Some of the most inspiring startup journeys of the last few years happened in plain sight.

@levelsio built Nomad List and Remote OK live on Twitter sharing revenue numbers, failures, and pivots in real time. @marclou does the same, shipping products publicly and turning his audience into his distribution. Both have built massive followings and real businesses partly because of how openly they build.

Got three outreach messages this week that all mentioned something specific about my product, referenced a post I made, sounded like someone had actually looked at what I do. Replied to one with a simple question. Took them over a day to answer something a real person would've typed back in a minute.

That's the weird part now. A bad cold email used to be easy to spot, generic greeting, no personalization, obviously copy pasted. Now the personalization itself is automated, so the one thing that used to signal someone actually cared doesn't mean anything anymore.

I wonder how people are handling this from both sides. If you send outreach, are you leaning into AI personalization or avoiding it because you think people can smell it now. And if you're on the receiving end, has anything actually worked to tell real interest apart from a well disguised template before you waste time replying.

From listening to different people and their journeys, I ve realised that before they built their first profitable product, many of them failed multiple times.

Similar stories were shared by @marclou , @levelsio or @iuliia_sh to name a few.

Uncomfortable pattern I keep seeing: the products with the worst UX debt are usually the ones that found product-market fit fastest. They ignored "best practices," shipped ugly-but-functional features, and got users anyway.

Then they scale and everything breaks. That's when they hire me.

I assume I'm not the only one dealing with this problem, so I'll seek advice from those more experienced and perhaps those who have a proven track record.

Whenever a user reaches the payment gateway, they often suddenly leave, either by uninstalling the app or closing the page.

Hey PH community!

We re preparing for our upcoming launch on Product Hunt and planning to include a short video introducing our product. We re debating between two approaches and would love your input:

In most parts of the world, Easter is being celebrated right now, honestly, not really.

Today, I was invited to a weekly meeting despite the holiday.
I had forgotten one fact: Orthodox countries celebrate Easter a week later.
(and countries in the Far East simply don t have this holiday at all.)

This is actually a broader topic, because every country celebrates holidays differently, and with many teams being international, some kind of synchronisation is necessary the question is: how?

before my last launch i read all the standard advice. post consistently, be everywhere, announce loudly, batch your content. i did a bunch of it and it mostly did nothing.

what actually moved the needle was embarrassingly small. a handful of real conversations. one question i asked in a forum out of curiosity brought more of the right people than every announcement post combined. i wasnt even promoting, i was asking about a problem, and the people who had that problem showed up on their own.

which leaves me with a weird conclusion i dont fully trust yet: the loud, scalable stuff performed worst and the slow, unscalable stuff performed best. maybe thats just my niche, or my sample size of one.

so im curious about your data points. whats a distribution move that worked way better than it had any right to? and whats the standard advice that did nothing for you?

I saw an article on TechCrunch discussing Cluely (created by Chungin Roy Lee and Neel Shanmugam).

TL;DR: The AI tool, originally developed to cheat on software engineering interviews, now helps users cheat on exams, sales calls, and job interviews through a hidden in-browser window. And now has raised $5+ million.