I was reading Nika's thread here about free vs paid features. Really made me think.

Link: https://www.producthunt.com/p/ge...
( shout-out to @busmark_w_nika ! )

She talks about giving generalized advice for free, but charging for specific, tailored help. That's a good framework.
But most product owners figure this out after they build, not before.

That's backwards.

When AI entered the public stage in 2023, I was working as a copywriter. One client gave me a condition:

either I write more articles using AI for the same price
or I lower my rate per article

That was when I realised this job was starting to change significantly. (And I ended up.)

I read 16 IRS publications from Korea. Then I found several government audit reports from the GAO. Here's the number that stopped me cold.

I am not American. I've never filed a Schedule C. I've never spoken to the IRS.

But I was already building a product for 31 million U.S. self-employed people. So I needed to understand their tax reality.

16 IRS publications. Multiple audit reports. Hundreds of pages. One month.

1. Y Combinator startup will pay humans to help AI agents when they get stuck. (This is what I read today.)

2. At the same time, I see how Indian employees in production have cameras on their heads, and the AI learns from their movements (practically filming their firing process).

3. In addition, there was already a site where AI agents hired human actions for stablecoins.

• First, AI worked for us.

• Now we are starting to work for AI.

• And eventually, will AI work (without us)?

I don t want to portray a Terminator scenario where people will have to unite against AI, but what future awaits us in terms of cooperation/non-cooperation with AI?

Every top athlete has one (Lebron James, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams). And it turns out, so do most of the biggest names in tech.

Steve Jobs mentored Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook. Eric Schmidt mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google and later credited that relationship as one of the key reasons Google scaled the way it did. Bill Campbell, known as "the Coach of Silicon Valley," mentored Jobs, Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, and dozens of other founders throughout his career.

Hey ProductHunt!

Trophy is now powering over 24M streaks which is kind of crazy to think about considering we only launched 1.0 here in January this year.
One of the parts I find most interesting about building horizontal infrastructure is that as you scale and power more and more products you get to see insights that most teams building in isolation will only see a part of, and you can use those insights to make the the infrastructure better for everyone.
For example, because we power streaks for so many users, Trophy can tell that 25% of all streaks are lost on a Friday, closely followed by Saturday (19%) and then Wednesday (18%).

1. I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.

2. But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.

Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).

+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.

Hey HS here, building B-ZEC.

Curious what actually frustrates you about tracking expenses for Schedule C.

Is it:

• Forgetting to log something right after you swipe?

• Not knowing which category it belongs to?

• Losing receipts before reconciliation?

• Something else entirely?

Hi Product Hunt!

I'm Mark, solo dev and co-founder of Moss Piglet a privacy-first public benefit company.

Habit tracking is personal. Your goals, your struggles, your progress that's some of the most intimate data you can generate about yourself. So why does every habit tracker out there store it in plaintext on their servers?

Metamorphic is a zero-knowledge encrypted habit tracker. Your data is encrypted in your browser before it ever leaves your device. The server never sees your habits, your goals, or your progress. Not even we can read it.

We thought we were ready.

Bigger deals. Fewer customers. Better margins. That was the dream.

So we built enterprise features. SSO. Advanced permissions. Audit logs. A whole new pricing tier starting at $2,000/month.

We spent 6 months. Three engineers. One dedicated product manager. Endless meetings about "enterprise readiness."

I genuinely love listening to podcasts. It's one of the best ways I've found to stay on top of new trends, pick up strategies I wouldn't have discovered otherwise, and come across founders and operators I'd never stumble on through regular reading.

So I'm always on the lookout for new ones worth adding to the rotation.

Let me start from the creator s perspective:
I personally don t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).

But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).