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

We re getting ready for our second Product Hunt launch on Jan 31, and a post by @busmark_w_nika got me thinking.

What to do (that we didn't do the first time):

• Plan your launch. What does it mean?

  • Write down everything you need to do before you launch.

  • Cleaning your copy

  • Your product images

  • Your product video (demo under 60 seconds if you can)

  • For our first launch, we didn't do anything. Even though we got 2nd Product of the Day, I would not recommend others to leave it to their luck. Plan and maximize your chances of success.

• Keep it simple, stupid.

  • Don't overcomplicate your page with lots of marketing language.

  • Simplicity, clean product screenshots, and clear language.

  • I think this is the single most important thing to take into account when launching, and why we probably did so well on our first launch.

    • Ask yourself: Does the tagline make sense? Will others understand what the product does and what it is in under 10 seconds?

    • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Grammarly for prompting. (Grammarly = it is an extension.) Improve prompts in one click. (super clear what it does).

    • You can straight away visualise how you might use the product and what it will do for you.

• Focus on your strengths.

  • Don't give everything you got in one go.

  • Earn the right for people to read and scroll down. Read and scroll down.

  • Save some stuff for your pinned post.

  • People have a short attention span.

  • Hook people on your most important feature, showcase it front and centre, don't give me everything together cos I'll forget, and also I'll get lost.

  • For us at @Pretty Prompt: Improve your prompts in one click. Works inside ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, Lovable, and more.

  • Even though you have about 10 other features on Pretty Prompt, we don't talk about them right in the beginning; we just feature that one "killer feature" and let users dive deeper afterwards.

• Product assets = show, don't tell.

  • Your images and video should be about your product.

  • Don't make it marketing-heavy. Make it product-heavy.

  • Show me what the product does, don't tell me about it.

  • For us: 60-second demo video actually using the tool. Screenshots of the top features (Improve - Refine - Save - History). Not fancy Figma designs, I mean screenshots of the actual product.

  • If you get big like Notion, Cursor, Claude, etc. you may also be able to add a more human video of you talking about the product, or new functionality, your story, etc. But for the majority, just show your product, and let the product win.

• Learn from others.

  • Though no two products or launches are the same, you can learn from others and pick the best things that fit your own product.

  • Checkout this post by @fmerian on "The Cursor Way to Launch". Great tips.

• Warm up the Audience.

  • Don't just rely on your followers.

  • Use as many channels as possible to maximise the reach and get people excited about your launch, even before you launch.

  • If you do this step well, the launch is just 50% of the job, and you're already a step ahead of most.

  • For us: I did a community post, Substack one, LinkedIn one, Slack one. We'll be recording a founder video too. I want it to be as human as possible; people buy into people.

New AI models pop up every week. Some dev tools like @Cursor and @Zed let you choose between different models, some others like @Amp and @Tonkotsu , more opinionated?, default to 1 model.

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

Insane progress in just a year.

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.

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:

Many people were looking for an answer in one category, namely, Forums Streaks.

This metric by itself only tells you that people log in to the app.

Today marks my 1 0 0 0 day streak in on product hunt - wow does time fly

The last 2.7 years have been insane From discovering awesome products (built by SF legends) to actually launching 2 products myself and winning 2x product of the month awards a golden kitty with @Clustr and now being nominated for an orbit award with @Trace feels unreal. Not only did my team go through the ups and downs, but we persevered and survived two top tier accelerators with @500 Startups & @Y Combinator - gotta catch them all

Yesterday, I had an unpleasant experience. For a few minutes, I lost my LinkedIn community of several thousand people (TL;DR: I was falsely accused of using suspicious software).

Fortunately, I got my account back but it was a strong reminder that we don t own platforms, nor our profiles on them.

This community helped turn a scrappy weekend project into something used by 25,000+ people from all around the world. So it felt right to share this here first:

On Jan 31, we are launching Pretty Prompt 1.0 right here on Product Hunt.

It s almost here for me. In three days, I ll be relaunching a major update for the app I have been collaborating with, and I ve set clear boundaries for myself about what I will and won t do before the launch. I guess these are some general, unwritten rules I try to follow

Definitely DON T:

• Accept offers from charlatans promising votes or engagement for money

• Send unsolicited messages begging for votes or support

• Spam other people s posts with launch announcements

I came to exactly the same conclusion that real startup ideas often come from simple and boring problems. From my own experience: I spent three years on a startup that was supposed to revolutionize online education, but in the end it had 0 users. Now I ve just started solving a simple problem for home appliance repair technicians and immediately got my first paying users on a very rough MVP.

A tagline is the first piece of content a user will see about your product on the leaderboard. It's so important that you get it right. You should be able to get a really solid idea of what your product is just by reading a handful of words.

In the spirit of forever optimising our taglines, I wanted to do a little experiment:

I am so excited about this one!

You can now use Pretty Prompt right inside @Lovable (in beta)

We ve been working super hard to take Pretty Prompt beyond the generic ChatGPT world, and stepping into Vibe Coding.

I know this topic has been here a million times (and people will still ask me a few more times after that).

I personally see advantages in both cases, but maybe one more advantage when it comes to launching during the week.

Very briefly:

I spend most of my time on these two things:
1) observing products on the main page and upvoting/commenting on them

2) talking with people within comments under my forums

The second one is the one where I notice some things that I lack and see possible improvements, namely:

I m curious how people here think about a calmer, signal-first feed in practice.

If you ve tried Trace already:
What felt immediately useful?
What felt missing or confusing?
What would make it something you d actually open every day?

If you haven t tried it:
What would you need to see before giving a feed like this a real shot?
What would make you bounce?

I m early and still shaping this, so honest feedback (good or bad) is genuinely helpful.

1. Need an AI Jarvis that turns chaotic voice/text updates into automatically structured tasks, projects, and dashboards for managing all of life and work.

2. Hours of manual searching for parts for Chinese cars. Need an AI agent that understands queries from photos or text and finds the part.

3. Online clothes shopping is a lottery. There's no accessible technology to see how an item will fit your body, especially in small stores. It's a pain for the buyer and a loss for the seller.

4. A musician from Lebanon cannot sell his music: streaming pays pennies, and Bandcamp doesn't accept payments in his country. Needs a fair radio-platform with direct sales.

5. VPN users have nowhere to find out if a service will work reliably on their network there is no up-to-date rating based on real-time quality monitoring.

6. It's impossible to order truly fresh farm vegetables and bread through delivery aggregators product quality is low, and you have to go to the market yourself.

Meow world, welcome back to The Breakpoint, a weekly thread on all things dev tools on Product Hunt.

The latest

Recent dev-first products launched on the site

Hey everyone - we re tremendously grateful for our fantastic launch yesterday, ending at #1 for the day. Thank you all for your support!

I started Tonkotsu because I saw a huge opportunity for a complete rethink of AI coding not just incremental adjustments to established tools and workflows. Having managed teams of hundreds of engineers at Meta, Microsoft, and Atlassian, it s been fascinating to me to find that the role of the developer has shifted overnight: you're now the manager of a team of agents. We're building Tonkotsu to help you succeed in that new role.

Some of you set resolutions for this year, and soon you ll be looking back to see how well you did.

Before that moment comes, what do you want to finish or achieve in this final month?

Today, I read in the news that OpenAI is considering "expanding its data footprint" and possibly buying Pinterest, as there is a lot of data on it just for the sake of users finding inspiration (which can be key for purchase decision making and understanding personas Pinterest has 600M+ users).

I also take into account how Pinterest started to resent the proliferation of AI content there users do not like it so much (as far as I know, OpenAI also wants to have its own social network, and Sora curation is a bit reminiscent of that)

We just wrapped the Orbit Awards for AI Dictation and now we re moving to the next category: AI Automation.

This one is for the tools that actually do work for you clearing chores, running workflows in the background, or quietly taking over a chunk of your week without turning into another dashboard you have to babysit.

Today, we declare the death to Search.

For too long, we've let Search dictate the way we work.

Trace tends to show up where workflows get complex. The parts of work that involve reasoning, coordination, and follow ups instead of simple triggers.

If you are using Trace, we want to hear how. What kind of workflow is it handling for you? What problem finally felt manageable once Trace was in the mix?