Nigel Jacob

@DanielSmidstrup pilotup.io

drop ur startup link

@stanlyyaa 🙌🏻

@thenigeljacob stanlyya.com/blog/my-reddit…

Any tips on growing a Reddit from scratch?

When thinking about payroll, hiring, and scaling have been on your mind, you're not alone. As you dig further into it, the crazier things get. The revenue is going up, the company is staying busy, but there's no margin to be found. It's something I've been focusing on quite heavily. Where founders are scaling smartly and when the numbers begin to lie.

We've been monitoring margin data for over 50 founders. It's basic: Sales go up, salaries rise even more quickly, and everyone is busy all the time. That's the trap. Many companies aren't struggling to grow. They’re just allocating their work incorrectly. Doing the wrong thing at the wrong price point.

The 5 indicators every startup founder should monitor on a weekly basis. 1. Revenues 2. Salary expenses as a percentage of revenues 3. Lead generation 4. Conversion rate 5. Cost of tasks that no longer require a human All founders monitor growth. But very few monitor the cost of their growth. That's where margin bleeds out.

Day 3 of building in public on X. @thePilotUP is starting to take shape 🚀 It’s still small progress, but seeing your idea slowly come to life on your screen motivates you to keep building more than anything else.

Anyone know good free directories to list an AI B2B product on? We're pre-launch, bootstrapped.

Here’s what I’m working on… Im building @thePilotUP, a platform for founders to build AI employees and scale revenue without scaling payroll. We’re launching soon. Waitlist is open. Would love your feedback from the community.

@cybermetheus @HesaraY13709 @thePilotUP Thanks man, appreciate it !!

@thenigeljacob @HesaraY13709 @thePilotUP welcome to the club

Day 1 of building in public on X. I see a lot of founders posting wins here. Guess this is the start of mine 🚀

@bas_fijneman Claude. Not for vibe coding but boosting your productivity 20x as a developer. Totally worth the 200$ you’d pay.

one tool you can't live without as a builder?

@hiarun02 @kavinesh22 Classic 😂

Claude Code 4.7 is insane. i know literally NOTHING about coding. ZERO. and i just built 3 fully functioning web apps in 30 minutes. http://localhost:3000/ http://localhost:8000/ http://localhost:5000/ check it out.

If the same thing is getting consistently outsourced, chased down, and rehired, don’t think of it as a people problem anymore. It’s a systems problem. Especially when AI can make it so much simpler.

Look for people who perform below their cost or value. Founders drowning in emails. Operations drowning in scheduling. Marketing redrafting the same content over and over again. This isn’t productivity. This is payroll inefficiency.

Start by benchmarking the dull. If a person spends 40–60% of their working hours repeating the same processes week in, week out, that is where you start auditing first. Not sexy. Extremely costly.

Start by checking one ratio, which is payroll as a percentage of revenue. The ideal ratio should be around 30-40%. Having a ratio above 50% impacts margin negatively. When the ratio hits 60%, margins start getting squeezed. It’s a straightforward ratio that speaks volumes.

Don’t measure payroll in terms of salary only. You should measure recruiter costs, time for training, tools cost, manager’s time spent, and lost production from onboarding. This helps you understand why an affordable hire may end up costing you a lot.

Perform an audit on your payroll before your next hiring process. Most entrepreneurs blame hiring woes on poor recruitment skills. The problem actually runs deeper in that you lack visibility into payroll.

Your last recruit quit within eight months. Let us run through some numbers. Recruitment. Training. Onboarding. Momentum lost. This one recruit alone has cost you over $50,000 and put you back to square one. Founders not only pay their employees salaries but have the cost of starting afresh too. This is what many overlook, and this is why most organizations are exploring artificial intelligence solutions for repetitive work.