Many products are hard to explain in one sentence especially to their own founders

You live with the idea every day.

You know the problem deeply.

Whenever I browse product launches, I somehow subconsciously judge not only the product itself and its quality, but also the quality that is reflected in the effort the makers put into preparing it.

It may sound insignificant, but in my case, these things also make a significant difference:

• Icon GIF at the launch it enlivens the overall impression and is dynamic

• Quality graphics and video

• First, a properly filled-out comment

• Photos in the makers' profiles (it's less trustworthy for me when there's only the letter "J" or something similar)

• Whether any of my contacts or acquaintances on the platform reacted to the launch

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.

According to @Supabase's State of Startups 2025, founders follow newsletters like TLDR. 

ICYMI Product Hunt isn t just a launch platform. It s also a collective of newsletters. 

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.

Many products start as experiments built at night or on weekends.

At first, there s no pressure just curiosity and momentum.

But at some point, expectations creep in: users, revenue goals, support, roadmap decisions.

With today s tools, translation (UI, copy, even video) is no longer the hard part.

What slows us down instead are things like tax, legal compliance, hiring, support, payments sometimes even geopolitics. The moment users show up from a new country, a product problem turns into an operating one.

The day before yesterday, I was looking at the profiles of founders and team members of Lovable, as well as other companies, e.g. Hubspot, and they all look pretty good.

Lately, I ve been getting offers to help grow LinkedIn profiles from several founders, and I m starting to feel like at least LinkedIn is hype.

I keep going back and forth on this, so I m curious how others think about it.

At what point do you start taking non-English markets seriously?

• only after you feel solid PMF in English?

• when inbound users from certain regions show up?

• by picking one market early (Japan, LatAm, etc.) and committing?

• or do you just keep pushing it off to stay focused?

We recently discussed the changes that took place on the platform in 2025, so it s clear that the approach to Product Hunt will need to evolve as well.

Some features were removed, others were added, but there are still opportunities to gain visibility.

A tagline is the first piece of content a user will see about your product on the leaderboard. It's so important that you get it right. You should be able to get a really solid idea of what your product is just by reading a handful of words.

In the spirit of forever optimising our taglines, I wanted to do a little experiment:

A tagline is the first piece of content a user will see about your product on the leaderboard. It's so important that you get it right. You should be able to get a really solid idea of what your product is just by reading a handful of words.

In the spirit of forever optimising our taglines, I wanted to do a little experiment: