Hey everyone! I'm curious what do you do for your mental health? How do you find your personal balance? Remote working actually brought more hours of real work to people's life. Huge amount of people's burns out. So what do you do to cope with any type of stress?
So I was on walk the other day and was thinking about how we've seen lots of great technologies recently but that the best use cases hadn't been created yet. One idea that I had is a personal home AI device that is upgradeable, secure and mindful of your privacy. Connect your home and mobile devices to it and it can monitor all your files, documents and media without it being sent to third parties who might resell your data or use it for marketing. It could even do things we haven't trained it on like discover patterns in our walking habits, suggest we upscale or colorize old photos of family members using neural networks.
Last year, we spent half a year courting a mid-market company. We did endless demos, built a custom integration for their legacy system, and jumped through every hoop. Finally, we closed a $2,000/month contract. The Head of Operations, who loved our product, was our internal champion and promised it would be a massive success.
Three months into the contract, our champion resigned.
Two weeks later, we got an email from the new VP of Operations. He wanted to "review the software stack." We jumped on a call, and he told us he was canceling the contract. His reasoning? "I didn't buy this tool. I don't see the ROI. And frankly, I want to consolidate vendors and use the tool my old company used."
I was devastated. We had built custom features for them, spent weeks onboarding their team, and the product was actually working perfectly for the users. But because the person who signed the check was gone, we were treated like an unwanted stepchild.
We spent months cleaning up an interface that worked fine but looked a bit dated, only to watch users get completely disoriented by the new layout.
Even though the new design scored much higher on aesthetics and modern UI tests, our churn spiked because people couldn't find their regular daily workflows anymore. Muscle memory matters way more than pretty padding.
How do you roll out a massive UI overhaul without frustrating your oldest power users?
Whether you're a maker, a founder, or an employee, I want to hear how your product is unique compared to the rest of the market. Why did you differentiate your product the way that you did?
We re in the thick of redesigning onboarding for a new consumer app trying to make that first minute actually count. Not just informative, but compelling enough that people actually stick around and use it again.
Too many products treat onboarding like a tutorial. And it becomes easy for the user to view it as just another hurdle to get through instead of a moment to get set up for a positive experience. Swipe, swipe swipe, go...
I'd been putting this off for eight months. Every time I opened the pricing page I closed it again. Last month I finally did it 40% across all plans, grandfathered existing users for 60 days, and sent a plain-text email to 312 customers.
Zero churned. Three replied thanking me. One asked why I hadn't done it sooner.
The email wasn't clever. It was four paragraphs: what's changing, when, why (I was honest support load had tripled), and what stays the same. No "exciting news" language, no discount code to soften it.
I'm posting because I see a lot of "should I raise prices" threads and almost no "here's what actually happened" threads. So: what actually happened, with numbers.
