Paxton Andrew

At what point does a product become ready to talk to investors?

When you have users?
Revenue?
A clear business model?
A certain number of people using it?

Especially for solo or small-team makers, it feels twice as hard to reach all of these points alone - while continuing to build the product without income and bootstrapping everything.

At some point, it starts to feel like an infinite loop:

I joined product Hunt recently and feel a bit lost. between daily launches, upvotes, collections, and comments, it is hard to tell useful tools apart from products that just got votes from friends.
I am also unsure about the general etiquette. is lurking and upvoting standard, or should i be commenting? Do makers reply to questions from new users?
How did you navigate the site when you first joined? What habits help you filter out the noise and spot genuinely good tools?

I was going through my old bookmarks and found three products I had saved from Product Hunt over the last couple of years that simply no longer exist. They are just dead links now, or a short message on the landing page thanking people for the support.

It feels strange because when those tools launched, they had hundreds of upvotes and active comment sections with people saying they would use them forever. Then at some point, the project just stopped, and nobody really mentioned it. The original launch page is still sitting there, frozen in time and full of optimism.

I know most side projects do not last, and that is just part of how building software works. Still, it has made me much more careful about what I rely on. I find myself checking whether a tool has an actual team behind it, or if it is just a solo creator who might move on to something else in six months.

Do you think about a product's long-term survival before committing to it, or do you just use whatever works right now and deal with finding a replacement later?