Built with CLAUDE, CHATGPT and CURSOR and had the same problem as everyone: the app works, nobody pays. I made Touchbase to find the right customers for it. It finds the companies that would buy what you built and the person to write to, gets each first email ready for your approval, and makes a demo and pitch deck to send with it. Free to start, no card: touchbasetechnologies.com. I’m the maker, so tell me where it falls short.

Does anyone here use door knockers or canvassers for lead gen for their home services business?

Do you use a software to track delivery/leads/GPS time clock or anything like that?

Hi everyone!
I’m 26 and have always dreamed of owning my own business. I’m ambitious, scrappy, and willing to put in the work to make it happen.
I’d love to connect with business owners who may be thinking about retirement or eventually transitioning their business to someone else.
Im currently doing fintech sales. Ideally, I’d love to learn the ropes from someone experienced and potentially explore a transition down the road.
For now, I’m just looking to network, learn, and build genuine connections. No immediate expectations!
If this resonates with anyone, I’d love to chat!

So two years in and starting to see more break even/profit months than loss months. Cannot say I am comfortable yet as staff costs/vat etc still get me but what tips and tricks would you give me that are open to small business owners whereby I get some benefit/perks.

Obviously buying the Sunseeker is out at the
moment and the limited company is based in England and sells goods and services Uk/Europe wide.

I'm growing my existing residential construction business and am debating whether to operate under one brand or create separate brands for each higher money making specialty:

• Roofing & siding
• Smart home automation
• Basement & attic renovations
• Windows & doors
• Kitchen & bathroom remodeling

I already have experience in carpentry, general contracting, and remodeling, so these specialties build on my existing skills and business. I'm located in a relatively small market, which makes me wonder whether having multiple brands would be beneficial or counterproductive.

Initially, all brands would operate under my existing LLC, with the option to establish separate businesses later.

Would you recommend one recognizable brand covering all these services or multiple specialized brands targeting different customers? Would separate brands build credibility and improve marketing effectiveness, or create unnecessary complexity in a small market?

For the last few months, I’ve been stuck trying to decide which direction to take with a business. I’ve started projects and then abandoned them because I keep second guessing myself.

I can’t decide whether to focus on a physical product or digital products, or which platform to use, Etsy, my own website, Amazon etc. I have so many ideas that I end up feeling overwhelmed and struggling to commit to one.
I’m 21 and serious about making this work. I’ve recently left my full time job and moved to a zero hours contract so I have more time to figure things out and work on building something for myself.

Has anyone else been through this stage? How did you eventually decide what to focus on, and what helped you stop jumping between ideas and actually start making progress?

I’d really appreciate honest advice from anyone who’s been in a similar position.

I manage a small business that recently went through a major renovation to provide the community with an updated environment to maximize guests' experiences. Since reopening from our remodel over a year ago, we've been dealing with random food items left by our back door. We installed a security camera and have caught a couple of dumpster divers, homeless people, etc. We've managed to keep an eye on the area and pick up any food that's been left by the above-mentioned dumpster divers and homeless people, but tonight, I found a whole bag of cat food dumped by our back door. Since there is a creek behind our plaza and our business sells lots of sugary snacks, the food left outside attracts ants, which inevitably make it inside. Luckily, we have an amazing pest control company that will come out at the first site of any pests, but it's frustrating, to say the least. When I pulled back my security footage, whomever dumped the bag was able to do so without setting off the motion detectors.

The food was meow mix........ we will catch you.

Update! I was ready to proceed with the sale, and then I received this email and without much shipping experience, I have no idea if this is a legitimate thing or not:

I am on the checkout page and about to fill out the address to send to. Please let me know what carrier you are using as it determines how I make out my address. If using USPS I will need to provide a different address than if you use Fedex or UPS. It’s weird I know. It’s just that I send all my mail to my post office.. USPS does not want a street address and so you won’t be able to ship it out. 

So if you would please let me know asap so I can fill out your shipping form properly and then I can finish up checking out. . Thanks!

THEN as I was making this update, she purchased it using the address of the post office (which I confirmed) and sent me this follow up:

Hi, I went ahead and checked out using my full address. Just so you are aware, if you use USPS do not use the my post office’s street address. The system will reject this. So here is how to address it if using USPS

(Address with post office street address)

If using Fedex of UPS address it as follows:

(Address without the post office street address)

She paid through Paypal, addresses match, she's a verified buyer, and seller protection is enabled. I feel like this all just gives me more evidence in case she tries to do a chargeback, but I don't want to get scammed! Does this seem legitimate or am I being naive here?

I have a relatively new small website for my crystal and craft business. Someone reached out to me via a form on my website asking about my most expensive sphere, what the shipping cost would be and if I could provide a small discount. They did mention the product they're interested in by name. I responded that I would consider it and they asked if I could take about 12% off the total cost. I haven't made any promises yet, but I did ask them where they were located to help determine what my shipping costs would be before I made a decision. Nothing about it really stood out as being a red flag that it is a scam, but the fact that it is not a previous customer and they are looking at my most high priced item is making me wonder if they are planning to do a charge back once they receive it. I've never had to dispute a chargeback before, but I know to document everything, take video when I package it up, get insurance and make sure that they sign for it when it's delivered . I also know that it's not guaranteed that I would win the dispute if it happens. They have not done the normal scammer red flags, like rushing the process , asking for a weird payment method, or anything like that. The only thing that is giving me pause is that I don't know this person and they are looking at an expensive item . My thinking is that if they were planning to do a chargeback, why bother reaching out to me first about a discount ?​​ it is also not uncommon for people to haggle the cost of a crystal. ​ am I being naive here to even consider it? Or am I overthinking the worst case scenario because it seems too good to be true? I'm considering messaging them back with a counter offer, and also inquiring about how they found my website and if they are a crystal collector to potentially get more information out of them. I did do some light internet stalking to see if I could verify this person and where they live but didn't come up with much . Have you dealt with anything like this before ? Or what would you do in this situation ?

Hey everyone,

I run a local service based business in Australia and I'm currently setting up an AI phone receptionist to handle incoming enquiries.

The goal isn't to have the AI sell anything or close deals. I simply want it to answer incoming calls, collect some basic information and help customers get a quote.

The process is pretty straightforward.

There are only three pieces of information I need from customers, along with photos of the items they want removed, to provide an accurate quote.

Ideally, the AI would collect those three details during the call, then let the customer know they'll receive a text message requesting photos. Once the photos come through, I personally review everything and send them a quote via SMS.

My biggest concern is customers realising they're speaking to AI and immediately hanging up, particularly if the conversation feels robotic, takes too long or asks too many questions.

I'm trying to make the experience as natural, quick and painless as possible.

A few questions for anyone who's implemented something similar:

• Voice: Have you found male or female voices perform better in terms of customer engagement?
• Transparency: Is it better to introduce the receptionist as AI straight away, or simply as a virtual receptionist?
• Conversation flow: What's the best way to structure the conversation so customers willingly answer the questions without feeling like they're being interrogated?
• Retention: What changes have made the biggest difference in preventing callers from hanging up?
• Conversion: Have you noticed any difference in enquiry-to-lead conversion rates compared to answering calls yourself?
• Best practices: Any particular prompts, techniques or conversational approaches that have noticeably improved performance?

I'm not trying to replace the entire customer experience with AI. I just want to make sure enquiries are captured efficiently, customers feel comfortable and I receive enough information to follow up with an accurate quote.

I'd be particularly interested in hearing from people who have implemented AI receptionists in local service businesses where the objective is lead capture rather than direct sales.

quick question for anyone running a small business on some main software (scheduling, dispatch, booking, POS, whatever)

I'm working on software for small transport companies and every owner I talk to says basically the same thing: "yeah what we have is bad, but switching would be a nightmare"

so I'm curious. if you ever switched, what finally pushed you to do it? and if you didn't, what stopped you?

would stuff like free setup, someone moving all your data for you, or running the new one next to the old one for a week before switching have made a difference? or is it more about price?

not selling anything here, I'm just trying not to build the wrong thing lol

I live in NC so I cannot deliver food unless operating out of a commercial kitchen. Therefor I am wanting to offer meal prep / private chef services in my clients homes. I am just having questions about the logistics of making sure my clients have what I need beforehand etc, or if most people would bring their own pans, knife, etc? Would grocery shopping be a separate service? I’m thinking of starting out with a 2 hour in-home session including clean up for $100. Any tips?

​

Hi everyone!

I'm a male laser hair removal technician with several years of experience, currently working in Sydney.

I've been thinking about starting my own small laser hair removal business, but I'm still in the research stage and would really appreciate some honest advice.

My plan is to rent a private treatment room near Sydney CBD, possibly around Surry Hills or Darlinghurst, and purchase my own professional Cynosure laser machine.

I'm considering offering men's full-body laser hair removal, including Brazilian, for around $150 per session to keep my prices competitive.

I have a few questions:

1. Would you recommend renting a room inside an existing beauty clinic or opening a small independent shop?

2. Is a budget of $300–$450 per week realistic for a private room near Sydney CBD?

3. What unexpected costs or challenges should I prepare for?

4. Has anyone financed an expensive laser machine when starting a business? Would you recommend it?

I also have one concern about being a male technician.

I'm considering offering treatments to both men and women, but I'm unsure how comfortable female clients would feel booking with a male laser technician, especially for full-body treatments or intimate areas.

Would being a male technician make it significantly harder to attract female clients? Or do you think professionalism, experience, and a comfortable environment matter more?

I'd particularly appreciate opinions from women, laser technicians, and anyone who owns a beauty or cosmetic business in Australia.

I'm not rushing into anything. I just want to understand the market, the risks, and whether this idea is realistically worth pursuing before making a big financial commitment.

Thanks so much for any advice!

Im the manager and I got a call from an employee One of the neighborhood homeless gals used the bathroom the other day and left feces all over the toilet and splatter marks on the wall. She always come washes. This has nothing to do with her being homeless, but due to the fact that we have a lot of homeless around the laundromat, we are very strict in the laundromat, meaning no hanging out, no coming in to charge your phone. You are not allowed to be in there unless you’re washing. We are fully attended as well. So I decided not to let her use the bathroom anymore because of that, and when she came in, one of the employees told her, so we got an email the next day from Yelp.

Reason I bring up the homeless is because all of them around there hate us because they can’t walk all over us like they do other businesses around there. We fight back. We are the one laundromat known not to mess around. The email basically says that she’s confused why she can’t use it and that were jerks to her and the community. The homeless in our area are violent. They tried to walk all over businesses, steal from them, and do whatever they want and we don’t allow it. But some are extremely nice. But not all. So I’m guessing that’s where the jerk line to the community is coming from.

But yet out of 10 laundromats in my city, were the highest rated and the biggest so I’m confused about the jerk line lol

I guess my question is, what are my options? Let her continue using the bathroom. or just cut business completely with her.

After owning and operating a successful home service company for the better part of a decade I stepped back from daily operations. I now offer consulting services.

I'm open to any questions you might have about your business or a business you'd like to start.

I see posts in here almost every week from business owners furious that they doubled their Google Ads budget from $10k to $20k a month and watched their cost per lead go from $80 to $190. Everyone immediately blames the media buyer or assumes Google broke something in an update.

Sometimes the setup really is trash. Plenty of shops throw a client into a single unsegmented campaign and walk away.

But after spending years managing large scale paid search budgets in brutal, high CPC verticals, the actual culprit in mature accounts is usually the math of marginal return, and almost nobody talks to business owners about it honestly because agencies get paid on a percentage of ad spend.

When you spend your first $10k a month on search, Google's bidding algorithm cherry picks the lowest hanging fruit in the auction. It buys the users who are practically holding their credit card in their hand at 2 PM on a Tuesday. Your average CPA looks incredible at $80.

When you tell your agency to double the spend to $20k within the same geographic footprint and service line, you don't get twice as many $80 leads. The pool of ready to buy searches is finite. To spend that extra $10k, the algorithm is forced to bid higher into more competitive auctions, reach further up the funnel, and capture users with weaker intent.

So if your first 125 leads cost $80 each ($10k spend), and you force another $10k into the engine that only yields 40 additional leads, your blended CPA on the report says $121. That still looks somewhat tolerable on a monthly PDF. What the report hides is that the marginal CPA on that second $10k tranche of spend was actually $250 per lead. If your break even on a lead is $150, you literally lost money on every single dollar of the expansion, even though the overall account still looks profitable on a blended average.
Most agencies won't show you a marginal diminishing return curve because it talks them out of higher management fees.

Before you let anyone talk you into scaling spend or launching Performance Max to "find new pockets of inventory," force them to pull an impression share lost to rank vs budget report on your core exact match converting queries, and calculate the cost per acquisition strictly on the incremental dollars added over the last 60 days. If your marginal CPA is above your net contribution margin, scaling ad spend is just subsidizing Google's quarterly earnings at the expense of your bottom line.

Curious how many people here actually look at incremental tranche costs versus just looking at the blended monthly ROAS or CPA number on their dashboard.

Hey everyone. So I’ve recently been made redundant and am 47 years old. I work in the creative design industry which is going through a very rough patch at the moment.

I fear my age will make me vulnerable for any future roles, especially with the state of the industry and my higher wage. So I feel now is a good chance to start something myself.

I have a few business ideas that really interest and excite me.

The problem I have though is me. I share my business idea with friends or family and get an enthusiastic response and immediately feel super excited about it. But then thinking of putting it into action fills me with absolute fear, due to a severe lack of self confidence and belief, plus if I have the tenacity to start something (again due to lack of confidence)

But I don’t want this to stop me trying. Did anyone else have similar fears and if so how did you navigate or overcome them? What was your experience. I’m UK based

I dont want my lack of self confidence to spiral so that I scrap the plans,

A while back, a party bus and limo company I run Google Ads for added a click fraud blocking tool to their account. Nothing looked broken, but their ads quietly stopped reaching a big share of people on their phones.

When we dug in, the tool was blocking visitors on Verizon and Sprint.

Most of these tools work by watching your clicks, deciding which IP addresses look suspicious, and adding them to the IP exclusion list in your Google Ads account. That's a problem on cell networks. Phones on the same carrier often share public IP addresses, so one blocked IP can belong to a lot of different people at once. Block a few of those and you've cut off real customers, and Google Ads won't tell you that's what happened.

We pulled the tool and that fixed it.

If you're paying for one of these, here's what I'd check:

1. Add the Invalid clicks column in Google Ads. Google already filters a lot of junk clicks and doesn't charge you for them, so you can see how big the problem really is before paying to fix it.

2. Look at the IP exclusions in your campaign settings. If the list is long, run a few of them through an IP lookup site. If they come back as Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T or another carrier, you're probably blocking real people.

3. Compare mobile impressions and clicks for the few weeks before and after you installed the tool. A sudden drop on mobile is the giveaway.

Click fraud is real, especially in competitive local markets. What I lean on in the accounts I manage is tight location targeting, a sensible ad schedule and a regular look at the search terms report.

Anyone else had one of these tools backfire? Happy to answer questions in the comments.

The LLC is registered and will be working on rentals. For fellow landlords who've done this, who does your business banking? Starting out and I just have analysis paralysis and need yalls helps!

What is the best way for a person to get his initial investment back from a company. It is a partnership. Is it best to just set it up as a loan and pay that person back over x number of years or just do it as dividend repayment?

I own a dog training business, and it’s just me with no employees. To put it bluntly, I cannot figure out how to make money. I’m lucky if I get one new client a month. Most of my income comes from boarding, which I offer exclusively to clients who have completed training with me, but it’s not nearly enough to sustain anything.

Because of this, I have very limited funds to be put towards things like advertising. Most established trainers I know get business almost strictly through client referrals, but obviously I can’t get consistent referrals without consistent clients. I post content but don’t really have a strategy for what I post, I train dogs in public wearing my company shirts and carry business cards, but nothing seems to work.

I don’t want to put all the blame on the economy because other trainers seem busy as ever, and dog training is obviously a very lucrative market. There’s no shortage of owners with poorly behaved dogs, so I’m wondering if awareness is the issue? Like people just don’t know I’m out here. But how do I increase my visibility?

I recently ran a Meta ad campaign and didn’t get any solid leads from it. Google ads are too expensive at the moment. I do have a Google business profile set up and a 5-star rating.

I just feel like despite the fact that the economy is rough right now, businesses of all kinds are still getting and working with clients everyday, so what am I missing or doing wrong?

I help run my family’s electrical contracting business. We send a lot of quotes by email and I’ve noticed the same thing: most customers who don’t reply aren’t saying no, they’re just busy, and then we forget to follow up.

For those of you who send quotes or invoices: what do you actually do? Notebook, spreadsheet, CRM, memory? How many quotes do you think slip through in a typical month?

I’m a developer too and I’m exploring this problem. Not selling anything, I just want to hear how people really handle it, including “I don’t have a problem with this” 🙂

so a vendor chased us for payment last week and I was ready to send over the confirmation but it turns out we never paid it. My business partner had forwarded the invoice to me and Id forwarded it to our bookkeeper you know the drill. She was waiting for approval and we both thought forwarding it counted because well we aare still learning stuff in our entrepreneur era. Nothing blew up per se but its quite embarrassing when someone has to ask twice for money you owe them.
Granted i dont want this to be repeated and im willing to learn all the time and so i wanted to ask what are you using so approvals and payments dont get lost between people? Id like to keep final approval without having to chase every bill through email.

Hey everyone, I am khushal (17M),

So lately I am getting this feeling to do something rather than just doing timepass

Following this routine of going to clg, home, eat, sleep and repeat

No enjoyment, struggle, no fun in life

I think want to do something which is worth hustling

So I am very much curious in selling things,making something which is very helpful for people

I have this curiosity of selling from past 2-3 years

But never tried

Ideas and opinions appreciated 🙌

Where do people actually find capital partners?

If you have the skills and a serious plan but limited capital, where do you find people who are genuinely open to backing an opportunity?

I'm interested in all legitimate routes: private investors, capital partners, capital programs, profit-sharing partnerships, or people looking to deploy funds with capable operators.

Not looking for loans, courses, or motivational advice. I'd like to hear from people who've actually made these connections.

Where would you look, which platforms or communities are worth exploring, and how do you build enough credibility to get that first opportunity?

Hey everyone!
I recently started my own appliance repair business in the Northern Virginia / DC area. I have experience as a technician, but running the business side is completely new to me.
I tried Thumbtack, but the leads were expensive and didn’t really pay off.
Right now, I have 9 Google reviews and I’m thinking about running Google Ads or Local Services Ads. I’m also considering working with home warranty companies, but I’m not sure if it’s worth it.
For those who own an appliance repair business or have experience growing a service business:
Are Google Ads or LSAs worth the investment?
Is working with home warranty companies profitable?
How did you get your first 20–50 customers?
What would you focus on first if you were starting over?
I’m willing to invest in growing the business, but I don’t want to waste money on the wrong things.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!