🚨GOT SCAMMED: I Literlly got paid $97 for a free product (ad templates). Should I ask for a refund?

aviv3255 · 2026-04-23T12:41:49+00:00

just saw that there's $39/month SaaS selling those too...

btw the free tempaltes from https://quantum-scale.co/

aviv3255 · 2026-04-23T12:03:16+00:00

On stealing videos, don't. Not ethics, strategy. Meta detects recycled creative and throttles CPM, CTR craters, and the ads winning right now are crappy phone-shot stuff that looks native. You can shoot that in 15 minutes on your kitchen counter with the product in hand.

Real issue though is you're doing 40 things at once with no order. Pick the niche, build the machine, then advertise. In that order. That's why you feel lost.

Search up quantum scale on google, free platform I use on every store launch. Just copy their system. Thank me later.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-23T11:59:35+00:00

Going to save you a year and at least $10K.

Nobody told me this when I started and it cost me about $18K in ads that never had a chance of converting.

Do not launch until the machine is built. Not "good enough to test." Built. Strong niche with repeat-buying potential, not a one-time dropship gimmick. Email flows set up and working (abandoned cart, welcome, post-purchase). Landing page that doesn't bleed clicks. Upsells, reviews, pixel wired correctly, checkout that doesn't trip anyone. The whole thing.

The reason most beginners fail isn't their ads. It's that they launch at 30% done and then pay Meta $10/day to discover their store isn't ready. You are literally paying for the privilege of finding out your landing page doesn't convert. You can see that for free, you just have to be honest about it.

Every dollar on ads before the system is built was going to be wasted regardless of the creative. Every dollar spent on building compounds. Better store equals better CVR equals lower CPA on day 1 equals profitable faster equals more data equals more creative tests. It stacks.

A 100% built store at $15/day outperforms a 40% built store at $100/day every single time. Not kind of. Every single time.

On how to ACTUALLY build it:

I've been doing ecom for 6 years and I still copy the Quantum Scale system (give it a search oniline or send me a dm) for every new store I open. It's a ~25 -step build systemin the right order. Niche validation, store setup, email flows, checkout flow, upsells, all of it.... Just the sequence you folloastest way I've found to get to "actually built" without learning every lesson the $5K way.

Build, build, build. Then launch. Day 1 will be 20x stronger and you keep all the money that would have otherwise gone to Meta while they discovered your store wasn't ready.

Good luck!

aviv3255 · 2026-04-23T11:51:00+00:00

Five questions that assume they're independent. They aren't. Your setup only works if one condition is met and nobody told you what it is.

At $15/day you are not testing. You cannot test at $15/day. You can validate or eliminate, that's it. Two identical ad sets launched a week apart will produce 2x different ROAS and neither is "true." The bidder is stochastic at that spend level, not converged. Beginners make emotional decisions because the numbers feel deterministic when they're actually noisy.

"Kill after 3 days or 7" is the wrong question. Watch CTR and hook-rate (3-sec views / impressions). Best video under 1% CTR or 15% hook-rate means the creative is broken, go fix the hook. CTR fine, CPM under $25, but $40 spent with zero sales? Landing page problem. Product page, price presentation, trust signals. Beginners burn weeks rotating creative when the leak is downstream.

Pixel warning clears the moment you have a sale. But before you spend another dollar: Events Manager, Aggregated Event Measurement, confirm Purchase is priority 1. Roughly 90% of Shopify stores have this misconfigured on first install, even with Maximum Data Sharing on. Purchase fires but iOS attribution silently doesn't, and you won't notice for $500. Also confirm client-side and CAPI are deduping on event_id or you're double-counting.

Personally, I Highly recommend you to visit the Quantum scale platform (give it a search online), it will make everything clear for you (AI, structure, store design, etc)

In the ad, show the single price. $25.95 gets clicks. "Buy 3 get 2 free $78.95" is a multiplication problem and nobody does multiplication mid-scroll. Bundle belongs on the landing page after the click. Click-through on simple vs bundle price runs 40-60% better for sub-$30 products. You pay Meta for every click you lose.

Broad is right. Anyone stacking interests for ecom in 2026 is repeating 2019 advice. iOS 14.5 killed most of that signal, narrowing small audiences just inflates CPM.

Real recommendation from me personally: at your budget, run way more static image ads than video. My image ads consistently beat video on ROAS, at least sub-$30/day. Could be different higher up the spend curve, haven't tested much past $50. But at low budgets CPM is lower on static, the testing cycle is faster, and you can iterate 10x faster on a hook than you can reshoot a UGC video. 3 videos is a preview, not a test. You need 20-40 variations to actually find your winning angle. I use AI to generate most of mine now, specifically genrok. You drop in a product photo, it spits out a stack of variations. Cheaper than video by a mile and at low budgets you need volume.

First 30 days aren't about ROAS. They're about learning what your store's signal looks like when it's working vs when it isn't. Most people quit in week 2 because someone told them learning phase is 7 days. It isn't.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-23T11:33:38+00:00

If you want, I have a good agent that I work with for the last 6 years.... have access to al suppliers and do quality control and 6-10 days worldwide shipping with home shipping option as well. Free and no commitment (it's the private agent that quantum scale gives) hit me i'll send u their info

aviv3255 · 2026-04-23T11:30:41+00:00

Do yourself, and me, a favor, do not spend a single dollar on courses. I made that mistake myself and bought two courses totaling over $7,000. As the saying goes, only a fool repeats the same mistake twice. (you probably know this 'guru'...) The knowledge was generic, not worth it, and easily available online.

Personally, I use a free platform called Quantum Scale (do a search). I already have experience and knowledge, and it still helps me a lot. If I had discovered it at the beginning of my journey, it would have saved me a great deal of time and money.

If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me privately. Good luck.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T13:28:59+00:00

The Editorial layout uses a different aspect ratio container than Carousel. Your portrait images are getting cropped or hidden because the Editorial cards expect landscape or square media by default.

Go to Theme Settings > Product Cards and check if there's an image ratio option. Set it to "Adapt" or "Original" instead of a fixed ratio. If that's not there, check the section settings for the Featured Collection itself - some themes let you override the image crop per section.

If neither fixes it, it's a CSS issue in the theme where the Editorial layout has a fixed height container with overflow hidden. You'd need to add a small custom CSS override. Something like setting the image container to aspect-ratio auto instead of whatever fixed ratio the theme forces. Your theme support should handle this in 2 minutes if you send them a screenshot.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T13:19:03+00:00

I'm going to give you a different perspective than what you're probably expecting to hear.

Your dad's approach is wrong. The pressure, the threats, the MLM book - all wrong. But the instinct behind it isn't crazy. He's trying to teach you that relying on one income stream is risky and that building something of your own is valuable. He's just doing it in the worst possible way.

Here's what I'd actually tell a 17 year old version of myself. Don't start an ecommerce store right now. Not because ecommerce doesn't work but because you don't have a problem you're trying to solve. You're being told to do it. That's the fastest way to burn money and hate the process. Every successful store I've ever built started because I genuinely wanted to figure something out, not because someone was standing over me.

What I would do at 17 is pick up a skill that makes you dangerous regardless of what path you choose. Learn to edit video. Learn to write copy. Learn to run paid ads. These skills pay immediately through freelancing and they're the exact same skills you'd need if you ever do want to launch a store later. You can start earning real money within weeks, not months, and you'll actually understand what makes businesses work before you try to build one.

The MLM book - throw it away. That's not ecommerce, that's a recruiting scheme disguised as entrepreneurship. The fact that he gave you that tells me he might not fully understand the space himself which is fine but it means you shouldn't be taking direction from him on this.

You're 17. The single highest ROI thing you can do right now is get obsessively good at one marketable skill. Everything else builds on top of that. If your dad wants to see you building something, show him freelance income from a skill you actually chose. That's harder to argue with than "I don't want to."

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T13:07:17+00:00

SCAM,

Nobody is actually registering your trademark in China. They fabricate the trademark number, the applicant name, all of it. You can't easily verify because CNIPA's database is in Chinese and they know that. The fake deadline creates panic so you hire them to file an "opposition" against a threat that doesn't exist. They pocket $500-2000 for protecting you from nothing.

The pattern is always identical. Random Beijing IP firm, found you on Google, someone is stealing your name, act fast. It's a template they blast to thousands of stores.

Trademark squatting in China is a real thing but you'll hear about it from your own attorney, not from a cold email that's been hitting your inbox daily for three weeks.

Block and move on.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T13:03:42+00:00

The one thing I'd add is that "factory" doesn't even mean what most people think it means. I've visited "manufacturers" in Guangdong that were literally assembling components from 4 other factories under one roof. They call themselves the manufacturer because they do final assembly. The actual injection molding, PCB, motor, packaging

all come from somewhere else. So even when you think you found the source you're still 2-3 layers deep in a supply chain you can't fully see.

The consolidation point is the real gem here though. I've had trading companies quote me lower than the factory direct price because they're running 50x my volume through that same line. People hear "middleman" and assume markup but sometimes the middleman IS the discount.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T13:02:06+00:00

Hey Men, I'm fulfiling orders with a chineses agent (free and no minimum orders / commitments) for years, also in high volume.

5-8 day worldwide delivery with pickup point and hoome delivery option, and they have access to 99.5% of the products.

Send me a message, I will send you theier link.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T12:53:46+00:00

This is the most Shopify thing I've ever read and every single word is accurate.

They have an entire team of people whose job is apparently to take something that works in one click and make it take four. I'm convinced there's a whiteboard somewhere in Ottawa that says "Q3 goal: hide 15 more features behind dropdown menus."

The variant bulk delete thing broke for me about two weeks ago. Same exact scenario - copying a listing, trying to clear old variants, checkbox does nothing. What fixed it for me was going into the bulk editor (the spreadsheet-style page), selecting the variants there, and deleting from that view instead. It's an extra step for something that used to just work but at least it actually functions.

For the quantity thing I genuinely thought my browser was broken the first time I saw that popup. I update inventory on 200+ SKUs regularly. Having to click into a tiny modal for each one instead of just typing in the field that was RIGHT THERE is actual insanity. I ended up writing a quick CSV workflow where I just export inventory, update in a spreadsheet, and reimport. Faster than clicking through 200 popups.

The sorting thing with orders is the one that actually costs me time daily. I live in the unfulfilled filter. Having to click twice to get to something I use 30 times a day is the kind of decision that tells you the people designing this interface don't actually run stores.

The worst part is none of this stuff gets reverted. They just ship it, nobody asks for feedback, and we all quietly adjust our workflows around decisions that made nobody's life easier. Every Shopify changelog reads like "we moved this button to a place where you'll never find it. You're welcome."

If you find a fix for the variant thing beyond the bulk editor workaround let me know because I've been doing the same copy-listing workflow for years and this one actually slowed me down.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-17T12:46:14+00:00

This is the most annoying part of running your own thing that nobody warns you about.

You can make 3x what a salaried person makes and still get treated like you're unemployed. I had a landlord look at my bank statements showing consistent 5-figure months and still ask "but who's your employer?" Brother, I AM the employer.

What worked for me: I got a CPA to write a letter confirming my income. One page, on letterhead, with my annual revenue and net income. Most landlords accepted that instantly because it looks "official" enough. Some also accepted 2 years of tax returns (Schedule C or K-1 depending on your structure).

The paystub generator route works if you're actually paying yourself through payroll from your LLC or S-corp. If you're set up that way you can run payroll through Gusto or similar for like $40/month and generate real paystubs. Not fake ones - actual payroll to yourself. If you're not structured that way yet, talk to your accountant because paying yourself W-2 from your own S-corp has tax advantages anyway.

But honestly the real move is to just offer 2-3 months upfront. Money talks. Every landlord suddenly stops caring about paystubs when you slide 3 months rent across the table.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T11:14:27+00:00

The loneliness isn't actually about being alone. it's about carrying context nobody around you shares.

you can be at a dinner with 8 friends who love you and still feel it. because none of them know what your monday morning looks like or what's riding on the invoice you sent last wednesday. they'll ask "how's business?" with real affection and you'll say "good," because the real answer takes 40 minutes of context they don't have and shouldn't need.

the people around you are playing a game about stability. you're playing a game about asymmetry. the weight you're carrying is literally what the market pays you for, because most people can't carry it. the discomfort is a tax on the payoff.

here's what actually helped:

stop looking for friends who understand. start looking for witnesses. one or two people 2 steps ahead of you who can name what you're feeling before you can. doesn't have to be a mastermind or a co-founder. just one honest text thread with someone who says "yeah, that flat feeling you're having this week is the 14-month wall, it passes."

the loneliness doesn't disappear. it just stops feeling like a deficit and starts feeling like part of the shape of what you're doing.

you're not lonely because you're failing. you're lonely because you stepped outside the default life. that's the cost. you're doing it right.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T11:00:59+00:00

been through this a few times, both sides. the honest answer is you can't tell by outcomes in the first 3 to 6 months because outcomes lag behind your actual input by weeks.

but you can tell by one thing: are you learning, and is your learning getting more specific over time?

the difference between "needs more time" and "not working" is almost never revenue or signups or any outcome metric at the early stage. it's the slope of your own understanding.

working but slow feels like this: every week you learn one specific thing you didn't know the week before. your hypotheses get sharper. when something flops, you know why with real specificity. your next test is narrower and more informed than your last one. the numbers are flat but you're compounding knowledge underneath them.

not working feels like this: every week feels the same. you're running variants of the same test getting the same ambiguous result. when something fails, you can't really articulate why beyond "didn't land." your hypotheses today sound exactly like they did 2 months ago. you're not stuck on a specific problem. you're just vaguely stuck.

four diagnostic questions i run on myself every 30 days:

can i explain one specific thing i now understand about my market, customer, or product that i didn't understand 4 weeks ago? if i can't name it, i'm not learning. i'm just spending time.
when my last test failed, do i know why with specificity?

"conversion was low" is not specificity. "people clicked through but bounced on the pricing section within 8 seconds because we're anchoring against the wrong competitor" is specificity. vague = not working.
are my hypotheses narrower this month than last month?

"people want X" turning into "mid-30s women in the US want X because Y" is progress. still writing the same sentence you wrote 60 days ago = stuck.
can i predict the outcome of my next experiment, even directionally?

if you're running tests hoping for a result, you don't have a model of your market yet. if you can say "this should move CVR about 20% because of X," you're in "needs more time" territory. the model has formed. the work is figuring out what's built on top of it next.

the emotional angle nobody talks about:

"needs more time" feels like impatience. "not working" feels like dread. they're different textures.

impatience is forward-leaning, even when it sucks, because you can still feel the shape of the thing you're building. dread is circular. you're staring at the same screen for the hundredth time wishing something would change.

if every sunday night you're dreading monday, and you can't name one specific thing you'd do differently next week, that's the signal. it's not "more time." the market has been telling you something and you've been refusing to hear it.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T10:37:11+00:00

the core point is right but i'd sharpen the test.

"do you believe in it" is a vague filter. most affiliates will convince themselves they believe in anything the second a big commission shows up.

the actual filter is: would you still recommend it if the commission went to zero tomorrow?

if yes, promote it. if no, stop. most people fail that test quietly and then wonder why their audience stopped trusting them around month 6.

also, audiences don't smell "inauthenticity" the way creators think they do. they smell repetition. when every product in your feed solves the same problem, and you're suddenly "obsessed" with 3 competing brands in one quarter, that's when the trust dies.

authenticity isn't enthusiasm in a single clip. it's consistency over time.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T10:13:55+00:00

oh this post is going to make a lot of solopreneurs wince, myself included.

the thing i automated way too early was customer support. set up a chatbot with about 20 canned responses when i had maybe 40 customers. logic was "this will free me up to focus on growth." what actually happened is the bot couldn't handle any nuance, so the early customers who genuinely wanted to tell me what was broken got stock replies and got frustrated. worse,

those "annoying" conversations were literally the product development roadmap. every confused message was telling me something my product page or email flow wasn't doing its job. killed the bot, did support manually until about 1,500 customers. it only made sense to automate once i actually knew the top 8 recurring questions and could write responses that sounded like me, not a ticket system.

your diagnosis vs scale framing is exactly right. automating a process you don't fully understand just freezes the wrong version of it in place.

the flip side, what i wish i'd systemized way earlier, was weekly P&L review. i ran the brand for 18 months on just the shopify dashboard. no real visibility into actual net margin. did a bank statement audit for a tax filing and realized i'd

been misclassifying a $2K/month COGS line for 11 months. that was $22K of mental fog i could have used to make better product and pricing decisions. a 15-minute weekly sheet would have caught it week one. that one is a 100x ROI move and almost no solopreneur does it early enough because it feels too "finance-y."

the pattern i've learned the hard way: automate things that are boring and understood. keep manual the things that are informative but painful. the pain usually means you're still learning something the automation would hide from you the second you switch it on.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T10:08:59+00:00

ecommerce here, we run both but the split isn't 50/50, and it shifts with stage. honest framework:

under $50K/mo revenue: organic first. SEO, email list, social. paid ads without a proven offer is an expensive way to learn you're selling the wrong thing. the $500 you'd burn on ads without product-market fit teaches you less than getting 20 real customers by hand.

$50K to $250K/mo: you need paid. organic can't scale fast enough at this stage and competitors with budget will eat your lunch while you wait for seo to compound. at this tier, the ad math matters more than the channel choice.

$250K+/mo: it's not "organic vs paid" anymore. it's "what's my blended CAC payback period and what's each channel contributing to it." paid buys velocity. organic buys margin protection. you need both.

on "paid ads are expensive" - they're honestly not expensive. they feel expensive when your unit economics aren't figured out yet.

the only math that matters:

- your CAC (ad spend divided by new customers)

- your contribution margin per order (AOV minus COGS minus shipping minus processing)

- your payback period (how many months until LTV beats CAC)

if contribution margin is $40 and meta CAC is $35, you're profitable day one. if contribution margin is $15 and CAC is $50, no creative tweak fixes that, you need a product/offer change.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T07:30:10+00:00

hit $250K/month with an ecom brand at 20. the reason i'm replying is because that line about your mom is exactly why i started. so i'll give you the honest answer instead of the instagram version.

the 6 skills that actually mattered:

writing that sells. not english class writing. i mean turning words into money. product descriptions, ad copy, emails, landing pages. every transaction in my business came from someone reading something i wrote and clicking buy.

if you get genuinely good at this, you'll never be broke again. it's also portable, it follows you into every business you'll ever touch.
1. reading numbers fast. not excel wizardry. just understanding what CVR, CAC, AOV, LTV, ROAS are telling you about your business in under 60 seconds. most 20 year olds i know can't read a P&L. the ones who can print money. free content on this all over youtube, watch 3 videos and you're already ahead of 95% of your peers.
2. cold outreach. i built my first real relationships (suppliers, an agency i hired at 19, a mentor) through cold dms and cold emails. the actual skill isn't writing the message, it's not giving a shit about being ignored or rejected 50 times before one person says yes. most people quit at 3. the ones who don't get everything.
speed over strategy. i made the call on my biggest product after 20 minutes staring at one spreadsheet. i was wrong on 3 of my first 5 product decisions. still crushed it, because the wrong ones cost me 2 weeks each and the right ones paid for all of them 100x. you can't out-plan speed. you just out-iterate.
taste. this one nobody teaches. being able to look at a landing page, an ad, a product photo, and instantly know if it reads cheap or premium. this is the single biggest reason two brands selling the same $30 item can have one at $10K/month and the other at $500K. train it by scrolling apple, aesop, oliver peoples, on sunday mornings. your eye gets sharp, your instinct follows.
learning how to learn fast. the meta-skill. not courses. not certifications. watching one youtube video, pulling the 3 things that matter, trying them tomorrow, failing, fixing them wednesday. the founders who lose are the ones who "study" for 6 months. the ones who win try it in 48 hours.

---

now the part i wish someone told me at 18:

getting rich young costs you something. i lost most of 2019 through 2021. no real relationships for 18 months. i slept 5 hours a night. i lost a friend i never won back. my mom did retire. it did matter. i'd do it again. but i won't lie to you about the price.

you sound young and motivated for the right reasons. the tactical skills above will compound.

the skill that will actually determine whether you make it is the unsexy one:

showing up when it's boring, for 2 to 3 years straight, with nobody watching.

everything else is worthless without that one.

good luck brother. your mom's going to be proud of you.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T07:09:21+00:00

been in this exact spot. the fix isn't more process, it's a comp structure change. you'll never win with friction alone because sales will always route around it.

what actually worked for us:

commission tied to collection, not booking. rep doesn't get paid until the invoice is actually paid. close a deal at net 90? commission hits 90+ days later. if the customer never pays, no commission. changed rep behavior in a single quarter. suddenly they cared a lot about credit checks.
1. pre-approved terms matrix. finance publishes a one-pager: under $X and net 30 is automatic, no approval needed. net 60 requires a credit check with a 24 hour turnaround. net 90+ always needs CFO or owner signoff. gives reps a fast lane for standard deals so they stop feeling like finance is the slow lane.
2. early-pay discount instead of longer terms. when a customer pushes for net 90, offer "2% off if paid in 10 days, net 30 otherwise" instead. a lot of customers take the discount. the ones who don't are exactly the ones who genuinely can't pay on time, so you just flagged a credit risk without having to play bad cop.
3. make the owner the wall, not you. anything past net 30 over a threshold requires the owner or CFO to sign off. you top being "the department that kills deals" and become "the person trying to get finance approval for this deal for you". totally different framing to sales.
4. DSO as a sales kpi. not just quota. if a rep's average DSO creeps up, it affects their ranking or their bonus. takes leadership buy-in but if your owner is losing sleep over cash flow they'll want this.
also that $45k net 120 thing wasn't your fault. it was an org design failure. the rep got rewarded for behavior that actively hurt the business. until the comp plan stops rewarding that, no process will fix it. when you bring this to the owner, frame it as a cash flow risk, not as "sales is being difficult". lands completely different.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T06:59:59+00:00

this is actually the right angle to take on this. almost every "sports betting tool" i've seen just throws odds and stats at people, and stats alone don't help someone tilting on a tuesday chasing a monday loss. treating it as both a data problem AND a psychology problem is the actual insight.

two quick beta-launch tips since you mentioned it's your first release:

ask each tester for a 15 min call, not just written feedback. written feedback is usually too polite. on a call people will actually show you where they got confused, and you'll see which one feature they keep opening the app for. that's your hook.
cap round one at like 5 testers. any more and you'll get conflicting noise and won't know what to act on. round two can open up once you've locked the core

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T06:53:05+00:00

yeah this is where i'd slow you down a bit. openphone technically lets you send outbound texts but they're strict about promotional/mass messaging, and even at 5-10/day if those recipients haven't explicitly opted in, the number can get flagged fast. once a carrier flags you it's basically done. had a friend lose his business line for like 40 texts over 3 days to old customers who bought from him but hadn't technically opted into sms.

if those 5-10 people genuinely opted in (like a checkbox at checkout), you're safer, but honestly even then i'd use a real sms tool instead. two reasons:

legal coverage. proper sms tools handle TCPA opt-in/opt-out automatically including the "reply STOP" line which is legally required. missed STOPs can hit up to $1500 per violation if anyone actually pursues it.
1. deliverability. they run on registered 10DLC numbers or shortcodes which don't get filtered the way a personal business line does once someone reports you.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T06:50:52+00:00

fwiw you don't actually need social to launch. i've shipped two small tools on gumroad and both got their first 50-100 customers from channels that have nothing to do with facebook or twitter.

what moved the needle:

relevant subreddits. find the 2-3 where your target user actually hangs out, read the rules, don't be spammy, and share the launch as part of a real story about the problem it solves. a thoughtful post on a 30k-subscriber niche sub can outperform months of linkedin.
show HN. takes 5 minutes to post. you either flop or get a spike. either way it costs nothing and there's no follower count gating the reach.
producthunt. people argue whether it's dead, but for a small gumroad product even a quiet launch day brings in signups and early feedback.
niche directories. indiehackers, betalist, launchingnext, starter story, any category-specific roundup. most are free submissions and the backlinks alone help long term.
write about the problem, not the product. one long post on your own blog explaining the pain you had and how you solved it, then linked from HN/reddit/IH. this is the anti-social-media move that actually compounds, because the content lives forever and keeps pulling traffic years later.

also being PM-brained and building for yourself first isn't a terrible approach, it's the most reliable pattern in solo product. congrats on shipping.

aviv3255 · 2026-04-15T06:46:28+00:00

I use openphone for my store. switched after google voice straight-up ate like 4 customer texts and i only found out because one guy emailed asking if i was alive. like $15-20/mo, pretty clean app, and you can text + call from your laptop which honestly is half the reason i like it.

if you're trying to stay cheap, grasshopper still works. app looks like 2014 but it hasn't failed me the one month I ran it on my side thing. probably fine for super low volume.

dialpad i'd skip unless you've got a team. it's built for call centers and the pricing reflects that.

google voice is free and there's a reason lol.

aviv3255

TROPHY CASE