That's one of the things that stuck with me while putting together Edition #57 of Curiosity Saved The Cat, which went out this Sunday
A study involving 1,800 participants across 9 experiments found the same pattern: we consistently underestimate how much we'll enjoy talking to someone, which might explain why we spend so much energy trying to skip past small talk rather than actually having it.
That's one of the things that stuck with me while putting together Edition #57 of Curiosity Saved The Cat, which went out this Sunday
A study involving 1,800 participants across 9 experiments found the same pattern: we consistently underestimate how much we'll enjoy talking to someone, which might explain why we spend so much energy trying to skip past small talk rather than actually having it.
We all have that one tool that quietly changed how we build, ship, or market something we found way later than we should have. For me, it was a simple log monitoring tool that saved hours of debugging at 2 am.
What's yours? Could be for design, code, analytics, user research, or even project management.
Trying to discover some hidden gems the community actually uses (not just the popular ones).
lately I open product hunt and the top 3 spots are just another feature drop from one of the big three, every single day :/ a small maker trying to get real feedback and traction doesn t stand a chance when they re going up against a billion-dollar company s changelog update. don t get me wrong, these companies ship incredibly fast and usually groundbreaking stuff. We all know it, and honestly, it s fun to watch. (I upvote a lot of them myself too) but to me, PH used to be about finding products I would never find otherwise. Chatting with makers, getting feedback on my own stuff. That was the whole point. for the big three and other giants, we re all going to see it anyway. Every reel, every thread, every newsletter will cover it as soon as it's launched, whether or not it s featured on Product Hunt. I am really curious about what you all do for these 2 things now - how are you all still finding good indie stuff on here? - and if you ve launched recently or are thinking about it: is it actually worth it anymore, or has it become a vanity checkbox? feels like Product Hunt needs a separate board for corporate launches vs. new indie products. Or am I wrong?
Uncertainty was the theme of this Sunday's edition of Curiosity Saved The Cat, and it turned out to be a bigger rabbit hole than expected
Ambiguity is metabolically expensive, apparently. The nervous system would always rather know, even badly, than not know at all. Which explains a lot about why we rush toward conclusions, perform confidence we don't feel, and reach for distractions the moment something stays unresolved for too long.
I don t mean this in a disrespectful way or anything like that, but throughout my life, I ve come across (and I m sure you have too) several products whose actual usefulness wasn t exactly impressive, but their creators still made a huge amount of money.
For me, for example, it was:
Fidget spinners (2017). At the peak, the global market was estimated at hundreds of millions to over $1 billion.
Metaverse land (2021) valuation could be for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each, with the overall market reaching hundreds of millions during the peak hype cycle. I bought one too. :D (actually was scammed).
Pet Rock (1975) the creator became a millionaire within a few months.
That's one of the rabbit holes I went down for edition #55, Is the Sun Deciding How You Feel?, which went out this Sunday
Rjukan sits so deep in a valley that it receives no direct sunlight for six months a year. In 2013, it installed three giant computer-controlled mirrors on the mountainside to redirect sunlight onto the town square. Considering that sunlight sets our serotonin levels, regulates our sleep, shapes how we make decisions, and even registers as a physical sensation in our joints before a storm arrives, we can easily say that Rjukan had a solution-oriented mindset.
That's one of the things I went down a rabbit hole on for Edition #53, which went out this Sunday, to celebrate last week's World Poetry Day
Diana Ferrus was studying in the Netherlands when she wrote a poem about Sarah Baartman, a South African woman whose remains had been held in Paris for nearly two centuries. The poem became so powerful it was eventually incorporated into French law and helped bring Baartman home.
The news dropped yesterday: OpenAI is shutting down Sora, their AI video app, six months after launch. The Disney $1B deal is off, and the API is going away, too.
The arc is fascinating if you zoom out. The app launched in September 2025, hit the top of the App Store within a day, and reached 1M downloads faster than ChatGPT did. By January, downloads had dropped 45%, and the whole thing had made roughly $2.1M in in-app purchases over its lifetime.
In the summer, one founder of a VC-backed startup approached me to manage his LinkedIn profile, through which he acquires clients (personal brand building).
It was a classic job interview, where the assumption is to create a conversion (you are active on someone's account, building their personal brand, as the account grows, people are noticing you, write to you, you arrange a call, and maybe close a sale)
I asked if there was a possibility of getting equity in this position, because the other positions they had advertised (whether tech, GTM, sales, some small percentage of equity) did offer even a small %...
The answer was "No, this position does not include equity."
For over a week, the wider Product Hunt community has been chiming in with their two cents in the discussion about where to draw the line between which product features should be free and which should require payment.
Just yesterday on X, a post started trending about a tool with 35,000+ users, but only just over 1,300 paying customers. The founder was asking the community for advice on how to increase conversions.
hey hunters, what s something you discovered on product hunt that you still use today?
not just tried once and forgot need some real recs also curious, what kind of products usually catch your attention here? what makes you actually try something?
Product Hunt just added a new leaderboard and it finally answers a big question: who s actually contributing to the platform?
For a long time, Streaks were the main signal of activity on Product Hunt. But streaks only showed who visited every day. Opening the site or app daily doesn t necessarily mean someone is adding enough value.
I didn't know no-shows waste 15-40% of every sales team's calendar until I met a stranger at Web Summit. I was standing by our booth when someone wandered over and started asking about what we're building at @Meet-Ting. I assumed he was just curious. Then he mentioned his company loses a lot of time to no-shows across his sales team. I asked how many. "We get 10,000 inbound demos a month." He walked off eventually, and someone came over to me and said: "Do you know who that was?".
Turns out he was the Head of Sales at a European unicorn.
We stayed in touch. And that conversation became a feature! We call it 'No Show Recovery'. Ting watches your calendar. If it notices the other person didn't show up, it asks if you want help rescheduling - automatically, inside the same thread. When you're running 10k sales calls a month and 15-40% don't show, recovering even 1-5% is hundreds of meetings saved and potential $$$s. Other lesson, talk to people as if you want and expect nothing in return.
