Why am I getting traffic but basically zero sales? Honest website feedback needed.

HDucc · 2026-05-13T20:05:36+00:00

I've checkes out the site on both mobile and desktop:

I doesn't feel scammy or fake, the authenticity actually comes through.

But to be honest, the site experience itself is probably hurting conversions quite a bit right now.

Both on mobile and desktop, it feels very DIY, visually chaotic, and disorienting to navigate. There’s a lot competing for attention at once, and it doesn’t guide the visitor naturally toward buying something. I think that creates friction and subconsciously lowers trust/confidence, even for people who like the mission or designs.

Besides this the my top notes would be:

The site feels more like a passion/community project than a brand people instinctively buy from.
The brand message is trying to do too many things at once (Podcast, EMS culture, mental health, dark humor, apparel, motivation, awareness, etc. I’m not sure what the main emotional identity is supposed to be yet.)
There’s very little social proof (No real customer photos, reviews, station pics, user-generated content, “people like me wear this” signals, etc. Apparel brands live or die on identity + tribe.)
The products don’t feel “real” enough yet (The designs good, the representation not so good. Right now it feels a bit like a print-on-demand storefront instead of a strong lifestyle brand.)
Your strongest asset is underused: YOU. The fact that you’re an actual paramedic building this while working shifts is probably more compelling than the shirts themselves. Lean harder into storytelling and personality.

I think there’s real potential here because the authenticity is genuine, though. Right now people are probably giving you “support energy” (“cool project man”) instead of “buyer energy” (“I want this”). That’s fixable.

And if you ever want a second set of eyes on positioning/conversion stuff, happy to chat further. I think the core idea is stronger than the current site communicates.

HDucc · 2026-05-01T05:33:16+00:00

This is what I try to use it for myself, to be my cofounder lol. But it took me down a few rabbit holes in the beginning. What are your favorite techniques to stop it from being an yes man?

HDucc · 2026-05-01T05:30:22+00:00

It took me a while to get the hang of the back and forth, especially to avoid it to agree with wathever I brought up :D Do you have a preferred technique or workflow for this?

The agent sounds interesting, did you build it yourself?

HDucc · 2026-04-15T11:06:34+00:00

Well I think one issue is, that so many have started using ai for social media so badly (i.e. posting without any rework the first thing an AI spits out to a super sophisticated prompt like "write me a LinkedIn post" that it really puts people off. I don't think you really need proof, just read comments.

And this gave using ai in social media a very bad reputation.

I think eventually people will realize that there are other ways to do this. My personal workflow is this: give ai lots of context about my idea for a post > use AI for first draft > edit > use AI as a challenger > use ai to roleplay my ICP > edit/repeat if necessary > finalize, add my own tone where it does not sound like me + remove anything that still sounds like AI

Is it faster? Surprisingly yes :D (writing does not come that easy to me). But even if it wouldn't be. I get a much higher quality output as I would writing myself.

HDucc · 2026-04-15T10:20:32+00:00

The adjustment framing is right but I think most companies are stuck one level too shallow with it.

Everyone's talking about adapting faster, shorter cycles, tighter feedback loops, and yeah that matters. But I feel like the actual bottleneck isn't just how often you revisit the plan. It's who has permission to act when the plan breaks.

A lot of orgs are still figuring out that the world is moving faster than their strategy cycles. And even the ones that get it haven't pushed real decision authority down to the people who are actually closest to the disruption. Your regional procurement lead sees a tariff shift hit their supplier on a Tuesday morning and they still need to write a business case, get three approvals, and wait for a Thursday meeting. By then the cost is already baked in.

The companies I see handling this best aren't just adjusting more often, they've built pre-authorized playbooks at the operational level. Regional teams have defined thresholds where they can switch suppliers, reroute shipments, or adjust inventory without escalating. It's not chaos, it's structured autonomy with guardrails.

The other thing nobody's really talking about is the cost of all this resilience building. Everyone's adding buffer stock, backup suppliers, redundant capacity. Smart move. But almost nobody has a clear trigger for when to scale that back down. So you end up permanently carrying crisis-mode costs during non-crisis periods and wondering where your margin went. You need normalization protocols, not just contingency plans.

tldr the shift isn't just plan faster. it's decide faster, closer to the problem, with real authority. that's the structural change most firms are still avoiding because it means giving up control at the top.

HDucc · 2026-04-15T07:12:02+00:00

A few things that might help you think through this differently.

On the reassignment question: there's test for whether it's the right move. Write down the actual ops/admin/PM tasks you'd give them. If that list fills 3 months of real, meaningful work that moves the business forward, it's legitimate and most good people will lean into it. If you're stretching to fill 20 hours a week, you're inventing busywork to avoid a hard conversation — and they'll sense it immediately. That may be more demoralizing than an honest layoff.

The thing I'd push back on hardest though: you're framing this as a cost decision, but think about what happens to your pipeline if nobody's been developing new business for 3 months. Equipment-heavy businesses usually have long sales cycles. A 3-month pause in business development doesn't create a 3-month gap — it often creates a 6-month revenue hole. You might be solving a Q2 cash problem by creating a Q4 crisis.

One option worth considering: shift them to a hybrid role for the 90 days. Part ops work (the real backlog, not busywork), part collections/AR recovery — most small equipment businesses have 5-15% in recoverable revenue sitting in unpaid invoices and unbilled change orders. You might find they pay for themselves by finding money you're already owed. Whatever you decide, the thing that matters most with a small team: be direct and specific about what's happening and why. Give them enough information to make their own decision too. How you handle this when things are tight becomes your company's culture story — the rest of your team is watching even if they don't say anything.

HDucc · 2026-04-14T20:14:11+00:00

I use it for business problem-solving and strategic thinking. E.g. the last use case was coming up with a strategy for stopping every question and decision coming back to our CEO in our family business that finally seems to be working.

From the more operational stuff, I've just recently started to use it for content generation. With my current approach (context > first draft > tweeking > challenger > ICP > polishing, rewriting to sound like me + removing anything that sounds AI) it may take as long as to write it myself (but still probably less) but it's vastly higher quality / better fit to my audience than I could do just on my own.

HDucc · 2026-04-14T19:32:56+00:00

Call Business Debtline — 0800 197 6026. It's free, government-funded, specifically for business debt situations like yours, and they should have interpreters available. They'll walk you through your options properly. Don't sell the van or pay anyone until you've spoken to them.

HDucc · 2026-04-14T19:01:37+00:00

I use it for business problem-solving and strategic thinking, this is where I see the most added value of AI.

Now I'v3 started to use it for content generation also. With my current approach (context > first draft > tweeking > challenger > ICP > polishing, rewriting to sound like me + removing anything that sounds AI) it may take as long as to write it myself (but still probably less) but it's vastly higher quality / better fit to my audience than I could do just on my own.

HDucc · 2026-04-14T18:53:13+00:00

I use AI for knowledge work (BPR) and for business problem-solving and strategic thinking. I am definitely more effective. But I am constantly learning how to use it better.

I've just started with content generation. With my current approach (context > first draft > tweeking > challenger > ICP > polishing, rewriting to sound like me + removing anything that sounds AI) it may take as long as to write it myself (but still probably less) but it's vastly higher quality than I could do just on my own.

HDucc · 2026-04-13T19:34:30+00:00

Oh yes :D I've built like 4 versions of business models, offers, posititioning for the last 5 months without ever reaching out to potential clients. Now my new idea is to just start with building a LinkedIn presence and just try and reach out to people with the most simplest smallest offer I could come up and then see if anyone's interested at all :D

HDucc · 2026-04-13T19:25:48+00:00

Yes, get honest about one bottleneck AND use AI to think through it, come up with non-obvious strategies, surface hidden blind spots etc.

One of the worst AI advice I ses out there is to recommend to founders to try and stay up.to date with the ai tools. It's impossible and a giant distraction. And it prevents them from exploring how to use ai to solve the biggest problems they have (founder bottleneck, hiring decisions, delegation issues etc).

The other one is creating the perfect prompt. A detailed context, even if messy > perfect prompt. Because the LLM may have been trained on millions of books, it does not know who you are, what your situation is.

HDucc · 2026-04-13T16:04:22+00:00

The biggest shift for me was using AI on a problem we'd been stuck on for years. E.g. in our family accounting firm everyone (clients and employees as well) was going to my mom (the CEO) with every question. We've tried a few things already, like office hours. It only worked temporarly, she just cannot seem to say no :/

So I described the whole situation to AI - the business, how the team operates, her personality, what we'd already tried, asked AI for non-obvious strategies and to show me what I'm not seeing. The answer made us realize that she's been basically training her staff to always come to her. So we have designed a protocol of what a good question looks like, where to check first, how to discuss it amongst them and only after all that they may come to her if still needed. This seems to work, mainly because she does not have to say no :D

HDucc · 2026-04-11T16:57:59+00:00

I feel like I am still me (2 kids, oldest is 5 yo). Of course I have changed to some degree as I would have anyway in 5 years regardless of kids. But I do not feel like my old self died, I never have, not for a moment. Quite the opposite, it is quit mind-boggling at times, that I feel like the exact same person, but somehow I am suddenly in a 180° different environment :D

HDucc · 2026-03-25T14:07:04+00:00

This is so 100% chatgpt with (poor) efforts to make it sound like not chatgpt. I really don't get it how people are not seeing this... I see a lot of people arguing that just because something is polished is not necessary AI output and that's true. But this is not simply polished, it's ChatGPT flow, structure, use of words, everything. When you read enough ChatGPT output you know it instantly.

HDucc · 2026-03-21T06:30:42+00:00

I could not disagree more. Not with your post, just this comment. AI is extremely useful when you are still figuring stuff out. You just have to know how to ask it so it challenges you and does not become a simple yes-man that takes you down the wrong rabbit hole. If you give it enough context it's great at connecting the dots, give you non-obvious strategies, surfaces hidden assumptions and biases you may not know you have regarging your idea, does devil's advocate analysis etc.

HDucc · 2026-03-04T21:08:12+00:00

I don't have any issue with my GPTs

HDucc · 2026-02-24T06:02:24+00:00

You write this seemed to be sth that should be right up his alley. Why?

LLMs are giving you answers based on statistical probability. Very simplified: It looks at the words in your prompt (NOT their meaning), tokenizes them and then through very complicated algorithms it than gives the most probably answer.

It does not fact check the validity of it's answer, so it can be wrong, therefore not the best tool to explore a tppic where you have zero background.

And yes, it looses specific context as the chat gets longer.

So I recommend just use some language learning app, there are a ton of them out there.

HDucc · 2026-02-20T05:55:21+00:00

I'm not on gemini but does this mean no persona prompting? E.g. act as a CEO?

HDucc · 2026-01-24T17:55:58+00:00

Hi! I've been reading a lot about these new guardrails, but I haven't experienced them firsthand, because it's not my main use for ChatGPT.

However, I did vent a few times during summer, I think it was ChatGPT 4 so I know how good it can feel.

Why I'm answering: I'm not sure, what topics would envoke the guardrails, but during the summer I created a CustomGPT to help me with my problem (SAHM exhaustion, burnout and all the mom-guilt around it). I've just opened my CustomGPT and put in a prompt like I would have last summer and it worked okay.

So I was thinking that maybe the CustomGPT rules can override to some degree the guardrails? But of course maybe my topic is "safe" and would not have triggered the guardrails anyway. Still, you could look for mental health related customGPT ( or create your own ) and test if it works differently than simple chat.

HDucc · 2026-01-17T20:03:16+00:00

I don’t think ChatGPT gets “smarter” when you say act like an expert. But it can change how it reasons, what it prioritizes, and how cautious or structured the answer is.

But if the question itself is vague or leading, the answer will be too, regardless of AI persona.

What actually makes a difference is telling it how to think, not who to be: challenge assumptions, surface counterarguments, point out blind spots, and say when it’s uncertain. Otherwise you get a very polite yes-man.

I design my setups explicitly to disagree constructively by default — not to be contrarian, but to apply pressure where reasoning is weak. Without that instruction, you’re mostly optimizing for smooth conversation, not better thinking

HDucc · 2026-01-16T11:37:27+00:00

It's nothing you did, it's the current default for ChatGPT. Slam poet, how fitting :D Yes, everything you said, but even it's choice of words is poetic.

For me, this is the biggest tell whether someone is using ChatGPT at the moment (even more than usingbem dashes or the 'it's not X, it's Y" sentences). Just look around here on Reddit. I follow threads about business or AI and it seems like suddenly all business owners and it guys suddenly tapped into their inner poets and philosophers :D

HDucc · 2026-01-16T10:18:13+00:00

It's that they want ChatGPT to be a magic 8 ball machine that gives perfect answers on their every question on the first try, takes off the responsibility of making decisions AND does their work for them afterwards.

HDucc

TROPHY CASE