James Carter

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.

I am a Computer Science student doing research into how solopreneurs and small startups create new apps and what their stack looks like. Particularly, I'm interested in how you handle things like authentication, billing, and permissions/authorization in your apps.

Let me know what you're working on below and how you're going about it -- I'd love to connect for some quick calls to learn about your product and talk about your process in building it!

Product Hunt is best known for its homepage, a daily leaderboard of the most creative and innovative products on the internet. Makers go all out to win launch day, because that visibility matters. Product Hunt also plays a significant role in how products appear in Google search results.

What surprised us was that AI assistants like ChatGPT were rarely citing Product Hunt in product recommendations.