We've teamed up with @Y Combinator or to give builders one more chance.

Launch on Product Hunt this Friday, tag your post "YC application" @gustaf will personally review the top launches. One or more will walk away with a YC interview, even though the official deadline has passed.

Let me start from the creator s perspective:
I personally don t have a product (apart from hiring people for creative work or offering personal consultations).

But as a creator, I constantly share content, insights, and information, value that helps me build trust (for free). Based on that perceived expertise, people eventually decide to work with me (a paid service).

1. I've always been on the personal brand side. More and more founders are building it now (sometimes even before the product is ready while it's still in development, before seed fundraising). The CEO builds their position so the product sells more easily at the official launch.

2. But I have experience with people who built the product, scaled it, and only then did we discover who was behind it.

Honestly, with the first approach, I'd be concerned that people invest more in me as a person than in the product. People would idealise the founder and overlook the product's flaws (which could hurt development and constructive feedback).

+ I noticed the most common mistake that many people who started building a personal brand first, connected their product to their personal accounts (emails, social media, etc.) and started having a problem selling these things, because they cannot "give someone keys" to their personal profiles.

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.

AI is incredibly good, I d even say almost perfect.

And for many people, that uniformity of perfect templates is starting to feel annoying.

This week in the Product Hunt blog, we have a banger from Julia Yu. She's the co-founder of 2024 Golden Kitty winner Unicorns Club, which matches VCs with early-stage startups. She's also founded three VC-backed companies herself.

According to Julia, early-stage founders need to change their mental model about pre-seed funding ASAP. As she puts it:

Once upon a time (in fact, as recently as two years ago), early-stage startups needed three things to get into investor conversations: a strong narrative, a solid team, and a prototype. Now, in most software categories, that s no longer enough.

The advent of AI has shifted investors attention to actual metrics. Yes, even at the pre-seed level, investors don t care so much about promise as they do about realized potential. They want monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and growth rate.

I like working (a lot of working), but sometimes I struggle with my time.
Understand that I am not able to manage/fit everything that I wanted to do in my schedule.

So I had to "re-organise" some activities and was able to learn something or make myself productive.

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:

Today, this graphic caught my attention:

It featured individuals who managed to build significant profit while running their businesses solo, without employees. Until now, I ve seen these more as exceptions rather than the norm.

I am a Computer Science student doing research into how solopreneurs and small startups create new apps and what their stack looks like. Particularly, I'm interested in how you handle things like authentication, billing, and permissions/authorization in your apps.

Let me know what you're working on below and how you're going about it -- I'd love to connect for some quick calls to learn about your product and talk about your process in building it!