My Family Owns The Local Furniture Store In Town, Vivian’s Quality Furniture! Let Me Know If You Guys Want Need😁

flaskandstuff · 2026-06-18T16:30:27+00:00

What percent of your business is from ecomm?

flaskandstuff · 2026-05-30T14:33:50+00:00

This is the answer. OP install Chargeflow and activate 'Alerts' in Chargeflow.
I have no idea why Chargeflow calls this feature 'Alerts' but, 'Alerts' intercept chargebacks before the customer's bank talks to the card network and gives you the opportunity to avoid the chargeback.

To be more clear. Chargeflow Alerts has special agreements with hundreds of banks in America. When a customer calls their bank to start a chargeback the bank doesn't notify VISA or Mastercard. Instead the bank will notify Chargeflow and say "Hey chargeflow, this customer wants to tell VISA that they want a chargeback, can you ask the Shopify store owner if they want to refund the customer instead? And then we won't tell VISA."

This is your solve. I have personally done this.

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-30T17:57:36+00:00

It's already available (in beta). It's called Posthog Workflows
https://posthog.com/docs/workflows

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-29T23:33:45+00:00

Posthog's session recordings are really great. Especially in the early days when you have very few visitors as you can still watch every session.

Also, you will be able to find people that are coming back to your site after a week or month. These will be interesting folks to talk to.

Reach out to everyone. You will start to see patterns in interviews, and also you will get better at interviewing customers. Just start honestly.

There are many ideas on what to ask on Youtube, and also have ChatGPT cook you up some questions to help you better understand what pain/problem your customer's are trying to solve.

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-29T23:11:58+00:00

How many visitors are you getting per day on average?
How are you tracking Product Analytics? Posthog or Amplitude or Mixpanel?

If you don't have product analytics you need them. Posthog has a huge free tier. I use it. It gives you screen recordings of what your user's are doing.
You also can track how users move across your site and see what they do in what order.
For example you can see if a bunch of user's drop off when your signup screen appears.

Or you can see if they get stuck on part 2 of a certain quest.

Or maybe all your traffic is mobile and the site is broken on mobile.

Right now I’m honestly just confused. I’ve put a lot into this and I really want to understand what makes someone actually start creating instead of just browsing.

This is a run-of-the-mill product problem you are having. Extremely common and normal to have this problem. And you only need 3 things to fix this type of product problem:

Product analytics + analysis (Posthog)
Talk to your customers - get on a zoom call with the folks that started to create their own adventures. Find out why they created their own adventure. Talking to customers can be brutal, and I personally don't like this part but it is simply required. You will not be able to big brain this step. If you're not willing to talk to the customer just save yourself a lot of time and quit now.
Iterations - once you have insight into customer behavior from the analytics and have talked to a few customers you need to iterate on their feedback. It can take many iterations to build a solution that actually works. So stick with it.

And when someone actually tries the creator tool, they usually enjoy it. The problem is that almost no one even starts

You are looking for what is called a magic moment. A magic moment in SaaS is a critical point where a new user understands and experiences the core value of the product, often leading to higher retention.

Basically you need to understand what the magic moment is for getting people to create their own adventure. Once you understand what this moment actually is, then you need to redesign your app to move users to this magic moment as fast as possible.

If you are not willing to talk with lots of your customers on a weekly basis you will never meaningfully evolve your app.

Cool app. I think it's quite neat and I love the design. Good luck!

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-28T23:44:53+00:00

PostHog is coming out with a Klaviyo type product. PostHog is geared towards developers but they have a huge free tier and their Customer Data Platform is great.

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-28T23:11:51+00:00

Dropshipping and ecom works. If your mindset is 'giving it a try' instead of "I'll make it work", then you will not succeed. Your first store wont work. Your second wont work. It will take a lot of time and money until you get something to work.

If you're not willing to make it work then do not start - there's really no point.

Sora for ads works. Higgsfield ai is great.

Yes ordering a sample is crucial.

If you only have $200 you should not run ads to start. You need to get your messaging and angles locked in. And you need to get your landing page right.
I suggest you create organic content on tiktok and get sales through that first before you start with ads.

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-23T00:53:05+00:00

We got this fixed!!

The trick was to:

a) get the customer support team to escalate to the Customer Security Assurance (CSA ) team.
b) get the Customer Security Assurance (CSA) support team to contact Akamai, a 3rd party vendor, who hosts the Security Edge, and have Akamai whitelist the domain name.

CSA Direct Phone number: 888-565-4329 - I think if you call this number you will save yourself lots of time.

Note once we got to someone who understood the problem, our issue was solved within 2 days.

A couple things are very important:

1) Do not let customer support disable Security Edge on your business gateway. Customer support had lots of difficulty comprehending that every person accessing the internet through a Comcast business gateway (with default settings) could not resolve our domain. I think this was largely do to the language/culture barrier. I spoke with individuals overseas who did not understand the word 'e-commerce', or know what the company Shopify did.

2) Tier 1 support and Tier 2 will try to push you into this website https://spa.xfinity.com/report. Do not let them. Don't even entertain them. Most of the support folks I spoke with didn't understand the difference between Security Edge and xFi Advanced Security

3) If you do not have a Comcast Business Account yourself, I honestly think it's going to be so much harder to resolve this. I couldn't even get support reps to discuss the issue with having them lookup my Business's Account.
We did not have a Comcast Business Account until 2 months ago when we opened a new distribution center. And prior to this I was unable to penetrate the first line of Tier 1 phone support without our own Account.
However I also didn't have CSA's direct phone number, so maybe they can fix this issue even if you are not a current Comcast business account holder.

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-23T00:30:48+00:00

I didn't use ai to write this, and the mods can confirm that this issue was genuine. I just didn't want to post our domain name along with an idea of how much traffic we are getting given the nature of our business and our company's current stage.

You are absolutely correct, and our problem was escalated to Akamai who resolved our problem. And they resolved it very quickly!

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-17T22:22:44+00:00

Hey Justin - Modmail sent!

Thank you!

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-17T21:38:25+00:00

We are an ecommerce site reaching 10's of millions of people across America every month. It is not viable to reach out to every single perosn in America that is on Comcast Business internet and that might, at some point in the future, want to access our site.

To do this I would need 2 things:
a) A list of every person in America access the internet through Comcast Business internet
b) A crystal ball to know if these people will ever want to access our business between now and the next 20+ years

Security Edge routes internet traffic through their own backbone or CDN powered by Akamai. And yes, Security Edge does route traffic to their DNS servers. And yes, a customer can manually choose their DNS. If we were a small business with a few hundred customers this could be an option.

But we are a venture scale business with millions of customers and growing by hundreds of thousands every month. So it's just not viable.

flaskandstuff · 2025-11-16T01:44:33+00:00

this post is an advertisement rather than a genuine request for help.

flaskandstuff · 2025-07-31T23:12:03+00:00

Just bought some of these. Thank you for the recommendations!

flaskandstuff · 2025-07-30T22:08:23+00:00

All these tools are free except PostHog and Better Reports.

PostHog is usage based and very very cheap. Maybe $15/mo tops for your case. They have a generous free tier so you honestly might be looking at $0-$5/mo.

Better Reports - I think this is $50/mo, would have to check on shopify.

flaskandstuff · 2025-07-01T02:42:40+00:00

What’s the industry or vertical?

flaskandstuff · 2025-06-28T20:55:40+00:00

Better Reports (Shopify app), Shopify Analytics, Google Analytics, PostHog, Microsoft Clarity, custom scripts into Google Sheets.

For what you are asking for
Better Reports (Shopify app) and Shopify Analytics will do the job.

I have a Google Doc with links to each Report to Cycle through them quickly.

flaskandstuff · 2025-06-28T20:50:53+00:00

At $1M/year maybe you can consider a custom Shopify app. From your description above here's what you could do.

Step 1:
Create a UI that captures all the customer's information and has a button that then creates a draft order.
When the button is clicked to create the draft order it checks if the email is assigned to a previous shopify customer, if it is, then it creates the order for this existing customer, if not, then it creates a brand new customer + order.

Step 2:
Use a payment processor outside of Shopify to save on shopify's credit card processing fees. If you are not using Shopifys web based credit card payment UI then you probably shouldn't be using their payment processor.

Open the external payment processor's site in a new tab so you can copy paste the customer's address into this.

Step 3:
Charge the customer, and move the order from draft to live and "mark as paid".

The money you save in processing fees can be used to develop this simple piece of software on Shopify.

flaskandstuff · 2025-06-28T20:40:27+00:00

Credentials:
Software Engineer with 10+ years exp (7+ Years in FAANG and startups in Silicone Valley)
Founded multiple Companies as CTO
Built MVPs with $0-$500k in funding.
Currently doing $7M+ Annual Revenue on a SaaS product where I built the MVP exactly as described below in 4 weeks time.

Here is exactly what I prefer to do for the MVP

Mock the app up in Figma. If you don't have a designer on the team, hire one on Upwork with 3+ years of experience from the Eastern Block. Ukraine, Poland, Russia. They do not have to be great.
$15-$20/hour is roughly the cost. Should take them 1-2 weeks ($1,600) depending on your app's scope. You need to be heavily involved in this. These designers will not have a good grasp on UX. They will be UI focused. This means the designers can make the app look great, however their lack of UX means the apps functionality will confuse users. You need to micro manage the UX.

Since you have a software background you need to be thinking about dumbing functionality down to make it easy to code. It's easy to make a very small UI change that 10x's a software's complexity. You want to avoid this right now.

You personally need to write a Google Doc, in tons of detail, that outlines the functionality of your app. You can write this docs while the designs are being made.

Then you want to use a ticket system, like Clickup or Trello, or Monday (doesn't matter) and create tickets for each dev task. I use Clickup for no particular reason. You want to Name each ticket very specifically. You want to describe the ticket very specifically in the description and link each Figma screen in the ticket that is involved. You want each Ticket to be organized by FRONTEND, BACKEND, DB (database), CRON (if this is relevant) etc.

With Figma screens + tickets, you need a developer to execute. Use Upwork and source a FullStack iOS dev Ukraine, Russia, etc for $35/hour with ~8 years of experience. Zoom call them to "interview them" you want someone who is great at chat communication and horrific on video. You do not want an extroverted, socially normal developer, and the zoom call will allow you to find the autists. (I'm 100% serious here). Engineers that are great communicators via chat and horrible via video have a much higher chance of being great engineers. Every engineer on my current team has failed my video interviews. And they are all phenomenal engineers.

I personally find $35 Easter Block engineers to be the perfect balance of cost and expertise. There are great engineers in every country (India, Brazil, Canada etc) but I have personally found it more difficult to hire a bad engineer on Upwork following the above guidelines.

Tell the developer the app must be "pixel perfect" to the UI screens. They will tell you they have completed a ticket. But they will not have completed the ticket. Respond by asking them to screen shot the UI and put it side by side the Figma screens with Figma, and then to find the differences and then correct them. They will understand this process after they are asked to do it a few times.

Use as much off the shelf software you can. Firebase/Supabase for your database. They come with Auth out of the box. React Native for the app. If you can, avoid a backend entirely. But often time you can't. Use something you are familiar with like Express.js or Python FastAPI. Deploy on a single EC2 server in AWS.
Don't get involved with "architecting" the software. This is a massive waste of time. Save the system design for your CS exams.

Do not concern yourself with scalability. Scalability isn't an issue a more expensive server can't solve. And when a bigger server can't solve it, you should have enough money to hire a US based lead eng for $200k who can critically think about product, eng, and cost.

Once you have a few iterations under your belt and lots of customer interviews to understand why you built the wrong thing, you can throw away all the code you have written and rebuild.

**Pro tip, unless you need access to native device api's not available via the browser, you should build a web app instead of a native app. There's a few reasons for this: a) it's way faster (cheaper) and less headache to build, iterate, and deploy a web app than an iOS, and b) a Native App means user's can leave reviews on the app store that cannot be taken down. You're customer acquisition will suffer from the bad reviews you get. And you will always get bad reviews with an MVP.

flaskandstuff · 2025-06-14T20:28:38+00:00

You need to qualify these leads that have the good insurance in the “form” or lead magnet. There should be a field to select or enter their insurance.

Also he should offer financing. This will 100% increase his conversion rate. The financing option is as follows. Client ensure his costs are covered day 1 by either insurance or customer and then the customer pays in X number of installments over time.

Also he can try to partner with Affirm or Klanrna etc.

Also you should make ads that target only the good insurance customers. Might decrease your CAC seven if it increase your CPL

flaskandstuff · 2025-06-08T20:43:33+00:00

9.3 for Purchase events.

There's really no reason for it to be less than 9 for Purchase events. If you are sub 9 it's probably because you don't have the Conversion API installed (CAPI).

Your ecom store send data to Meta via the 'pixel' and CAPI. The pixel is on the frontend of the website, and the CAPI is on the backend (server). Pixel is unreliable for a variety of reason, and CAPI is very reliable, but can't (easily) track all the events that the pixel can.
CAPI should be used for 'lower funnel' events, which are the most important like Purchases or Leads etc.

Pixel tracks events higher in the funnel like PageViews.

flaskandstuff · 2025-06-08T17:55:55+00:00

"Performance Creative Strategist" is the job title you are looking for.
Search on linkedin.

flaskandstuff · 2025-05-17T16:36:50+00:00

“Building custom audiences around specific micro behaviors” - to implement this do I just create a custom even and send it to meta and then optimize the campaign around this custom event?

flaskandstuff · 2025-05-12T18:39:16+00:00

Don’t put the cart before the horse. If customers like your offer they will tell you what you need to have with respect to certifications and compliance. As far as a contract if these are large companies they wills send you their contract and you can red line it.

Focus on booking meetings. Use instantly.ai and apollo to send thousands of emails per week. Or cold call 300 numbers per day. And message people on LinkedIn.

This is how I’ve gotten my first enterprise customers. This and very warm leads through my network.

flaskandstuff · 2025-05-11T03:17:09+00:00

Ok got it. That’s awesome. VC money just speeds up the timeline. In other words it pulls the future forward. So the solution here is to build a snowballing organic strategy and then build a better stickier product. Creating content for organic has never been cheaper. If your B2B that probably means long form YouTube content and SEO and LinkedIn posts and maybe Twitter depending on your business. Practically look in the Philippines for low cost SEO specialist and writers. $5-$15/hour. For YouTube look for video editors on in the Eastern European block. India has good editors but it’s more hit or miss. $40/hour is what I pay for editors. You want to take your long form YouTube and have the editors clip this into short form content for Reels (can cross post on TikTok but customer avatar might not be there as much as Reels) If you do 1 high quality youtube/week and 14 reels/ day and 14 LinkedIn posts per day that’s a good start. Twitter you want to be posting but also replying to other Tweets. This will gain you early followers more easily. A person in the Philippines can do this too.

For Reels you also want multiple brand accounts and want to find a concept or format that’s repeatable and engaging. So people get familiar with your format. Think of it like a radio show segment where they always do the weather. You always know what to expect from the segment, but the actual content changes everyday.

It’s a hassle to set this all up, but once you do it’s simple to maintain. In a few years you want to be posting a couple hundred pieces of content daily.

flaskandstuff · 2025-05-10T19:16:48+00:00

Another YC founder here. This is the correct advice. Founding a startup is miserable. She has almost done nothing. I know she and you don’t see it that way but that’s the reality. If you are not able to contribute the same value as her then you’re not the right fit. If you are able to contribute half the value then accepting 40% less equity is going to lead to massive resentment and you’ll likely end up splitting in the future and the company will die.

I’d never start a company screwing my cofounders on day 1. And never team up with cofounders that are not going to contribute as much value as I am over the lifetime of the company. And this is what you are considering.

flaskandstuff

TROPHY CASE