Tonight, we are hosting a small hackathon in Phoenix in partnership with @bolt.new! All the hackers get free credits to build whatever they can imagine during the hackathon. Thanks Bolt for the hookup! In this forum thread, all the hackers will submit their projects and vote on their favorite one (they can't vote on their own).
The top project will get hunted on @Product Hunt by me! If you want to follow along, come back to this thread in an hour or so and the submissions will start rolling in.
I can see that many people use especially: LinkedIn (group) posts, DMs Twitter posts, DMs, Streams Product Hunt in p/self-promotion Newsletter in sequences campaign YT for streaming Have you ever used other channels too? (E.g. Reddit, HN) or any other form that would make your upcoming launch stand out?
No-code has come a long way but I still don't feel it's an entire code replacement yet, especially when it comes to mobile apps. I want to be proved wrong though, what's the best no code builder for apps that you've used?
I've been noticing something lately. We went from using AI as a tool to letting AI become the default for almost everything: writing, deciding, planning, even reflecting.
Need to write an email? AI. Need to make a decision? Ask AI. Need to understand how you feel about something? Believe it or not, AI.
The problem isn't the technology. The problem is that we're quietly outsourcing the one thing that makes us valuable: our ability to think for ourselves.
We built a B2B productivity tool that helps freelancers track billable hours. Our core web app is priced at $35/month, and we have about 400 paying customers. Last year, we finally launched our iOS app to capture the "on-the-go" market.
We set the price in the App Store at $35/month to match our website. Then, we looked at the revenue reports. After Apple took their 30% cut, we were netting just $24.50 per user. We were actually losing money on every iOS user after accounting for hosting and support.
So, we made a decision: we raised the App Store price to $50/month to cover Apple's tax and maintain our margins. We thought our power users would understand; after all, we were providing immense value.
The backlash was immediate. Within two months, our iOS subscriber count dropped from 120 to 70. Our App Store rating tanked from 4.8 stars to 3.2 stars. The reviews were brutal: "Greedy developers. Why is it $15 more expensive just because it's on my phone?"
We spent six months in beta testing our B2B SaaS platform, and last Tuesday, we finally launched out of beta with a massive marketing push. We were thrilled. By Thursday morning, we had onboarded 50 paying customers on our $99/month plan.
On Thursday afternoon, I was doing a routine review of our database logs and my heart stopped. I noticed that a change we made to our API authentication right before launch had accidentally bypassed our multi-tenant architecture. Essentially, if a user knew exactly how to format an API request, they could pull data from other companies' dashboards.
I felt sick to my stomach. This was a catastrophic privacy breach.
We immediately took the entire platform offline to patch the hole. For 6 hours, our site displayed a "Scheduled Maintenance" page while I sat in a cold sweat fixing the logic. We patched it, brought it back online, and then I had to do the hardest thing I've ever done as a founder: write an email to those 50 customers confessing the mistake.
I've spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between testing a product and validating it.
When you're building software, there are so many things you can measure. Does the functionality work? Are the calculations correct? Can users complete the workflow? Are the security controls working as intended?
Those are important questions, and you can spend months getting them right.
But there's another question that technical testing can't fully answer:
I was scrolling through X today when one of my X friends shared screenshots of two employees who recently moved from Anthropic to OpenAI.
We had an era when people were leaving OpenAI for Anthropic in large numbers, Sam Altman was becoming the second most-hated Mark Zuckerberg, and Anthropic was attracting talent from OpenAI.
While browsing the new signups on my SaaS the other day, I spotted someone using the app in Polish. At that point the UI only supported Japanese and English.
That got me wondering how the big project management tools approach localization. Trello supports 21 languages, so I decided to support the exact same 21: Japanese and English, plus German, Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Czech, Turkish, Thai, Vietnamese, and Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
