YekSoon Lok

According to Product Hunt's Q2 State of Tech Discovery report, Venture Capital sits right at the top of the "Under-used but competitive" chart, averaging 515 upvotes per launch across just 11 products.

The demand is massive, but most tools in private capital stall out because they rely on surface-level LLM summaries that neither founders nor investors can truly verify.

We built askOdin to bridge that trust gap with deterministic, auditable judgment infrastructure:

• For Founders (Crucible): A stress-testing engine to catch logic gaps, narrative flaws, and weak assumptions in pitch decks before meeting investors.

• For Allocators (Clarity): Institutional-grade deal risk scoring backed by full audit logs and verifiable signal.

At Product Hunt, we re on a mission to help builders find users and help users find the best new products.

We ve been at it for over a decade, and we ve accumulated a ton of data, but we ve rarely shared it with the outside world. Until now.

Having sat on both sides of the table, here are the 3 biggest unforced errors I see, looking at it as both an investor and now a founder:

1. The market size does not hold.
Many founders use a top-down approach with questionable data sources to claim a massive TAM. In my opinion, a much more credible and defensible approach is to build your market size from the bottom-up.

2. Trying to do too many things.
In the early stages, you can only focus on a few areas, starting with your beachhead market. It is incredibly difficult to juggle product development, consulting, and training revenue simultaneously and still hope the business will scale. Even with AI efficiencies, stretching the team too thin kills momentum.

3. Not thinking deeply enough about the Moat and GTM.
A great product does not automatically equal a great business. If you haven't thoroughly thought through your Go-To-Market strategy and why your business is defensible against competitors, the pitch falls flat.