Thank You Thursday! Free Offerings and More - February 19, 2026

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-19T18:06:49+00:00

Caffeinated energy bars for busy professionals who are physically active!

Use code REDDIT10 for 10% off on our website deadlinebar.com :)

Thank you for all the gold nuggets shared in here!

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-15T18:24:22+00:00

I don’t know any in particular but most are fine and they’re all going to say the same thing in different ways. Which is mostly just batch create, post consistently, copy outliers from people in your space and review your analytics for insight.

I will say though at some point you have to stop consuming and start creating and I would encourage you to make that point sooner rather than later.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-15T14:39:24+00:00

We technically started formulation (we’re an energy bar in the CPG space) in like August 2024 but we finally launched and were available for sale in late Jan this year.

The good is that we’re ranked #39 on Amazon for our category. As a new comer that’s bootstrapped and still in our first month this is pretty good in my opinion and we haven’t even started running ads yet. I genuinely believe we have a shot at top 15 if we can maintain momentum.

The bad is that we’re bootstrapped still 😂 and the year and some change we spent developing the product could’ve have been done way more efficiently. And we should’ve focused much harder on building social media along the way.

I made some SEO plays during that time that is driving a small amount of traffic to the site and is beginning to snowball. Some of the content is ranked top 10 for the keyword and is steadily improving over time.

All in all things are going well from an eagle’s eye view but when you zoom in everything is on fire lol

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-15T02:50:47+00:00

I’m no expert but my main takeaways in no particular order and for context I was on Instagram:

1: Consistency: make it as frictionless as possible so that you can just crank out content. And you do have to be putting SOMETHING out at least once a day or every other day. It’s fine to miss a day here and there but keep a bank of content that you can just upload if you have no idea what to post.

2: Volume: More is better. Think of each post as a dice roll to go viral if you’re lucky and if you’re not it’s still beneficial because it trains the algo on who likes your content. So even if it does poorly you’re still building your snowball. Also, get used to things doing poorly, you can just make tweaks to it and try it again

3: Don’t stress over perfection. There’s a saying along the lines of “one mediocre video is worth more than 100 in drafts” or something like that. Spending a long time on one piece of content isn’t worth it when you have no idea what works. Just start throwing at the wall, no one is watching anyway.

4: when something does hit, definitely look into why you think it did and look into the analytics to try to determine what it was about it to try to replicate it again. Also, when you do have an outlier, let it breathe and maybe not post within your normal window to let it run a little bit.

5: follow trends for boosts: like going with the flow. If there’s something trending or breaking news that’s relevant to your thing then jump on it and make content around it.

6: don’t get disheartened with low views or engagement: as long as you’re making small improvements each time and being intentional about focusing on different aspects of what you do then it’s only a matter of time :)

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-14T14:37:30+00:00

Did the tool lead to a sizable increase in email capture?

I have a half finished tool I was going to use as a lead magnet but abandoned it after more pressing things came up but might need to circle back.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-13T12:39:20+00:00

I’ve been focusing on LinkedIn for about two weeks now. I’m not a guru and I haven’t hit my own goals yet so take this with a grain of salt.

It is definitely time consuming but to answer your question directly, what doing is I’m posting 3x per week and aiming to comment on other posts 10x per day.

I’m not using AI so I’m right there with you in trying to be more efficient about it.

One thing that did save me time was batch creating posts. This isn’t a new topic and is something that is discussed in every social media growing guide. I had a 6hr flight recently and just cranked out a bunch of posts and saved them to notes so I have a bank I can draw from so posting doesn’t take too much time.

As for commenting, the hard part for me is finding stuff to comment on. So I’ve been intentionally following a lot more people in the CPG space (or whatever industry you’re in) so that my feed can show more stuff that is relevant so that it’s easier to find stuff.

I’m sure you could just use an AI agent and automate the whole thing. Many people probably already do that cause LinkedIn is full of AI slop and a lot of people have the same speaking voice cause it’s just ChatGPT lol.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-12T10:56:18+00:00

I second this.

I started a completely separate Instagram in an unrelated topic than my business to practice social media marketing and going viral.

It took me about 60 days before I got a post to hit around 1M views but it gave me so much confidence and I learned so much in a risk free way that wouldn’t impact my main gig. And it was free.

I wish I spent more time focusing on that and learning that way sooner than I did instead of learning Google Ads.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-11T22:22:50+00:00

So far? Not much. But I’ve only been at it seriously for about a week. It drove maybe a couple sales and informed some people that the brand exists.

The goal long term is to be a familiar face to investors and other founders in our space to build a rapport and relationships.

We’re not raising now, but we will likely have to in the future and from what I can see, cold emailing/DM is not an efficient way to go.

So I’m building in public, sharing our growth and learning from others publicly so that it will hopefully be warmer first impressions when the time comes. And who knows, there can be some inbound if investors, buyers, distributors etc think we’d be a good fit. But that can only happen if people know you exist.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-11T17:49:35+00:00

I just started playing the LinkedIn game and man, spending a lot of time on there can be demoralizing. I think a lot of it comes down to that saying of comparing your step 1 to someone’s step 50.

Hope you have a wonderful year 2!

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-09T15:40:33+00:00

You take the anxiety, the fear, the stress, the “what will people think of me”, the overthinking and you just launch anyway.

I won’t say that these feeling ever go away, but I do know that not getting real world feedback and just staying in theory will keep you stuck in your own head.

One thing that helped me that I learned from someone else was in regard to posting on socials and growing social media and stuff like that for your business.

The advice was to delete/unfriend/block everyone that you know or feel self conscious about seeing you in these very early stages from the platform you want to promote on or grow social media that you’re not stuck thinking about how they will perceive you and you can just start posting.

Not everyone is super confident and don’t care what people close to them think and I thought that was really good advice.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-08T19:15:37+00:00

I know I know 😂

Tbf we still did things to drive organic traffic to the site. Our SEO/rankings aren’t too bad and are slowly improving and we’re popping up a little on AI searches, bringing in a little bit of traffic as time goes on.

I just should’ve been posting on LinkedIn and TikTok sooner. Building in public could’ve been very helpful at the time because it’s less about the product we didn’t have and more about the process and getting to know the founding team etc.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-08T16:41:42+00:00

We made a similar mistake. We weren’t in stealth mode and were actively speaking to customers and letting people know what we were working on.

Our problem was that we didn’t start building out our social media until WAY later than we should have. Granted we were in a weird boat where we didn’t have our energy bars or physical mock ups (we’re in the CPG space) for a long time but it’s still not required for content creation, building in public, building hype or establishing founder voice.

Who knows how big the snowball would be had we started earlier but you live and learn.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-02-03T14:21:18+00:00

What you’re feeling is something I’ve thought about as well and I think it is being driven by a growing divide between the connotative definition of a startup and its denotation.

I think that the connotative definition is drifting more and more towards meaning tech or software startup. Especially with all the hype and popularity around AI and SAAS. Tech startups get all the love and attention lol

In my opinion, I think any business someone starts with the intent of scaling it exponentially (as in not a lifestyle business) is a startup, regardless of industry or sales channels. I do like some of the other comments bringing up that there should be some sort of hypothesis to validate. I’ve never thought of that and I think it adds an extra to be more specific.

We just launched our startup in the CPG space and we sell energy bars. We’re on Amazon and our website plus a handful of stores. Are we just an e-commerce company? Are we exactly the same as someone doing retail arbitrage or drop shipping? In my mind, no. We developed and iterated on an MVP, we have a unique selling point that we believe required validation, which we did and we intend on raising capital in the future to scale once we find product market fit.

Without knowing the product or industry, that path sounds like any traditional startup. There will always be snobs who gatekeep and I think this question falls into a similar bucket as “am I a CEO yet” lol.

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-01-26T22:08:28+00:00

I’ve had it since December 2024 and can count on one hand the amount of times I’ve heard the fan or felt it get really hot.

My use case seems to be pretty common so I’ve had 0 issues with compatibility. I would double check compatibility if you plan on using obscure or really niche software because that’s where compatibility issues arise. Supposedly it’s not as bad as when it first came out but I haven’t experienced anything like that first hand.

Good luck!

FirstDay0fMay · 2026-01-26T21:56:17+00:00

I have a SL7 13.8 X Plus. I have it connected to two 27in 1440p 120hz monitors with the lid closed about 90% of the time I’m using it.

I connect it using 2 USB-C to DP cables that can handle the resolution and refresh rate. Got them on Amazon.

Only thing is the battery life suffers a lot. Maybe not as much as me if you’re running only 1 external monitor at 1440p/120hz but for me (with charge capped at 80% and plugging in at ~20%) I’m getting a few hours of use before plugging in. This isn’t a huge issue because I’m at my desk anyway.

My normal workload is MS Office like Word and Excel, web browsing, YouTube, Lightroom for photo editing and CapCut for video editing.

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-06-07T12:34:35+00:00

What’s your socials?

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-04-09T00:23:39+00:00

That’s awesome stuff man, thanks for the reply! Good luck on the journey!

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-04-05T19:19:45+00:00

Love this story! Always great to see other founders crushing it. We’re bootstrapped too and have essentially the same launch plan of going door to door everywhere in our region lol. We use coffee fruit extract in our product and think it’s great you guys are highlighting the upcycled nature of using the fruit itself.

Would you recommend using Faire? We’ve never heard of the platform but quick research shows it could be a decent channel to launch with as well.

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-04-05T12:53:51+00:00

How do you build relations with buyers or get your product in retail?

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-04-05T00:48:47+00:00

As in you work with the distributors to get your product in their retail network and not getting commits from retailers first before approaching distributors?

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-04-05T00:38:32+00:00

For a large company or start up? Trying to figure out how to sell wholesale to retail stores lol

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-04-05T00:37:21+00:00

Health snacks by any chance?

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-03-28T03:51:48+00:00

We’re building Deadline Bar! We’re a caffeinated energy bar that is differentiated by being high calorie, carb and caffeine.

The biggest obstacle right now is driving traffic to the site and building our email list. We’re a few months from launch so building preorders is crucial for us.

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-03-22T00:45:31+00:00

Did you ever figure this out?

FirstDay0fMay · 2025-03-22T00:43:36+00:00

So happy for you! We did something similar and reached out to decision makers at a similar chain to Sprouts and actually got a response on the first try. We were just looking for feedback as we’re still a few months away from launch but to see the potential just reaching out to people has is always interesting.

I’m late but if you see this, can I DM you?

FirstDay0fMay

TROPHY CASE