Here s what I think actually matters:

1. Being featured

2. Getting into the top 10 within the first 4 hours

3. Scaling into the top 5

4. Securing a badge (1st 3rd place)

Why?

Today, I came across an article on TechCrunch: The great computer science exodus (and where students are going instead).

It shows that UC campuses saw a drop in computer science enrollment for the first time since the dot-com crash (6% in 2025, 3% in 2024), but students are shifting to AI-focused programs.

Yesterday, I came across a post saying that OpenAI projects a $14 billion loss in 2026. They ve gone through several funding rounds, offer monthly subscriptions, and are now planning to integrate ads into search results (which means another revenue stream).

Realistically, I don t think this loss will be covered in the short term, and profitability might only come over a longer horizon (if at all).

I m curious how far teams have really gone with AI support.

Are you still using chat mainly as a helper alongside tickets - or has AI actually reduced your support volume in a meaningful way?

Would love to hear:

What tools are helpful

With the advent of clawdbots, it's as if we've all lost our inhibitions and "put our lives completely in their hands."

I'm all for delegating work, but not giving them too much personal/sensitive stuff to handle.

Yesterday went through this Tweet by Greg Isenberg.

There is an app called "rent a human."

I work closely with product and growth teams, and one challenge I keep running into is explaining user drop-offs to people who aren t deep into analytics.

The data usually shows where users leave, but turning that into a clear, confident explanation without overloading dashboards or making assumptions can be tough. Especially when the audience is leadership or business stakeholders.

I m curious how others handle this in practice:

AI as you know it is disrupting industries, and the software industry is at the forefront of this disruption. So what will be the future of SaaS, a model that presents users value for use?

The first and most important impact as we are already seeing is that the barrier for non-technical people to build software they require will drastically drop. This is evident in tools like lovable, bolt, replit etc... where users with no coding experience can whip up apps in a couple of minutes or hours as the case maybe.

News in the tech world gets old quickly. It's no longer relevant in 10 minutes.

What helps you quickly navigate the world of AI?

I caught the latest news about AI from:

Just wanted to say a quick thank you to everyone who checked out Cue today.

I launched this morning not expecting much. It's a tool I built over the holidays that turned from a side project into the main project I'm working on. Seeing it hit #3 (so far) is honestly surreal.

Over the past few days, I ve been trying to understand what helped the most successful launches stand out.

In general, here s what I noticed they tend to share:

• Their Product Hunt page had at least 500 followers.

• The product was in overall good condition (I mean, already had some level of reputation, really good marketing).

• Many were hunted by well-established, well-known hunters on the platform.

• Every comment received a response.

• The visuals were strong there was almost always a video or demo featured at the beginning of the carousel.

As users, we all want to try a product before committing. As builders, we want to show real value without over-engineering and investing time 'just for show'. Finding that balance is harder than it looks.

I just shipped my demo for Rewo (https://rewo.app), and intentionally went with a live, real demo:

• Fully functional product (same codebase as prod)

• Uses demo data instead of real integrations

• Some interfacing + sync pieces are disabled

• Auto-resets on a schedule so anyone can jump in fresh

My question is as follows, and I'll ask it right at the beginning:

Do you ask for help with upvoting from the people you're competing with on that day?

I know this topic has been here a million times (and people will still ask me a few more times after that).

I personally see advantages in both cases, but maybe one more advantage when it comes to launching during the week.

Very briefly:

This is something I ll find out in just a short while, one week from now (Jan 28), as I m about to re-launch a digital detox app. If you want, follow, maybe you will be on watch of my steps and activities

However, that s not the main point of this post.

Yesterday, I had an unpleasant experience. For a few minutes, I lost my LinkedIn community of several thousand people (TL;DR: I was falsely accused of using suspicious software).

Fortunately, I got my account back but it was a strong reminder that we don t own platforms, nor our profiles on them.

Over the past month, I've been scrolling through several LinkedIn profiles and noticed how some people have long portfolios of businesses that say:

Founder

Founder

As leaders, we spend most of our time pouring into others. Our families, our friends, our teams. We invest our time, energy, and presence in being there for others. But somewhere along the way, it becomes easy to overlook an important question

Who is pouring into you?

There are plenty of tools that seem useful on paper, yet something makes us close the tab instantly.

Sometimes it s pricing, sometimes messaging, sometimes the onboarding feels unclear.

Often it s a gut feeling that s hard to explain.

We often see launch posts, milestones, and success stories.
What we don t see as much are honest breakdowns of products that quietly stalled or failed.

I feel there s a lot of learning hidden there about timing, assumptions, and trade-offs.