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  1. Iqen

    Foot in the door techniques for digital service clients

    MARKETING 
    Any digital niche: SEO, SEM, Ads management or others. Do you guys have any foot in the door techniques that have worked well for getting paying clients? I once sent leads for free to 7 businesses at my own cost. 0 of the 7 continued after the free trial. I was stunned, but I learned a valuable...
  2. Iqen

    Sold my carpet cleaning business, started a Google Ads agency. Niche down or stay general?

    MARKETING SCALING EXECUTION 
    Great job man, I wish I did it in your order. I'm 40 and looking to make remote work which isn't easy starting from scratch. Local first was the smart play.
  3. Iqen

    The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Random Chat Thread...

    CHAT - AI - 
    I think you have a good start but your specific conclusions seem weak. 1. Cloudflare or vercel is dollars whereas SMEs like us want tens of dollars to host (or more) 2 and 4. Same capex problem, either you come with huge funds for infra or you try to be some awkward low value middleman 3 is...
  4. Iqen

    The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Random Chat Thread...

    CHAT - AI - 
    It's not a bad thing for salaries to drop $5,000/year if everyone's expenses drop $10,000/year. 1. Lower education is coming up. That means more capable minds (of oversight over projects) 2. Lower healthcare costs 3. Support areas like accounting, legal, financial projections...
  5. Iqen

    I'm a game designer thinking about creating a videogame magazine to raise money, can I get your feedback?

    IDEA INVESTING 
    Man, there are a lot of game industry people here. You guys need to acknowledge that the small project economy in your industry is, or is near saturation. Developing a breakout success will be like getting a lead role in acting. Visible, possible, highly unlikely. Choose boring, non flashy...
  6. Iqen

    The Artificial Intelligence (AI) Random Chat Thread...

    CHAT - AI - 
    11labs v4 turbo View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GagC4nKpBLQ Spent saturday trying to get GPT Live to work. Too laggy, AI level emotiveness, clearly fake. In the past I used Gemini and Qwen which were also bad. This one is the best so far. lower latency and more natural sounding. Not...
  7. Iqen

    From Laid off to CEO: Building a Multi-Million Dollar Software Company [Progress Thread]

    HOT! EXECUTION 
    Games just are not a good niche. You can spend a few more years overcommitted or just learned the lesson and go where demand actually is. Boring businesses. I fixed washers and dryers in my spare time when I was in the us. I would list them with free shipping in exchange for your broken...
  8. Iqen

    Making a Videogame

    SIDE HUSTLE SAAS / APPS EXECUTION 
    Terrible niche. Especially right now. I can tell you're already committed but in the future when you hit your milestone for realization, the money making pivot goes into boring niches that not everybody has flooded into.
  9. Iqen

    My cold emails closed $200K+ for the agency I worked for. This is week 1 of building my own.

    MARKETING INTRO 
    I will review it after you post your guide as you promised :) But more seriously, I just find it hard to breakthrough on email. On the phone, at least, we get a conversation some small percentage of the time. With email, it's mostly dead air. Total ignorance. I feel like you have to really...
  10. Iqen

    Exploring a Real Problem in the Indian Railway System

    IDEA 
    Unfortunately, a lot of these are common sense solutions that I think you're planning on pitching to a government body with no funds. If you're hoping to make a living on improving "poor hygiene in certain areas of the train" in India be prepared to learn tough lessons about solving what...
  11. Iqen

    My cold emails closed $200K+ for the agency I worked for. This is week 1 of building my own.

    MARKETING INTRO 
    That is stunning dude. I was about to hire a skilled b2b Kenyan for client hunting. Accent was the one downside. If we can find a way to put her on this I'm using it (messaged krisp but they seem to orient this towards "call centers"
  12. Iqen

    My cold emails closed $200K+ for the agency I worked for. This is week 1 of building my own.

    MARKETING INTRO 
    Best of luck. I have a feeling you'll make it. I think securing an established US partner will be hard though and you should plan around doing the launch yourself. Maybe use Elevenlabs or Heygen for the voice portion. It has a lip sync feature. Downside is this will not help on phone calls...
  13. Iqen

    The Agencies & Freelancers Chat Thread / Mastermind

    CHAT 
    I think if you can corral a guy like this into accepting a text message chat "because you're in a meeting," GPT Luna can basically talk to him on your behalf for like a dollar an hour.
  14. Iqen

    Banks suck

    SCALING 
    Did you take out any credit cards? Think their rule is often that you can get about a month of revenues as your limit
  15. Iqen

    The AI Savings Thread, How Much Time and Money has it Saved You?

    CHAT - AI - 
    Do you have a separate secretary then? Constant calls coming in are one of the things I planned to pass to a human at some point. Every call is an interruption. A huge part of the traditional Exec Assistant role is phone based: scheduling, support, oversight...
  16. Iqen

    The AI Savings Thread, How Much Time and Money has it Saved You?

    CHAT - AI - 
    I don't think AI can fully replace the Exec Assistant role yet. 1. It's not good at phone calls yet 2. I notice Claude gets locked into certain decisions when further discussion subtly changes the ground under the original plan. Maybe in 2 years we'll be there but right now the EA will be more...
  17. Iqen

    Soft validation looked good, hard validation got zero. What would you change or pivot?

    QUESTION 
    I don't think it's time to move on yet. Lots of businesses require a call or some personal communication before buying. House cleaning basically had your results when we tried to charge upfront on a lander. When we spoke first over sms or phone it suddenly worked. I imagine anything b2b would...
  18. Iqen

    Building and Scaling my Exterior Property Wash Business

    GOLD! EXECUTION 
    Impressive man. Mike Andes says home service businesses that are well run will be at $1m+ revenue and 20% net profit, presumably without owner labor. You are well on your way.
  19. Iqen

    Anyone know how to bypass the Claude Cowork password issue?

    - AI - 
    Yeah, it seems pretty tough on that issue. Sometimes you can lie to it to get it to do things. If your workflow absolutely depends on it, maybe you do something like: 1. Create a utility that's only job is to pass login details to a browser. 2. Tell Claude whenever it needs to login to push the...
  20. Iqen

    Laid off (probably). 10 years as a dev. Going for my first paying client. FTE

    EXECUTION 
    Maybe you could offer the website for free and just mention it costs money to host it. If they agree to $25 a month you buy the domain for them (customer lock in).

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