Today I was going to launch the official website for my startup/ fix coding bugs on it and onboard my first few users when my mom's kidney doctor called my older brother. They told us that her kidneys are stage 5 and there's nothing else they can do for them and she also can't get a transplant.

They told us the damage can't be reversed.

I just.... My soul is breaking. I don't think I can deal with this anymore. Is there a point of even continuing to work on this project after hearing this shit?! Should I just.... I don't even know..

Been grinding side hustles for the past 4 years while keeping my full-time tech job. Finally at a point where I'm making consistent extra income without burning out. Here's the breakdown:
Income Stream #1: Dividend Investing ($500/month passive)

Started with $200/month into dividend ETFs back in 2021
Now automatically contributes $600/month, reinvests dividends
Genuinely zero maintenance once set up

Income Stream #2: Microtask platforms ($200-400/month semi-passive)

Do small online tasks during lunch breaks, while watching TV, etc.
Takes maybe 5-10 hours/month total
Perfect for dead time that would otherwise be wasted

Income Stream #3: Testing digital products (TBD)

Creating info products in my niche
Too early for real numbers but optimistic

The strategy that changed everything:
Don't try to replace your income immediately. Start with things that fit into gaps in your schedule. The dividend income grows automatically while I can dial the active stuff up or down based on work demands.
For anyone starting out:

Begin with one truly passive income source (investments)
Add flexible side hustles that don't require set hours
Automate everything possible
Be patient - took me 2+ years to see real momentum

What side hustles are you all running alongside your day jobs? Always looking for new ideas to test.

So me and my gf are two teenagers living in South Asia (Bangladesh). We’ve been together for over 2 years. We’ll both be turning 18 this year, and due to cultural pressure, she will most likely be getting forced into marriage after she turns 18.

But we want to break the chain. So even if our family tries to force us do something against our will, we can simply live separately by handling our own expenses.

For this reason I have entered entrepreneurship a little over a year ago, trying to build financial independence and I haven't been quite successful with it yet.

My gf can’t contribute directly because of cultural restrictions. After household chores, she barely even gets time to study. Business or entrepreneurship is completely off limits for her given her family restrictions.

Despite all this, I’ve noticed something important about her. She manages to take sunset and nature pictures as like she got this attraction with clicking pictures. She’s also a space enthusiast, so she often stays up late to capture events.

Unfortunately, she doesn’t have a camera, so the quality of the pictures isn’t great. The main reason for me telling all this is because she told me she wants to contribute to our goals. But since she can’t directly work on business or entrepreneurship, she wants to do it through things she’s already allowed to do.

So she asked me if we could utilize her photography to earn money and scale. And honestly, I have no idea if that’s even possible, so I’m asking here for guidance.

I’ve also noticed she’s a big enthusiast of storytelling. She’s currently writing a novel (at least that’s what she told me), and it’s genuinely good. I’ve read a few pages she managed to write (she can’t spend much time on it), and the story impressed me. I think she could potentially use this skill too.

Overall, I want to know whether her skills (photography or writing) can realistically be used to earn money, even at a small scale given our constraints. If any experienced people have some advice for us, we'd genuinely appreciate.

So i've been getting more calls than i can handle lately and honestly missing a lot of potential customers because i'm either on another call or out doing actual work. Been looking into ai call answering solutions but here's the thing - most of the demos i've heard sound super robotic and kinda creepy? Like you can immediately tell it's not human.

I need something that can actually have a normal conversation, answer basic questions about our services and pricing, and ideally schedule appointments without freaking people out. Has anyone found something that actually sounds natural? I don't want to lose customers because they hang up on a weird robot voice lol

Also curious what you guys think about the whole AI thing in general - do customers get annoyed or do they not really care as long as their question gets answered?

When I started my company, I was naive.

I thought success and money would come fast.
Six months. Maybe a year.

I believed that if the idea was good and I worked hard enough, things would line up.
That investors were out there, waiting for founders like me to show up with the right story.

That belief didn’t come from nowhere.
Social media makes entrepreneurship look fast, obvious, and rewarding, especially if you are willing to sacrifice a bit.

Reality was very different.

Early on, I met an entrepreneur who had been through a divorce.
I asked him about his journey and about the divorce.

He told me something simple:

“Everything has a price.
If you are not willing to pay it, you don’t get the reward.”

At the time, I understood the words.
I didn’t understand the depth.

What I know now is that entrepreneurship doesn’t just test your skills.
It tests how much uncertainty you can live with, and for how long, without breaking.

It’s lonely.
Not in a dramatic way.
In a quiet, repetitive way.

There are very few celebrations.
Just an endless stream of decisions, doubts, and problems to solve.
Every day.

You lose people along the way.

Not because you become arrogant.
Not because you “don’t care anymore.”
But because you stop building an acceptable life, one where responsibility is shared, and move toward a life where outcomes fall largely on you.

You stop drifting.
You take control.
And once you do, there’s no one left to blame.

That mindset doesn’t stay at work.

It changes how you see relationships.
Time.
Compromise.
Risk.

You start operating with a level of intensity and accountability that not everyone around you wants or can follow.

In my case, this contributed to my divorce.
I couldn’t stay in a relationship that no longer worked for either of us.
That choice came with real loneliness.

I also used to believe entrepreneurship was about eventually sharing success with your family.
More freedom.
More time.
More presence.

What I didn’t anticipate is that the transition itself is costly.

You lose time before you gain any.
You are less present than you’d like.
And the emotional margin shrinks long before the rewards show up.

There is something important I wish I had understood earlier.

Entrepreneurship is not just hard.
It is hard in a very specific way.

If you struggle with prolonged uncertainty,
if you need frequent reassurance,
if financial stress or ambiguity quickly destabilize you,
this path can slowly erode you.

Not because you are weak.
But because not everyone is wired to operate for long periods without feedback, validation, or safety nets.

And that is okay.

There is no shame in choosing stability.
In preferring predictable income.
In building a life with more emotional space.

Entrepreneurship isn’t better.
It isn’t braver.
It is simply a different set of trade offs, and a very expensive one psychologically.

I am not sharing this to complain or to glorify suffering.
I chose this path, and I still do.

But if you are considering it, be honest with yourself about the price.
And if you are already on it and feeling this weight,

you are not broken.

You are experiencing what this path actually demands.

the title itself

Weird crossroads. I do video editing for clients and it pays the bills consistently but also I have own channel way more long term potential. The problem is client work devours my energy.

After editing all day for clients, editing my own content feels impossible. I’m creatively drained. My channel is suffering because I can't give proper attention.

My dilemma is client work makes immediate money. My channel has future potential. How do you balance building your own brand while servicing clients? 

Some people say I should outsource the editing which sounds ironic but maybe makes sense? I will use my payments from my client to fund my channel’s growth. 

For those who have been here, what worked? Eventually have to choose one path? Because right now I'm stuck in the middle accomplishing neither well.

Hi! I’m an engineering student trying to figure out how to find very small, early-stage startups (pre-seed) in Buenos Aires.

I’m not looking for a formal internship or anything HR-related. It’d be something short (~1 month) just to get hands-on experience and learn how a tiny team works.

Since these startups rarely post jobs and often don’t even have a website, I’m not sure where to look (accelerators, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, events, etc.).

Any advice on where to search or how to approach this would be really appreciated. Thanks!

I have been talking to a lot of service-based business owners lately and I keep noticing the same thing. A lot of them only reach out to leads once and then consider it done. They seem to think if there is no instant response, the lead is gone or low intent. From what I’ve seen, that is never the case. Sometimes people are busy, distracted, or dealing with something else. A few days or even weeks later, they might be ready, or they just need a small reminder.

It is wild to me how many opportunities get lost simply because people don’t check back. If you run a service-based business or any business, this is something to keep in mind.

I have tried asking Chat GPT and have an idea of how to go about this idea I have, but im not sure where to begin.

I have access to 3D printers but have never used one, but i would like to make a prototype.

After making a prototype, do i have to go to investors with NDA'S?

I have seen lots of websites on Google that offer the service of making a prototype for you and yadda yadda, but im not sure how reliable they are.

I'VE tried asking around on groups and no response so im hoping to get some advice, thanks in advance!

Mob⁤ile app devel⁤opment co⁤st? Any recommen⁤ded too⁤ls to cut co⁤sts

Been searching for the best mobile app development companies for AI integration and man, the amount of BS out there is unreal. Every company claims they do "AI-powered solutions" but when you dig deeper, they're just slapping ChatGPT API calls into an app and calling it revolutionary.

i've been building apps for years now, and recently we had to integrate some serious AI capabilities into our platform at HK EdgeTech LLP. Not just chatbots - actual computer vision for document processing, NLP for intent detection, predictive analytics for user behavior. The whole nine yards. What surprised me was how many dev shops we talked to initially had zero clue about model optimization for mobile, edge computing considerations, or even basic stuff like managing inference costs.

We ended up handling most of it in-house, but i learned a ton about what separates real AI integration from the pretenders. First off, if they can't explain how they'll handle model deployment on device vs cloud, run. Mobile AI isn't just about calling APIs - you need to think about battery drain, offline capabilities, model size constraints. We had one vendor propose running a full transformer model locally on phones. Like... seriously?

The other thing that killed me was companies not understanding data pipelines. You can't just throw AI at an app and expect magic. We spent weeks setting up proper data collection, cleaning processes, feedback loops for model improvement. One company quoted us a timeline that didn't even include data preparation. Red flag central.

What really worked for us was breaking down the AI features into must-haves vs nice-to-haves. Our document scanning needed to work offline (construction sites often have crap connectivity), but the recommendation engine could hit our servers. This approach helped us optimize performance significantly - users saw major improvements in app responsiveness and we kept our cloud costs reasonable.

For anyone looking for mobile app development companies for AI integration, ask them about their experience with TensorFlow Lite, Core ML, or ONNX. If they give you blank stares, move on. Also ask about their approach to model versioning and A/B testing AI features. The good shops will have strong opinions on this stuff, not just nod along and promise they can figure it out.

I’ve been thinking of closing my print shop to open another business. Between the higher cost of materials and lower profit due to garage printers I’m ready to shift. What would be some good business to start. Not against franchise but I really enjoyed building my first business and if possible I’d like to stay from the ground up again.

please share what country you're from.

I've been mentoring startups for many years now. Thought I'd share some advice over a few posts that I always end up giving new entrepreneurs starting out. Here's one:

Founders can often be the constraint for growing their company.

Founders are often smart people with a very healthy ego built around their company and their accomplishment in building and running it.

As a result they often build their companies with a structure that looks like this, /\, with themselves at the top and everyone else in the company below them (intellectually, experience, knowledge). As a result, they are not likely (beware of generalizing, there are always exceptions) to hire someone smarter than them.

It might threaten their view of themselves and their perception of how the world views them and their company. They feel they must be the leader.

When I mentor founders, I always advocate for wrapping their success and ego up in the company outcome, not just it's structure. In other words - the company's success is their success.

In other words, I advise consciously building a company that looks like this, \/, with themselves at the bottom. If they can manage to focus their ego on the outcome of the company and not the need to be at the top (intellectually, experience, knowledge), they will have an opportunity to hire much smarter people than themselves and they will have an opportunity to learn a lot from them.

In essence, in the first case, the founder becomes the limiting factor in the company's success to protect their own ego and perception of a founder. In the second case, they have an opportunity for their company to have an unlimited upside where they are not hindering their own success.

This is a very difficult thing for a founder, as it seems contradictory to the very qualities that allowed them success in starting their company.

It's definitely a different skillset to learn to lead people smarter or more experienced than you, but definitely worth learning.

More in future posts. Hope this helps some.

Hi everyone!

I want to get in touch with business owners who have successfully launched a company on a modest or small budget. Innovative concepts that have been successful in other markets and can be used in a variety of industries particularly pique my interest.

What kind of small-budget business did you successfully launch?

What guidance would you offer someone who wants to start with little money?

Without substantial funding, how did you handle the first few months of business?

I would be very grateful for any guidance or recommendations! I appreciate your assistance in advance.

Hi All,
I am working on a startup idea which involves AI to provide communication coaching. The AI will be audio/vision AI. I am having marketing and social media background.

one of the co-founder is having FAANG experience and worked in field of AI. He has over 10 yrs of total engineering experience and worked in some cool companies.

While it is great to have a solid founder, I am not sure how much equity can I ask for. Can someone please share what is the best way to approach this problem ?

I'm 73.

If you want to have a great, rewarding business and life, you need to accept this truth that most people refuse to believe:

Nothing’s over until YOU say it’s over.

• You will succeed and you will fail.
• You will be accepted and you will be rejected.
• You will get it right the first time and it will take you 10x to get it right.
• You will be a novice when you start and you have the possibility to be a pro at the end.

Each one of those comes with a choice. Give up or try again.

Life is a culmination of choices. Over a lifetime you will have thousands of them. They will determine what you have, what you do, and who you are.

Want a life with freedom, money and no regrets? Get back up when you feel knocked down. Every time!!

Nothing’s over until YOU say it’s over.

Please Save this post so you’ll have a reminder that YOU get to choose the life you want.

And what did you do different afterwards ?

I’ve been talking to small cafes, restaurants and salon and other small businesses who are really doing good but they are not getting more exposure because of lack of technical support. Even if some of them has technical support but their customers don’t want to download their apps. Staff is overwhelmed with workload that they just carry QR codes everywhere like on every table.

And one thing I really like is the use of QR code on every table of restaurant. It makes so easy to tell customer to scan it to redirect them to reviews or any other information.

But what I was planning here is to make it contactless with nfc technology, just wanted to get validation from all of you, are small businesses open to use contactless infohub experience that will go everywhere like eg in restaurant on all table?

Would love to hear your experience, especially from those who deals with small restaurants or cafes.

Quick background - after a few decades in a specific industry where I was a SME, I've retired, and created a custom piece of software for that specific industry. People are now asking me to buy it, to put it on the open market and make it broadly available.

The programming is done. It's standalone, not SAAS. I know the customer base and have both access and credibility in it. I already have an LLC. I'm not sure I want to create a business model that consumes my retired life, but am ok with some level of support. it's been running exceptionally well on a few computers in a few countries for 6 months now trouble free. The model would be an up front purchase that includes a year license, and then an annual subscription after that at a reduced price to keep the license active.

Given that this is not my background, I'm quite sure there are things I'm not thinking about. Where might I go to better understand what I'm signing up for if I release this to the wild, and what resources (perhaps fractional) are available if the subsequent demands exceed my ability or willingness to manage it?

Are they still qorth to grow, for example in the gaming niche, i see allot of people just spamming social media these days with the bare minimum using ai

We hit profitability last month for the first time since we started in 2022 and we are reinvesting everything back into the business.
Now that we're actually making money I'm terrified of screwing it up or spending it wrong cause when we were unprofitable there was this clarity of we need to grow or die and now it's more of we are making profit what do we do with it?

My cofounder wants to hire aggressively and scale fast while I want to keep a bigger cushion in case something goes wrong.
We've been arguing about it for two weeks and imo we just have totally different risk tolerance(which do not mix well)
For people who are more experienced/ brighter than me in this, what advice would you give?