I ve had a lot of conversations lately, and there s one pattern that keeps showing up. You launch. Signups roll in. Everything feels great. But as the product grows, pricing becomes a mess. More complexity. Harder to manage. And suddenly, you're stuck.
Do you double down on the product or stop and figure out pricing?
For most teams, it becomes one of two paths: Path 1: You treat pricing like a product. Features, tiers, plans, discounts it becomes its own development cycle. Path 2: You and your team scribble numbers into a spreadsheet and hope it works.
TL;DR: Anthropic refused to sign a contract with the Pentagon that would have allowed the U.S. military to use all of its models without restrictions. Anthropic insisted on an exception, and brace yourself, that its models cannot be used: 1) for mass surveillance of citizens, 2) for autonomous killing. Now the administration is threatening that if the founder of Anthropic doesn't change his mind by a certain date, they will come after him.
Google, OpenAI, and Musk (Grok) have all signed the contract.
Following Sam Altman's announcement over the past few hours, people have been speaking out massively about cancelling their OpenAI subscriptions and subscribing to Claude.
Being consistent with content is harder than building features. Here me out. Shipping a feature feels productive. There s momentum. There s code. There s progress you can measure.
Content? You show up. You write. You post. And most days, nothing happens.
No clear feedback loop. No passing test case. No deploy notification saying success. Just impressions. Maybe.
Building product rewards logic. Content rewards patience.
When I first started, I believed that as long as I built a great product, it would naturally become popular. But as I zoomed out, I realized the market is incredibly competitive. Having a good product alone isn t enough to truly convince users.
That s when I began building my presence on social media creating content about myself, sharing my journey, and talking about the product I m building. I ve come to see this as a very effective way to build trust and spark genuine interest not only in what I make, but also in who I am as a founder.
Last year we hired a design agency to build our marketing site for @Basedash. They did an incredible job. The headline makes it sound like I'm dunking on them, but I'm not. The site was genuinely great. They built it in Framer so we could manage content ourselves, which was a completely reasonable bet at the time (and something we explicitly asked for).
After our first launch on Product Hunt, our team spent a little over a month upgrading the product. There were major changes to the UI and several new features added, so the process took time from discussions and redesigning the interface to testing, fixing bugs, and updating AI prompts.
We re also a very small team, so everyone had to push themselves to give 200%. Time and resources are limited, and at the same time, we also had to work on securing funding for the next six months to keep the team running and continue developing the app.
AI is everywhere right now - from copilots and chat assistants to analytics, research, and planning tools. But beyond the hype, I m curious about what s truly useful in day-to-day product work.
From a PM or founder perspective:
Where has AI genuinely saved you time?
What tasks do you trust AI with - and what do you never delegate?
Has AI changed how you write specs, manage roadmaps, or talk to users?
What AI use cases sounded great in theory but failed in practice?
Personally, I see a lot of potential, but also a lot of noise. I believe that in the future, AI should help us much more. Create good roadmaps, convert product specs into concrete tasks, prioritise them, assign people, push for realisation, and much more.
A 3-year search for a simple tool to track both personal and business finances in one place. Nothing fits.
Website owners constantly need minor edits in the admin panel. They are forced to pay specialists for 5-minute tasks. We need an AI agent that does this on command in the browser.
An indie hacker spends 20-30 hours manually cold launching each new product in directories, Reddit, and blogs. There is no tool that fully automates this and proves its effectiveness.
A freelancer often loses in proposal competitions due to the inability to quickly create personalized and visual website concepts for each job order.
A Telegram channel owner is losing their audience without understanding the reasons for unsubscriptions. There is no simple tool for automatically collecting feedback from departed subscribers.
All of us want customers on our platforms. However, a sign-up is very different from an engaged user who keeps returning and finding value over time.
Creating the right user experience, without being too intrusive, spammy, or in your face , can significantly improve engagement, increase conversions, and reduce churn. In my experience, a platform s success is defined far more by its active users than by the total number of people who have ever signed up.
Below are a few approaches I ve seen work well, along with some that haven t been as effective.
Building my app with AI tools, zero coding background. The magic part - I can ship features in hours. The scary part - I have no idea if the code is actually good.
StealthHound just crossed 100 active users on the Chrome Web Store
Built to make invisible tracking visible StealthHound analyzes websites for fingerprinting & tracking risks and surfaces them in a simple, user-first way.
