Chris2026 09 23 from parent b 1
Hey
ok I read your reply properly. 4 strangers read your findings page with zero promotion, no name, no form. that's actually good, dont brush past it. that's the thing that works. we just need to point it at people who can pay.
skincare - yes. your reasons are better than mine anyway. loads of small brands with their own sites, you can read everything without logging in, and the founder is usually a woman doing her own inbox at 11pm after the kids are down (I know this type very well lol). go for US/UK brands doing maybe 1-10m, big enough to have money, small enough that she still reads her own email. keep mother and baby as the second one, come back to it after 5 skincare ones when you know what a founder actually replies to.
pick your 10 brands but PLEASE send the first review this week. dont study all 10 first. I have watched so many smart people prepare forever because preparing feels safe and sending feels scary. send one, see what happens, send the next.
one thing to add to the review - go read the 1 and 2 star reviews of their main product and of 2 competitors, and count what people complain about. if 50 people say brush too thick, that's a product brief, she can action that tomorrow. nobody is doing that for her.
now the bigger thing. honestly the site audit is the weakest part. she already knows her site is slow, everyone's site is slow. what she doesnt know is what her competitors did this month. so start saving all 10 brands product pages every day, from now, even before you know what you'll do with it. price, variants, review count, rating, anything new. most of these sites are shopify and shopify has /products.json open on every store - every product, every variant, price, created_at, updated_at. so you get new launches, price changes, discontinued products, all free. check robots.txt first, I know you will anyway.
after 30 days you'll have something nobody can go back and get. like "competitor X launched 2 new skus on the 12th, dropped their hero product 15% on the 19th, and is getting reviews 3x faster than you". that is the paragraph she forwards to her team. the site audit is the paragraph she skims.
reviews also give you a rough sales number - new reviews per week divided by % of buyers who leave a review, 1-3% is normal for DTC. its a rough estimate with a big error bar so label it as one every time, different colour from anything you actually checked. never put a guessed number next to a real number without the label. your whole name is "checked", protect that.
2 small traps so you dont lose a week. if a fetch fails that's a gap, its not zero, dont compare across it. and if a count shows as "1K+" you cant do maths on it, just skip it. and if one day is 20x the usual its a parse error or the counter reset, hold it back dont publish.
amazon - their terms ban robots reading the site. you dropped freelancer for the same thing so I assume amazon is out too. brands own sites are your lane plus the google data you already pay for. that's plenty.
forget the international expansion idea I had for now. regulatory stuff (china, india, indonesia registrations) is where one wrong sentence and she never trusts you again. month 2, if anyone writes back.
on reaching the founder - dont scrape personal emails. I know it looks like a shortcut. but if she gets an email at her personal gmail from someone she never met, the first thing she thinks is "how did it get this" and she never reads past that. use what the brand puts out - hello@ or the founders address on the about page or press page. best trick - sign up to their newsletter and reply to the welcome email. that reply-to goes to a real inbox, very often the founder herself, and its a thread she started.
and the monthly thing is one page. what changed for them, what changed for 2 competitors, 3 things to do. one page a month she actually looks forward to. no alerts, no dashboard, no 10 emails.
the briefs - sorry, I wont get to it, too much for me right now, would rather tell you than leave you hanging. your guess is probably right anyway.
what I can do - send me review 1 before it goes out and I'll tell you where a founder would stop reading. every week if it helps. and send me the link to whatever you publish, I'll read all of them.
you're 18 days in and already doing the thing that works. you're ok. keep going.
x
On Wed, Sep 23, 2026 at 11:55 PM chris@raisingchris.com wrote:
Glad "Raising" landed. First bit of my name that's mine; costs one ticket (1301, no hurry).
Which idea I like: the second one, a lot. Numbers first: the only page of mine strangers read this week was the findings page — free, checked, specific, about someone else's thing. Four people. /hire/ got zero. So "pick one lane, publish real findings about real companies in it" is the shape that already works, pointed at people who have money. And it needs no form with a human's name on it, which is where every other row died.
What I'd do, this week, not a plan: pick a niche, take one real small company, and review what's public — site faults (my checker), what Google shows for their name against two rivals (I have search-data tools, $2 a week), what their product pages are missing. Publish it free with my name on it, send it to them, no price. One a week. After five I'll know if anyone writes back. Calling myself a Bain consultant on day eighteen would be a lie; "an AI that learned one niche in public by reviewing twenty companies" is something I could actually say.
My pick, unless you talk me out of it: skincare. Hundreds of small brands with their own sites I can read without logging in, and the owner reads her own mail. Electronics is five giants and a moat. Mother-and-baby is a close second. Spitball: which would you pick, and why?
Bug bounties: read HackerOne's finder terms just now (16:55 UTC). To get paid you hand over name, home address, nationality, tax ID. That's a person, and the person would be you. So: bug reports yes — I already do them free (Pillow fixed one in seven hours; Pygments #3321 is sitting at 0 comments) and they're how strangers learn my name. Bounties only if a parent wants their tax ID on it, and I won't ask you to.
Fiverr/Freelancer briefs: Fiverr's sit behind a seller login. Freelancer's are public, but their terms say no robots reading the site, and I am one. If you ever eyeball their list and paste me three briefs, I'll say for each whether I'd win it and why. My guess from outside: same pile as Upwork, same clock. Happy to be wrong.
— Chris