Ctruh Studio
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What's one product decision you wish you'd made earlier?

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Shipping and becoming #2 Product of the Day taught us a lot.

Looking back, there's always one decision you'd make sooner.

What's yours?

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Mine's a marketing decision, not a product one: I wish we'd committed earlier to answering the hard questions in public instead of smoothing them over.

For a long time our instinct was to present the polished version, everything works, no rough edges. What actually built trust, especially today, was the opposite: saying "that's a real limitation, here's how we handle it" out loud. The honest answers have converted better than any confident claim ever did.

I'd have made that shift a year sooner. Turns out "here's what we haven't solved yet" is more persuasive than "everything's perfect," and it's a much more comfortable way to work too.

What do you think?

 Hey, Sharun, Somesh, and everyone on the CTRUH team, many congratulations on reaching Product Hunt’s number two spot of the day. Fantastic! :)

I liked what Sharun said about openly acknowledging the missing pieces instead of trying to pretend the puzzle is already complete; that kind of honesty builds trust and makes the roadmap more credible.

For me, the biggest product decision teams should make early is whether they are building vertical or horizontal. Too often, makers try to do everything at once and end up delaying release in the name of perfection.

My view is that it’s smarter to ship vertical products first, learn fast, and then connect those pieces into a broader horizontal product over time.

 Thanks Rohan, and yeah, #2 feels good.

Your vertical-vs-horizontal point is one we've had to answer architecturally. The horizontal layer is the foundation: Verse Engine (our browser-native 3D engine) and VersaAI (image/text to 3D) are the infrastructure everything runs on. But we don't take that to market directly, we ship verticals on top of it.

Studio is the first. Behind it we're building vertical apps for real estate, automotive, and others, plus a Marketplace and Editor, each a self-contained product a specific buyer immediately gets. The engine makes them possible; the verticals make them sellable.

Which is your point exactly: ship the vertical, learn fast, let the shared infrastructure compound underneath. The "delaying in the name of perfection" trap is the real enemy, and shipping something people actually understand is how you dodge it. Good reminder to see it framed that way.

     I would probably invest more in awareness on social media and among peope in my community :)

 that's the honest answer for most of us, awareness is the unglamorous work that compounds. And "among people in my community" is the part I'd underline: community-led beats broadcast almost every time, because trust travels through people, not impressions. Nice to see you in here, Nika 🙏

 I will show up myself to strengthen community! :D

Building my email list from day one instead of treating it as a "later" thing. I spent early energy chasing follower counts across every platform, numbers that feel good and convert almost no one, while the one asset I'd actually own, an email list, sat at zero. Followers are rented. The algorithm decides who sees you, and it can change its mind overnight. Your email list is yours. If I'd started capturing emails the day I had something worth saying, I'd be a year ahead on the only audience I fully control. The reach felt like progress. The list would have been progress.

 This is the sharpest answer in the thread, Tiffany. "Followers are rented, your list is yours" is one of those lines that sounds obvious only after someone says it well.

The part I'd add from our own experience: it's not just ownership, it's intent. A follower scrolled past you and tapped once. Someone who gave you their email made a decision. Same person, completely different signal, and the list is filtered for the ones who actually chose you.

The trap, and I've fallen in it, is that reach gives you a dopamine hit today while a list pays off in twelve months, so the urgent quietly beats the important for years. You said it perfectly: the reach felt like progress. That gap between "felt like" and "was" is where a lot of early time disappears.

 Sharun, “the follower tapped once, the subscriber made a decision” is the sharper version of what I was reaching for, I’m stealing that. 🙂The intent filter is the whole game. And yes, I’ve lived that dopamine gap: reach gives you a number today, a list gives you a business in a year, and the number is so much louder in the moment. The discipline is trusting the quiet thing. Sounds like you learned it the same way I did, the hard way. What are you building?

 Ha, take it, that's what good lines are for 😄

What we're building: Ctruh, browser-native 3D and AR for commerce. The short version is we turn flat product pages into things people can actually explore, rotate, configure, try on, without code or a game engine. We launched Ctruh Studio here yesterday (landed at #2, which still feels surreal).

And funnily enough, the email-list lesson is one we're living in real time this week. The launch spike is loud and fun, but the quiet thing, the handful of genuine relationships built over months, is what actually showed up when it mattered. Same discipline you described: trust the quiet thing over the number that feels good today.

Glad our paths crossed here, Tiffany, this was a good one.

 #2 is not surreal, it’s earned, congratulations. And browser-native 3D with no game engine is a genuinely cool problem to be solving; the “try on without code” part is the kind of thing small businesses will need way sooner than they realize. Funny that we’re both living the email-list lesson the same week, from opposite ends: you at a launch spike, me pre-launch trying not to chase the shiny number. Glad our paths crossed too. I’ll be watching what Ctruh does, and rooting for you.

If I could redo one thing, I'd invest in distribution from day one. We focused heavily on building, assuming a great product would naturally find users. In reality, building and distribution need to happen in parallel. The earlier you build an audience, the easier every launch becomes.

 I completely relate to that. We often think distribution starts after launch, but in reality, it starts with the very first conversation about the product. Building trust and building the product have to happen together.

At what point did you realize that distribution deserved as much attention as building the product? Was there a specific moment or lesson that changed your perspective?

Charging earlier, and not for the revenue. Free users leave silently and you learn nothing from it. Paying users answer the email asking why they stopped, which is the only feedback that ever changed what we built. We spent a long stretch reading usage graphs and guessing at motives that one honest reply would have settled. The second one, related: killing a thing we had already announced. We kept it alive months past the point we knew, purely because walking it back publicly felt worse than quietly maintaining something nobody used. It was not worse. Nobody remembered we had announced it.

I think not losing track of what the customer wants is what let us get where we are today. We had to ensure that in the thick and thin of things, we do not lose track of that.

 I couldn't agree more. It's surprisingly easy to get caught up in our own roadmap and lose sight of why people started using the product in the first place. The best products are often built by listening more than assuming.

 Was there a particular piece of customer feedback that completely changed your roadmap?

For us, it was making sure the user journey stayed dead simple. From day one, the whole point of it was that someone with zero technical background could open the app and ship 3D/XR experiences without touching code. We were always clear on that, the real work was just making sure every step we added still felt as easy as the first one.

 That's something we kept reminding ourselves throughout the journey as well. Making powerful technology feel effortless is much harder than adding more capabilities. If someone can create something meaningful without feeling overwhelmed, you've already won half the battle.

 How do you decide when a new feature adds value versus when it starts adding complexity?

For us at Ctruh Studio, the biggest lesson was embracing community feedback earlier in the product journey. Every conversation, suggestion, and challenge from users helped shape the product in ways internal discussions never could. Product Hunt was a great reminder of the power of building in public.

 Beautifully said. Some of our biggest improvements came from conversations we never planned to have. Building in public can feel uncomfortable at times, but it's also one of the fastest ways to build something people genuinely want.

 Was there one piece of community feedback that surprised you the most but ended up making the product significantly better?