I've spent the last few weeks building Tally free personal finance calculators (budget split, debt payoff, emergency fund, and a few more) with the actual math shown instead of hidden behind an email wall or a paywall.
While building it I kept running into the same pattern: sites that market themselves as "free calculators" usually aren't you get a teaser number, then a signup form, or the formula is a black box.
Hey PH folks, I am building an AI product for fashion ecommerce brands. Still in a very early state, raw and we've a lot to work on. I am seeking conversations with operators in this space and trying to live a day in their shoes.
This will help me in driving my PLG charter and build something really meaningful and useful by speaking to people on the ground. By which I mean, I want to speak to the designers, people who click the pictures, people who are in production, people who do merchandising/cataloging, person who does content, someone who uploads things on the website & people who take it to the market... etc I want to understand the deep operational dynamics of a fashion businesses. How do they operate
What are the processes they follow What are the challenges they face in their daily tasks If they had a "genie in a lamp" what would they wish to get solved magically Be it optimization of speed, cost or efficiency. All of this will help me in building something that truly matters to them. Any help from the community is much appreciated. If you're somebody who understands these dynamics, please let me know. If you run a DTC ecommerce business, even great. If you know someone who operates in this domain, if you can connect me to them (I'll be very grateful) In return, I will pick one problem, that's most critical to them & solve it using what I'm building. They'll walk out with a solution and I'll walkout with golden insights. P.S. For Mods, not sure if this is the right forum to seek this kinda help. If not, please guide me to a right forum. I genuinely need some help here.
Google Tag Manager was supposed to free marketers from developer dependencies. Somewhere along the way, mastering it became a career in itself.
I've been in digital marketing for 20 years. The pattern I kept watching: businesses not tracking conversions properly, not because they didn't care, but because the tool assumed a level of technical knowledge most marketers don't have and shouldn't need. CSS selectors breaking after frontend deploys. DataLayer events waiting on developer queues. The Preview Mode loop eating unbillable hours nobody talks about.
I quit Google last year to re-discover my own relationship with technology and the tech industry as a whole. Rather than create products to take advantage of people's attention, I wanted to find ways to give it back.
Integrating proxies into your stack sounds simple until you're debugging why your requests are randomly failing at 2 AM. After building and scaling multiple data pipelines, here are four lessons that would have saved us weeks of headache.
1. Test authentication before you write a single line of scraping logic
Proxy auth failures are the #1 reason integrations stall. Test your credentials with a simple curl command first before you embed them in your application code. Confirm whether your provider uses username/password or IP whitelisting, and make sure both sides are configured correctly.
I have a question for you all. Every AI travel tool I have tried recently does the exact same thing: you ask an AI chat for ideas, you map it out on a visual trip planner, and then it completely leaves you to go and book it all yourself.
You end up copying the hotel name into one booking site, searching for the flight on another, and checking activities in a completely different tab.
Basically, you are still doing the boring part manually. The AI did the fun part and handed you the homework.
