What's the PROBLEM your product solves?
In the month that I've been here, I've been noticing a pattern in a lot of launches - strong demos, polished UI, clear outputs of "what it does."
But when I ask myself "What problem does this solve?" I sometimes have to dig for the answer. (I come by that thinking honestly - I've spent 33 years building and fixing businesses, so this is the lens I can't turn off.)
The products where the problem is obvious are the ones people actually buy - you see it, you go "oh, that's exactly my issue," and you're sold on it.
It also makes pitching easier. If you're clear on the problem, explaining your product to anyone - buyers, other makers, whoever - gets a lot simpler.
And it's a small tweak with a big payoff - naming the problem clearly in your launch messaging can be the difference between people scrolling past and people stopping to actually look.
Curious what others think: when you're checking out a launch here, do you look for the problem first, or does the demo/output usually sell you on its own?
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For us it's this: every AI image tool makes gorgeous images that look nothing like your brand. Wrong colors, generic fonts, that "made by AI" tell. So people fix outputs by hand or fight prompts for an hour.
@brandgen_ai learns the brand first (colors, type, tone), then keeps every generation on that DNA. Took us a full rebuild to get there - v2 launches Tuesday.
Curious how you all define "the problem" when you're this deep into building - does it ever drift from what you started with?
@brandgen_ai @yashs369 Feels like a useful shift from “generate a nice image” to “keep the brand system consistent across many outputs.”
Are you seeing BrandGen used mostly for occasional one-off visuals, or more by marketing teams/agencies that need repeated campaign assets under the same Brand DNA?
@daria_brown Honestly it's shifted a bit as we've watched people use it.
WE JUST LAUNCHED OUR SAAS PLATFORM YESTERDAY
Early on, mostly one-off stuff, someone needed a quick on-brand post or banner. But lately it's leaning more toward marketing teams and agencies running repeat campaigns off the same brand DNA. That's actually why we built projects into v2, so the brand stays loaded and you're not starting from scratch each time.
If you want to poke around, getbrandgen.com. Curious which case you'd actually use it for 🙂
@yashs369 I’d be happy to stay in touch and continue the conversation. What’s the best way for you? email, LinkedIn, or another channel?
@daria_brown Sure. here is my X account
@leighton_lauton Ha, a GREAT problem to solve! I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that problem. Do you include that pain problem in your messaging?
@leighton_lauton Oh yeah - THAT'S going to make people sit up and take notice!! Having testimonials that showcase the problem your product solves is GOLD!! Only thing better is a video testimonial ;)
@leighton_lauton Haha, yes, you do - you weren't really that busy, were you?! lol
@leighton_lauton HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!
Outcome
@leighton_lauton I quite like that!
This is a crucial lens, Anna. Too many tools out there solve the 'pretty demo' problem, but completely miss the 'real workflow' problem.
As we've been building our AI rendering engine for architects and spatial designers, our entire focus shifted to a very specific problem: prompt fatigue and lack of physical reality.
Standard AI image generators are great at making 'cool pictures,' but they don't understand real-world constraints like bioclimatic design, solar orientation, or how actual materials react to specific geographic climates. Architects were spending hours playing text-riddle games with prompts just to get a realistic shadow.
By focusing entirely on solving that exact friction—replacing text prompts with physical and climate constraints—we realized that users don't want more AI features; they just want their time back.
@piview Estephany, that “replacing prompts with physical and climate constraints” part is interesting.
How does that work in practice for the architect? Are they setting structured inputs like location, climate, materials, orientation and etc, or is Piview interpreting those constraints from a more natural project brief?
@piview "Night and day compared to generic generators" is the right direction, but it's still the comparison version. What's the one-line version of what the architect actually gets to stop doing, or stop dreading?
@sharun_kanan landed on "buy it knowing instead of buy it hoping" for his shoppers - what's a good sentence for your architects?
I look for the problem first.
If I can’t tell what gets easier, cheaper, or less messy in the first few seconds, I usually move on no matter how polished the demo is. A good launch doesn’t just show what the product does. It makes me feel the friction it removes.
That’s something we’ve had to keep reminding ourselves while building DukieX. The tempting version is to talk about content, memberships, community, products, livestreams, all the moving parts. But the clearer version is usually just: creators get tired of running their business across too many separate tools, and that fragmentation starts costing them time and money.
Once the problem is obvious, the product makes a lot more sense.
@adrian_witaszak Yes, you've clearly put the problem-solve front and centre! Leaning into that friction, making the Prospect FEEL the pain, is what gets them stopping and taking notice. The flip side to that is SHOW what the relief looks like - how will their life/business/whatever be better after they use your product/service.
@anna_ludwinowski Totally agree, and that's the harder half to get right. Naming the pain is easy. Painting the relief without it sliding back into a feature list is the tricky part.
For DukieX the "after" we keep coming back to is boring in a good way: a creator opens one place in the morning and sees who booked, who paid, who's in their community, and what they sold, without stitching five dashboards together or digging through DMs for context. The relief isn't a feature, it's the mental load that quietly disappears. They get to go back to making the thing people actually showed up for.
Honestly that's become our internal test too. If a relief story sounds like a feature, we haven't found the real one yet.
@adrian_witaszak Ha, boring but convenient! Having all that important information in ONE convenient place saves time and bandwidth, which in turn saves $$$.
Have you launched DukieX yet?
@anna_ludwinowski Exactly. And the strange part is that after two years of building, you become the person least able to feel that pain. You get so deep in the features that the friction you started from goes invisible. Our first DukieX customers landing this week has been the reset. What lands with them isn't the feature list, it's the simple fact that running a creator business across five different tools gets exhausting and expensive. That's the thing worth leading with.
A sharp problem statement also tells the wrong customer to keep scrolling. That's not a failure, it's the point. The best launch messaging I've seen usually sacrifices broad appeal for instant recognition from the people who actually have the problem. More clicks is easy. Getting the right users is harder.
@jared_salois Great point and one that I see many Founders struggling with. They want to cast a wide net, hoping to catch more Prospects. But it goes back to the saying: when you talk to everyone, you end up talking with no one. Wrong customers scrolling past is what you want - you're not wasting each other's time, which leaves you to help those who really need it!
The problem Fluxerv solves: you build something with AI, get code back, then have to copy it somewhere, run it, and keep track of which version matched which note. The output and the thinking behind it live in different places.
Fluxerv puts them on the same page. The note and the working tool are one document.
To your question: I always look for the problem first. A demo without a problem is just a feature. When the problem lands, the demo becomes evidence.
@mpanpalli That last is spot on. And you sharing this point made me realize a problem I didn't know I had yet so thanks for that!
@anna_ludwinowski Glad it resonated! Sometimes articulating someone else's problem helps you see your own more clearly. That's the best kind of conversation.
@mpanpalli Agreed!
I’ve noticed the same pattern.
The products that scale fastest usually don’t start with “what it does” they start with a problem people already feel daily.
In our case, the strongest response we see isn’t from explaining features, it’s from naming the gap: leads are not the problem, speed-to-conversation is.
Once that clicks, the product almost becomes secondary.
Curious, do you think most teams struggle more with unclear problems, or just too many competing problems in their messaging?
@moeez1 That's a keen observation! I'd say it's both - some Founders build without truly knowing what the problem is they're trying to solve for. OR, they're trying to be everything to everyone, solving all the problems. Neither one is sustainable, practical, or profitable.
Solve the ONE problem first. If your audience has other problems you can solve for, that becomes another conversation, product, marketing campaign, company, whatever. If we muddle the message, our Prospects get confused, they don't buy, and no one wins.
@anna_ludwinowski Exactly. Dialbotix does a lot under the hood. AI calls, qualification, booking, CRM updates, but none of that matters if we don't first communicate the core problem: sales teams are spending too much time trying to reach leads instead of talking to qualified prospects. The features only make sense after that.
@moeez1 Ok, that's good but dig a little deeper - what's the deeper pain for those sales teams spending too much time trying to reach leads instead of talking to qualified prospects? What aren't they doing as a result? Why does that matter? What does using your product give them instead?
@anna_ludwinowski The deeper pain is lost revenue. Every hour reps spend chasing unanswered calls is an hour they're not talking to qualified buyers, and many leads go cold before anyone reaches them.
Dialbotix changes that by contacting leads immediately, qualifying them, and booking meetings automatically, so reps spend their time selling instead of chasing.
Honest tension as a maker: when I scroll PH, the demo grabs me first. But the launches I remember a week later are the ones where I actually felt the problem.
The hardest problems to pitch are the invisible ones — people don't notice them until you name them. A demo alone never lands there, because nothing looks broken. You have to make someone feel the gap first.
So for me it's not problem-first OR demo-first. The best launches make you feel the problem through the demo. (Funny enough, the product I'm launching here Monday is built on exactly that.)
@mincheol_kim We remember things that make us FEEL - happiness, sadness, frustration, anger, loneliness, love - because they hit us deep inside. The feel comes from the problem, not the demo, so I'm going to push back on your assessment. The demo is the vehicle that (hopefully) captures the feeling.
I took a look at your product, Bubbling, and you articulated the problem well- "I started it from a worry I kept having: the more I used AI, the less I heard myself."
The bigger question is: do other people have this same problem? And the follow-up question: is that FEELING & PROBLEM clearly stated in my launch messaging?
@anna_ludwinowski Yeah, I agree - the demo can spark feeling because of the problem the user is actually experiencing.
Thanks for taking a look at my product. I'm a developer, and a lot of my colleagues have said things like "I feel like I'm getting dumber because AI just does everything for me." There's even a term for it now - "outsourcing your thinking" - because people feel like their ability to sit with a hard problem alone has genuinely declined.
As for the follow-up question, I'll say no. Honestly, I'm not sure how to translate the problem people are experiencing into the right copy and demo. Making a strong first impression is really hard. I don't think my current copy makes a stranger go "oh wait, that's exactly the problem I have."
I'm curious - how do you approach making someone who's never seen your product before feel like it's "their story" right away?
@mincheol_kim Well, I don't think you make someone go "that's my story" with just a description at all - you do it with a moment. Not "AI does too much for you," but the specific instant it happens.
Your colleague's line- "I feel like I'm getting dumber because AI just does everything for me", is closer to that moment than anything abstract about "outsourcing your thinking." That phrase is a term for it. Your friend's sentence is the feeling of it.
So the test isn't "does this describe the problem accurately," it's "would a stranger read this and go, oh, that happened to me last Tuesday." Abstractions describe, moments implicate.
What's the most recent specific moment [not the general worry, the actual scene] where you caught yourself not hearing your own thinking anymore?
@anna_ludwinowski @mincheol_kim the outsourcing-your-thinking thing is basically why we went voice-first — the moment that pulls someone back in isn't a stat, it's hearing their own voice say something they didn't expect. does Bubbling play back a person's actual words, or reflect on them some other way?
Completely agree. I actually built Get Styli because of a very common problem:
People buy clothes online without knowing how they'll actually look on their body. Product photos use professional models, sizing varies between brands, and returns are expensive and frustrating.
Get Styli solves that by letting shoppers virtually try on outfits using AI before they buy, helping them make more confident purchase decisions.
A polished demo may grab attention, but it's the problem being solved that convinces people to stay. If users instantly think, "That's exactly what I struggle with," you've already won half the battle.
@gauravchadhry Ok, now THIS solves a very real problem! It's a universal problem in the clothing industry. And if it reduces the cost of returns, that's a huge bonus.
I took a quick peek and it's genuinely impressive - you address the concerns about various body shapes and complexions. The pricing is super reasonable (maybe a little too reasonable), which makes it a no-brainer to try.
One question, though - have you considered marketing this directly to the clothing brands? Having a version on their sites so their customers can use it for their clothes?
@anna_ludwinowski Thank you so much, Anna! That really means a lot coming from someone with your perspective. 😊
And yes—that's actually a direction we're actively exploring. Our long-term vision is to make Get Styli available as an API/SDK that fashion brands and e-commerce platforms can integrate directly into their websites and apps, allowing customers to virtually try on products without leaving the shopping experience.
We started with a consumer app because it helps us validate the experience, gather real-world feedback, and improve the AI quickly. Once we've reached the level of quality and scale we want, the B2B platform becomes a natural next step.
If we can help brands increase buyer confidence while reducing costly returns, it's a win for both businesses and shoppers. Thanks for bringing it up—it reinforces that we're thinking in the right direction! 🚀
@gauravchadhry Validating the UX first is a smart move - work out any issues before pitching it to the companies. Just remember that companies speak in ROI - there has to be something of $$$ value for them to get excited. Focusing on the monetary benefits (savings on returns, customer comfort, which means more loyalty and spending) will help them see the OUTCOME for them :)
I built my SaaS to solve two practical problems that cause friction for non-technical teams.
Security. A friend's site was defaced. Securing admin panels is crucial, but forcing non-tech staff to configure complex VPNs or ZTNA creates too much friction.
Migrations. Asking a non-technical user to edit their local hosts file just to test a staging server is confusing and impractical.
@zapimir Those both sound like big problems for those experiencing them - who defaces someone's site?! That's crazy and I honestly didn't even know that was a thing! I'd imagine anything around security is a concern for most of us and we have little understanding of how to protect ourselves. Sounds like a valuable product, Volodymyr.