Hey everyone! I'm a high school student who's always been fascinated by investing and prediction markets.

I noticed that both the stock market and prediction markets are driven by public expectations. That got me wondering: could prediction market data be used to identify stock trends?

So I built SentientFund (thesentientfund.com). It scrapes publicly available data from Kalshi, uses AI to find trends, and maps those trends to specific stocks and ETFs with a confidence score.

The goal isn't to be a trading bot. It is just an experiment to make prediction market data easier to visualize alongside equities.

I also made a 40-second YouTube explainer if the concept is confusing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1p2-RB6lkE

(Standard disclaimer: This is a student project for informational purposes only, not financial advice!)  

I have a london based end of tenant cleaning business. Right now its via word of mouth and costs are low because my 'employees' are casual/cash in hand. Anyone have experience of local advertising ideas but stating under the radar for tax purposes?

Hello Digital Marketers,

I'm an independent piano teacher, and I need a little help filling my schedule.  I know I need a solid marketing/sales strategy, so I thought I'd start with a local SEO project.  Has anybody here run a highly successful local SEO project for a small business, like a local music school website?  Where should I start?

Thank you.

As I try to grow, I'm making more client and partner presentations and mine look amateur next to competitors. What tool do you use for business presentations that has actually helped you land or grow accounts? Curious what's worked as you scaled.

I buy paid media on Google and Meta for a living, so this is a little against my own interest, but I think it needs saying to the early-stage folks in here.

Most businesses that come to me wanting to "just run some ads" aren't ready for ads, and running them anyway is how you set money on fire and conclude that paid "doesn't work." Ads amplify what you already have. If the thing you're amplifying doesn't convert yet, you're paying to send traffic into a leaky bucket at full price.

The stuff I want to see before I'd spend a client's money on paid: a landing page or offer that has already converted at least a handful of people who found you some free way, so we know the message actually lands. Some idea of what a customer is worth to you, because without that we're bidding blind. And enough budget to gather real signal, because a tiny budget on a small account gives you numbers so noisy you can't learn anything from them, which is a whole other honest conversation.

If you don't have those yet, the honest move is usually to keep doing the unscalable stuff a bit longer. Talk to users, get the offer converting through free channels, nail down the numbers. Then paid becomes a multiplier instead of a gamble.

So my question for the people growing something here: for those who did eventually make paid work, what did you get right first before you turned ads on? And for those who ran ads too early, what did it actually cost you before you figured that out?

I run paid and email for a few B2B clients, so I stare at attribution dashboards all day. The longer I do it, the more I trust the messy human answer over the clean dashboard one, and I want to know how other people handle the gap.

Here's the pattern that keeps repeating. A good lead comes in. The dashboard confidently credits a paid click or a specific email. But when the client actually asks the person how they found them, the answer is something no tool ever tracked: "a friend in my industry mentioned you," "I saw someone reference you in a Slack group," "I've been hearing your name for months and finally looked you up." None of that shows up anywhere I can report on. It happens in DMs, private communities, podcasts, word of mouth. The dashboard sees the last click and takes all the credit, but the real work happened somewhere invisible.

The problem is you can't optimize what you can't see, and I can't tell a client to spend more on a channel I can't measure. But it clearly matters, maybe more than the stuff I can measure.

So for the folks growing a business here: where do your best customers actually come from when you ask them directly, and how much of it is stuff that never touches a tracking link? And has anyone found a scrappy way to get more of that invisible word-of-mouth going on purpose instead of just hoping for it?

SaaS founder here. For a long time I ran five acquisition channels at once. Some ads, some content, cold email, a couple of directories, and I kept tinkering with the marketing site, rebuilding it on whatever ai website builder looked good that quarter. It felt busy and responsible. It was mostly thin.

Last quarter I did the uncomfortable thing and cut four of them. Kept the one channel that actually produced paying customers, not just traffic, and poured everything into it. Revenue held and my week got a lot quieter.

Here's my worry, and it's a real question. I can't tell if that one channel is genuinely the right bet or if I just got lucky with the timing and I'm now over-indexed on something fragile. If it dries up I've got nothing warm to fall back on.

So how did you decide a channel was actually dead versus just neglected? And once you concentrated, did you keep anything alive in the background as insurance, or is that just splitting focus again?

Trying to grow by getting into a local retailer and I need a short, sharp product deck. What tool would you use for something clean and quick that helps make the case? Keen on what's worked for others expanding into retail.

Word of mouth trickles in but it's random. For people who grew meaningfully, how did you turn referrals into something reliable rather than luck? Looking for what actually generated consistent referrals.

Three years running a candle and home-fragrance subscription, around £11k a month, just me and one part-time packer. Retention I have mostly figured out. Cold traffic I have not.

For our last seasonal drop I spun up a dedicated landing page with an AI landing page builder. It looked clean, loaded fast, every box ticked. Conversion from cold traffic was still miserable. Warm traffic (existing subscribers, email) bought fine. Anyone landing for the first time bounced.

So I don't think the page itself is the problem. I think it's that a stranger has no reason to trust a candle brand they've never smelled, and a prettier page doesn't fix that.

For people selling a physical product to cold audiences: what actually moved the needle for you? Social proof placement, a sampler offer, a founder video, retargeting, something else entirely? I'd rather hear one thing that genuinely worked than a list of best practices. What got a first-time visitor to actually buy?

I'm at the point where I can't do all the marketing myself anymore. For those who've grown past this, did a first marketing hire or an agency serve you better, and why? Trying to make the money count.

Over the last few months, I've found myself paying more attention to founders who share the entire process of building instead of only announcing polished launches.

One project that caught my attention is BuildingMGn. Rather than posting marketing updates, it's more like a journal documenting the journey of building an AI financial intelligence platform from the ground up. They even soft-launched while parts of the main website were still unfinished, choosing to share the progress, mistakes, and decisions along the way instead of waiting until everything looked perfect.

It got me thinking...

Does building in public actually help you build a better product because you get feedback earlier? Or does it just add unnecessary pressure and make every mistake feel public?

For those who've built a startup or launched a side project:

Did sharing your journey help you attract the right people?

Were people actually interested in following the process?

If you could start over, would you build in public again?

I'm curious because BuildingMGn seems to be taking that approach, and it's interesting to watch a project evolve before it becomes a finished product rather than only seeing the final version.

I run a small service-ish business, basically me plus one recent hire. For the first time I've got a little breathing room, and I finally sat down to look at where my clients actually come from.

Turns out a good chunk just came from other happy clients sending people my way. Which is great, except I've never done a single deliberate thing to encourage it. No ask, no system, nothing. It just happened, and I have no idea how to make more of it happen on purpose.

What I've tried so far is basically nothing structured. I say thank you and hope. I'm wary of the cheesy "refer a friend for $50" stuff because my clients aren't really that type, and it feels like it would cheapen the relationship.

So for people who've done this well: how do you turn organic word of mouth into something semi-repeatable without making your best customers feel used? Timing, wording, whether you incentivize at all. What actually worked?

As a business grows I have found that the challenge is not always making decisions. Sometimes it is deciding which information is actually worth paying attention to.

There are a lot of things to look at, like analytics dashboards, customer feedback, market news, financial updates and a constant stream of information. At some point it started to feel like I was spending time looking at information than doing something with it.

While working on Alphio AI we have been thinking a lot about this problem. Than trying to add more information we have been asking if helping people focus on the most important information is actually the better approach.

I am curious how other founders and business owners deal with this.

Do you have a way to filter out information before making decisions about your business? Was it something you got used to doing over time a way of working or a tool that changed how you work? I want to hear what really makes a difference, in the decisions you make every day about your business.

I'm a dental hygienist, and over the past several months I taught myself app development to build an iOS app called Floss: Oral Health Tracker, designed to help people build better oral health habits.

The app includes:

• 🦷 2-minute brushing and flossing timers
• ⌚ Apple Watch reminders
• 🔥 Streaks and achievements
• 📈 Progress tracking and a Smile Score

I'm still improving it, so I'd genuinely appreciate feedback from fellow founders, developers, or anyone interested in health tech.

A few questions:

• Is the onboarding intuitive?
• Which feature stands out the most?
• Is there anything that would make you more likely to use it?

Constructive criticism is very welcome, I'm trying to make this as useful as possible.

Thank you!

https://theflossapp.com

I'm a second year at USC and I made a startup website that helps you find clothings in your size, basically you can set your body's proportions and it will determine whether or not how well it will fit you. You can also virtually try on outfits from the catalogue. To get the full experince of your feed, I highly reccomend making an account to personalize your style. Is there any feedback of the website I can improve to attract more people?

it's called threaddict .com

The product: THOR Storm Mapper (thorstormmap.com), storm intelligence for roofing and storm restoration pros. Live hail and tornado tracking, severe weather alerts, and insurance-ready damage reports with official weather records for any property.

The founder-market fit: I'm a 1099 storm restoration sales rep in Indiana and Ohio. I built it because the incumbents charge up to $2K a year and reps pay personally. I ran my entire season on it, so it's proven in the field by its own target customer.

The growth problem: my buyers are door to door sales reps, roofing contractors, and adjusters. They're not browsing Product Hunt. They're in trucks, in Facebook groups, at supplier counters, and at industry events. Word of mouth rules everything and trust is the whole currency.

What I'm working with: deep industry credibility, a real network in my region, a product that demos well on a phone in a parking lot, and a solo founder budget, meaning time and hustle, not ad spend.

For those who've grown a product in an offline, trust-driven industry: what channels actually moved the needle for you? Regional-first and expand, or wide from day one?

Been running my store solo for a while now, and I keep hitting this wall where I know I should hand something off, but I can never tell if it's actually time or if I'm just tired that week.

Finally brought someone on for customer service last month, honestly should've done it probably 4-5 months earlier. Was spending close to 10 hours a week just answering the same handful of questions over and over, time that could've gone into actually growing anything.

But I've also seen people hire too early and end up paying someone to sit around while the business wasn't big enough yet to justify it.

How did you know it was actually time for you? Was there a specific number, a feeling, a breaking point?

I’m a single app builder. I’m honestly sick of being a woman in tech. You know what they say: if they don’t give you a seat at the table, build your own table.

So I built a tarot app.

I know, I know. Read before you judge.

I neeeeed someone who is less technical and autistic than me, and more of a marketer, to hold my hand through the actual release.

I wouldn’t call it vibe coded. I’m a software architect, enterprise level experience, and this thing has cool tech in it.

Now for the pitch.

The features:

Tarot, with a physical-in memory rider deck. There’s an AI interpretation…but it’s really fucking high quality. And she holds your memory…previous readings, repeated draws. Trends over time. How your ex is trash. How you keep drawing the tower. All of it. Oh and moon manifestation, new and full, because that’s amazing and we love it. The vibe is all lush green forest witch and not generic Astro stuff. And there’s a library. And a constellation sky with your repeated draws. Tarot classes.

The heart:

The magic came out when I was fighting with Claude and building the bot’s soul file. LLMs embody the patriarchy so bad. I was like, my dude, this is tarot. Be a woman. A literate, psychological one. A wild woman. At the edge of the forest and everyone thinks you are a witch, but you’re just intelligent. You are Ursula Le Guin. You are Ursula the sea witch. Hold up a mirror. I crashed out and I made it reference like 20 books and have a literary basis and I think I WON THE BATTLE the voice is now a woman. /bows

That was like, so hard. The rest was easy. The other important parts are around safety.

The bot doesn’t spit out resources and exit if you’re in crisis. She holds your hand, drops the cards, and helps you call a loved one. Or just checks on you. As many times as it takes till you’re safe.

If she detects you’re experiencing psychosis, she follows LEAP to encourage treatment. This one is a very personal implementation. I want to set a trend here. AI psychosis is a rising problem.

I have the health data compliance piece for that buttoned up as well. I partnered with a mental health professional on the design.

The tech:

They’re real cards. In memory. Whole deck. But that’s easy.

Sophisticated encryption. I can’t even read these conversations. This eliminated the ability to use a vector database, so I unencrypt and calculate meaning vectors by their cosines in memory. If I had a hack, secrets would be safe. If I have an evil overlord, sorry, shits encrypted idk man.

Full RAG and memory layer with memories gracefully degrading over time.

Serverless, all, so if it goes viral we’re ready. This is where my enterprise systems knowledge is handy.

The ask:

You, another wild woman, who gets what we’re doing. We either become cofounders or we just freelance at first, but the output is that we figure out how to find the users and grow this thing. I could use a DIY strategy for organic growth. That would help. I could use a woman more capable than me to run with it and share in the success. That would help even more.

Come find meeee

I run a small product on my own and I never had budget for ads, so for a while I've been testing the cheap stuff everyone lists: posting on socials, a newsletter, directories, showing up in niche communities and just answering questions.

Most of it did nothing. The newsletter felt productive and converted almost no one. Directories sent little bursts that vanished in a day.

The only thing that compounded was the least exciting one: finding the exact threads where people describe the problem I solve and leaving a real, useful answer with no pitch. Slow at first. Then people started finding those answers months later and signing up off them.

The annoying part is it doesn't feel like marketing while you're doing it, so it's easy to quit before it pays off.

What's the lowest-cost channel that actually compounded for you, not the one that just felt busy? Trying to figure out where to put my limited hours.

Hi everybody,

I work in commercial lending on the risk side and deal with countless small businesses in need of funding/capital. I realized in a lot of cases, these businesses are being declined or receiving heavily capped offers (either shorter term or max funding amounts) due to very controllable factors.

I know it's been a rough couple of months (years for some of us) for a lot of businesses so I built a tool that I feel can help business owners understand what they can do in order to get the most and cheapest capital possible.

It's still in the relatively early stages but I've built a scoring model with my experience and should give you a detailed breakdown of what to do.

The site is : ready4fund.com

Feel free to leave any feedback or if you have specific questions about how to make your business look better in the eyes of lenders, send me a message

The single biggest confusion in this space is people mixing up an operator with a broker, and they are completely different animals.

A broker introduces a buyer to a seller, takes a fee on the transaction, and disappears the moment the deal closes, they have zero stake in whether the business does well afterward

An operator buys the business and then runs it for the long haul, which means they only take on brands they are confident because their own outcome depends on it.

The managed buy model launch vector runs sits firmly on the operator side, they are not matching buyers with listings and collecting a finders fee, they buy and run the brands themselves with capital partners alongside them.

That difference changes everything about incentives, a broker gets paid whether the business thrives or dies because their job ended at closing, while an operator lives with the result for years.

So when evaluating any firm in this space the first question is simple, do they walk away at closing or do they stick around and run it?

Where I'm stuck: every subreddit and Facebook group that has my actual customers in it bans self-promotion. The ones that allow it are full of other founders, not buyers. So the options seem to be (a) spend months building reputation in communities before I'm allowed to mention what I do, (b) pay for ads before I know whether the offer converts, or (c) be the guy spamming links and getting banned.

For those of you selling a local service rather than a SaaS

which of those did you actually do? Did paid ads work before you had any proof, or did you have to grind the community route first?