What are /r/sweatystartup's favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

You would need to run the numbers and adjust your prices. It's expensive to drive around to customer locations so your fees would need to address this.

You might want to make it easy for the customer to decide by keeping the sharpening cost the same for "shop" and "customer location" but charge a trip charge to come out. $50 would be a completely reasonable fee, considering what it costs to actually drive there, including your time.

You'll probably find that the "on site" service would be from profitable restaurants and rich individuals, while most of the other people would rather drop off/send-in.

Bonus points for offering special service for expensive and/or single sided blades like these which only have one side beveled and can't be sharpened on a home sharpener.

You don't have to have everything figured out to do this. Do you have a business name in mind? Just put yourself out there and do it.

First, I'd get a free one page site (carrd.co) is a good place to build a free site. Just have some basic info on there- what you do, where you serve, etc.

Then, setup a Google My Business page that points to your site. Once you start getting jobs, post regularly to your GMB page. Its an easy way to have it show up higher in searches.

Then, setup an IG and FB pages to get the word out, and post some pics, even if it is your empty truck and trailer. If you're in it, just have a huge smile on your face. Post pics of jobs in process, completed, etc.

Are you familiar with builtwith.com? It lets you figure out which sites run which tech. It's amazing, but really pricey.

I do some work with the Common Crawl, so I have an in-house tool that I use for prospecting sites based on technologies. If you tell me what city you're in, I'd be happy to send you a list of websites built on Shopify near you so you can sculpt your outreach. I already have the data for myself, so no cost to you.

Read this book (it's quick)

https://www.amazon.com/ONE-Thing-Surprisingly-Extraordinary-Results/dp/1885167776/ref=asc_df_1885167776/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=312065696873&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12976924057664464564&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061104&hvtargid=pla-395617944179&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=61316180399&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=312065696873&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=12976924057664464564&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9061104&hvtargid=pla-395617944179

then make your ONE thing to earn enough revenue to not only stay in business but thrive, personally.

Then, after you have achieved that for 3 months, you can change your focus to addressing secondary/tertiary business concerns (online presence, for example).

Revenue is the lifeblood of business. It must come first and it must come regularly or the business dies. Keep that front of mind until it's easy.

Hi Everyone!
I am doing some user interviews — https://airtable.com/shro9lBQvyM0VUHzn
If you qualify for an interview, we will give away a $50 Amazon gift card.
The interview consists of a 45 min video call with me asking you about the way you run your home service business and the pains that you currently have.
Not trying to sell anything here, I promise, just trying to learn more about the industry.

Hi Everyone!
I am doing some user interviews — https://airtable.com/shro9lBQvyM0VUHzn
If you qualify for an interview, we will give away a $50 Amazon gift card.
The interview consists of a 45 min video call of me asking you about the way you run your home service business and the pains that you currently have.
Not trying to sell anything here, I promise, juts trying to learn more about the industry.

Update: I wrote a book! "From Zero To Janitorial" Available at Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Zero-Janitorial-commercial-cleaning-business/dp/B0B8RCGC6V/ref=sr\_1\_1?crid=1C5ERR1WXPMK&keywords=from+zero+to+janitorial&qid=1660966954&sprefix=%2Caps%2C70&sr=8-1

Dryer vent cleaning.

Yeah, no bullshit.

A Vent Cleaning Brush, a good cordless drill, a shopvac, some trash bags, and a stack of OfficeMax flyers extolling the extra expenses and dangers of lint buildup, and you're in business. Might be worth getting a few sizes of the flex brush, because you can use the shorter ones a lot, and link them together for very long vents.

On the flyers, have a 'limited time offer' where the price is stikethrough at $150, make the 'sale' price $90, and go put them in places where families frequent. When it gets too busy and you're working too much? Price goes up. New flyers, different prices. Inflation, you know.

You can do your first vent in about an hour or two, with a little practice you'll be down to 20 minutes or so.

People will call you back every time it seems like their dryer is taking longer, just to save time and money on the power bill. Best practice is every 6-10 months.

Get going.

Can you send a link of the moving pads you use? Do you think these are of decent quality? They LOOK like the ones we have at work which I think work quite well.

https://www.amazon.com/Sure-Max-Moving-Packing-Blankets-Professional/dp/B01GK6JTFE?ref_=ast_sto_dp

Well, I researched, I couldn't find anything for WooCommerce that could solve your problem... I found this in official documentation https://stripe.com/docs/payments/save-and-reuse

learn about The Setup Intents API...

I hope that helps..

Most of these answers are either entirely wrong or partially wrong.

Web tactics from 2005 no longer work...

If you follow most of this “advice”, you will waste so much time and money!

Get Calendly (https://calendly.com). Sign up for the Pro version — i think its $15 monthly. This will be your calendar / scheduling / booking / ecommerce tool.

It will give you a link so you don’t even really need a site right away.

But if you want a site (and you should).. go get a Wix or Squarespace site and build it DIY. Cheap, quick and easy to maintain .

You can also embed the Calendly scheduler link into your site.

Stripe integrates easily with Calendly.

Boom!

Mate you need to build a system or funnel. If someone asked you to marry them in the first date, would you do it? Most likely not.

That's why you have to ease people into your main service.

Here's what I would do:

Write a small report/ ebook and call it something like, "5 Powerful Ways to Finally Get Shi*t Done". In the eBook, make sure to give out your best tips. You need to give multiple times before people feel comfortable buying your service.
Create a Facebook Page so you can create an Ad. There's tons of YouTube videos about this very subject. Watch them, it'll help you. Make sure to really laser in your copywriting. This will break or make your ad.
When people click on the Ad, they can opt to receive the Ebook for free in exchange for their Email.
After they opt in, have the landing page go to another page. In this page, you'll have a video (5min-30min). Again, the goal is to give value. DON'T SELL.
In the video, try to build credibility.
At the end of the video, tell them you're doing a Webinar at [DATE]. Ask them to opt in.
Webinar should be 30-60 min. Again, give away more tips and at the end of the video you tell them you offer Life coaching sessions and for a limited time I'm offering XX% Off for the first 5 people in the webinar.

Instead of a Webinar, you can also offer a free 30 min coaching session and tell them to schedule it. Use calendly.com.

But a Webinar will be more scalable because you can record it once and act like it's 'live'.

If youre conversion is not good after the Webinar, you might need to add another step offering a Free coaching session.

So right now with all of our clients we are using Calendly.

Longer term we want to integrate with other common calendar options. Google Calendar and the like. Also with any service based specific booking services. (i.e. Jobber booking, Housecall Pro booking).

Are there other booking options out there that you use?

If you are still in the early stages, I'd love to help you at no cost.

I'm looking to boost my portfolio, I'm a Web Developer Entrepreneur just starting out. I can even help you get free hosting on GitHub Pages if that interests you.

PM me and I'll send you a link to my portfolio site.

Do you know what “no-code” is? If not I recommend checking out some YouTube videos etc. But the basics is that there is less and less necessity for coding to get simple projects off the ground. A fun and simple example is Random Pizza, a pizza subscription service where you pay a monthly fee and get two random pizzas delivered a month at random times (you dictate acceptable windows) from random places. The whole company was built without any code, using off-the-shelf SASS services to tie everything together and tools like Zapier or IFTTT to create event triggers etc.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/randompizza

There are a lot of good suggestions in this comment.

Some other ideas:

Nextdoor.com advertisement and start it immediately.
Every job you do, book their next appointment and add it to Google Calendar for next year. Give them a discount, if they book their next appointment immediately.
What this commenter said about commercial work. You should know every real estate agent and property flipper by name in 20 square miles. If they give you referrals, then clean the windows at their personal home for free.

First question, do you have experience running an online business in the niche that you're looking? I've owned an online retail business for over 21 years and still sometimes feel like I don't know what I'm doing... but at least I have my experience to fall back on. I can't imagine buying a business in a completely different industry.

As for due diligence, you should know what reasonable multiples for the industry/niche you're in... e-commerce sites are currently selling for around 3-4x SDE for medium sized (six figure SDE), 2-3x for <$100k SDE, and higher multiples for businesses with more than 7-figure SDE/EBITDAs.

You should verify everything... Ask for 3 years financial statements (profit & loss/income statement, cash flow, balance sheet), 3 years bank statements for all business accounts, and 3 years business tax returns. If you don't know how to read those, hire a CPA to review them and look for any anomolies.

And about "passive" income... no business is truly passive. If you buy a website that's generating "passive income" and don't do anything, it might continue earning the same revenue for a few months or a year, but things change and competition will encroach on your business. Whether it's a content site or an e-commerce site, they all require constant optimization to even stay at the same level. From organic SEO to PPC to social ads... they all need to be constantly optimized or you will be left in the dust. If you don't know how to do any of that or have the money to hire professionals, then it's probably not a good idea to jump into a business you know nothing about.

Also, read Buy Then Build it's a great book about buying an existing business to grow.

Check this add-on if your looking for live, virtual receptionist to answer phones. Great service...well work the 300/month i pay over a FT receptionist at $12 hour https://grasshopper.com/features/ruby/

https://www.invoiceninja.com/

The full all-the-bells-and-whistles version is free if you host it on your own computer, and they free version that they host, with fewer features.

I've been really happy with it. It does quotes, invoices, billing and takes credit card payments.

If you are looking for a free email ticketing system, you should definitely give ProProfs Help Desk a try. We have used it for over a year now and the tool has helped us tremendously in improving our email game. You can use their shared inbox feature to manage multiple customer-facing inboxes (such as sales@, contact@, etc.) from one place. Moreover, since you mentioned scaling, ProProfs also offers a premium plan that can be used by big teams. Do let me know how it works out for you. Good luck!

There are many "standard" CRMs ,task schedule & Bookings apps out there.

See the Zoho suite & the likes. eg

Zoho Bookings
FreshService
Trello

If they don't satisfy your style OR are too generic, you can own one, like this one I made for a team of "engineers" & handymen in Auckland, NZ to fit your own style of work & features you want.

Some quick tips I would offer:

Build it on WordPress using the free Astra Theme + Free elementor plugin. You can use the free Astra Starter templates to get going, they look great, load really fast and there are tons of youtube videos to show you how to do everything.
You can find some great images on Unsplash or similar sites. Try to use the best quality images possible.
You can use Canva.com to edit the sizes or add filters to the images to customize them bit for stylization purposes.
You can use Grammarly to check all of the spelling and grammar.

Additionally Neil Patel has created this excellent template of what a High Converting Local Business looks like. Check it here.

Take your classes and develop a course you can sell. Offer some live stream to answer questions while building videos of those to add to the course.

https://teachable.com/ I notice Meet Kevin (Real Estate Broker/Agent/Investor) uses it for his courses.

this could mean passive income too.

https://www.sololearn.com/ would be a good place to start to learn the basics. basically you want to learn how to pull data, analyze it and present it to stakeholders. then look for online jobs that involve those skills (there are a lot of analyst positions). see if they can be remote and you will have yourself a winner. apply to everything and just try to improve your communication skills and be able to convince(/bullshit) whoever interviews you that you will be able to do a good job

Hi,

I've generated a graph for your website that shows where are all 404 pages and what page are linking to them:

https://www.pulno.com/shared/50d5464aaff7ff54

There are also unnecessary 301 redirects like /servicearea to /servicearea/ , I don't understand why you link to it.

There are also some pages that are missing in the sitemap like /book/ , /mobile-car-wash/ etc.

Carrd.co is my favorite builder. It's super clean and can be set-up in less than 30 minutes. If you're wanting more complex features you will probably need to look somewhere else, but it's a solid option for service businesses.

One CL ad every few days is excessive, IMO. Every few weeks, sure. Anyway, get setup on Google My Business and you're probably set. This way, when someone Google's landscaping or tree trimming, you'll show up. Get a basic website setup just to you have a presence. You can get a free site at carrd.co Social media is not a huge deal, despite what many say.

Here's my recommendation;

Complete both FreeCodeCamp and The Odin Project. Both will teach you the fundamentals of web development.

I use unitelvoice.com. It works fine has an app and can forward to my cell number. Used to use ringcentral.com it was fine when it worked but support was crap.

https://www.tsheets.com/resources/determine-the-true-cost-of-an-employee

input an initial hourly wage you would like to pay your first employee in the website above and then start inputting numbers below and above that to see what you can afford. Figure out your true hourly wage you're going to pay by inputting all other associated costs and then it will show you how much you're expected to pay each month by hiring an employee.

Hope this helps!

For work management software, I use Quire.

Quire is a free tool with great features such as kanban board, gantt chart, offline syncing, easy collaboration, priorities..etc.

Basically, they provide all the features you would need for free. Huge fan of this app.

Hope this helps!

I've been highly recommended this Vacuum - by my cleaner, it's meant to be second to none for getting at pet hair.

My philosophy is a bit different than most. For me, profits come third. I believe the primary goal of an employer is to grow his employees skills to the point where he can no longer afford them and they go on to better jobs and better pay. That's how you create legacy.

My second goal is for some work/life balance. I just don't see the point in 100 hour work weeks.

After those its to grow the business and bank accounts so that you can do more, hire more, and impact more. I really don't care about being rich and that makes me an outlier among my peers.

There is a book titled "Small Giants" which talks about the importance of putting quality above all else so that you're not seen as a commodity. https://www.amazon.com/Small-Giants-Companies-Instead-10th-Anniversary/dp/014310960X

Thanks! We do generalize our target audience while we make games as it's very vital for success.

Let's take an example and discuss on it. We have a game called Solbot Energy Rush available on Android and iOS. The game is about a Robot collecting energy orbs and the target audience is casual gamers ( mainly who play games during breaks, travel etc). The game is not intended for hard-core gamers. For this particular game which are the areas/brands that can be targeted?

iOS : https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/solbot-energy-rush/id1368418939?ls=1&mt=8

Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freakoutgames.chromaflyer

What are /r/sweatystartup's favorite Products & Services? From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

The most popular Products mentioned in /r/sweatystartup:

The most popular Services mentioned in /r/sweatystartup:

Carrd

Calendly

Nextdoor

Airtable

Product Hunt

Stripe

KWFinder

Facebook Marketplace

Moz

WordPress

RingCentral

Restyaboard

Integromat

The Odin Project

TSheets Time Tracker

The most popular reviews in /r/sweatystartup:

What are /r/sweatystartup's favorite Products & Services?
From 3.5 billion Reddit comments