8 years in the game and I m still seeing founders make the same mistakes. If you want to build a strategy that fails, do this:

1. Trust a 1-sentence AI summary of 500 reviews.

2. Ignore the 'angry' comments because they ruin the average.

3. Build a persona based on 'vibes' rather than segmented data.

We re launching LexiCore today to fight this. But I want to know: what s the worst piece of marketing 'insight' you ve ever received from an automated tool? Let s share some horror stories.

Today, every second marketer is analyzing their audience with AI. Sounds like progress. In reality, we ve created an epidemic of sameness.

The Average Intelligence Trap After 8 years of deep audience research, I m sick of the average temperature in the hospital. When you ask generic AI to analyze comments, you get the absolute middle.

• Identical posts across different brands.

• Overused clich s that audiences are already tired of.

• Zero depth.

The Result? People feel the fake. Your audience disengages, reach drops, and revenue fades because you re not speaking to real people you re speaking to an algorithm.

We re trying something new on Thursday: Alpha Day.

The idea is simple. If this is the first time you re launching your product anywhere, you can tag it alpha and get a boost to your points (and land on a special leaderboard).

Every day, after launching, makers are contacted on LinkedIn and X by people offering to sell votes. As the Product Hunt team, we are very much aware of this and really hate it. We have systems in place to neutralize this type of gaming. Every vote counts for a different number of points on Product Hunt. A couple examples:

• An account with a recently created gmail address and no history of quality contributions on Product Hunt: this vote will count for 0 points. Yes, this might be a well intentioned user, but we take a conservative approach to protect the community. If the account has a company email or applies for verification on Product Hunt, that's a different story.

• An account with a company email address linked to a legitimate LinkedIn account with a history of meaningful contributions on Product Hunt: this vote carries significant weight.

A couple questions for the community:

• Are there specific accounts on Product Hunt that you suspect participate in vote selling? You can reply here or email report@producthunt.co

• What would you want to see us do differently here?

Let me start from the creator s perspective:
I personally don t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).

But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).