We re officially in nominees season for the Orbit Awards: AI Workflow Automation.

Building @Tonkotsu has taught us many lessons in product design, with both the underlying technology and user behavior shifting rapidly.

One of the hardest but most critical lessons we ve learned is about calibrating the zoom level how close or far the user feels from the work. You can see examples of this play out across the industry:

• Codex gets flak for going heads-down for too long compared to Claude. Users feel too zoomed out from the work.

• By contrast, Cursor and IDEs are starting to feel too zoomed in. When the majority of code is written by agents, an editor-first UI is a misfit.

Most products obsess over user acquisition.

More traffic. Better conversion rates.

Turns out, growth often comes from something much simpler.

Moments. Retention. Care.

With the advent of clawdbots, it's as if we've all lost our inhibitions and "put our lives completely in their hands."

I'm all for delegating work, but not giving them too much personal/sensitive stuff to handle.

New Votap promo video just dropped! (turn sound on)
Instagram video ads keep working best for us, so we re doubling down there.
This one s new:
Built the mockups with Promo Gen (Canva still can t do proper mockup videos )
Much easier for showing the app in motion
Would honestly recommend it if you re doing app ads
Also, we re 8 users away from 500, which still feels a bit unreal.
Curious what you think rate the video in the comments
https://www.instagram.com/reel/D...

More tomorrow.

We've objectively tested Safari, Chrome, Firefox, and Edge to determine which offers the best:

Speed,

Standards Compliance,

As usual, Y Combinator came up with segments that are worth investing:

1. Cursor for Product Managers
2. AI-Native Hedge Funds
3. AI-Native Agencies
4. Stablecoin Financial Services
5. AI for Government
6. Modern Metal Mills
7. AI Guidance for Physical Work 8. Large Spatial Models 9. Infra for Government Fraud Hunters 10. Make LLMs Easy to Train

It took longer than it should have, mostly because it kept getting deprioritized in quarterly planning. And the annoying part is: the longer you wait on dark mode, the bigger it gets. More components to adjust, more edge cases, more workflows to test.

So we stopped debating it. No justification, no comparisons. We just shipped it.

Since I haven't been able to meet my work goals very well in the last few quarters, I now plan to approach them more systematically and not push myself too hard on work goals, as that ultimately led to problems that made my plan less sustainable.

So here is my structure and list:

New AI models pop up every week. Some developer tools like @Cursor, @Zed, and @Kilo Code let you choose between different models, while more opinionated products like @Amp and @Tonkotsu default to 1 model.

Curious what the community recommends for coding tasks? Any preferences?

First of all, I want to thank you for voting for us in yesterday's launch - you still can, the week is not over. HERE

Second thing, I summarised some things that I realised, reflected on, and maybe should have known sooner:

Hi everyone!

I planned to release ArkTabs update few weeks ago with built in feature to automatic tab grouping. But I decided to build that as new extension. And I've added a new shortcut in ArkTabs - Cycle Last Tabs: By pressing Alt + L, you can jump between current and last tab. and by press Alt + J and Alt + K, you can switch between last 5 mostly recently used tabs.

Hey everyone,

I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market.
That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.

In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.

For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools:

Our team is planning to launch a new version of our product on Product Hunt next week, after a period of optimization and improvements. As we get closer to launch day, I realize there s a lot to prepare, and I m curious about how other teams usually approach this process.

So far, here s what we ve been focusing on:

• Most importantly, making sure the product works well and delivers real value

• Continuous testing to ensure performance and stability

• Designing clean and clear product screenshots

• Preparing a summary of what s been updated, fixed, or optimized

• Writing launch content (tagline, description, first comment, etc.)

• Maintaining good health and a stable mindset for the launch

• Expanding our network and connecting with other makers

This is something I ll find out in just a short while, one week from now (Jan 28), as I m about to re-launch a digital detox app. If you want, follow, maybe you will be on watch of my steps and activities

However, that s not the main point of this post.

Hey everyone!

I wanted to take a moment to thank each and every one of you for the incredible support during our launch week. Seeing VolumeHub climb the rankings and reading all your thoughtful comments has been absolutely amazing. The fact that 200+ people upvoted and believed in this project means the world to me!

If you use AI dev tools daily, you ve probably felt this:

You start a new session and immediately have to re-explain:

• what the project is

• what you already tried

• why certain decisions exist

• what not to repeat

Not because the AI is bad.
Because the workflow forgets.

What was the reason for any YC rejection you faced in the past? And what would you suggest future founders do differently with their profile/ idea/ application to minimize downside?

Hey!

Wanted to share something I've been working on. Besides the MCP server stuff, we now have a CLI and a Claude Code plugin.

I used to think the hardest part of building a product was building the product.

Turns out, creating superfans is harder.

The real challenge is getting people to love your product:

We re usually very good at creating to-do lists for work.
But what about everything outside of work?

I ve started turning my personal habits into a checklist to build discipline and make these habits non-negotiable over time.

Here s mine:

After four long years of grinding, building, fundraising, and hiring, we decided to pivot. I wanted to write down my thought process and timeline because I wish I d seen more honest pivot stories when we were stuck. Not just we pivoted and everything was instantly great but the real version where we kept trying to make the original idea work for way too long because we already put so much into it.

I went through YC S20 (the first COVID batch) as a solo founder working on @Basedash. After YC, I did what you re supposed to do. I talked to users. I built product. I did founder-led sales. I hired a great team. It felt like progress because I was constantly busy and the product kept getting better.

1. A 3-year search for a simple tool to track both personal and business finances in one place. Nothing fits.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. A freelancer often loses in proposal competitions due to the inability to quickly create personalized and visual website concepts for each job order.

5. 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.

Many people have told me that being part of Gen Z comes with advantages we have time, energy, and plenty of opportunities to shape our careers in the AI era. And I do feel lucky to have grown up with technology, to have had early exposure and opportunities to learn and explore it.

But the AI era feels different. The shift is not only new, it s happening at lightning speed. Before I ve even fully adapted to working with AI, we re already seeing waves of layoffs where human roles are being replaced or reshaped by AI systems. And honestly, that creates uncertainty and anxiety not just for me, but for many people around us.

Hey PH community, I counted yesterday. 23 different apps before noon. Slack, Notion, ChatGPT, Figma, Google Sheets, email, Trello... and about 15 Chrome tabs I never closed from yesterday. By lunch I was exhausted and my actual work was still sitting there unfinished. The thing is, we all do this. We've normalized digital whack-a-mole. We have AI that can generate images and write code in seconds. But somehow we're still the ones doing all the clicking and switching. The AI just sits in a chat window waiting for us to feed it context. That felt backwards. So we built HappyCapy basically a computer where the AI can actually DO stuff, not just tell you what to do. Generate images, edit docs, crunch numbers, build sites. Whatever. You just describe what you need and it handles the tool-hopping. We're not replacing your main computer. But for a lot of tasks, it's way faster to just delegate to an agent that gets it done. It's live now. Still rough in places. But if you're tired of being an unpaid assistant to your own AI assistant, it might click. Curious: how many apps are you juggling right now? What's driving you most crazy about it?