Ketan Kasabe

Hello to all the product builders.

I am a first time entrepreneur who has taken the problem I have lived for last 17yrs and converted it into a product.
I have 17yrs experience working in Digital Marketing space and one of the problem I always faced was that I knew what shoppers did on my site, what they purchase and where all they went on the site but never the 'Why' of their decision to purchase or not.

Celebrating 100 new signups feels great on social media, but losing 5 paying customers quietly in the background kills your business. When we switched from free to paid, our metrics completely inverted acquisition became secondary, and retention became our entire survival story.

A missed signup is just a lost opportunity, but a cancelled subscription is a leak in a boat you worked months to build.

Should founders completely ignore top-of-funnel acquisition until they've solved customer retention?

Used to be an obvious call, hire a junior dev, let them grow into it over time, review their code, build them up.
Now with AI handling a lot of basic implementation well, curious if that math still holds.

Is anyone still bringing on interns or junior developers for entry level coding work, or has AI quietly replaced that hiring category for a lot of teams already.

Genuinely trying to understand if this is still a real starting point for someone entering the field, or if that entry point has basically disappeared.