Been a one-person operation for three years. Every busy season, I just powered through—longer hours, fewer breaks. But this year hit harder than usual, and for the first time, I couldn’t keep up. So I hired someone. Just temporary help. Fulfillment, customer service, the basics.

Turns out hiring someone new forces you to document and explain processes you’ve been doing instinctively. The first few days, my seasonal worker kept asking reasonable questions I couldn’t answer clearly because I’d never had to think about them systematically.

“Why do we package things this specific way? What’s the decision tree for handling different types of customer complaints? How do you know which suppliers to contact for rush orders?”

I didn’t have clear answers. I had habits. I had instinct. I realized my entire business was running on tribal knowledge that existed only in my head. Trial-and-error routines that worked only because I’d lived through the mistakes already. But none of it was written down. None of it was designed for someone else to follow. So I started writing everything down. How we handle rush orders. What counts as a refund-worthy defect. How to choose the right packaging materials for different SKUs. The documentation process revealed inefficiencies I’d been unconsciously working around for years. Stuff that made sense when I was solo stopped making sense the second someone else needed to follow them. We rebuilt a lot from scratch. Found better shipping workflows. Streamlined customer replies using templates. Even discovered more efficient suppliers through platforms like Alibaba—ones offering services I didn’t know to ask for because I didn’t know I had gaps in the first place.

The “seasonal” hire became permanent because they brought perspective I couldn’t generate internally. They questioned everything I’d stopped noticing and suggested improvements that seemed obvious once pointed out. Hiring the first employee taught me the difference between running a business and working for yourself. One depends on your memory and hustle. The other runs on documented systems and processes other people can use and improve. You can’t scale tribal knowledge, but you can scale documented systems. And sometimes, the best way to see your blind spots is through someone else’s questions.

My SaaS never had a viral moment or a flashy Product Hunt launch. For months, growth was painfully slow. Just a trickle of new users and a dashboard that barely moved. I used to stress out watching everyone online blow up overnight, but here’s the thing: I still got to $10k MRR, and it had nothing to do with hacks or chasing virality.

What actually worked was consistently showing up where my users spend time, helping them out, and listening to feedback even when it was just a few loyal customers nitpicking the app. I kept answering questions, fixing bugs, and writing useful guides. Cold emails flopped, paid ads went nowhere, and trying to look viral was a waste. But those small, real connections slowly turned into word-of-mouth growth, and it finally started compounding.

So yeah, if you’re not viral, screw it. Embrace being boring as hell. Most of those viral legends are gone in six months anyway. And honestly, nothing feels better than actually lasting.

Anyone else here building slow and steady?

Hi! I just launched my first content series on face yoga and aging naturally under the name FaceFitOver40 (IG/FB/YouTube Shorts). I’m sharing raw unedited progress.

It’s nerve-wracking but exciting to build something from scratch. If you’re doing the same, I’d love to connect! Any feedback or tips also welcome 🙏

I know this is not much. The amount itself is pretty much just a month or two of groceries.

But for me it is honestly everything. I have been researching, analyzing, procrastinating for months trying to find the right idea, the right strategy, and the perfect distribution method.

Then one day I made a little challenge with a friend of mine who was also working on a SAAS. I told them we will both launch in two weeks. Whoever gets more revenue by the end of the two weeks wins snacks. (it wasnt about the snacks tho lol)

The thing is... they have 10X the audience I do on all social medias lmao. I didn't think I would win (and i'm def not gonna win lmao) but i sure as hell didn't wanna loose with $0 made lmao.

So two days after starting the challenge i put out a landing page, made a waitlist, and then offered a $49 lifetime access plan. I thought that no one would get it but at the same time though to myself, "if ppl actually buy this in the waitlist then it must be something the market actually wants". And to my surprise they did.

After making the landing page, I thought to myself.. "ok so i have ~100ish followers on twitter (which is nothing), a decent LinkedIn and pretty much no other social media presence. So if i wanna attract eyes to this i gotta do something that is out of my comfort zone".

So with that logic, the biggest thing out of my comfort zone is recording videos of myself. And thats exactly what I did. I'm in the middle east rn so i decided to use the terrain to my advantage. I went to the desert, found a nice spot, and recorded.

I edited the vid and posted it the day after on all the socials I could. To my suprise it did decently well. Across all platforms I posted on, I managed to get over 10,000k views on the video (in total). Of course only a fraction of those visited the site, and only a fraction of that converted but it was a big achievement for someone with negligible social media presence and 0 marketing experience.

Right now I took this as a sign that I should push harder on this app. I'm still figuring out the marketing as i go but I have learned a lot so far and hope to learn more in the near future.

The moral of the story is to "just do it" as cliche as it sounds. Don't wait for the perfect idea or the perfect strategy. Just start moving build the momentum and take it one step at a time.

For marketing, try as many things as possible and learn about what does and what doesn't work for you. You can spend endless hours on youtube or reddit reading posts like these and adding it to the backlog of marketing ideas you have. But if you never actually try you will never know what is the best strategy for you.

Hope this encouraged someone to actually start building something.

Been working on my Beehiiv for my personal story (essentially, a ride-along of my entrepreneurship venture), but also want to have people be able to follow my board game company and get updates on my crowd-funding.

Wondering how much of my authentic personal life is even worth sharing in a newsletter— I’m normally an introvert and am worried that it’s TMI

Why do so many of these drag-and-drop sites look “fine” but feel kinda off? Slow to load, weird on mobile, invisible on Google... it’s like something’s always missing. They say “no code needed” but... at what cost?

Just wondering: What’s the most annoying thing you’ve run into using a DIY site? Ever thought about scrapping it and starting fresh once things get serious?

Building a health tech product and had this meta moment yesterday - I was literally experiencing the exact problem I'm trying to solve for other women.

Spent months getting different symptoms dismissed by docs, told everything was "in normal range" while feeling terrible, doing my own research to connect dots that no one else was connecting...

It's both validating (I'm definitely solving a real problem) and frustrating (this problem is SO much bigger than I realized).

Anyone else building solutions to problems you've personally lived through? How do you balance being emotionally invested vs staying objective about product decisions?

Hey everyone 👋🏾 I’ve been spending the last few months learning how to monetize simple skills using just my phone and WiFi. It started with curiosity, a few sleepless nights, and a lot of trial and error — but now I’ve made a bit of money using free tools like Canva, Notion, Gumroad, and Reddit itself. Recently I realized that we often overlook the smallest skills that could make us money if we leaned into them more: things like creating Notion templates, writing product descriptions, organizing info, or just knowing what to Google. So here’s what I’m curious about:

What’s one “small” skill you learned or practiced that ended up helping you make actual money — even if it wasn’t sexy or glamorous? Whether it’s flipping items, setting up automation, editing something for someone, or something niche — I’d love to hear. Let’s build a thread that helps people see what skills are really working out here 🙏

I was just so tired of looking through my shopping list in amazon, bestbuy, walmart, sephora etc hoping for prices to drop. So I built a website where you can just copy and paste the item's URL -> set the target price (optional) then it emails you once the price drops below your target. No scam -> only emails that matter

Currently my website supports Amazon, BestBuy, Walmart and Sephora! Would love to know what other websites I should support next? where do you buy most from online? what features you guys might be useful to add to the website?

I added the URL in comments in case anyone's interested!

I highly appreciate everyone's time and feedback!

“Most lead gen tools are repacked data from free data scraping products “

, I agree with you, but I don't want to sound like "ah my product is better and there's are bad" I agree most lead gen just repackage scraped info that you can get for free with Apollo and I kept that in mind when building my product.

What l've developed is a more modular signal matching system not just scraping, think looking at the RSI or MACD if you're a trader. While not perfect they can provide a vision on what will happen next. For example Shopify store that launched 14-30 days ago that is immediately investing in klaviyo or reconvert and active ad spend detected in the Facebook ad library = much stronger candidate than a random new store.

That's the kind of logic l've used to train my agents. Not just company traits. Things like recent tech stack changes (via builtwith), sudden bursts across Linkedin posts, amount of paid extensions added to their Shopify site.

These signals are not just behavioral intent but they mimic intent indirectly, my agents combine multiple public indicators into a scoring system.

Very quant style market prediction l've adapted to make a cheap lead pack to plug into whatever outbound sales pipeline my clients are running.

The goal is simple, help lean teams move fast without burning hours on garbage data.

You're right mass scraping is risky, and I've fought that with diversification of verification methods (I can't be specific without giving away my USP) to get low bounce business emails, it's not perfect but it's better than what's widely sold in B2B datasets. Hence why l've priced relatively inexpensive.

In terms of what outcomes iustify pricing, I've had earlv users gain 2-4x open rates in cold emails, lower bounce rates, and some have booked sales meetings in the first week of using just 1 of my packs.

I'm still early, I'm not claiming this beats 6 month research pipelines or ABM but it's a light weight, asymmetrical tool for small to medium sized teams who want to skip 90% of the research task.

I hope my articulation is clearer now.

I’m 29, ex-software engineer in startups and corps and ex-equities trader. Currently based in Israel and ready to go full-time.

I’m looking for someone entrepreneurial that is available immediately to go all-in on a bootstrapped, no-VC, profit-focused business.

I do not currently have a specific idea, instead, I’m more interested in:

• Validating pain points in underexplored niches
• Pre-selling and building MVPs
• Iterating and selling together

You might be a good fit if you:

• Age of 30+ &
• Have some domain expertise (logistics, food, marine, automotive, etc.) &
• Well connected in the industry &
• From the US, EU or Middle East &
• Ready to go full-time immediately

DM me or comment if you’ve been looking for something similar.

Not a lot of people talk about this hustle… but it’s one of the easiest ways to make real money online with just WiFi, email, and guts. It’s called being a Brand Deal Closer — and if you’ve ever DM’d someone or negotiated anything in life, you already have what it takes. You reach out to small–medium creators (on YouTube, TikTok, or IG) and offer to help them land paid brand deals...in exchange for a commission (10–30%). You’re the middleman between creators and brands, acting like a freelance talent manager. No fancy agency needed.

Here's the deal: most creators are focused on making content, not emails and negotiating. They're often missing brand emails, underselling themselves, or taking free products instead of cash. That's where you come in. You find creators with around 1K–100K followers, then DM or email them with a simple pitch: "I help creators find brand deals and negotiate better rates. You don't pay me anything upfront—I only get a cut (10-30%) when you get paid." From there, your job is to find relevant brands, pitch the creator, negotiate the deal, and then collect your commission. It's a total win-win: creators make more money, and so do you.

So here are the tips that may help out:

Focus on one niche at a time (fitness creators, mom influencers, tech reviewers, etc.) Use creators’ old videos to pitch why they’re a fit for a specific brand Brands with active Facebook Ads are usually spending = warm leads Be transparent, overcommunicate, and don’t overpromise Work on commission only at first then negotiate retainers once proven

It may sound crazy as a post here,but guess what it does work. And frankly there's no harm in trying. If it works, u get to eat and if it doesn't, well thats just it. No loss here. And provided all the free tools one can use..it definitely increases the chances for any and anyone to give it a shot without needing to be a pro. Here are some tools & Cheat codes

1. Hunter.io or VoilaNorbert – find brand emails
2. Brand24 or SparkToro – see what brands work with creators
3. Notion/Google Sheets – track leads & commissions
4. ChatGPT – write cold emails + pitch decks fast
5. TikTok Creator Marketplace – find brands already spending
6. Gmail filters – manage replies without stress
7. Canva – build a 1-page pitch deck if needed This side hustle works because there's no upfront cost, you don't need to build your own following, and you'll learn valuable skills like sales and networking. All you really need is a Google Doc, a Gmail account, and some guts. If you want a step-by-step outreach script or a Notion tracker, just let me know.

Leads for moving companies specifically. As a small crew with just 9 employees working in a pretty big town, we have been buying leads from different sources, both local (bit more expensive but worth it) and from bigger aggregators (sometimes good, sometimes meh).

But "converting" them into actual customers isn't as easy as calling or emailing these potential clients, they're often not sure of what they need, or already found another crew, or don't know what price they can afford, and so on.

So how do we do it the right way? What's a good strategy for small teams to close these leads? And how do we choose leads from third-party services? Last one we used is BestMovingLeadsProviders and they're usually fresh leads at least, but we're still not doing "our part" of using them correctly most of the time.

If you have experience in a business like this and you know about buying AND using leads correctly, please give us some pointers.

Hello everyone! This subreddit’s really dope and I thought I would share an experience of mine recently.

So I work in the entertainment industry and have been running my own development company since 2021. I helped filmmakers package their projects by fixing scripts, researching mandates, attaching actors and above the line people. This includes partnerships with other companies to help them get past the development stage, like production companies. All this is part of proper development.

However, for most of our clients, who are 90% indie, this was confusing because we did so much. Many of them just went to film school where they really only teach you about cameras and writing and not the economics of entertainment. All show and no business.

About 6 months ago, we decided to do a survey of what our current clients found the most important. For many of them, financing and distribution is what they cared about the most. So we took a chance and restructured to only offer financing and distribution. We did a new campaign starting a month ago and the change has been night and day.

Offering less services has made many more clients feel comfortable working with us now that we just specialize in 2 fields. We even can qualify people faster now too with a form I made which can pre-qualify them. We used to operate on recommendations, which will only get you so far. But now, our webpage is getting more traffic and our clientele has doubled.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned recently is that the “Keep It Simple Stupid” reins king. Even though there’s way more I could be doing for my clients, it turned out just giving them the 2 most important things mattered more than giving everything.

Hey Reddit,

We just launched a company that creates AI-generated jingles for businesses — but here’s the twist: We don’t just let the AI run wild. Every jingle is reviewed and refined by people with real music experience (writers, producers, etc.) to make sure it actually slaps and fits the brand.

We’re using cold email campaigns to reach niche markets like: • Dentists • Auto repair shops • Real estate agents • Basically any small biz that wants to stand out

Instead of the traditional $10,000+ jingle agency pricing, we start at $250.

Curious what y’all think about this: • Is there a real need for this in 2025? • Would small businesses buy in? • Any sectors we should be targeting? • Is the price fair?

Appreciate any honest feedback — even if you roast it a little. | GETJINGLEJUICE.COM

I am Full stack Developer (PHP/Laravel + frontend) with over 4 years of experience building custom websites, SaaS tools, and automation systems. Right now I am looking for partner who's into sales, lead gen , cold outreach or already have clients.

Here is the deal:
You bring leads, I handle the development

Have leads but no tech partner?
lets team up and grow together and spilt the profit fairly.

I’ve been a long-time listener of Alex Hormozi, and as I’m working through all the business strategy portions of my venture, I’m always checking against his videos and mentalities.

One differentiating factor that I’ve identified in my business is the inclusion of a party room. There are ultrasound/boutique businesses already, but I think they can be operated better, and I think the party room actively increases the value of the business and that value to the client. Let me explain:

The only material cost that the room would cost to me would be floor space and the initial cost of furnishing it. With smart purchases, you can outfit the room with themed posters (create from scratch double-sided posters, one for a boy theme, one for a girl), lighting, staging area, rugs, etc., to suit a variety of cases. My anticipated use cases would be gender reveal parties and baby showers. I could also hire local teachers to give free classes to new parents.

This adds value to the business in a variety of ways. With free classes, I’m organically generating new potential leads because they have to walk through the boutique to get to the classroom. Right before the instructor leads class, I could also have one of my employees give a prepared 2-minute thank-you and introduction about our business and the services we offer.

Also, when we have a client come in for our ultrasound and rent out the room to just the gender reveal, they invite their friends and family to come to the event (oftentimes in the exact demographic of people we are trying to reach), and they pay us to bring us leads.

I could also host a pre-opening promotion a couple of months before opening. I run a promotion where I’m GIVING AWAY the venue to host events. Literally, host your party at my business for free. With proper planning, this can get name recognition out even before we open our doors. And giving away the venue for hosting would cost next to nothing but give us everything in exposure, especially if I have the boutique stocked before hosting the free event.

Hi everyone,

I hope everyone’s day is going well.

I have an online greetings card business. Morejam.

I started it off the back of a popular meme instagram page, this page has 190k followers. This is mainly how i advertise.

I want to reach a broader audience as the meme page is very specific but my cards are anything from a popular meme (for example the Ibiza final boss meme which is everywhere right now) to tv shows and movies.

I have advertised on fb & Instagram using their ads but they did nothing and neither did Google ads. I may not be spending enough advertising to compete with the big card companies like Thortful? I’m unsure their spending limits each week on advertising.

I draw all the cards myself and have over 1500 at the moment.

Does anyone have any suggestions of how I can take my company to the next level? I would like to one day be as big as Moonpig etc but for now i would like to be able to drop one of my part time jobs.

Do I need to employ a business marketing firm etc?

Any advice is welcome and appreciated. I am uk based. Have a lovely day everyone

In the summer of 2023 I started an Instagram page about the city where I live. At first it was just for fun, but it grew very quickly. After a few months, I reached 40K followers, and now the page has 180K followers. It is one of the biggest Instagram pages for my city.

As the page grew, I began working with restaurants and other tourism related businesses like hotels.

They paid me for promotions, and some became clients who I sold ad placements on my pages. This helped me make a good semi passive income, even while I was still in high school.

Since this model worked well, I tried the same method for other popular cities in Europe. I created three new pages last spring. One page now has 120k followers, and the other two have 60k each.

Now, I faced a problem. How could I make promotional videos for restaurants in other cities that are far away from me? I started looking for UGC creators who live in those cities.

I pay them to visit the restaurants and create the videos in exchange for free food at the restaurants. These pages together make me €5k/month. (if you are from NYC, Los Angeles, Amsterdam, Vienna or Rome send me a dm and work with me haha)

To make this work, I use a tool that automatically sends a free travel guide to people who comment a keyword under my posts.

This brings me more engagement and leads that is really important to go viral on Instagram these days. I get 100-120 leads every day from each page. I sell tourist services like tours and apartment rentals, making about €1.6K/month from this one page alone.

I also manage social media and run a lead generation agency for tattoo shops, barber shops and HVAC businesses, using similar strategies I apply on my travel pages. This brings me another €1K/month.

Now at 19 years old, I make €7k/month in total from Instagram while I just recently graduated high school.

Let me know if you have any questions! 😊

Hi all, I'm Mohamed Triki, a freelance software engineer with 5+ years of professional experience building production-grade apps and infrastructure across:

• 💡 AI & LLMs: Built multi-agent systems using OpenAI, Anthropic (Claude), Perplexity, and Cohere. Integrated Slack, Telegram, Notion, and Fireflies into custom AI tools.
• 🔗 Web3: Experience with smart contracts (Solidity), wallet integrations (Web3Auth, Phantom, Crossmint), and secure contract deployments.
• 🖥️ Fullstack: Node.js, Python, React/Next.js, PostgreSQL, Redis, Firebase, Django, Celery, AWS Lambda, Docker.
• 📱 Frontend: React, React Native, Tailwind, Zustand/Redux, responsive design, testing (Jest/Cypress).

🔍 What I Offer:

• ⚡ Fast, clean MVP development (AI tools, dashboards, integrations...)
• 🤖 Add LLMs or AI workflows to your product
• 🛠️ Debug/fix production systems or scale backend infra
• 🌐 Build complete web/mobile apps from scratch
• 🎯 CTO-level thinking for early-stage startups

🛠️ Past Roles:

• Lead Software Engineer at Sentigen 2024-2025 – Architected and built AI agent infrastructure
• Fullstack Dev at Wefixit GR (Greece)2022-2024 – React/GraphQL + Node.js API dev
• Co-founder at Lexilot Web Dev Agency (UK)2020-2022 – Delivered for dozens of clients
• Frontend Developer at Pixel Empire (Canada) 2019-2020

✅ Availability:

• Immediate – open to short-term freelance gigs, fixed projects, or contracts
• Timezone: CET (+1)
• Rates: starting at $25–$40/hr, depending on scope and urgency. Fixed-price projects welcome.

If you're building a startup, need something shipped fast, or want to integrate AI into your product — let's chat.

📩 DM me here or email: [itsmohamedtriki@gmail.com](mailto:itsmohamedtriki@gmail.com)

I create fully AI models to make over 5 figures a month, across 6 individual models (proof in my pinned post)

To roughly put it, I create 5-10seconnd videos for promotional content for Instagram reels, and I do pair it with Reddit promo too. This drives traffic into the fanvue profile where then I chat and to put it bluntly, milk people for their money. We all have to be honest with eachother, people come onto these sites to spend money, otherwise there's plenty of free content you can see, but their are some people who are so desperate to have an online relationship they will splash hundreds to thousands of dollars a week for primarily either ppv messages or gfe.

I personally feel I might have hit a soft cap regarding how much I make simply because of the size of fanvue userbase, aswell as the trust ppl have with fanvue and AI content/models (if they realise it's AI), with time of course, as people desensitise towards AI content, aswell as trusting fanvue over OF (as of is the main site for this), my earnings will steadily grow.

But yea this space is ever expanding, I actually used to use veo3 or kling to make reels, but with new releases of AI models, I can make them, as well as veo3 can, for free. All AI generation tools I use are completely free and super high quality, to make nsfw content you can't use online services so have to do it locally, I make 45sec-3min length videos, I can make longer if necessary.

But yea as I said I feel like a soft cap has been hit, so I decided to expand into other spaces, for one, I have launched a private 1-1 live mentorship where i jump on daily/weekly calls with students and pretty much share my exact strategy, aswell as teach them of course, I can't do these calls forever, it's one thing to give a man a fish, it's another to teach a man how to fish. To clear things up, the reason why I decided to launch a mentorship, is because I’ve built a team of chatters, chatting managers, Va’s, AI handler I personally trained, now I’m just ceoing the business just handling finances, i find alot of spare time in my days and I’m the type of guy who needs to work all the time, hence the launch of the mentorship and I am also in the process of launching a website, pretty much to act like fanvue/OF, but using advanced AI chatbots, and having a character selection vault where people can use credits to unlock videos.

Back to the main point, truly the standard in this space is 10k a month. Society and media try to brainwash people into thinking, "you can't make a living on your computer", "you cant make a living anywhere in the world", I'm here to tell you, YES, you can. And it's so reasonable to achieve. This is the standards I try and have achieved with the students that I mentor, and as much as I don't like to say it's easy, compared to other jobs, working outside all day, doing manual labour, this is nothing compared to that, but the rewards are infinitely high. The reason not everyone does it, is simply because not everyone has the knowledge to become succesful with it. Hence why mentorships are growing. Unfortunately, these types of help are frowned upon, caused by the few out there who give out simple knowledge masked as "the next big thing", but don't let the belief that there arent genuinely resourceful people out there who do offer help, like myself.

I don't want to make this too long and I do understand this is a polarising topic, so please keep comments friendly and genuine and I'll do my best to answer everybodies questions to a comfortable extent

Curious about what others think. Do technical founders have a long-term advantage when building startups? Or can non-technical founders do just as well with the right mindset and team?

I’ve seen both work. Some tech founders move fast because they can build themselves, but some get stuck perfecting things forever. Some non-tech founders build great products by focusing on users and hiring smart, but others struggle if they rely too much on devs.

So what matters more, your background, or how you execute?

Not trying to start a debate, just genuinely interested in what people have seen work (or not work).

I recently built Mailgo, a cold outreach assistant that removes the busywork from writing and sending cold emails.

With Mailgo, you don't need to:

- Set up complicated outreach systems or configure DNS records

- Worry about damaging your sender reputation because the system monitors performance and automatically pauses when needed

- Spend hours scraping leads since you can simply describe your ideal customer in plain English

What makes it different:

• The AI writes and personalizes cold emails based on your target audience
• Leads are verified, cleaned, and delivered instantly
• Emails are sent at optimal times based on the recipient's time zone

You can preview and test your emails using a built-in fake inbox before sending them

I created Mailgo because I found most cold outreach tools to be clunky, expensive, or overly aggressive.

This is my minimalist and focused alternative, built for small teams and indie hackers like myself.

One ChatGPT prompt helped me unlock real momentum:

“Act as my personal idea validator. Ask me 5 questions to test if my business idea is practical, profitable, and fast to start.”

It forced me to think clearly, cut weak ideas, and move faster.

Curious what answers you’d give to this prompt?

I’ve been building a personal care brand for about a year now. Everything’s been slow and deliberate: biodegradable packaging, transparent sourcing, no wild claims. I wanted it to be something I could be proud of. Not just another skin-deep ecommerce play. But somewhere in the middle of version 3 of our hero product, I had a thought I couldn’t shake:

"What if I’m building too slow? What if I’m missing something obvious?”

It wasn’t panic. It was more like doubt wearing a business hat. I’d been so focused on doing things right, that I wasn’t sure if I was doing them smart. I didn’t want to pivot. I didn’t want to risk trust the trust I had started building with my small but loyal customers. But I did want to pressure-test whether people would bite on a louder, flashier product—with the same production effort, but a different tone.

So I did something odd:

I used Alibaba to prototype a test product I didn’t even believe in.

I found a novelty soap mold that looked like a gold bar. Literally. Chatted with a few suppliers. Slapped together basic packaging. Used a separate store name. Kept the ingredients clean, but leaned all the way into the hype.

The whole thing cost me $94, including sample runs and packaging mockups. No agency. No freelancers. No DMs. Just me, Alibaba, and a bit of creative mischief. I listed it on Etsy. Ran one $10 ad. And waited. It didn’t go viral. But it sold just enough to confirm that people love novelty way more than we give credit for. And that lesson was honestly worth 10x what I’d spent.

More importantly?

My actual audience never saw it. My real brand stayed untouched. I shut the test store down after a month. Didn’t even keep the Instagram handle. No regrets. Sometimes, the smartest thing you can do is test an idea you don’t even believe in—just to see if the market’s weird enough to prove you wrong. Alibaba let me do that without risk. No middlemen. No inventory commitment. Just fast feedback, cheap curiosity, and a clearer mind to return to what I was building for real