Preston Daniel

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 can never tell what is a genuine from a real user versus someone just hyping up their friend's project. Some discussion threads feel authentic, where people ask tough questions, offer genuine feedback, and point out potential issues. Other times, the whole section is just a wall of generic praise like "congrats on the launch" and "this looks incredible" without any real substance.
It makes it hard to gauge whether a tool is actually solid or if people are just being polite. I find myself ignoring most of the surface-level compliments and actively searching for the few comments that bring up actual use cases, flaws, or comparisons to existing tools.

How do you evaluate the feedback on a launch page? Do the comments ever actually change your mind about giving a product a shot, or do you ignore them entirely and just test things out yourself?

Scrolling the leaderboard this morning, I realized I could barely tell any of the products apart. Every tool follows the exact same formula, using generic keywords and audience tags jammed together. It gets to the point where my brain just glazes over after reading five identical titles in a row.

I get why makers do it since it clearly states what the product is, but it makes everything feel forgettable. Do you think this kind of predictable naming actually hurts a launch, or do people just click based on the logo and upvote count anyway?