We ve spent the last few months moving our Google Workspace tools over to the Model Context Protocol (MCP). While the potential for 'agentic' workflows is huge, but the friction of working on the edge of a new protocol is very real.

For those who haven't dived in yet, the biggest hurdle we found was the Remote vs. Local setup, rather than the protocol itself. Most tutorials focus on local command-line installs, but for a production-ready SaaS, you have to build for remote MCP servers. This requires a completely different approach to authentication and persistent state that the current docs don't fully cover yet.

We just shipped something new on Product Hunt.

Ask Product Hunt AI is a way to explore launches, products, and discussions without digging through pages or trying the perfect search query. You can just ask a question and it pulls from everything happening on the platform products, comments, makers, all of it.

Looking for tools in a specific space? Want to see what people are saying about a launch? Trying to find something you saw last week but forgot the name of? Just ask.

Lately I ve been thinking about how hard it s become to choose well.

Almost every category now feels overcrowded agencies, SaaS tools, AI products, consultants, even simple productivity apps. On the surface, there are more options than ever. But instead of making decisions easier, that abundance often makes everything feel noisier and harder to evaluate.

Today, I read a study showing that social media use is linked to weaker reading, vocabulary, and word-recognition skills in teens under 16.
Yesterday, I read an article saying that students who used AI showed up to 55% less brain activity and remembered less.
According to the news, if this is what technology was supposed to help us with and make our lives easier, then I don t see the future very brightly.

On the contrary, I have to say that I use AI for education (e.g. for building, explaining things when I do not understand them). But 80% of people just take the information and do not bother to think about other things.
Yes, we can save a lot of time, and mental capacity/energy with "no memorising" but do we really spend that saved time on something useful and meaningful?

A year ago, half the marketing world told us "AI search" was overhyped. The other half was shipping "ChatGPT SEO checklists" in a week.

We ignored both.

Instead we did one boring thing: we scraped LLM citations. Every day. Across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Claude. For hundreds of brands. And we asked one question when AI recommends a product, where does that recommendation actually come from?

Here's what we found that nobody was talking about:

We analyzed the codebases of 100 startups that hit a scalability wall (*)
The goal was not to find the most exotic bug. The goal was to find the most common, expensive, and preventable patterns of failure.

The results were almost identical across 85% of them. Here is what the data says.

The Timeline to Failure

Months 1 6: Everything worked. Fast releases. Happy customers. No time for architecture.

I said "never again" to hardware.

I meant it. I had done it before. I know what hardware costs, not just in money, but in decisions you make at 2am about components that may or may not arrive, about inventory that ties up capital for months before a single unit ships. When I moved into SaaS, the relief was real. Software scales. Software does not sit in a warehouse. 

There's a pattern in AI products right now that worries me: the goal is to make AI the relationship.

AI friends. AI therapists. AI partners. The pitch is always the same humans are complicated, AI is easy. No judgment, available 24/7, infinitely patient.

I feel like a lot of product bloat starts with a request that seems totally reasonable in the moment.

Then it ships, and months later you realize it added more complexity than value more support, more exceptions, more maintenance, and one more thing the product has to carry forever.

Would love to hear examples from other builders. What s one request you wish you had handled differently?

Lately I ve been thinking about how different design challenges look depending on the product you re building.

In theory, design processes often look clean and structured. But in reality, every product comes with its own constraints unclear requirements, edge cases, technical limitations, or simply trying to balance user needs with business goals.

I formally studied marketing as a university program (5 years), and due to inspiration on social networks, it feels completely natural to do it, even easy to learn (because most of the time you just guess what might work for you).

BUT

I'll go first.

I still reply to every comment manually. Reddit, LinkedIn, Product Hunt, forums, Twitter, Discord. Every single one.

AI could do this. There are tools that generate replies, post on schedule, analyze sentiment, even mimic your brand voice. But I don't use them. Here's why.

A 2024 study on community engagement across 500 brands found that personalized responses drive 3.2x higher retention and 4.7x more repeat interactions than automated replies. People can tell when a response is copy-pasted. They can feel when no one actually read their comment. The average user only needs 2-3 automated interactions before they disengage entirely.

As founders, calls are part of our daily life. Brainstorming, quick updates, random discussions with the team and there s always value in those moments. But most of the time, all that value just disappears after the call.
By connecting Prodshort to your calendar, it automatically joins your calls and turns them into ready-to-post content.

If you're a founder and want to create content, I'm doing short discussion calls. Let's connect !!

At some point every dev ends up here

you run a project
something fails
you try again

Hey Product Hunt family!

Just wanted to share a little "behind the scenes" pain from the OptiClear launch. We all know the Apple App Store review process can be a rollercoaster, and I definitely hit a loop.

I had built this sweet "Invite a Friend" feature. The logic was simple: generate a code, share it with a friend, and both of you earn free premium days. A classic, organic growth loop, right?

Well, Apple hit me with a rejection. Apparently, unlocking premium features outside of their standard In-App Purchase flow (even as a reward) is a big no-no.

Hey there,

I am Nikolas and with my 30+ team we like giving back to the community. So, while I cant support every project that launches every day (I can barely keep up so somedays I dont even log on PH), I do want to make an effort for dev tool projects, especially those helping with AI code assistants (and platforms that could help me evaluate their effectiveness), IDEs, productivity tools and more. I am also interested in SaaS products with an API or simply APIs, especially APIs that leverage AI and can help developers build better (and faster).

We all have that one tool that quietly changed how we build, ship, or market something we found way later than we should have. For me, it was a simple log monitoring tool that saved hours of debugging at 2 am.

What's yours? Could be for design, code, analytics, user research, or even project management.

Trying to discover some hidden gems the community actually uses (not just the popular ones).

Hey PH.

Launched Briefance here last week. Solo founder, Istanbul, no team, no investors. Wanted to share what actually happened instead of the usual "thank you so much" post.

Quick context: Briefance turns chaotic client emails into structured briefs. Freelancer target. Paste the mess, get scope, timeline, budget, and follow up questions in ten seconds. Free tier has 3 briefs, no card needed.

Here's what the launch week taught me.

AI tools are becoming a standard part of the design workflow from generating UI ideas to writing copy and speeding up iterations.

In my experience, they re great for exploration and saving time, but they also tend to push outputs toward similar patterns and solutions. It feels like the more we rely on them, the more important our own taste and judgment become.

This is probably a shared problem for a lot of people right now.

It s Monday (but honestly, it happens on other days too) many people try to sync up, you end up with endless calls scattered throughout the day, and: