One interesting thing I came across this week was that the CEO of Duolingo first declared intentions to use AI to replace contract workers in some positions. However, they later withdrew that comment, making it clear that AI will not replace its employees.
Ahh, this type of discrepancy appears to be happening more often, to be honest. The same thing happened to Klarna not long ago. That AI will take care of everything in one minute, and then, hold on: in reality, we still need human workers.
Mozilla recently announced that they're shutting down Pocket. I used to use Pocket a lot back in the day, but I don't find myself regularly saving articles that much now.
For those that are still using Pocket, what are you planning to switch over to?
I ve launched a few small tools before, but I usually skipped the whole talk to people first step. I d just build, ship, and hope something stuck.
This time, I m trying something different. I started asking around about a pain I kept noticing, SaaS free trials and how hard it is to get meaningful feedback from users.
Early on, marketing is just as important as building the product, especially if you want a successful launch.
Some say the fit in Product-Market Fit is really about marketing. I tend to agree. For me, when I founded my first company, I was more comfortable writing code than copywriting. When I started trying to sell the first product I developed, I realised just how much I didn t know about Go-To-Market (GTM) and marketing. I ve tried everything from cold outreach to reading all the books I could find. After my second company failed, I actually went back to being an operator and only took "business" roles to try and learn as much as possible from doing.
So, if you don t have an MBA or business background, how are you tackling this side of things?
Are you talking to mentors, reading books, taking online courses, using LLMs, or something else entirely?
Community-driven product development is a huge advantage hearing directly from your users fuels better ideas and stronger loyalty. But it also comes with a classic challenge: feature bloat.
How do you decide which user requests to say yes to, and which to decline without alienating your audience? How do you keep your product vision focused and sharp when the feedback pulls in so many directions?
I d love to hear your strategies for balancing user-driven growth with staying true to your core mission. What frameworks or decision-making processes have worked for you?
Let s share best practices on how to build with community input without losing product clarity.
What s that one task you always end up doing but really wish you didn t have to?
For me, it s the scrappy stuff like cold outreach or chasing feedback (and getting no reply). It's essential, but always pulls me away from deeper work.
Launching a product that I've been working on for a while, solving a problem that I am passionate about, and truly believe can help thousands of people. But then, getting nothing other than crickets from the community, seems like a very daunting prospect to me. I'd love to know if you have had a flop launch in the past, what did you do to turn it around. Or if you haven't turned around, what are you planning to do? What have you learnt from success stories, best practices, things that really make you feel ready for that launch and take anything that you get back from it..?
We're all seeing AI transform industries, but are we looking deep enough? I've been thinking about applying first-principle thinking to identify areas truly ripe for AI disruption going beyond automating existing tasks to fundamentally reimagining solutions.
Instead of asking 'How can AI make X better?', what if we ask:
What is the core human need X is trying to solve?
What are the fundamental limitations of current solutions, pre-AI?
If we were to solve this need from scratch today, with current AI capabilities (LLMs, generative models, etc.) as a core building block, what would it look like?
I m currently working on a product designed for users around the world, and as exciting as it sounds, building something truly global comes with a lot of unexpected challenges.
