I recently saw a marketer with 10k+ followers launch and finish 6th with 348 upvotes. They followed a proper pre-launch and post-launch plan, did everything right, and still the outcome felt unpredictable.

Now I m launching @Curatora next week.

I m not a marketer. I have a little over 1k followers. Of course, asking for support helps. But I also keep hearing that a large part of the Product Hunt community shows up mainly for their own launch, then goes quiet until the next one.

That makes me wonder: how much of success here is strategy, and how much is timing and network effect?

Product Hunt is best known for its homepage, a daily leaderboard of the most creative and innovative products on the internet. Makers go all out to win launch day, because that visibility matters. Product Hunt also plays a significant role in how products appear in Google search results.

What surprised us was that AI assistants like ChatGPT were rarely citing Product Hunt in product recommendations.

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.

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

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?

We added two Product Hunt badges to starnus.com.
#1 Product of the Day and #4 Product of the Week.

Feels good having them there. Thanks again to everyone who supported the launch.

This post is actually inspired by a tweet from @sandradjajic + an update here on PH from @chrismessina.

A few days ago I saw this:

Last month, Tailwind CSS fired 75% of their engineering team.

Revenue dropped 80%. Doc traffic down 40%.

Meanwhile, Tailwind is more popular than ever.

Source.

Once upon a time, developing for Apple was an exciting, rewarding challenge. But lately, that relationship has soured.

Apple has transformed into a trillion-dollar giant that sees developers not as partners, but as a resource to control, extract from, and when convenient ignore.

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:

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.

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:

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

Why We Built It

Most automation workflows can call a model, but still need substantial glue code for memory, personalization, and structured data. The Mnexium connector makes those capabilities native in n8n.

npm install n8n-nodes-mnexium

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.

We re about to make Votap arguments louder.

Security used to be a final checkpoint.

In the AI era, it has to be continuous.

Before I started Ting, I did the classic founder things...

Read every Paul Graham essay.
Listened to Masters of Scale.
Obsessed over founder stories.

After launch, one request came up repeatedly: people wanted to listen instead of reading.

The release 1.3.1 adds audio support to Trailward!

you read a word. you highlight it. maybe you even google its meaning.

two days later? gone.

Today, I came across an article on TechCrunch: The great computer science exodus (and where students are going instead).

It shows that UC campuses saw a drop in computer science enrollment for the first time since the dot-com crash (6% in 2025, 3% in 2024), but students are shifting to AI-focused programs.

We just released a production ready RAG project-template for Bult.ai.

If you want to deploy a serious Retrieval Augmented Generation system, not a toy demo, this is for you.