Max and Mini. Perfect for presenting your apps. Huge library of components, compositions, wallpapers and plugins made for Figma, Sketch and XD. Make Mockups, Logos, Videos and Designs in Seconds [](https://placeit.net/) Get unlimited downloads on all our 100K templates! You can make a logo, video, mockup, flyer, business card and social media image in seconds right from your browser. Free and premium tools for graphic designers | Lstore Graphics [](https://www.ls.graphics/) Free and premium mockups, UI/UX tools, scene creators for busy designers Logo Design & Brand Identity Platform for Entrepreneurs | Looka [](https://looka.com/) Logojoy is now Looka! Design a Logo, make a website, and create a Brand Identity you’ll love with the power of Artificial Intelligence. 100% free to use. Create stunning product mockups easily and online - Smartmockups [](https://smartmockups.com/) Smartmockups enables you to create stunning high-resolution mockups right inside your browser within one interface across multiple devices. Previewed - Free mockup generator for your app [](https://previewed.app/) Join Previewed to create stunning 3D image shots and animations for your app. Choose from hundreds of ready made mockups, or create your own. Free Design Software - Graphic Online Maker - Glorify [](https://www.glorify.com/) Create professional and high converting social media posts, ads, infographics, presentations, and more with Glorify, a free design software & graphic maker. Other BuiltWith Technology Lookup [](https://builtwith.com/) Web technology information profiler tool. Find out what a website is built with. Compress JPEG Images Online [](https://compressjpeg.com/) Compress JPEG images and photos for displaying on web pages, sharing on social networks or sending by email. PhotoRoom - Remove Background and Create Product Pictures [](https://www.photoroom.com/) Create product and portrait pictures using only your phone. Remove background, change background and showcase products. Magic Eraser - Remove unwanted things from images in seconds [](https://www.magiceraser.io/) Magic Eraser - Use AI to remove unwanted things from images in seconds. Upload an image, mark the bit you need removed, download the fixed up image. Compressor.io - optimize and compress JPEG photos and PNG images [](https://compressor.io/) Optimize and compress JPEG, PNG, SVG, GIF and WEBP images online. Compress, resize and rename your photos for free. Remove Video Background – Unscreen [](https://www.unscreen.com/) Remove the background of any video - 100% automatically, online & free! Goodbye Greenscreen. Hello Unscreen. Noun Project: Free Icons & Stock Photos for Everything [](https://thenounproject.com/) Noun Project features the most diverse collection of icons and stock photos ever. Download SVG and PNG. Browse over 5 million art-quality icons and photos. Design Principles [](https://principles.design/) An Open Source collection of Design Principles and methods Shapefest™ - A massive library of free 3D shapes [](https://www.shapefest.com/) A massive free library of beautifully rendered 3D shapes. 160,000+ high resolution PNG images in one cohesive library. Learning UX Degreeless.design - Everything I Learned in Design School [](https://degreeless.design/) This is a list of everything I've found useful in my journey of learning design, and an ongoing list of things I think you should read. For budding UX, UI, Interaction, or whatever other title designers. UX Tools | Practical UX skills and tools [](https://uxtools.co/) Lessons and resources from two full-time product designers. Built For Mars [](https://builtformars.com/) On a mission to help the world build better user experiences by demystifying UX. Thousands of hours of research packed into UX case studies. Case Study Club – Curated UX Case Study Gallery [](https://www.casestudy.club/) Case Study Club is the biggest curated gallery of the best UI/UX design case studies. Get inspired by industry-leading designers, openly sharing their UX process. The Guide to Design [](https://start.uxdesign.cc/) A self-guided class to help you get started in UX and answer key questions about craft, design, and career Uxcel - Where design careers are built [](https://app.uxcel.com/explore) Available on any device anywhere in the world, Uxcel is the best way to improve and learn UX design online in just 5 minutes per day. UI & UX Design Tips by Jim Raptis. [](https://www.uidesign.tips/) Learn UI & UX Design with practical byte-sized tips and in-depth articles from Jim Raptis. Entrepreneur Instant Username Search [](https://instantusername.com/#/) Instant Username Search checks out if your username is available on more than 100 social media sites. Results appear instantly as you type. Flourish | Data Visualization & Storytelling [](https://flourish.studio/) Beautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling PiPiADS - #1 TikTok Ads Spy Tool [](https://www.pipiads.com/) PiPiADS is the best tiktok ads spy tool .We provide tiktok advertising,advertising on tiktok,tiktok ads examples,tiktok ads library,tiktok ads best practices,so you can understand the tiktok ads cost and master the tiktok ads 2021 and tiktok ads manager. Minea - The best adspy for product search in ecommerce and dropshipping [](https://en.minea.com/) Minea is the ultimate e-commerce product search tool. Minea tracks all ads on all networks. Facebook Ads, influencer product placements, Snapspy, all networks are tracked. Stop paying adspy 149€ for one network and discover Minea. AdSpy [](https://adspy.com/) Google Trends [](https://trends.google.com/) ScoreApp: Advanced Quiz Funnel Marketing | Make a Quiz Today [](https://www.scoreapp.com/) ScoreApp makes quiz funnel marketing easy, so you can attract relevant warm leads, insightful data and increase your sales. Try for free today Mailmodo - Send Interactive Emails That Drive Conversions [](https://www.mailmodo.com/) Use Mailmodo to create and send interactive emails your customers love. Drive conversions and get better email ROI. Sign up for a free trial now. 185 Top E-Commerce Sites Ranked by User Experience Performance – Baymard Institute [](https://baymard.com/ux-benchmark) See the ranked UX performance of the 185 largest e-commerce sites in the US and Europe. The chart summarizes 50,000+ UX performance ratings. Metricool - Analyze, manage and measure your digital content [](https://metricool.com/) Social media scheduling, web analytics, link in bio and reporting. Metricool is free per live for one brand. START HERE Visualping: #1 Website change detection, monitoring and alerts [](https://visualping.io/) More than 1.5 millions users monitor changes in websites with Visualping, the No1 website change detection, website checker, webpage change monitoring and webpage change detection tool. Gumroad – Sell what you know and see what sticks [](https://gumroad.com/) Gumroad is a powerful, but simple, e-commerce platform. We make it easy to earn your first dollar online by selling digital products, memberships and more. Product Hunt – The best new products in tech. [](https://www.producthunt.com/) Product Hunt is a curation of the best new products, every day. Discover the latest mobile apps, websites, and technology products that everyone's talking about. 12ft Ladder [](https://12ft.io/) Show me a 10ft paywall, I’ll show you a 12ft ladder. namecheckr | Social and Domain Name Availability Search For Brand Professionals [](https://www.namecheckr.com/) Social and Domain Name Availability Search For Brand Professionals Excel AI Formula Generator - Excelformulabot.com [](https://excelformulabot.com/) Transform your text instructions into Excel formulas in seconds with the help of AI. Z-Library [](https://z-lib.org/) Global Print On Demand Platform | Gelato [](https://www.gelato.com/) Create and sell custom products online. With local production in 33 countries, easy integration, and 24/7 customer support, Gelato is an all-in-one platform. Freecycle: Front Door [](https://freecycle.org/) Free eBooks | Project Gutenberg [](https://www.gutenberg.org/) Project Gutenberg is a library of free eBooks. Convertio — File Converter [](https://convertio.co/) Convertio - Easy tool to convert files online. More than 309 different document, image, spreadsheet, ebook, archive, presentation, audio and video formats supported. Namechk [](https://namechk.com/) Crazy Egg Website — Optimization | Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys & A/B Testing [](https://www.crazyegg.com/) Use Crazy Egg to see what's hot and what's not, and to know what your web visitors are doing with tools, such as heatmaps, recordings, surveys, A/B testing & more. Ifttt [](https://ifttt.com/) Also Asked [](https://alsoasked.com/) Business Name Generator - Easily create Brandable Business Names - Namelix [](https://namelix.com/) Namelix uses artificial intelligence to create a short, brandable business name. Search for domain availability, and instantly generate a logo for your new business Merch Informer [](https://merchinformer.com/) Headline Generator [](https://www.title-generator.com/) Title Generator: create 700 headlines with ONE CLICK: Content Ideas + Catchy Headlines + Ad Campaign E-mail Subject Lines + Emotional Titles. Simple - Efficient - One Click Make [](https://www.make.com/en) Create and add calculator widgets to your website | CALCONIC_ [](https://www.calconic.com/) Web calculator builder empowers you to choose from a pre-made templates or build your own calculator widgets from a scratch without any need of programming knowledge Boost Your Views And Subscribers On YouTube - vidIQ [](https://vidiq.com/) vidIQ helps you acquire the tools and knowledge needed to grow your audience faster on YouTube and beyond. Learn More Last Pass [](https://www.lastpass.com/) Starter Story: Learn How People Are Starting Successful Businesses [](https://www.starterstory.com/) Starter Story interviews successful entrepreneurs and shares the stories behind their businesses. In each interview, we ask how they got started, how they grew, and how they run their business today. How To Say No [](https://www.starterstory.com/how-to-say-no) Saying no is hard, but it's also essential for your sanity. Here are some templates for how to say no - so you can take back your life. Think with Google - Discover Marketing Research & Digital Trends [](https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/) Uncover the latest marketing research and digital trends with data reports, guides, infographics, and articles from Think with Google. ClickUp™ | One app to replace them all [](https://clickup.com/) Our mission is to make the world more productive. To do this, we built one app to replace them all - Tasks, Docs, Goals, and Chat. The Manual [](https://manual.withcompound.com/) Wealth-planning resources for founders and startup employees Software for Amazon FBA Sellers & Walmart Sellers | Helium 10 [](https://www.helium10.com/) If you're looking for the best software for Amazon FBA & Walmart sellers on the market, check out Helium 10's capabilities online today! Buffer: All-you-need social media toolkit for small businesses [](https://buffer.com/) Use Buffer to manage your social media so that you have more time for your business. Join 160,000+ small businesses today. CPGD — The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory [](https://www.cpgd.xyz/) The Consumer Packaged Goods Directory is a platform to discover new brands and resources. We share weekly trends in our newsletter and partner with services to provide vetted, recommended platforms for our Directory brands. Jungle Scout [](https://www.junglescout.com/) BuzzSumo | The World's #1 Content Marketing Platform [](https://buzzsumo.com/) BuzzSumo powers the strategies of 500k+ marketers, with content marketing data on 8b articles, 42m websites, 300t engagements, 500k journalists & 492m questions. Login - Capital [](https://app.capital.xyz/) Raise, hold, spend, and send funds — all in one place. Marketing Pictory – Video Marketing Made Easy - Pictory.ai [](https://pictory.ai/) Pictory's powerful AI enables you to create and edit professional quality videos using text, no technical skills required or software to download. Tolstoy | Communicate with interactive videos [](https://www.gotolstoy.com/) Start having face-to-face conversations with your customers. Create Email Marketing Your Audience Will Love - MailerLite [](https://www.mailerlite.com/) Email marketing tools to grow your audience faster and drive revenue smarter. Get free access to premium features with a 30-day trial! Sign up now! Hypefury - Schedule & Automate Social Media Marketing [](https://hypefury.com/) Save time on social media while creating more value, and growing your audience faster. Schedule & automate your social media experience! Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. Online Email & Lead Scraper | Klean Leads [](https://www.kleanleads.com/) Klean Leads is an online email scraper & email address finder. Use it to book more appointments, get more replies, and close more sales. PhantomBuster [](https://phantombuster.com/) Call to Action Examples - 300+ CTA Phrases [](https://ctaexamples.com/) See the best CTA example in every situation covered by the library of 300+ CTA goals. Use the examples to create your own CTAs in minutes. Creative Center: one-stop creative solution for TikTok [](https://ads.tiktok.com/business/creativecenter/pc/en?from=001010) Come to get your next great idea for TikTok. Here you can find the best performing ads, viral videos, and trending hashtags across regions and verticals. Groove.cm GrooveFunnels, GrooveMail with CRM and Digital Marketing Automation Platform - Groove.cm with GrooveFunnels, GroovePages, GrooveKart [](https://groove.cm/) Groove is a website creator, page builder, sales funnel maker, membership site platform, email autoresponder, blog tool, shopping cart system, ecommerce store solution, affiliate manager, video marketing software and more apps to help build your online business. SurveyMonkey: The World’s Most Popular Free Online Survey Tool [](https://www.surveymonkey.com/) Use SurveyMonkey to drive your business forward by using our free online survey tool to capture the voices and opinions of the people who matter most to you. Video Maker | Create Videos Online | Promo.com [](https://promo.com/) Free customizable video maker to help boost your business. Video creator for ads, social media, product and explainer videos, and for anything else you need! beehiiv — The newsletter platform built for growth [](https://www.beehiiv.com/) Access the best tools available in email, helping your newsletter scale and monetize like never before. GetResponse | Professional Email Marketing for Everyone [](https://www.getresponse.com/) No matter your level of expertise, we have a solution for you. At GetResponse, it's email marketing done right. Start your free account today! Search Email Newsletter Archives : Email Tuna [](https://emailtuna.com/) Explore newsletters without subscribing. Get email design ideas, discount coupon codes and exclusive newsletters deals. Database of email newsletters archived from all over the internet. Other Tools Simplescraper — Scrape Websites and turn them into APIs [](https://simplescraper.io/) Web scraping made easy — a powerful and free Chrome extension for scraping websites in your browser, automated in the cloud, or via API. No code required. Exploding Topics - Discover the hottest new trends. [](https://explodingtopics.com/) See new market opportunities, trending topics, emerging technology, hot startups and more on Exploding Topics. Scribe | Visual step-by-step guides [](https://scribehow.com/) By capturing your process while you work, Scribe automatically generates a visual guide, ready to share with the click of a button. Get It Free – The internet's BEST place to find free stuff! [](https://getitfree.us/) The internet's BEST place to find free stuff! Inflact by Ingramer – Marketing toolkit for Instagram [](https://inflact.com/) Sell on Instagram, build your audience, curate content with the right set of tools. Free Online Form Builder & Form Creator | Jotform [](https://www.jotform.com/) We believe the right form makes all the difference. Go from busywork to less work with powerful forms that use conditional logic, accept payments, generate reports, and automate workflows. Manage Your Team’s Projects From Anywhere | Trello [](https://trello.com/en) Trello is the ultimate project management tool. Start up a board in seconds, automate tedious tasks, and collaborate anywhere, even on mobile. TikTok hashtag generator - tiktokhashtags.com [](https://tiktokhashtags.com/) Find out which are the best hashtags for your TikTok post. Create Infographics, Reports and Maps - Infogram [](https://infogram.com/) Infogram is an easy to use infographic and chart maker. Create and share beautiful infographics, online reports, and interactive maps. Make your own here. Confetto - Create Instagram content in minutes [](https://www.confet.to/) Confetto is an all-in-one social media marketing tool built for SMBs and Social Media Managers. Confetto helps you create high-quality content for your audience that maximizes your reach and engagement on social media. Design, copy-write, plan and schedule content all in one place. Find email addresses in seconds • Hunter (Email Hunter) [](https://hunter.io/) Hunter is the leading solution to find and verify professional email addresses. Start using Hunter and connect with the people that matter for your business. PlayPhrase.me: Site for cinema archaeologists. [](https://playphrase.me/) Travel and explore the world of cinema. Largest collection of video quotes from movies on the web. #1 Free SEO Tools → SEO Review Tools [](https://www.seoreviewtools.com/) SEO Review Tools: 42+ Free Online SEO Tools build with ❤! → Rank checker → Domain Authority Checker → Keyword Tool → Backlink Checker Podcastle: Seamless Podcast Recording & Editing [](https://podcastle.ai/) Podcastle is the simplest way to create professional-quality podcasts. Record, edit, transcribe, and export your content with the power of AI, in an intuitive web-based platform. Save Ads from TikTok & Facebook Ad Library - Foreplay [](https://www.foreplay.co/) The best way to save ads from TikTok Creative Center and Facebook Ad Library, Organize them into boards and share ad inspiration with your team. Supercharge your creative strategy. SiteRight - Automate Your Business [](https://www.siteright.co/) SiteRight combines the abilities of multiple online resources into a single dashboard allowing you to have full control over how you manage your business. Diffchecker - Compare text online to find the difference between two text files [](https://www.diffchecker.com/) Diffchecker will compare text to find the difference between two text files. Just paste your files and click Find Difference! Yout.com [](https://yout.com/) Yout.com allows you to record videos from YouTube, FaceBook, SoundCloud, VK and others too many formats with clipping. Intuitively easy to use, with Yout the Internet DVR, with a bit of extra. AI Content Generation | Competitor Analysis - Predis.ai [](https://predis.ai/) Predis helps brands and influencers communicate better on social media by providing AI-powered content strategy analysis, content and hashtag recommendations. Castr | #1 Live Video Streaming Solution With Video Hosting [](https://castr.io/) Castr is a live video streaming solution platform that delivers enterprise-grade live videos globally with CDN. Live event streaming, video hosting, pre-recorded live, multi stream – all in one place using Castr. Headliner - Promote your podcast, radio show or blog with video [](https://www.headliner.app/) Easily create videos to promote your podcast, radio show or blog. Share to Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Linkedin and anywhere video lives Create Presentations, Infographics, Design & Video | Visme [](https://www.visme.co/) Create professional presentations, interactive infographics, beautiful design and engaging videos, all in one place. Start using Visme today. Designrr - Create eBooks, Kindle books, Leadmagnets, Flipbooks and Blog posts from your content in 2 minutes [](https://designrr.io/) Upload any web page, MS Word, Video, Podcast or YouTube and it will create a stunning ebook and convert it to pdf, epub, Kindle or Flipbook. Quick and Easy to use. Full Training, 24x7 Support and Facebook Group Included. SwipeWell | Swipe File Software [](https://www.swipewell.app/) The only Chrome extension dedicated to helping you save, organize, and reference marketing examples (so you never feel stumped). Tango | Create how-to guides, in seconds [](https://www.tango.us/) Tango takes the pain out of documenting processes by automatically generating how-to guides while you work. Empower your team to do their best work. Ad Creative Bank [](https://www.theadcreativebank.com/) Get inspired by ads from across industries, learn new best practices, and start thinking creatively about your brand’s digital creative. Signature Hound • Free Email Signature and Template Generator [](https://signaturehound.com/) Our email signature generator is free and easy to use. Our customizable templates work with Gmail, Outlook, Office 365, Apple Mail and more. Organize All Of Your Marketing In One Place - CoSchedule [](https://coschedule.com/) Get more done in less time with the only work management software for marketers. B Ok - Books [](https://b-ok.xyz/categories) OmmWriter [](https://ommwriter.com/) Ommwriter Rebrandly | Custom URL Shortener, Branded Link Management, API [](https://www.rebrandly.com/) URL Shortener with custom domains. Shorten, brand and track URLs with the industry-leading link management platform. Free to try. API, Short URL, Custom Domains. Common Tools [](https://www.commontools.org/) Book Bolt [](https://bookbolt.io/) Zazzle [](https://www.zazzle.com/) InspiroBot [](https://inspirobot.me/) Download Free Cheat Sheets or Create Your Own! - Cheatography.com: Cheat Sheets For Every Occasion [](https://cheatography.com/) Find thousands of incredible, original programming cheat sheets, all free to download. No Code Chatbot Platform | Free Chatbot Platform | WotNot [](https://wotnot.io/) WotNot is the best no code chatbot platform to build AI bot easily without coding. Deploy bots and live chat on the Website, Messenger, WhatsApp, and more. SpyFu - Competitor Keyword Research Tools for Google Ads PPC & SEO [](https://www.spyfu.com/) Systeme.io - The only tool you need to launch your online business [](https://systeme.io/) Systeme.io has all the tools you need to grow your online business. Click here to create your FREE account! Productivity Temp Mail [](https://temp-mail.org/en/) The Visual Collaboration Platform for Every Team | Miro [](https://miro.com/) Scalable, secure, cross-device and enterprise-ready team collaboration whiteboard for distributed teams. Join 35M+ users from around the world. Grammarly: Free Online Writing Assistant [](https://www.grammarly.com/) Millions trust Grammarly’s free writing app to make their online writing clear and effective. Getting started is simple — download Grammarly’s extension today. Rize · Maximize Your Productivity [](https://rize.io/) Rize is a smart time tracker that improves your focus and helps you build better work habits. Motion | Manage calendars, meetings, projects & tasks in one app [](https://www.usemotion.com/) Automatically prioritize tasks, schedule meetings, and resolve calendar conflicts. Used by over 10k CEOs and professionals to improve focus, get more done, and streamline workday. Notion – One workspace. Every team. [](https://www.notion.so/) We’re more than a doc. Or a table. Customize Notion to work the way you do. Loom: Async Video Messaging for Work | Loom [](https://www.loom.com/) Record your screen, share your thoughts, and get things done faster with async video. Zapier | Automation that moves you forward [](https://zapier.com/) Workflow automation for everyone. Zapier automates your work across 5,000+ app integrations, so you can focus on what matters. Rows — The spreadsheet with superpowers [](https://rows.com/) Combine the power of a spreadsheet with built-in integrations from your business apps. Automate workflows and build tools that make work simpler. Free Online Form Builder | Tally [](https://tally.so/) Tally is the simplest way to create free forms & surveys. Create any type of form in seconds, without knowing how to code, and for free. Highbrow | Learn Something New Every Day. Join for Free! [](https://gohighbrow.com/) Highbrow helps you learn something new every day with 5-minute lessons delivered to your inbox every morning. Join over 400,000 lifelong learners today! Slick Write | Check your grammar. Proofread online. [](https://www.slickwrite.com/#!home) Slick Write is a powerful, FREE application that makes it easy to check your writing for grammar errors, potential stylistic mistakes, and other features of interest. Whether you're a blogger, novelist, SEO professional, or student writing an essay for school, Slick Write can help take your writing to the next level. Reverso [](https://www.reverso.net) Hemingway Editor [](https://hemingwayapp.com/) Web Apps by 123apps - Edit, Convert, Create [](https://123apps.com/) Splitbee – Your all-in-one analytics and conversion platform [](https://splitbee.io/) Track and optimize your online business with Splitbee. Analytics, Funnels, Automations, A/B Testing and more. PDF Tools Free PDF, Video, Image & Other Online Tools - TinyWow [](https://tinywow.com/) Smallpdf.com - A Free Solution to all your PDF Problems [](https://smallpdf.com/) Smallpdf - the platform that makes it super easy to convert and edit all your PDF files. Solving all your PDF problems in one place - and yes, free. Sejda helps with your PDF tasks [](https://www.sejda.com/) Sejda helps with your PDF tasks. Quick and simple online service, no installation required! Split, merge or convert PDF to images, alternate mix or split scans and many other. iLovePDF | Online PDF tools for PDF lovers [](https://www.ilovepdf.com/) iLovePDF is an online service to work with PDF files completely free and easy to use. Merge PDF, split PDF, compress PDF, office to PDF, PDF to JPG and more! Text rewrite QuillBot [](https://quillbot.com/) Pre Post SEO : Online SEO Tools [](https://www.prepostseo.com/) Free Online SEO Tools: plagiarism checker, grammar checker, image compressor, website seo checker, article rewriter, back link checker Wordtune | Your personal writing assistant & editor [](https://www.wordtune.com/) Wordtune is the ultimate AI writing tool that rewrites, rephrases, and rewords your writing! Trusted by over 1,000,000 users, Wordtune strengthens articles, academic papers, essays, emails and any other online content. Aliexpress alternatives CJdropshipping - Dropshipping from Worldwide to Worldwide! [](https://cjdropshipping.com/) China's reliable eCommerce dropshipping fulfillment supplier, helps small businesses ship worldwide, dropship and fulfillment services that are friendly to start-ups and small businesses, Shopify dropshipping. SaleHoo [](https://www.salehoo.com/) Alibaba.com: Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters & Importers from the world's largest online B2B marketplace [](https://www.alibaba.com/) Find quality Manufacturers, Suppliers, Exporters, Importers, Buyers, Wholesalers, Products and Trade Leads from our award-winning International Trade Site. Import & Export on alibaba.com Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products | Spocket [](https://www.spocket.co/) Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Get started for free and see why Spocket consistently gets 5 stars. Best dropshipping supplier to the US [](https://www.usadrop.com/) THE ONLY AMERICAN-MADE FULFILLMENT CENTER IN CHINA. Our knowledge of the Worldwide dropshipping market and the Chinese Supply-Chain can't be beat! 阿里1688 [](https://www.1688.com/) 阿里巴巴(1688.com)是全球企业间(B2B)电子商务的著名品牌,为数千万网商提供海量商机信息和便捷安全的在线交易市场,也是商人们以商会友、真实互动的社区平台。目前1688.com已覆盖原材料、工业品、服装服饰、家居百货、小商品等12个行业大类,提供从原料--生产--加工--现货等一系列的供应产品和服务 Dropshipping Tools Oberlo | Where Self Made is Made [](https://www.oberlo.com/) Start selling online now with Shopify. All the videos, podcasts, ebooks, and dropshipping tools you'll need to build your online empire. Klaviyo: Marketing Automation Platform for Email & SMS [](https://www.klaviyo.com/) Klaviyo, an ecommerce marketing automation platform for email marketing and sms syncs your tech stack with your website store to scale your business. SMSBump | SMS Marketing E-Commerce App for Shopify [](https://smsbump.com/) SMSBump is an SMS marketing & automation app for Shopify. Segment customers, recover orders, send campaign text messages with a 35%+ click through rate. AfterShip: The #1 Shipment Tracking Platform [](https://www.aftership.com/) Order status lookup, branded tracking page, and multi-carrier tracking API for eCommerce. Supports USPS, FedEx, UPS, and 900+ carriers worldwide. #1 Dropshipping App | Zendrop [](https://zendrop.com/) Start and scale your own dropshipping business with Zendrop. Sell and easily fulfill your orders with the fastest shipping in the industry. Best Dropshipping Suppliers for US + EU Products | Spocket [](https://www.spocket.co/) Spocket allows you to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Get started for free and see why Spocket consistently gets 5 stars. Video Editing Jitter • The simplest motion design tool on the web. [](https://jitter.video/) Animate your designs easily. Export your creations as videos or GIFs. All in your browser. DaVinci Resolve 18 | Blackmagic Design [](https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/products/davinciresolve) Professional video editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in a single application. Free and paid versions for Mac, Windows and Linux. Online Video Editor | Video Creator | InVideo [](https://invideo.io/) InVideo's Online Video Editor Helps You Make Professional Videos From Premium Templates, Images, And Music. All your video needs in one place | Clipchamp [](https://clipchamp.com/) Fast-forward your creations with our video editing platform. Start with a video template or record your webcam or screen. Get the pro look with filters, transitions, text and more. Then, export in minutes and share in an instant. Descript | All-in-one audio/video editing, as easy as a doc. [](https://www.descript.com/) Record, transcribe, edit, mix, collaborate, and master your audio and video with Descript. Download for free →. Kapwing — Reach more people with your content [](https://www.kapwing.com/) Kapwing is a collaborative, online content creation platform that you can use to edit video and create content. Join over 10 million modern creators who trust Kapwing to create, edit, and grow their content on every channel. Panzoid [](https://panzoid.com/) Powerful, free online apps and community for creating beautiful custom content. Google Web Designer - Home [](https://webdesigner.withgoogle.com/) Kapwing — Reach more people with your content [](https://www.kapwing.com/) Kapwing is a collaborative, online content creation platform that you can use to edit video and create content. Join over 10 million modern creators who trust Kapwing to create, edit, and grow their content on every channel. ClipDrop [](https://clipdrop.co/) Create professional visuals without a photo studio CapCut [](https://www.capcut.com/) CapCut is an all-in-one online video editing software which makes creation, upload & share easier, with frame by frame track editor, cloud drive etc. VEED - Online Video Editor - Video Editing Made Simple [](https://www.veed.io/) Make stunning videos with a single click. Cut, trim, crop, add subtitles and more. Online, no account needed. Try it now, free. VEED Free Video Maker | Create & Edit Your Videos Easily - Animoto [](https://animoto.com/k/welcome) Create, edit, and share videos with our online video maker. Combine your photos, video clips, and music to make quality videos in minutes. Get started free! Runway - Online Video Editor | Everything you need to make content, fast. [](https://runwayml.com/) Discover advanced video editing capabilities to take your creations to the next level. CreatorKit - A.I. video creator for marketers [](https://creatorkit.com/) Create videos with just one click, using our A.I. video editor purpose built for marketers. Create scroll stopping videos, Instagram stories, Ads, Reels, and TikTok videos. Pixar in a Box | Computing | Khan Academy [](https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/pixar) 3D Video Motions Plask - AI Motion Capture and 3D Animation Tool [](https://plask.ai/) Plask is an all-in-one browser-based AI motion capture tool and animation editor that anybody can use, from motion designers to every day content creators. Captions Captions [](https://www.getcaptions.app/) Say hello to Captions, the only camera and editing app that automatically transcribes, captions and clips your talking videos for you. 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Chill Work Music — Deep Focus Mix for Working, Programming, Coding
youtube
LLM Vibe Score0.274
Human Vibe Score0.29
Chill Music LabJan 22, 2025

Chill Work Music — Deep Focus Mix for Working, Programming, Coding

This carefully curated mix of tracks is designed specifically to help you focus on programming and coding. Deep, energizing electronic music in genres like chillstep and future garage creates the perfect background for working on complex projects or completing routine tasks. This carefully crafted selection is ideal for creative endeavors, adding atmosphere, enhancing motivation, and setting a positive mood for work or any activity. Thanks to the futuristic atmosphere of this musical accompaniment, you will be able to immerse yourself in the creative process with special depth and inspiration. These tracks help maintain a high level of concentration and productivity, enabling you to achieve maximum results. Discover new horizons of efficiency with our specially curated musical accompaniment. If you enjoyed this video like, comment or subscribe to the channel. 🙏 Join our Discord to contact us, grow, share your goals and find inspiration. Work together to turn ideas into reality. https://discord.gg/Tfe8gnAhYY Genre: Electrtonic Music Style: Chillout, Chillstep, Downtempo, Future Garage Mood: Inspiring, Motivating, Deep Feature: Without Lyrics 📹 Similar videos ► /https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdE7uo_7KBkf6X1lbOpL3tAWERvlYej2L ► /https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdE7uo_7KBkeSTmryNClNxUkioFpq3Btx ► /https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdE7uo_7KBkdbssGgnnIDm3EnE2gmHyEQ ► /https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdE7uo_7KBkeH0adsnxZupMARfGxY6qik ► /https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdE7uo_7KBkf0gwWO9-qeu-La5vSJPmPc ► /https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLdE7uo_7KBkdsNAZNbzOUj61OQ5N0Ka26 🎧 Tracklist ► 00:00 Nomyn - Elsewhere ► 03:36 Sappheiros - Stay ► 06:36 Veil - Sorrow ► 09:56 Kazukii - It's Been Awhile ► 11:21 AK - Departure ► 13:57 Lazarus Moment - Reminescence ► 19:29 Nereus - Pathwaysh ► 22:39 Vigo - Bright Light ► 25:57 Osk - Komorebi ► 30:25 Phelian - Wound ► 33:12 4lienetic - If Only ► 35:40 Andy Leech, Victoriya - Aerolith ► 38:39 Bythewvve - Dreams Come True ► 41:01 Faodail - Far From Anyone ► 44:30 Mit-Rich - Timestream ► 46:41 Twisted Psykie - Mourning Glory ► 50:16 Oscuro - Can't Find My Way ► 53:41 Future Skyline - Silent Moon ► 57:45 Hollowz - Children (Cover) ► 1:00:45 Oscuro - Now Or Never ► 1:03:33 Alchemorph - Angel ► 1:06:53 Nikita Mirnyy - Souless ► 1:08:24 Nomyn - Elsewhere ► 1:11:58 Sappheiros - Stay ► 1:14:58 Veil - Sorrow ► 1:18:17 Kazukii - It's Been Awhile ► 1:19:43 AK - Departure ► 1:22:19 Lazarus Moment - Reminescence ► 1:27:50 Nereus - Pathwaysh ► 1:31:00 Vigo - Bright Light ► 1:34:19 Osk - Komorebi ► 1:38:46 Phelian - Wound ► 1:41:33 4lienetic - If Only ► 1:44:02 Andy Leech, Victoriya - Aerolith ► 1:47:00 Bythewvve - Dreams Come True ► 1:49:22 Faodail - Far From Anyone ► 1:52:51 Mit-Rich - Timestream ► 1:55:02 Twisted Psykie - Mourning Glory ► 1:58:38 Oscuro - Can't Find My Way ► 2:02:03 Future Skyline - Silent Moon ► 2:06:07 Hollowz - Children (Cover) ► 2:09:06 Oscuro - Now Or Never ► 2:11:55 Alchemorph - Angel ► 2:15:14 Nikita Mirnyy - Souless ► 2:16:46 Nomyn - Elsewhere ► 2:20:19 Sappheiros - Stay ► 2:23:19 Veil - Sorrow ► 2:26:39 Kazukii - It's Been Awhile ► 2:28:04 AK - Departure ► 2:30:40 Lazarus Moment - Reminescence ► 2:36:11 Nereus - Pathwaysh ► 2:39:21 Vigo - Bright Light #ConcentrationMusic #CodingMusic #FocusMusic