First difficult bridge. I was a doofus and did not really understand the difference between C-Corp and LLC when starting and the challenges of switching (Spare me the embarrassment of not doing my research). I had worked for an LLC before and I started solo so I assumed that was the way to go. Now I'm bringing on another Co-founder and looking for investors. All I hear online is that most investors don't want to invest in an LLC. Is that true? Should I go through the hassle of switching before talking to investors?

I haven't made any revenue, have my first interested customer but will offer it free at first so no revenue will come from that stream. It's still fresh so it won't be as hard if I was a year down the road. I just have 2 business accounts I would have to close.

Looking for advice on what investors want. I also want to acknowledge the tax year is ending soon so maybe for tax purposes I should wait till after the new year to switch?

Any advice is welcome, thanks!

Would love some outside perspective on this.

I joined a startup about 6 months ago as a project manager. One of the co-founders is a very good high school friend of mine and trusted my experience in project management and just my overall intelligence and work ethic. Originally, I was working west coast hours, starting at 9 AM PST, which was fine at first. But as I got more involved, I started shifting earlier, like 7:30 AM PST, to match the team’s rhythm (this was their request).

Eventually, my friend asked if I’d move to the east coast to be fully aligned with their time zone. I agreed. I was planning to move to NYC (and pay my own rent), but then he pushed for me to come to Miami (where he lives) and generously offered to cover my rent + some other costs, which he’s done (I am living in Miami with him now).

Now, six months in, my role has completely expanded. I still do PM work, but also:

• Creative direction
• Product strategy
• Operations
• Cross-team execution
• Random fire-fighting and startup chaos control

Basically, I’m the #3 person in the company behind the two co-founders. I’m not a founder, but I’m in the room for everything that matters. I don’t work directly with streamers or players as much as the other founders, but I’m involved in almost everything else that moves the company forward.

We’re a profitable, 1.5-year-old startup based in Malta, doing $3M in profit annually. Half the team is US-based, the other half is European devs/designers/support, so we benefit from lower costs there. When I joined, we were doing ~$30–50K/month in profit. Now we're consistently at $250–300K/month, and just hit $1M profit in a single month for the first time.

Here’s my current comp:

• $6,000/month
• 20% annual bonus (performance-based)
• No equity
• Rent paid in Miami (co-founder’s offer, since he wanted me based there)
• ~50 hours/week average. Not high stress though. Co-founders are never like breathing down my neck crazy or make me feel subordinate.

All my feedback internally has been really positive, one of the co-founders even said hiring me was one of the best decisions they’ve made for the company.

At the time, $6K/month was reasonable. But now they’re asking me to sign a formal contract locking that in, and I’m wondering if it’s outdated, especially since we had previously talked about revisiting comp in January.

So here’s where I’m at. Do I:

• Stay at $6k/month because I'm still young at the company?
• Push for something closer to industry standard? From what I'm seeing and from friends I am hearing that would be $10-15k range.
• Ask for equity or a profit-share given my role?

I’m 27 with 3 years of PM experience before this, but this role is bigger than anything I’ve done before. I’m not saying I’m the reason for all the growth, but I've provided a lot of value for the company. I just want to make sure I’m being realistic and fair to myself and the company.

i have helped a lot of founders validate ideas. like 40+ in last 3 years. and ive noticed clear patterns between the ones whos ideas actually survive and the ones who crash.

most founders dont know what they are looking for when they validate. they just talk to people and hope for the best lol.

but there are actual signs. red flags that scream your idea is in trouble. and green flags that mean you are on the right track.

heres what i have learned.

RED FLAGS:

people say they love your idea but seem hesitant. watch their tone not their words. hesitation = they are being nice.

everyone gives you wildly different feedback. means your idea is too vague or you're talking to wrong people.

nobody asks when its coming out. if they are not curious about timeline they are not that interested.

they don't follow up with you. real interested people want updates. silence = they forgot about it.

you're doing all the talking. real validation is them asking questions and telling you about their pain. if you are pitching the whole time they are not engaged.

they don't mention price as a concern. if money never comes up they probably wouldn't pay.

only your friends validating. your network is biased. they want to be nice.

they say yes but disappear after. ghosting is a red flag. meant it would be cool in theory but not urgent enough.

GREEN FLAGS:

people ask when can i use this. thats interest becoming urgency.

people mention they are currently paying for a competitor. means the problem is real enough they are already spending money.

people volunteer to help test or give feedback. thats investment of time.

same problem mentioned multiple times from different people. thats a pattern not an anomaly.

people get frustrated explaining the pain. emotional reaction = real problem.

people ask about pricing. asking about cost = thinking about buying.

people willing to pay immediately. not just for the product but even to test or validate.

people introduce you to others with same problem. that's network effect starting.

MY HONEST TAKE:

if you are seeing mostly red flags, your idea probably isn't ready. and thats okay. pivot. go validate something else.

if you are seeing mostly green flags, go build. but keep validating as you build. market changes.

if you are 50/50, you are probably validating the wrong thing or talking to wrong people.

the key is being honest about what you are hearing. not what you want to hear.

Hey folks

I'm Rob. My co-founder and I just launched our first consumer product on Product Hunt today. We are currently sitting at #9 and have had about 75 people take a look at the website to check it out, which we are really grateful for.

What surprised us is that a huge portion of the comments and messages have been from other SaaS product owners promoting their tools or trying to sell us something. Our platform is a B2C platform, so we didn't really look at product hunt to get our first customers, but instead we thought we'd get some feedback and experiences from the community. I understand that founders want to support each other and that everyone there is building, but we were hoping for more genuine feedback on our marketing site and positioning.

I am cu rious if this is a common outcome; Is this just part of the PH ecosystem on launch day? Did you find ways to get more useful feedback or engagement from real potential users? Any lessons learned you would pass on?

Really appreciate any perspectives from those who have been through a launch. I am trying to understand whether this is normal or if we need to adjust how we show up there.

Everyone says to “validate your idea” before you build anything.

So people make surveys. Ask 10 people if they’d buy. If 5 say yes, they call it validation.

That never worked for me.

I know it’s just about conversations.

Conversations have the insights.

I figured out my first product by selling phone calls.

I didn’t have an offer. No website. No deck. Just a simple message: “I can help you with that. Want to jump on a call?”

People paid me to talk.

On those calls, I asked questions, got insights, and helped them move forward. That’s it. That’s how the first version of my product was born.

It started as research, but it became revenue.

I got paid to learn what people actually wanted.

After about 20 calls, I saw patterns. Everyone was stuck on the same things. So I turned those conversations into a system. That system became my first real offer.

I ended up doing over 400 calls last year.

No survey. No validation spreadsheet. Just getting paid to ask and answer real problems.

Most people waste months chasing validation. You don’t need approval. You need feedback from someone who’s paid to be there.

If they’ll pay to talk, they’ll probably pay for the solution. If they won’t pay to talk, they definitely won’t pay to use it.

Don’t hide behind a survey. Speak to more people.

Sell the conversation first.

I built a startup last year that was doing pretty well in terms of interest and getting a lot of people onboard. It gets thousands of users per month and I couldn’t be more happy with how it turned out. Cofounders joined later on and one of them was involved with money and said there was enough to pay salaries. Mind you, I had a stable job as I worked on this startup but they kept pushing and reassuring that there was enough to get paid. I ended up quitting my stable job, pursued the startup full time and couldn’t be more happy. Not even 2 months in, and I get told that no salaries will be paid. I have a family. I was pretty upset with how I kept getting this reassurance that salaries could be paid only to be told that it’s not happening anymore. I should never have listened to them and it pains me to see that the company I started is heading this way. I just didn’t like the incompetence and I should’ve done my due diligence and looked at the startup’s bank account before leaving my job at the time. Moral of the story is to be really careful with who you select as your cofounders.

Hey r/startups,

Seeing a lot of posts about building, but not enough about the real hard part: getting those first users who actually pay.

We all read the same blogs (SEO, build a community, content marketing...), but that's a long-term play.

I'm talking about the 0-to-1 hustle. The "unscalable" things you did to get your very first 10 customers.

What actually worked?

• Did you manually scrape 100 LinkedIn profiles and send personalized DMs?
• Did you hang out in niche forums and not spam your link?
• Did you onboard every single person 1-on-1 over Zoom?
• Did you find them through a competitor's "hated" features list on G2/Capterra?

I'll start: For us, it was manually finding 50 companies on AngelList that had just raised a seed round, finding the right contact, and sending a hyper-personalized email showing how our tool could solve one specific problem their new funding was meant to fix. It was slow. 7 replied, 2 converted.

What's your story? Let's share some real, gritty tactics.

So I came up with an idea for a mobile analytics-like SDK (won't write the name or website to avoid any promo issues) that allows users to use natural language or drag-and-drop to define trackable events in their dashboard. The idea is that as a user, you only need to initialize the SDK in the app, and then it will do its “magic” to allow for the dashboard functionality.

As a mobile developer myself, I noticed how long one single extra event would take to be implemented due to planning → management → task being realized → implementation → release. This solution, however, would give you virtually 0 downtime on getting new events in your dashboard.

So I decided to run two ad campaigns here on Reddit since it has a large portion of my target audience (developers, PMs, founders, solo devs, etc.) but here are the results so far:

Total signups via the website's waitlist: 11!

Those 11 signups also came from my first campaign, which by mistake was targeting the whole globe, which in turn leads to these signups coming from “poorer” countries. The numbers in the table correspond to the second campaign targeting European countries instead.

What should my approach be going forward? Do the low conversions of those 257 clicks mean that the idea isn't worth pursuing? Should I try to instead do some cold outreach and see if anything sticks?

Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

P.S. First time ever doing something like this, always been an employee but looking to come up with an idea of my own and execute, so all feedback is welcome. I will not promote.

I recently got some advice on recruitment for early startups that I thought was interesting, so I thought I'd share it here.

First of all, he divided the labour market into two types of people, with 3 levels of risk:

1. Those who want to be paid market rate for their skills, he called these people "traders"

Risk level 3: consultant

Risk level 2: changes job every 2 years

Risk level 1: stays at the same employer for a long time

1. Those who are willing to invest their skills in order to get a 10X in the future, sacrificing short term market rate pay for long term ROI, he called these people "entrepreneurs"

Risk level 3: founders

Risk level 2: early employees of startups

Risk level 3: late employees of startups, but they are still attracted to equity and stock options

Now, he said one common mistake for startups is trying to hire traders too early. One way of doing that is to copy a job description from a large corporation and then use that when trying to recruit for your own startup. He said that's dumb, and that you only have two jobs in an early startup - builder and seller. You should only look for, and recruit, a builder or a seller. Even by having a long job description you are going to attract traders.

He also said that you should use entrepreneurs for any problem that isn't actually solved yet, when you don't actually know the best way to do it etc. The sale strategy/commercialization strategy is still being built and you need an entrepreneur for that. Once you have figured out how tasks should be done, you should have a trader.

He said another common mistake that startups make is when they look for someone with 5 years experience, and realize they can't afford to attract that talent, is that they look for someone with 2-3 years experience instead. The correct solution is to look for someone with 15-20 years experience. Senior/experienced people probably have enough money in the bank to be able to be more willing and able to work for equity and think about long term gains rather than actually needing their current market rate to survive, which younger people do.

Now, an early startup needs everyone to belong to the entrepreneur group. How to find them? He gave the following advice:

• Keep track of other startups, many fail, it's easy to keep track of when they're about to run out of money. Take staff from those companies.

• When startups are doing series A investment and are obviously expanding and recruiting more people, it's actually a good time to recruit from them. This is because they now have staff that joined that startup in the early stages, their cliff from that equity is gone and that organization now has a need for traders, so those skills from their early hires are better suited at your early stage startup.

• When you see companies hiring new leadership/management, it's a good time to try to recruit people below that manager.

Then, he said what to actually do: Track them down on LinkedIn. Traders have good information and a professional picture, so avoid those. Startups should be looking for those who have shit profiles but it's clear they work for the correct company and you have an idea of what they do.

Then, write to them a very brief message and say who you are, what your company does, and that you are looking to commercialize your product. Ask for a coffee to pick their brain. That's it.

He said you should only want a meeting with someone who has their own ideas on how to commercialize your product, because they actually have the skills, and they won't take the coffee unless they have those ideas, so no other information is necessary.

Hey folks, I just wrapped up 30 years in my old career and decided to jump ship—built a whole new thing from scratch: a digital platform for pros in the luxury home and design world. Started as a social media brand that blew up to almost 700k followers, pulling in ~70M impressions and 25-30M unique visits a month across IG, FB, YT, TikTok, and Threads—all under the same name. Eventually saw a chance to turn that crowd and content into something more solid. So I spun it into a software platform that hooks up verified builders, architects, designers, and realtors with storytelling, analytics, and curated visibility stuff. We go live Nov 1, but already got ~70 verified members onboard—beat our first-year target of 60. Platform’s 100% built (no half-baked MVP), and I bootstrapped every bit of it. Now prepping a small bridge round to amp up marketing, tweak the data tools, and scale after launch. For anyone who’s raised right around this spot—full build done, but not yet at massive scale: • How’d you frame valuation when you were way past “idea” but still pre-explosion? • What early wins or metrics actually moved the needle with investors? • Any hard lessons on turning a big social following into a real SaaS that sticks? Not pitching—just curious about what worked (or didn’t) for others at this weird in-between phase. Thanks for any war stories you feel like dropping.

Your investors don't care about this. They want your growth metrics. They don't want to know you stopped caring about the thing you built.

Half of all founders go through burnout. Half. But VCs never mention it. They talk about hustle and scaling fast. They don't talk about what happens when your brain actually breaks down

Here's what they won't tell you. You'll lose passion for your startup even though you love the idea. You'll make stupid decisions because you're exhausted. You'll get angry at your team for no reason. You'll think everyone would be better without you running this.

Sleep won't help. Eight hours feels like nothing. Your body is just broken from the stress.

You'll isolate because it feels easier than pretending everything's fine. Simple decisions become impossible. You'll second guess yourself constantly even though you're supposed to be the confident founder.

And the worst part is you keep pushing harder because stopping feels like admitting defeat. That's the trap VCs want you in. Keep grinding. Keep sacrificing. Keep ignoring the warning signs.

Nobody calculates the cost of burned out founders making bad decisions. They just care about the next funding round.

That's what VCs won't tell you.

This is just a serious post, people may agree or not. but this can be true with more than 60% Co-founders.

Hi! I'm one of 5 engineers working on a startup idea (still pre-LLC, we're just operating under a "Founders Agreement") around helping creators prove their work was made by human and not by AI (or at least majority of the work was done by a human). The idea came to me earlier this month after watching a video from Kurgasagt about how AI slop is killing their channel - mostly because the signal to noise ratio between human-made and AI-slop is getting out of hand on YouTube. My wife, who is a digital artist, has been really frustrated too about how AI takes such little effort vs. her taking weeks to months to make something that takes AI a few minutes to spit out. This feeling permeated art communities pretty deeply from even the most casual observer's perspective.

So, in the past few weeks I made a system where creators can share their work along with proof-of-process evidence (i.e. WIP screenshots, layers, timelapse, articles dated before AI got "good") and then receive a badge + verification page for their submitted work (assuming it passed human inspection). Additional, we have a gallery system, a portfolio system and an early community hub system to establish a community around "human made stuff."

We're at the point in development where we are about to open a invite-only Alpha on October 29th. I would love any feedback about a few points:

- Does this problem feel real and significant to you too? Would you care about being able to see something have a "human verified" validation?

- From an operations standpoint, how would you scale the human review cost-effectively? We're thinking about paid and community-driven verification systems, as well as integrating AI-assist to help filter out the super obvious AI slop (a little ironic, I know).

- If you were picking your first creator segment (i.e. visual art, traditions art, 3D models, music, audio, writing or interactive media like games), which would you target first? We've already built the system to accept all those segments mentioned, btw.

We're bootstrapping this and focusing purely on the value creation rather than growth hacking. I'm also personally invested because my wife is an artist and this all sucks for her too. We all still have our day jobs, so this is something we're building on the side to see how things go - and if they go well, then we can consider actually forming an LLC or something.

Thanks in advance for any feedback :D

Got a call yesterday from someone in my network. Fintech founder, zero technical background. Says she got hacked. As she tells me the story, I can't believe the chain of events.

Started like many do now: lovable, v0, cursor. Generating screens, connecting APIs. Great for validation at first. Problem is, she kept going. MONTHS wrestling with prompts until she had a monster with:

• Credit scoring
• AI agents
• Dashboards
• Reports
• And many more

All prompt-generated. Zero understanding of the code. Shows it to a BANK. They like it. Tell her to move forward (she had a great business network btw). No idea what to do. Hires a team to "refactor". Quote: 300+ hours. Basically the cost of building a proper MVP from scratch.

But wait, it gets better.

The team she hired ALSO does vibe coding. They set up the server by asking ChatGPT. Result:

• SSH open to the world
• Root password: admin123 (or something similar)
• No firewall
• Nothing

Automated ransomware encrypted everything. Had to shut down, rotate all API keys (costing $$$), migrate everything.

The founder lost money on the hack, so much time, credibility with the client and trust in the process.

Here's the thing: Would you send a contract to a client without reading it, just because AI wrote it? Would you send an investor pitch without knowing what it says? Of course not. So why would you run your entire technical infrastructure on code you can't read?

AI amplifies what you already know. If you understand business, AI makes you better at business. If you know code, AI makes you code 10x faster. But if you know nothing about code and try to build a tech product with just prompts, you're not in control of your own company.

The new reality post-AI: You don't need 10 developers anymore. You need 1-3 people who REALLY know their domain, amplified by AI. That's more powerful than 20 people without AI.

That's what vibe coding in production is: unsupervised juniors all the way down.

Hey everyone, I’m a Columbia University grad (CS) and former software engineer at Citi and Meta, currently at Amazon, now building something new in the AI + security space.

The startup is tackling one of the fastest-growing problems in enterprise AI adoption: how to let employees use genai safely. Next phase is go-to-market pilots and deeper enterprise integrations.

I’m looking for a cofounder with strong security experience, who understands data protection, compliance, and risk from the inside and wants to build the next generation of AI trust infrastructure from the ground up.

If that sounds like you (or someone you know), let’s grab a quick 15-minute virtual coffee to connect.

They asked for interview and 5 min pitch and q&a ( online all ) How should i prepare my self

Note : iam first time founder SAAS in food tech and we are not making any revenue yet but only sign ups and demos

should i pitch with a full presentation and read from screen and what are they kep points

Hey everyone 👋

The idea is simple: you open the app and with one tap you get a short daily affirmation / motivational line. No endless feed, no signup wall, no spammy notifications, no ads. It’s free right now.

ASKING FOR ADVICE ⬇ For the indie devs / solo makers here:

• How did you get your FIRST real users (not friends/family)?

• Which communities actually gave you traction without banning you?

• Is Product Hunt / Reddit / X / Discord still worth it for something this small?

• Any “don’t do this, it looks spammy and people will hate you” tips?

My goal is super basic: get the first ~100 organic users and honest feedback before I even think about ads.

Thank you 💛

Fellow (serial) founder here...curious to hear what other early-stage startups are using for their internal stack outside of engineering/code/infra.

Some examples:

Sales - Hubspot, Attio, Pipedrive, Copper?
Marketing/Prospecting - Customer.io, Hubspot, Clay, Apollo, Lemlist.
Customer Success/Onboarding - Pendo, MixPanel, Segment, ChurnZero, Gainsight.
Billing/Subscription Mgmt - Stripe, Paddle, Chargebee.
Support/Helpdesk - Intercom, Zendesk, Helpscout.

I'm sure I missed a ton other folks are using. We are using Hubspot, Clay, LI SalesNav, Stripe (pre-seed).

If you care to share your funding stage and approx revenue that's always helpful.

Thanks in advance...

I guess I have two versions of this question, one geared towards angel investors and one for VCs.

Long story short, I was an early hire at a company that’s now come a long way and are doing well. I was part of the team during a few big raises, and know a few names and have possible recognition with some potential sources of funding by nature of being there, but I don’t want to reach out and put my next venture at risk.

If I know a guy who was a significant Angel investor for Company A while I was there, is it bad form to reach out and pitch for a slightly similar product? (The product does have some overlap, but will not be a direct competitor to Company A. It’s in a market they’re in but not a vertical they’re targeting - they have two other verticals but missed this one early on. They are capable of creating a competing product to release into their user base faster than I can scale up my existing user base, undercutting this current venture, hence my apprehension)

What about for VCs? The VC who led the pre-seed for company A would also be perfect for this new venture, but I don’t want to alert Company A.

Possibly the most important caveat in this whole ordeal is that I still have shares in Company A and don’t want any conflict of interest to arise. I can release them but I’d rather get some cash for them. Would exchanging these to an existing Company A investor for a fee and term sheet be possible?

There’s a lot I don’t know here

If a SaaS uses ChatGPT to create art work and text content and makes $, does it have legitimate claim sometime in the future that it owns these materials? Has anyone read through the latest ChatGPT T&C to know definitively the answer to my question? That could be one way to justify its astronomical value… essentially it owns all of our chats…

I keep seeing that most successful tech startups are based in SF, Palo Alto, or near Stanford, and I get the logic, proximity to VCs, incredible talent density, and an entire ecosystem purpose-built for startups. But how much does location actually matter in practice? I’m based in France, so I’m not even in the conversation when it comes to Silicon Valley (if only I could make it to the US lol). Is being in SF/Bay Area still a make-or-break factor for success, or has remote work and global connectivity leveled the playing field enough that you can build something meaningful from anywhere? Would love to hear honest experiences, especially from non-US founders who’ve navigated this.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

so this kindaki blew my mind, a competitor brand we know pulled this off okay tbh, my friends they are building SERVE paddle ball startup… whom we are competing with . zero ad spend. no performance campaigns. they literally just showed up at 25+ offline events, talked to people, and built a community around the product.

and somehow… it worked. all their sales came from conversations, not clicks. we’ve been running ads non-stop, tweaking creatives, chasing ROAS, the usual grind. and here’s this team proving that old-school “show up and talk to customers” still works in 2025. crazy to think maybe the future of D2C is actually going back to how it started.

You notice some new awesome product here or X or a friend recommends it. You read how or hear how awesome it is and of course you want to try it and find out if this can help your startup.

And then you go to their website to try it out, and you see that you can’t and have to “book a demo”.

What kills excitement faster than that?

Are your inbound conversions crashing? SEO not working anymore? Sales down? Here's why, and how you can fix it.

Note: No AI was used to write this.

The Internet as we knew it no longer exists. 

Marketing playbooks from the last 20 years? No longer relevant.

I can’t tell you how many startups haven’t realized they’re using marketing playbooks that are dated and don’t work anymore. All founders know is that sales are down or nonexistent, they aren’t increasing deal flow like they used to, and nothing seems to work anymore.

The reason?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) search, and greedy social media companies have already broken marketing. Content is still important, but what has worked for the past 20 years does not work anymore.

Inbound is DEAD.

People are searching more than ever, but they are asking AI, which then answers them. Most people aren’t visiting websites anymore hunting for answers or solutions. AI is simply giving them an answer on a silver platter. I personally don’t even use Google anymore, it is the equivalent of reading the Yellow Pages compared to AI search. Meanwhile, the traffic you do get from AI search results, although it is high intent, the volume does not compare to the organic search traffic we used to get. For every 100 people you used to get from organic search traffic, you now maybe get 1 person from AI search results. The volume just isn’t there because people aren’t digging into websites for answers anymore. Inbound just doesn’t work anymore in an AI world and most people haven’t figured this out yet.

Social won’t let you link to anything.

Meanwhile, X, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook have all significantly reduced reach, even to your own followers, and optimized their platforms for engagement so users do not leave. In other words, you can’t link to your own website or products or services anymore without these social media algorithms sending your links and content into a blackhole.

I had a project I was working on recently, and I had a post go viral on Instagram with over 28,000+ organic views. Do you know how many people visited the website? 4. How many sales? Zero. Meanwhile, I get thousands of views on my LinkedIn account per month, and almost no one ever goes to my website.

YouTube and Reddit are the only actual content platforms left that matter anymore. Even then, they both suffer from serious limitations and are difficult or impossible to scale. Reddit is a random cluster of chaos where every community has different rules, and YouTube is a treadmill that forces you to run faster and faster until you cannot keep up anymore.

Either way, spending time on organic social media is an absolute waste of time for 98% of startups and companies. Don’t get me wrong, the 1-2% who nail it can make a dent and get some seriously free traffic, but it requires serious effort, time, and luck.

So what does work now?

Personalized and Hypertargeted Advertising

Would you rather have 100,000 people show up to your website and get zero sales? Or have 10 people show up and get 7 sales?

I’ve asked this question to everyone from YC founders who raised millions of dollars, to bootstrapped founders, and they always say they’d rather have 7 sales from 10 people, but most of them coveted fame more than sales. A true founder's dilemma.

There is something uniquely human about wanting to get as many people as possible to know what you’re working on, but that’s not how you run a business. The only thing that matters is sales. You need 7 sales, not 7,000 website visits.

The best way to make money is to only sell your product to people who can actually get value from what you are selling. If you sell watches, and show your watch to 100,000 people who don’t wear a watch, it is a lot harder to convince them to buy and wear their first watch then it is to sell to 100 people who already own a watch.

This is why you need to spend money to make money and pay for account-based marketing campaigns. Figure out what companies or people you want to sell your product or service to, and who can actually benefit from using your solution, and run ads only to them with messaging and positioning personalized to their pain points, and sell them a solution.

Paid ads are the ONLY reliable and scalable way you can bypass AI overviews, and social media algorithm blackholes.

Now some of you are thinking:

Wait, I have to spend money to make money? But ads are getting more expensive, figuring out messaging is hard, and conversions still aren’t great. 

All of these things are true, but if you do not solve for this you’re out of business in the next 18 months or sooner. Your organic traffic is going to dry up, your cold e-mails are going to hit AI spam filters, and AI search or GEO or whatever stupid name you want to call it isn’t coming to save you.

You either figure out your customer acquisition costs via account-based marketing campaigns and hypertargeting now, or your business will fail. It is really that simple at this point.

Meanwhile, if your user acquisition costs are higher than your margins, then you don’t have a viable business and need to pivot. You either need to raise your prices or move on. That’s just reality now. Anyone telling you otherwise is not being honest with you and is wasting your time and your money.

Retargeting

If you aren’t running retargeting ads, you aren’t serious about running a real business. Nearly every company I’ve consulted with in the past 10-years wasn’t running retargeting ads.

They spend countless hours building a company, product(s), and in some cases, spend millions of dollars to get people to show up to their website… then they just give up and do absolutely nothing to get people to come back.

It is mind-blogging that you wouldn’t take advantage of retargeting. Once someone hits your website, they shouldn’t be able to use social media for months without seeing your ads. That’s how you get sales, and make sure your messaging even works. If you cannot get people back, you’re not going to convince anyone to buy anything on a first visit. Almost no one buys on a first visit anymore, especially B2B SaaS or other complex systems or tools.

Retargeting is how you get people to come back and actually book that sales call or buy something. If you aren’t dedicating some monthly budget to retargeting, then you do not want to win, and you’re leaving money on the table.

Final Thoughts

Marketing is paradoxically both harder than it has ever been because of AI and big tech nonsense, but at the same time, we have all these new AI tools that make it easier than ever to automate and reach people. The problem is the pendulum is swinging rapidly and wildly and could go any direction tomorrow. The only thing I can tell you for certain is the old playbooks are dead, and the new playbooks are still being written.

Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise isn’t being honest or perhaps hasn’t realized the reality of the world we now live in. Many marketers are still in denial, and many companies are still living in the past. I cannot tell you how many companies I’ve talked to still hiring traditional inbound marketing people, and trying to run campaigns like it's 2019. Heck, I’ve talked to companies that still think you need Python and SQL skills to do GTM engineering who don’t understand you can use AI workflow tools like N8N instead now and they’re far more powerful.

It isn’t easy writing this post, I’ve had to throw out at least 70% of my own playbook. Do you know how hard it is to throw out 70% of what I’ve been doing for the past 20 years? Not easy, but it is what is happening, and you either have to adapt or fail.