I was wondering if anyone could tell me what they think the best OCR tools there are out there, with zero retention if possible. I played around with Mistral, PDF vector, Tesseract.... Was wondering if anyone has any better suggestions?

Curious to see when everyone does their best building, when do you usually find yourself deep in automation mode?

Sharing real numbers because the fake guru stuff helps nobody. 📉 **MONTH 1-3: The Delusion Phase** - Revenue: $0 - Expenses: $400 (tools, courses, domains) - Clients: 0 - Projects: 12 "portfolio builds" nobody saw - Confidence: "I'm gonna be rich" - Reality: Eating ramen 📈 **MONTH 4-6: First Blood** - Revenue: $1,800/month average - Clients: 3 small businesses - Pricing: $500-800/month (way too low) - Mistakes: Promised too much, delivered chaos - Lost: First client in month 5 (overengineered their solution) - Lesson: Simple beats complex 📊 **MONTH 7-9: Finding The Groove** - Revenue: $5,400/month average - Clients: 5 (lost 1, gained 3) - Pricing: Raised to $1,200 average - Breakthrough: Focused only on invoices/contracts - Stopped: Building custom solutions - Started: Reusing templates 💰 **MONTH 10-12 (Current): Actual Business** - Revenue: $14,000/month - Clients: 8 active - Pricing: $800-3,500/month - Sweet spot: Law firms and accounting ($2,500 average) - Retention: 100% past 3 months - Referrals: 3 new clients from existing ones THE REAL COSTS: - PDF Vector Pro: $79/month (handles everything) - n8n hosting: $20/month (DigitalOcean) - Make/Zapier: $58/month (for clients who insist) - Random tools: $43/month - Total: $200/month Time investment: - Week 1-20: 60 hours/week (unsustainable) - Week 21-40: 40 hours/week (still too much) - Now: 20 hours/week (finally balanced) Net profit: ~$13,800/month THE HARD TRUTHS: - First 6 months sucked. Made $67/hour at McDonald's in college. Made $0/hour for 6 months here. - Almost quit in month 5 when client said my work was "unusable" - Wife questioned my sanity daily - Imposter syndrome hit different at 3 AM debugging webhooks WHAT ACTUALLY WORKED: - Picking one thing (document processing) - Building boring solutions that work - Charging for value, not time - Saying no to complex requests - Using reliable tools (stop trying to save $50/month) Currently building toward $18k/month. Not there yet, but the path is clear now.

THE $50K OPPORTUNITY Healthcare network needed document processing. - 50 clinics - 30,000 patient forms monthly - Budget: $50,000 setup + $5,000/month - Timeline: 2 weeks ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ MY 2-HOUR "IMPRESSIVE" PITCH "I'll build you an enterprise-grade solution!" The architecture: - Custom Python application - Dockerized microservices - Kubernetes orchestration - React dashboard - Machine learning models - 6-week timeline Their response: "We'll think about it." ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE OTHER CONSULTANT'S 15-MINUTE DEMO He opened his laptop. "Let me show you something." Built it LIVE: 1. n8n webhook → receives forms 2. PDF extraction → handles any format 3. Direct to EMR → their existing system "That's it. Deploy tomorrow. $50k." They signed immediately. ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE PAINFUL PHONE CALL I had to know what I did wrong. Me: "Your solution must be sophisticated" Him: "11 nodes" Me: "Development time?" Him: "6 hours" Me: "Maintenance?" Him: "Maybe 2 hours monthly" My solution: 240 hours to build His solution: 6 hours His profit margin: 90% ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ WHAT I LEARNED THAT DAY ❌ Clients don't buy code ✅ Clients buy outcomes ❌ "Enterprise-grade" impresses developers ✅ "It works tomorrow" impresses CEOs ❌ Complex solutions show capability ✅ Simple solutions show confidence ❌ 6-week timelines show thoroughness ✅ 2-day delivery shows competence ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ HOW I CHANGED EVERYTHING BEFORE (First 6 months): - Python everything - Average project: 6 weeks - Close rate: 20% - Monthly revenue: $3k AFTER (Last 6 months): - n8n/Make for everything - Average project: 4 hours - Close rate: 65% - Monthly revenue: $16,500 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━ THE EXACT PIVOT Stopped selling: "Custom Python solutions" Started selling: "Works by Monday" Stopped building: What I thought was impressive Started building: What actually solves problems Stopped pricing: Development hours Started pricing: Value delivered ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━