To make our mid-tier plan appealing we included generous usage limits thinking people would upgrade once they felt the value.
Instead power users optimized their workflow just to stay right under the threshold. Once we switched to feature gated tiers instead of usage-based limits users upgraded much faster because they actually hit functional walls instead of artificial caps.
Do you find feature-gating or usage limits work better to drive tier upgrades?
I ve been thinking about this over the past few weeks, especially as larger tech corporations that weren t originally built around AI (Oracle, Meta, ClickUp, etc.) have started mass layoffs in favour of more efficient AI-driven solutions.
From that, it seems like AI companies must be doing extremely well and are actively trying to protect their positions. This also suggests that to strengthen their position (besides AI itself), they still need human capital to help them grow.
Google unveiled a chatbot called Bard compete with ChatGPT. Looks quite similar in terms of the conversational functionality. https://blog.google/technology/a... Thoughts?
I've used ChatGPT and other AI tools while building my startup, and they've made it possible to take on work that would normally require a much larger team. Research, technical problem-solving, planning, and exploring new ideas can happen much faster. But one thing I've learned is that completing more work doesn't necessarily mean the business is moving forward at the same speed. You can build faster, solve technical problems faster, and make improvements faster, while the harder questions about customers, adoption, and business growth still take time to answer. It's changed how I think about productivity as a founder. I'm learning to distinguish between how much work gets completed and whether that work is actually moving the business forward.
For founders building with AI, what's one lesson you've learned about the difference between moving faster and making real business progress?
In a discussion forum with @monatruong_murror , we talked about how AI can help us learn things that aren t naturally familiar to us, like programming.
The biggest challenge was/is: Getting AI to guide you toward a solution, instead of just giving you the answer.
I keep seeing the same pattern across early-stage teams:
the MVP works until it really doesn t.
For many founders, the hardest part isn t getting something online it s everything that comes after: infra that cracks under real users code that no dev wants to touch rewriting the whole stack AI-built projects no one can maintain the moment you realize your prototype isn t a product
I'm a solo developer. In August I launched a small side project here, and it was never featured, so it couldn't rank at all. It finished with 0 upvotes and 1 comment. My earlier launch, a job-search tool, got only a few upvotes back in July.
Looking back, I think I made two mistakes. I launched without checking whether it would be featured, and I didn't spend any time in the community beforehand. Since then I've been active here daily for about three months.
For makers whose launches were featured: what did you change in your listing (tagline, gallery, first comment, topics) that you think made the difference? I'm especially curious whether anything specific helps a niche or experimental product get featured.
