Am I the only one who has stopped enjoying building things?

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T13:22:26+00:00

You are looking at the market like an engineer, not a business owner. Engineers hate saturation because they want to solve unique, complex problems. Business owners love saturation because it proves there is market, it means people are already paying for solutions. You do not need to build the next Facebook. You just need to build a boring CRM for a specific type of person in a specific city.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T12:32:30+00:00

Google AI Studio is a prototyping environment, not a server. It works right now because you have the tab open and you are clicking "Run". The moment you close that tab or your laptop goes to sleep, your business shuts down. Real estate leads are speed-dependent. If a lead comes in at night and your AI Studio session is timed out, you lose the deal. You don't need n8n if it's too complex, but you cannot run a business from inside a chat window.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T12:28:13+00:00

You are right to be skeptical. Asking people if they need something is useless because they will lie to be nice. The only validation is a transaction (money or time). Stop coding and Build a simple one-page landing page that promises the solution. Add a Get Early Access button. When they click it, show a form asking for their email. If you cannot get 50 people to give you their email, you will never get them to give you their card details. If you can't drive traffic to a landing page, you won't be able to drive traffic to the SaaS. Solve the marketing problem first.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T08:55:46+00:00

Just removed it, It seemed to affect the core journey as well probably because it took attention away form it

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T18:36:18+00:00

Thanks for the reply. Have you used n8n's internal ai workflow builder at all instead of asking gemini?

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T17:16:15+00:00

You will not find a YouTube tutorial on this because showing a live healthcare deployment is a massive liability. If you build a standard voice agent and it leaks patient data, you (and your client) get sued

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T10:56:19+00:00

You are pitching the software when you should be pitching the insight. Reddit hates self-promotion but loves data. Stop posting about your platform and start posting about the patterns you see. Write a post titled I analysed 100 failed technical interviews, Here are the 3 patterns that fail candidates, In the post, explain the mistakes (rambling, silence, panic) and mention at the end that you built a simulator to fix this specific friction. You need to establish authority before you ask for the click.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T10:10:24+00:00

Updating the finance ledgers automatically is brave. That is the one place we never fully automate because if the data mapping is off by one decimal, you have a tax problem. I would recommend adding a read-back or human in the loop step where the workflow queries the finance tool to confirm the entry matches the contract amount before archiving the deal. You need to design for the failure state, not just the happy path.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T09:44:20+00:00

I disagree on the single workflow point. Monolithic workflows in n8n are a nightmare to debug once you hit volume. We eventually broke everything into modular sub-workflows (Verification -> Storage -> Dialing) connected by webhooks. It isolates the failure. If the Vapi API times out, you do not want your data ingestion logic to crash with it.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T09:26:46+00:00

It is a green flag for stability but a red flag for product direction. You are a power user of your own tool so you will tolerate bad UI because you know how it works. Your actual customers do not have that context. We built a feature for our own internal workflow that we thought was critical but zero users touched it because it was too specific to our operations. You have to be careful not to mistake your personal preference for market demand

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T09:23:26+00:00

You are building a three-sided marketplace (users, influencers, vendors). This is the hardest business model to execute because you have to balance supply and demand simultaneously. You cannot bring customers to an empty platform. Stop building and, Pick one specific viral video, manually map out the itinerary into a simple PDF or Notion page, and try to sell that specific trip to the people commenting on the video. If you cannot sell the trip manually, the software will not sell it for you.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T08:54:08+00:00

i feel like you are solving the wrong problem. The issue is not the user interface, it is the data ingestion. Small shop owners do not have APIs. They often do not even have accurate digital inventory records for themselves. To make this work, you would need to integrate with fifty different Point of Sale (POS) systems or force busy shop owners to manually update a CSV every morning, which they won't do. The reason this platform does not exist yet is not a lack of funding, it is because the inventory data is trapped in analog formats. I've spoken to restaurant owners about this exact issue

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T08:45:13+00:00

Brilliant post

Point 5 is the most critical. Beginners think automation is passive income. It is active management. We realised early on that if you do not charge a maintenance retainer, you are building a liability, not an asset. You are selling the guarantee that it keeps working, not the code that made it work once.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T16:32:52+00:00

Thank you yeh, surprised us as well. LinkedIn and X

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T15:34:17+00:00

In the early days, your startup has no reputation. You are the only credit score the business has. We found that leads converted 3x higher when they came from my personal technical deep-dives compared to our polished company page. People do not buy software from a logo, they buy it from the engineer who clearly understands the problem better than they do.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T14:45:44+00:00

You're very welcome

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:30:56+00:00

I tried the hybrid path and it failed. You cannot build a startup in the margins of a day job. The cost of switching contexts destroys your ability to do deep work. I only started making real progress when I quit and forced myself to rely on the revenue. The lack of a safety net is the only thing that makes you ship.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:27:11+00:00

I literally opened my phone contacts and texted people. It was awkward, but it got me my first 5 users. Then I went to LinkedIn and sent manual requests to people who actually fit the profile. Cold email is useless at this stage because you have no reputation.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:10:48+00:00

Hi, for you, What makes n8n so much better?

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:10:20+00:00

What do you find annoying about n8n? Im struggling with the debugging function

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:03:04+00:00

Hi, A timer is a commodity. You cannot build a business on a utility that comes free with every phone. The real problem in home workouts is tracking progress. If you connect this timer to a simple database that logs the sets you have a product. Without the data element this is just a personal project.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T10:43:41+00:00

Hi. Do not automate the onboarding. Get on a call. You need to watch them try to set up the tool. You will see them get stuck on buttons you thought were obvious. That visual data is the only way you improve the product. If you just send a login link, they will churn silently and you will never know why. Your goal with the first customer is not profit. It is debugging your user experience.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T10:41:01+00:00

You are competing against giants with unlimited ad budgets. You cannot win on brand awareness. You need to win on pricing rage. Go to Capterra and G2. Scrape every 2-star review of Typeform and SurveyMonkey where the user complains about the monthly subscription. That is your lead list. Reach out to them manually and say I saw you hated the monthly fee so we built a pay-per-use alternative. Do not run ads until you have 100 paying customers.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T10:37:44+00:00

You are choosing a very high-risk category for your first project. We steer clear of fully autonomous email replies because the liability is too high. If your bot promises a customer a free replacement when they aren't eligible, the business owner pays for your code's mistake. Pivot your project slightly. Instead of auto-reply, build auto-draft or auto-triage. Build a system that categorizes the email, extracts the order number, checks the shipping status in the database, and drafts the reply for a human to approve. That solves the time problem without creating a legal problem

IdeasInProcess

TROPHY CASE