First launch, first product ever!

I just released Cloudboard a new way for students to find study partners instantly and work together using voice chat and a shared whiteboard.

If you ve got a second, I d love for you to check it out and let me know what you think!

Are you the kind of person who believes in your dream enough to burn through most of your savings on it?

For millionaires, this might not be a big deal, but what about people with a typical 9 5 job? I see how much a solid marketing campaign costs on just one platform (often the monthly expense is equal to at least a full year s salary).

The day before yesterday, a friend told me he and his wife are closing their restaurant, which they opened just six months ago. They had taken a loan for it, which makes it even worse.

We keep seeing things like AI and LLM. But I'm happy about technology products that go beyond the occasional. For example, today I read that Aura is introducing a $499 e-ink digital photo frame that allows you to work without a cable.

I was also happy with the @Flowtica Scribepen from @zaczuo .

Lately, I have been experimenting with how to feed context into GPT models more effectively.

For example, when fine-tuning or working with larger context windows, I have noticed that the dilemma is in organizing the surrounding information, rather than the prompt itself. Last week, I came to know that it's called Context Engineering.

I don't know about you, but I feel like I've been working non-stop for years now, and I don't know how I'm able to do it. And it's often because I include activities in my daily life that make my work more enjoyable or break up the monotony.

For example:

I exercise every day (and listen to video casts about tech, business, and marketing in the background)

I left the UK in August 2024 to go traveling with my partner. By the time I got back, I was single and unemployed.
I wasn t in a good place. To cope with the traveling blues and the breakup, I turned to bedrotting. I was lying there, scrolling Instagram and TikTok, jumping from news app to news app, opening dozens of loops but never closing any of them. I was looking for distraction and some sort of comfort, but I couldn t get it on a screen. My phone habits were making me feel worse.
So I set out to better manage my relationship with my device.
And it didn t work. The existing screentime apps like Opal, Brick, and Jomo are very all-or-nothing. There's no middle ground where I felt I could stay informed without getting sucked back in by social media algorithms.
I still wanted to go on YouTube to see what news channels were saying about international politics, but I didn t want to get distracted by all the other recommendations that happened to be there. I still wanted to see what my friends were up to on Instagram, but I didn't want to be enticed by the reels asking me to watch just one more video. I still wanted to check my emails, but I didn t want to lose half an hour to meaningless messages. Software s stickiness made it nearly impossible for me to stay disciplined.
So I set out with a new mission: to make something for myself that would allow me to stay updated without becoming easily distracted.
What I envisioned was a hub that put things in an environment where I had control letting me stay on my home turf instead of cruising through internet neighborhoods filled with booby traps. That way, I could avoid the endless stream of information, the notifications, and the slot machine-like UX.
I ve started building that. Siftly (https://siftly.space/) is part wellness tool, part productivity tool. It s completely customizable and designed to put people back in control of their digital experience. Ironically, my relationship to screens has improved since I started creating the app because I'm coming at it from a creator mindset instead of a consumer mindset. But if Siftly doesn t work out, even if I go on the dole, I ll be doing it without the scroll.

Yesterday, I had a chat with a founder who s launching on Product Hunt next week.

He said: We ve got a community of 500+ people. Getting Product of the Day should be easy.

So I asked one question:

How many of them have an active Product Hunt accounts that are at least 4 6 weeks old?

A few days ago, we discussed how difficult it was for me, for example, to create my first product.

In many cases, people struggle with money. But I believe that with the mass adoption of AI, many things can now be done at a relatively low cost.

Sometimes I have a problem to have a look at my past milestones or things I have achieved so far.
When I think about it, even creating my first product was a success for me. I ve always been a bit shy and afraid to show what I was working on, or I just didn t know how to present it properly, so it took me a really long time.

My first product was an online workout program with a payment gateway, and the monthly price was ridiculously low. But I managed to monetise it and had my first customers. I was probably around 20 at the time.

• What was your first product?

• What would you do differently to maintain it and make it successful?

• What lesson did you learn from it?