I often hear that LinkedIn is starting to be cringe, becoming a second Facebook, but let s be honest: it s still a career platform. A little cringe, but it still is.

On the other hand, Sam Altman introduced a new ambition OpenAI Jobs Platform an AI-powered hiring platform, expected to launch by mid-2026.

Despite the quiet season typical for summer, I do believe you experienced some business highlights.

(Product Hunt was full of launches, which surprised me in a good way.)

Five years ago, if you wanted to automate technology in your business your only options were to either be or hire a software engineer.

Today the landscape is completely different. The barrier to entry for automation is much lower, with builders typically falling into three camps

1 Glue Builders

I keep running into this problem as an indie hacker:

I need an audience to get feedback.

I need feedback to grow an audience.

Classic catch-22.

Over the past year, I ve noticed more founders stepping into the course creator role. Some are sharing genuine frameworks, while others lean heavily on personal branding and hype.

A recent example is App Mafia: a group of young founders (Zach Yadegari, Blake Anderson, Alex Slater, Connor McLaren) who claim to have built mobile apps valued at over $100M. They just launched a $997 marketing course, and the reaction online has been mixed.

Early-stage building is full of hacks and sometimes the fastest, scrappiest experiments teach you more than months of proper work.

I ve heard of people testing demand with:

• A fake door sign-up button that went nowhere (but proved interest)

• A quick landing page with nothing behind it

• Cold DMs to potential users with a mockup

• Even just a Google Form dressed up as a product

The past few months, I ve been deep in the weeds building my product. A few choices, some risky, some intuitive, completely changed the direction of the project.

One that stands out: launching before I felt ready. Terrifying at the time, but the flood of real feedback saved me months of guessing.

I recently launched my first wellness app, Momentia, a mindful journaling app designed to help people check in with their moods quickly. It s been a rewarding (and humbling) experience, and I wanted to share a few lessons that might help other makers in this space:

1. Simplicity wins. People don t want a complicated system when it comes to journaling or mental wellness. Small, consistent actions matter more. I discovered this both in my own wellness journey and from early test users.

2. Community > marketing spend. The most valuable traction so far has come from engaging with communities like this one, not ads.

3. Your own habits matter. I ve found myself becoming the best test user using the app daily gave me insights I d never get from wireframes or specs.

4. Feedback is gold. Early testers and even casual users often highlight things I would ve missed as a builder. Just the other day, an early adopter gave me unsolicited feedback in a casual conversation and it turned out to be incredibly valuable.

Launching something in the wellness space has reminded me how important it is to keep things human and approachable. Momentia started as an idea to help me, and I can only hope it helps others, too.

I wrote last week about how we re building Ting on two axes: one to get attention, the other to build the product.

On attention, we re doing pretty well in 3-weeks:

• 1k on the waitlist.

• 200 people have joined meetings booked by Ting already.

• 375 invites sent out so far...

@byalexai asked in his recent forum post when to submit your product on PH.

Earlier, I said there are two groups of people.

Those who:

I ve seen this come about recently & I still never really understood the idea of a stealth startup.

How do you make noise?

Hello everyone.

I hope I can get some advices here. I am developer, a solo developer. I make my project, snapencode.com. It is a self-host video platform. The idea is you buy license one time, for lifetime. No more monthly pay. You own it.

The building part, is fun for me. I love code. The logic.

I ve been wondering about this a lot lately.... If LLMs keep pulling from blogs, news platforms (and obviously other content sources) -> this results in ad revenue keeps shrinking for most folks reliant on this source of income -> what is the pivot for these creators?

My wife runs a food blog that s heavily ad traffic based. Right now her niche (make based content seems to be some of the safest on the internet.. likely way worse for someone with an information based blog) hasn t been hit too hard, but it feels like something that could change quickly.
That s got us thinking about what a pivot could look like.

I go back and forth on this a lot.

As someone working on branding myself online as I build, I ve shared some missteps as they happened: marketing experiments that went nowhere, outreach that genuinely just flopped and weirdly, those posts got way more engagement than when I only shared wins.

Maybe it's a bit of a dumb question, but I am still a bit confused about how external hunters work.

Does the product have a higher chance of getting promoted if hunted by someone outside the team?

How to find them? Do you need to reach out to them directly and ask about hunting your product?

I ve just launched something I built to solve a real pain I faced (opensecatlas.com) . It s a curated directory of free/open-source tools that I wish existed when I needed it. I used vibe coding to build and refine it quickly, and I m proud of what came out.

But here s the problem: I don t have a big following. No established X/Twitter, no strong LinkedIn presence, no personal brand. I see other makers and influencers launch something and immediately get thousands of visitors. For me, even though the product is real and solves a problem, it feels invisible.

I m stuck between two questions:

AI is moving fast and in expert hands it s rocket fuel. It helps us analyze faster, prototype quicker, and ship smarter.

But there s a trap: using AI in areas where we don t have our own expertise. If we can t validate the output, we risk mistaking confidence for correctness and drifting from the original goal.

For anyone who s tried marketing on Reddit, how do you avoid getting banned while still getting real traction?

This is an issue I've seen so many creators face as they market on Reddit, especially initially as they start their journeys on there.

I m currently building my first SaaS app and mapping out the go-to-market plan. One concern I keep running into is visibility especially with so many apps launching every day.

Without a budget for paid ads or influencers, I m wondering: is organic marketing still a viable strategy for early growth?

Would love to hear from founders or marketers who ve gone the organic route. What worked for you, and what didn t?

Networking is basically part of the job whether it s an investor coffee, a random meetup chat, or bumping into someone at a coworking space.

I used to carry stacks of printed business cards until I realized they were usually forgotten at home.

Now I just have it in my Apple wallet in a digital format (I chose wisery.io)