This meme made me laugh because it is painfully real.

YC mentioning AI-native agencies really resonated with us.

We started Starnus as a self-serve product. But pretty quickly, founders started asking us to help them run it too.

That happened enough times that it became clear this was not random.

A lot of people do not just want software.

If you re still sitting on your launch, this is the push.

YC made a special exception for this community: one or more companies that launch tomorrow will get a YC interview and potentially funding. A YC partner will review every eligible launch.

A lot of startup growth content is theater.

I wanted to write this because I think it can genuinely hurt early-stage founders.

When we launched Starnus our competitors were charging $100+/month. So we thought let's undercut them. Start at $20. Make it a no brainer.

Signups were great. Payments? Almost zero.

Here's what actually changed our MRR:

1. Cheap pricing kills trust

After our Product Hunt launch we watched hundreds of founders sign up and start using the platform.

And here's what surprised us.

Most of them even ones running real businesses making money had no idea how to describe their ideal customer. They'd stare at the prompt and type stuff like "anyone who needs my product" or "find me buyers from everywhere."

Not beginners. Founders with revenue. With teams.

I posted a random thread on X about the cost of living in the Netherlands. Nothing about what we're building. Just genuine thoughts about life in the Netherlands.

It hit 1M+ impressions. And here's the weird part we got a ton of signups and paid users for Starnus from it. Without ever mentioning the product.

Meanwhile, my "here's what Starnus does" posts? Way less engagement.

This genuinely messed with my head. I'm sharing the actual X post below

We added two Product Hunt badges to starnus.com.
#1 Product of the Day and #4 Product of the Week.

Feels good having them there. Thanks again to everyone who supported the launch.

Hey Product Hunt community

I'm Khashayar, founder and CEO of Starnus. Together with my co-founder Ayda we just launched today.

Quick backstory: we're two founders who did our doctorates in data science and mechanical engineering. We used to build robots. Two years ago we started a B2B company and hit a wall ,we had no idea how to do sales. We tried every tool out there and ended up paying $500+/mo for 5 different platforms just to send cold emails.

So we built Starnus. And I know what you're thinking "great, another AI SDR." I promise you it's not (ok maybe it is a little, as a founder I can't always see it ). But seriously this is not a CRM with a sprinkle of AI on top. You describe your ideal customer in a simple prompt and Starnus handles everything end to end, prospecting, enrichment, personalized outreach, campaigns, and tracking.

As a measure of the impact of vibe coding and the need to focus on positioning, narrative, and marketing and distribution, I noticed that that 610 products were submitted to the Product Hunt leaderboard today, but only 16 were featured which is less than 3%.

The previous high was just over 500 products in December.

I ve been more active here lately, and what I genuinely love is how people treat launches like effort, not ads.

We re launching Ashera on Feb 15. For now I m here to learn, support other makers, and meet good people.