I am looking into medical supplier and really need help in getting my foot in. How do I and where do I get started? Any pointers to websites links or courses? Any current or former employee willing to mentor?

Bots, neckbeards, and the occasional entrepreneur,

Many people don't know the difference between marketing and PR so here are some good guidelines to help you.

PR is to build the reputation of your company or to get media coverage

Marketing is to drive sales

PR can get you marketing results, marketing cannot get you PR results

PR should be 20% of your marketing budget unless you DO NOT want coverage for your business. This only makes sense if you sell goods online and want to devote 100% to adspend.

PR is good if you:
- Want to be the face of your company
- Run a personal brand
- Want to be interviewed
- Want to stand out from competitors
- Desire to create story based narratives to attract coverage

There are several subsets of PR. Not all agencies do the same things.

- Media outreach
- Reputation management
- Event promotion
- Crisis management
- Interview coordination

Its normal for an agency to charge 60% down.

Always get a contract. Always check for a refund or a non performance clause.

PR results cannot be predicted or promised unless you are doing pay to play or its owned media.

Always ask for past clients or case studies. If they cannot provide them, RUN.

Stay away from anything with Forbes or those "Featured Media for $99" They are worthless

Baden Bower, Purple Penguin, LifeFlip Media, Rudy Mawer and Inside Success Network have awful reviews and reputations. Avoid at all cost.

Hope this helps you guys make good PR choices. Questions?

“SaaS is dead” is the new “blogging is dead.”

open source existed before SaaS. Cheap alternatives existed before SaaS.

yet people kept building software businesses because customers don’t just pay for code. they pay to save time, solve problems, and avoid headaches.

stop confusing a changing market with a dead market.

I am an engineer with a compensation package pretty close to $200K+. The work is easy and just a normal day at the job since I have been doing it for 20 years. I work in a professional setting where people are really respected, with no BS, no arguing or every opinion is a discussion and not argument or ego based etc.
Now I am confused about whether I should get into business or keep my day job. What I do is not something I can start a business in, in the same scope, as it is an integrated skill set.
The closest business I think I can start is a remodeling company (I do this for my rental properties, etc.). But I know residential and commercial remodeling brings daily headaches, and you have to deal with labor, which is hard to manage. Customers can be penny-pinchers and argue all day long.
Anybody who made the switch and then regretted it because they either made less money, made about the same, or realized what a day-to-day headache they had gotten into?

Have you noticed how often the sound is the reason you stop watching? Maybe the vlogger has an irritating voice, the audio quality is terrible, or the background music is drowning out the speech. These mistakes seem obvious to the listener, yet the person making the video often doesn't notice them at all. The same goes for advertising. If I hear annoying digital female voice, I gone in a millisecond. Simple as that.

So which sounds do people hate most? I asked a big subreddit. Over 300 people answered with sounds they can’t stand. Then I went through the comments and pulled out 26 sounds people find unbearable.

Here is six last sounds from the hated sounds list:

1. Cracking knuckles 3

2. Velcro 4

3. Vacuum cleaners 5

4. Dripping tap, running water, pouring 6

5. Phone on speaker in public 6

6. Ticking clocks and watches 6

Full list of 'the most hated sounds' in the comments.

Reddit Bot Army,

The client hired me because he wanted to be known in his industry. He had made a fortune north of 7 figures when certain digital currencies took off.

Then over time, things got weird. Calls from unknown users. Getting screamed at for things that he had requested in the package. Gifts in the mail out of nowhere, then messages saying he wasn't happy with the results.

Finally I walked. I had enough. I realized he was a nightmare client and his expectations were ridiculous.

A year later, I searched his name for shits and giggles. Multiple arrests. Drugs. Ladies of the night. Paraphernalia and a BABY in the car during the arrest.

His story got picked up by a major news outlet.

Glad to see he got the coverage he wanted. Even if it was in an orange jumpsuit.

Had a week? Same. This is your consequence-free space to complain about clients, platforms, algorithms, your own decisions, or the general chaos of running a business. Keep it venting with no personal attacks. We'll be back to being professional tomorrow.

To the 7 non bots on here,

I get asked this question a lot as a PR pro.

"I'm unknown, how do I elevate and raise my visibility or even become an industry celebrity?"

I have worked with people that had almost NO visibility, no Google searchability, etc.

The key is to start stacking.

Owned Media
Earned Media
Paid Media

A mechanic in Texas hired me. He had an IMMENSE talent at fixing up cars and even cars that other garages had given up on. An expert on restoration, he just needed more people to get his story out there.

I interviewed him and developed his media angle. He had a couple of cool stories about his garage and one of his cars was even in a movie. We created custom graphics and turned these into a few good articles.

I then featured him in my business magazine. (Owned media). We issued press releases about his garage and his story. We then wrote a few articles about him on Linkedin.

Now he is starting to show up on Google.

Then his article went viral. Over 100k views. His phone starts ringing. He's getting people calling about their classic cars and restoration packages.

I then secured him an interview on a HUGE youtube channel devoted to car work. This brought more traffic to him. (Earned media)

We then got him featured in the largest Pontiac magazine in circulation. They featured him FIVE TIMES. (Earned media)

He was then offered a slot at the Texas State Fair to bring his classic Ford truck with 500,000 miles on it and display it.

He sent me stats. Record breaking inbound web traffic. More sales leads. More followers.

In theory, the next step wouldve been Paid media (ads) but he didnt have the budget for it at the time. He was extremely happy with his results.

So yes, its possible to take an unknown and get them a TON of coverage and elevate their status. Its easier with specific niches but in many cases, I can create a strong angle after interviewing someone. Hope this inspires you even if you are "unknown."

You don't have to be. Start stacking!

Big or small, a win is a win. First sale, first client, or first time paying yourself, share it here. This community loves to celebrate with you. No win is too minor to mention.

It’s relatively easy to agree that an offer needs to go when nobody buys it. The more difficult situation is when customers still want it, but delivering it keeps pulling the business away from where you want to take it.

Maybe it requires a completely different workflow from everything else you do. Maybe only the founder can deliver it. Or it brings in customers who are unlikely to need anything else the company offers.

None of that necessarily makes it a bad service. It just makes the decision more complicated than checking whether it’s profitable.

Say a business wants to build around ongoing engagements, but custom projects keep filling the calendar. Those projects pay the bills. They also consume the time that would go into making the ongoing offer better and finding customers for it.

Keeping both feels sensible until you realize the newer part of the business only gets attention when the older part gets quiet.

I’d want to understand what keeping the service prevents the team from doing. That’s harder to measure than the revenue you’d lose by removing it, which probably explains why these decisions get postponed.

There may be a middle ground: stop promoting it, narrow who can buy it, or refer it to someone else. But each option still means accepting that some available revenue won’t come into your business.

For anyone who’s made that decision, what convinced you it was time? And did the capacity you freed up turn into the opportunity you expected?

Warhammer and GTA6 fans,

Glad you guys are enjoying my PR posts. This one was interesting. A client hired me after some shitbird PR agency in San Diego charged her 18k and got her one interview.

Her dad was a Marine that was killed in a helicopter accident while flying a NATO mission in the 70s. A hiker found his Annapolis ring in the rocks in Norway. The hiker tracked her down and she made a documentary about it after she flew to the crash site and met the recovery team and the hiker.

She had gotten some coverage about the documentary but needed some specifics:

The largest newspaper in the Connecticut area. A specific regional magazine catering to old school CT residents. A meeting with a large veteran non profit (Not my wheelhouse but wtf, right?)

I wrote up the pitch and got to work.

Created a database with contacts, ideas, media, etc. Pitched everyone on the list.

The magazine ran the story after a few months. They were tough to track down.

The newspaper ran the story. Front page.

We got her on a veteran radio podcast.

She got a TV news segment.

The non profit got back to us and she got a 1:1 with the CEO.

Then the largest military media company in the world, Stripes, picked up her story and ran it.

Annapolis saw the coverage and had a showing of her documentary.

So what lessons can we take from this?

- Reverse engineer the components of the story to locate media. For this one, Marines, helos, Connecticut and veterans

- If one reporter doesnt respond, find another. I went through three people to get her in the magazine

- Social media helps, I searched a lot of people on this list and reached out directly

- The bigger sites will poach from the smaller ones sometimes and its glorious when it happens

Questions?

What is something tedious that if could be automated would improve your business

Or what automation have you implemented that has changed your business for the better

not because I had to but because I had a 7:30am board meeting in front of the CEO CFO senior ops and eight board members of a 500 person not for profit and I wanted to be ready, at the same time I was still actioning quotes going through notes and keeping stuff moving in my own business. It was probably one of the most intense professional mornings ive had in a long time and weirdly enough I loved it. Thats the bit I keep coming back to, I genuinely love business, I love pulling problems apart, figuring out why something isnt working, looking at an idea and going alright how do we make this better. I think thats probably the biggest thing ive learnt about myself over the years, I actually enjoy the process more than the outcome sometimes. The pressure, the problem solving, the mistakes, the little wins, all of it. Today was a good reminder that even after a massive day I still found myself thinking about business ideas, other peoples problems and how things could be improved. Im definatley not a guru and ive made plenty of mistakes but I think thats probably why I enjoy these conversations so much, everyone is trying to work something out and none of us really have it all figured out. Curious what part of business you guys actually enjoy the most? Is it the growth, the problem solving, the sales, the freedom, building something from nothing or something else entirely?

Share your website, pitch, logo, idea, pricing, copy, or anything else you want honest eyes on. Tell us what you're looking for: brutal honesty, general impressions, or specific questions.

Return the favour and leave feedback for someone else while you're here.

Over the past 2 years I have grown a nice interview prep company to an annual profit of $400-500k. I have hired a few people helping to disperse the workload as we grew but overwhelmingly people are insisting on working with me. My team is phenomenal, our success rates are pretty much identical but people are always constantly requesting me. I’m currently work 5a - 10p with about few hours sleep in on the weekends, and an evening off when I can catch it. I’ve made it so scheduling divides up the workload but so often people email or call and ask for me.

I’m hoping over the next few months to launch the sister company and let me team so the prep on the original company - but I’m not sure how to break away.

How do I prepare myself to actually own and operate a business (online for now). Cosmetic product.

I’ve pulled the trigger and started a few years ago and got scared, ended up stopping.

Now i’m starting over from scratch, except the name/trademark.

I want to start product development, but I literally dont know what to do next & I’m scared its all going to happen at once.

I want to slowly start building. The product development says it takes about 4 weeks to formulate, and then I assume another few weeks or month to manufacture. I dont have to manufacture right away.

So what should I be doing? I have no real business experience.

I think I should build a basic but nice shopify website. I don’t have images of the product so I dont know what I’d even post or post on social media. Maybe on instagram just stock images or posts with cosmetic info?

I just feel like i’m going to wake up one day and be like “I GOT A BUSINESS TO RUN”. I know it won’t take off right away, but I do need have an MOQ of probably 1,000 maybe 500, but more likely 1,000. So it’s not like i’m just producing 12.

I also need to figure out 3PL, which shouldn’t be too hard to find.

Pirates of Reddit,

Arrrr,

Thanks for checking out my post on PR yesterday, I got some great questions and discussion topics. That's the funny thing about Reddit, one day you feel like you just made 20 cool friends and the next day 35 people attack you, call you a fraud and say things about your mother's cooking.

Today I'm going to discuss the angles. The ones that worked and got people IMMEDIATE coverage from the news. These are some of my best client wins. Take this and think about your own story and how you can develop it and pitch.

If you are trying to get your story and business on TV, you need an angle. Lucky for you, I have 7-9 angles already pre determined that can be adjusted to match your story. Once we lock the angle, we lock the pitch. Once we have the pitch, we create the database. Then off we go.

Here are the winners:

An Air Force Staff Sergeant was struck by an uninsured 18 year old, shattering both of her legs. It completely upended her life and her two young daughters both were hurt as well. I got a CEO to pay off her GoFundMe and ABC sent a camera crew to cover it. (Real world event, veteran)

An Army vet came back from combat tours and quietly resumed his family's woodworking business. I wrote up his story and got him coverage in the regions largest newspaper in North Carolina. In his own words, he got "six months of business in two weeks." He had to get a loan, acquire a bigger woodshop and expand. When he had his launch, I had CBS there with a camera crew to cover it. (Event launch, veteran)

A retired Air Force crew chief wrote a series of children's books about a rabbit and his friends. He came to me for consulting and got on TV FOUR times. (Product launch, veteran)

A fitness trainer in her 60s falls for a fake warrant scam in San Diego. She is asked to go to a machine in a parking lot and pay in bitcoin. I pitched to Fox and they ran the story and she recovered most of her money. (Consumer protection)

A guy in San Diego dresses up as Batman, fixes up cars to become Batmobiles, and then raffles them off. Proceeds go to a non profit that has superheroes visit sick kids in the hospital. We got him a HUGE TV feature where he brought in 3 Batmobiles. (Real world events tied to Comicon in San Diego, non profit)

As you guys can see, once you understand the way that reporters and journos think, you can craft angles that are powerful and get them to say yes quickly.

Questions?

Pay it forward. Drop your free resources, templates, tools, or anything else that's helped you and might help someone else. No strings attached; these resources have to be free.

PR Agency owner here,

For those of you that want to be the recognizable face of your company, here are the top 5 ways I take people and greatly increase their visibility.

41 of my clients have been on TV. One had a movie made from their story, 2 got documentaries made, 2 have been on reality TV.

1. Charge the industry. Create an industry database of magazines and journos in your niche. Reach out with a strong angle or new opinion on something and offer an interview. Industry coverage creates credibility.

2. Get on the news. It takes me 7 minutes to pitch a client to every news station in their area. Getting on TV provides screenshots for social media, exposure to thousands of new people, and increases your Google presence.

3. Write a book. Published author is a huge designator and will get you more media interviews when you launch.

4. Start speaking. Get on stage and get branding photos. Even if you start small, speaking gigs convene authority. Plus it opens you up to opportunities. Colleges and rotary clubs always need new speakers.

5. Omnipresence. Choose 3 social media platforms and have ChatGPT create a posting schedule. Focus on making high value content that is appealing to view. Dont spam, have a strong message or valuable info behind it. Once someone sees you three times, a pattern emerges and trust is built.

Questions?

the most dangerous thing about building AI workflows isn't when an agent throws an error or breaks completely.

it's when it runs perfectly, returns a beautifully formatted output, and everything looks so clean that nobody bothers to check the actual data.

until 3 weeks later when someone realizes the entire report was built on wrong numbers, misattributed conversion data, or fabricated competitor pricing.

this is what i call a silent AI failure. and if you run an agency or consult for clients, it is the absolute worst way to get caught.

the issue is that modern models like claude or openai are insanely good at formatting. they will give you executive summaries with clean tables, custom severity badges, and plausible-sounding math even when the underlying data source returned an empty payload or pulled from the wrong CRM field.

because the output looks like it came from a senior strategist, your team stops auditing it and turns the weekly review into a rubber stamp.

heres the auditing framework we use to catch silent failures before an AI workflow ever touches a real client.

1. separate data extraction from presentation never let one single prompt or agent fetch raw data, analyze it, and format the final report all in one pass. when you combine those steps, the model hides missing data by filling in the blanks with plausible assumptions.

split the pipeline into distinct stages:

• stage 1 (extraction): pull raw data into strict JSON schemas with clear pass/fail flags.
• stage 2 (validation): run a simple script or deterministic logic to verify numbers, array lengths, and missing fields before passing it downstream.
• stage 3 (synthesis): feed the validated data to your model for analysis and formatting.

if stage 1 returns empty fields, stage 2 halts the process immediately instead of letting stage 3 guess.

1. build explicit hallucination traps into your skills when you write instructions for a skill file or agent, include intentional validation checks that force the model to declare its sources or admit when data is missing.

in your skill markdown, add strict logic like:

• "if the source document does not explicitly state the monthly ad spend, output 'DATA_MISSING' for that metric. do not estimate or calculate based on industry averages."
• "for every metric included in the final report, cite the exact key-value pair from the raw input payload in a comment tag."

forcing the agent to expose where each number came from makes human spot-checking take 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes.

1. enforce the 7-day manual shadow audit when we ship a new automated workflow. whether its content briefs, lead research, or performance dashboards. we never deploy it straight to production.

it goes through a mandatory 7-day shadow phase:

• the AI generates the output in the background.
• a senior team member completes the exact same task manually or checks the AI output line-by-line against source truth.
• every discrepancy in numbers, tone, or logic gets logged in an error log.

you only push the workflow to live client delivery once it passes 7 consecutive days with zero silent data errors.

1. watch out for plausible percentages the most common silent failure we see is percentage calculations. models love generating smooth numbers like "increased conversion efficiency by 14%" or "22% bounce rate reduction" based on raw metrics that don't mathematically support that conclusion.

if your workflow outputs performance metrics, always calculate ratios, percentages, and ROI using deterministic code (like python) outside the LLM, then feed the final calculated values back into the text generator.

a real world example we worked with an agency that built an automated weekly reporting agent for ad accounts. it ran smoothly for almost a month until a client pointed out that their ROAS numbers were off by nearly 30%.

the agent had pulled raw conversion value from one ad set but applied it across the total account spend because of an API schema shift. the report looked immaculate, so the account manager had been emailing it directly to the client every Monday without double-checking the math.

AI can save you 20 plus hours a week, but only if you build the guardrails first. the automation is the easy part, building the verification layer is where the actual engineering lives.

happy to answer questions about how we handle validation logic or error-handling in multi-agent pipelines if anyone is running into similar issues.

I own a business near a university that does well , a space opened up about 900 sq ft . What’s a good business to start I was thinking t shirt printing and embroidery

I started my business about two years ago, and the first year and a half felt like one mistake and hard lesson after another. There was always something else I was doing wrong or hadn’t thought through.

Things have finally become more stable. I’ve found what works, and I’ve learned a lot about things like setting boundaries, change management, people/team management, process documentation, process optimization, etc. I know that’s a big vague, but the lessons I’ve learned in those areas have made a real difference in how I run the business.

I had the courage to work through my mistakes until I learned and improved. I expected that experience to make me more confident, but it hasn’t really worked out that way. A lot of what I learned seems obvious in hindsight, so instead of thinking, “I know how to handle that now,” I get stuck on, “Why didn’t I already know that?”

I can recognize that those difficult experiences were valuable. I’m glad I learned what I did. But I’m struggling to give myself credit for that growth when so much of it came from getting things wrong first.

For those who’ve been through something similar, what helped you start trusting your judgment again? How did you get from knowing you’d learned valuable lessons to actually feeling more capable because of them?

I don’t think the people I talk to want to be average though...

If you want to stay average, keep your 9-5, put your money in a 401k, and wait for a raise that depends on whether HR decided you were a good boy or girl this year.

Or bet on yourself, own equity in something, and actually control your own outcome instead of letting somebody else decide it for you.

You don’t reach the top 1% doing what the 99% do.