I recently saw a marketer with 10k+ followers launch and finish 6th with 348 upvotes. They followed a proper pre-launch and post-launch plan, did everything right, and still the outcome felt unpredictable.

Now I m launching @Curatora next week.

I m not a marketer. I have a little over 1k followers. Of course, asking for support helps. But I also keep hearing that a large part of the Product Hunt community shows up mainly for their own launch, then goes quiet until the next one.

That makes me wonder: how much of success here is strategy, and how much is timing and network effect?

Product Hunt is best known for its homepage, a daily leaderboard of the most creative and innovative products on the internet. Makers go all out to win launch day, because that visibility matters. Product Hunt also plays a significant role in how products appear in Google search results.

What surprised us was that AI assistants like ChatGPT were rarely citing Product Hunt in product recommendations.

Last month, Tailwind CSS fired 75% of their engineering team.

Revenue dropped 80%. Doc traffic down 40%.

Meanwhile, Tailwind is more popular than ever.

After our first launch on Product Hunt, our team spent a little over a month upgrading the product. There were major changes to the UI and several new features added, so the process took time from discussions and redesigning the interface to testing, fixing bugs, and updating AI prompts.

We re also a very small team, so everyone had to push themselves to give 200%. Time and resources are limited, and at the same time, we also had to work on securing funding for the next six months to keep the team running and continue developing the app.

With the advent of clawdbots, it's as if we've all lost our inhibitions and "put our lives completely in their hands."

I'm all for delegating work, but not giving them too much personal/sensitive stuff to handle.

As usual, Y Combinator came up with segments that are worth investing:

1. Cursor for Product Managers
2. AI-Native Hedge Funds
3. AI-Native Agencies
4. Stablecoin Financial Services
5. AI for Government
6. Modern Metal Mills
7. AI Guidance for Physical Work 8. Large Spatial Models 9. Infra for Government Fraud Hunters 10. Make LLMs Easy to Train

In the past, my thoughts were often stuck in small, daily things like:
Is there any drama on Facebook today?
Did anyone like my story?
Did my crush drop any hints?
Is anyone asking me out today?
Does my best friend have new stories to tell me?

Looking back, I can t help but laugh at myself. None of these thoughts really helped me grow, yet they always gave me that emotional, butterfly-in-the-stomach feeling.

Everything started to change when I entered a phase of I don t even know who I am.
And that s when I began searching for real answers.

The greatest invention of our time the smartphone has also become one of the biggest consumers of our energy and attention.

Being focused is now an art.

Hey everyone,

I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market.
That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.

In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.

For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools:

We re getting ready for our second Product Hunt launch on Jan 31, and a post by @busmark_w_nika got me thinking.

What to do (that we didn't do the first time):

• Plan your launch. What does it mean?

  • Write down everything you need to do before you launch.

  • Cleaning your copy

  • Your product images

  • Your product video (demo under 60 seconds if you can)

  • For our first launch, we didn't do anything. Even though we got 2nd Product of the Day, I would not recommend others to leave it to their luck. Plan and maximize your chances of success.

• Keep it simple, stupid.

  • Don't overcomplicate your page with lots of marketing language.

  • Simplicity, clean product screenshots, and clear language.

  • I think this is the single most important thing to take into account when launching, and why we probably did so well on our first launch.

    • Ask yourself: Does the tagline make sense? Will others understand what the product does and what it is in under 10 seconds?

    • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Grammarly for prompting. (Grammarly = it is an extension.) Improve prompts in one click. (super clear what it does).

    • You can straight away visualise how you might use the product and what it will do for you.

• Focus on your strengths.

  • Don't give everything you got in one go.

  • Earn the right for people to read and scroll down. Read and scroll down.

  • Save some stuff for your pinned post.

  • People have a short attention span.

  • Hook people on your most important feature, showcase it front and centre, don't give me everything together cos I'll forget, and also I'll get lost.

  • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Improve your prompts in one click. Works inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Lovable, and more.

  • Even though you have about 10 other features on Pretty Prompt, we don't talk about them right in the beginning; we just feature that one "killer feature" and let users dive deeper afterwards.

• Product assets = show, don't tell.

  • Your images and video should be about your product.

  • Don't make it marketing-heavy. Make it product-heavy.

  • Show me what the product does, don't tell me about it.

  • For us: 60-second demo video actually using the tool. Screenshots of the top features (Improve - Refine - Save - History). Not fancy Figma designs, I mean screenshots of the actual product.

  • If you get big like Notion, Cursor, Claude, etc. you may also be able to add a more human video of you talking about the product, or new functionality, your story, etc. But for the majority, just show your product, and let the product win.

• Learn from others.

  • Though no two products or launches are the same, you can learn from others and pick the best things that fit your own product.

  • Checkout this post by @fmerian on "The Cursor Way to Launch". Great tips.

• Warm up the Audience.

  • Don't just rely on your followers.

  • Use as many channels as possible to maximise the reach and get people excited about your launch, even before you launch.

  • If you do this step well, the launch is just 50% of the job, and you're already a step ahead of most.

  • For us: I did a community post, Substack one, LinkedIn one, Slack one. We'll be recording a founder video too. I want it to be as human as possible; people buy into people.

It s almost here for me. In three days, I ll be relaunching a major update for the app I have been collaborating with, and I ve set clear boundaries for myself about what I will and won t do before the launch. I guess these are some general, unwritten rules I try to follow

Definitely DON T:

• Accept offers from charlatans promising votes or engagement for money

• Send unsolicited messages begging for votes or support

• Spam other people s posts with launch announcements

I came to exactly the same conclusion that real startup ideas often come from simple and boring problems. From my own experience: I spent three years on a startup that was supposed to revolutionize online education, but in the end it had 0 users. Now I ve just started solving a simple problem for home appliance repair technicians and immediately got my first paying users on a very rough MVP.

Many people were looking for an answer in one category, namely, Forums Streaks.

This metric by itself only tells you that people log in to the app.

New AI models pop up every week. Some developer tools like @Cursor, @Zed, and @Kilo Code let you choose between different models, while more opinionated products like @Amp and @Tonkotsu default to 1 model.

Curious what the community recommends for coding tasks? Any preferences?

I am so excited about this one!

You can now use Pretty Prompt right inside @Lovable (in beta)

We ve been working super hard to take Pretty Prompt beyond the generic ChatGPT world, and stepping into Vibe Coding.

This is something I ll find out in just a short while, one week from now (Jan 28), as I m about to re-launch a digital detox app. If you want, follow, maybe you will be on watch of my steps and activities

However, that s not the main point of this post.

Yesterday, I had an unpleasant experience. For a few minutes, I lost my LinkedIn community of several thousand people (TL;DR: I was falsely accused of using suspicious software).

Fortunately, I got my account back but it was a strong reminder that we don t own platforms, nor our profiles on them.

Today I read in the news that X is offering a $1 million prize to the author of the most popular long-form X Article published by January 30, 2026, as part of its push to grow long-form content on the platform.

Eligible articles must be original, at least 1,000 words, and winners will be judged mainly on Verified Home Timeline impressions. Only U.S.-based X Premium subscribers can participate.

Not really much, and it annoys me a bit. In exactly 14 days (28. 1.) we will launch the product, and the only thing I do is talk about it.

But yes, there are points that I still want to master by then, e.g.:

• Create an informational newsletter inviting people to follow our product page

• Create a list of people who could support us and ask them for help

• Announcements on social networks

• Inform Kickstarter backers who supported us with updates this is also an audience

• Publishing a Product Hunt badge on the landing page

• Continually grow and maintain a personal brand which should be a long-term goal, not just for launch purposes.

We re officially in nominees season for the Orbit Awards: AI Workflow Automation.