Visual bugs or broken buttons are easy to spot right away, but silent failures are terrifying because everything looks completely normal on the dashboard.
Our scariest silent bug happened when a background worker quietly stopped processing webhook retries due to a silent timeout exception leaving hundreds of user orders stuck in limbo for days without any logs throwing an alert. We ended up setting up an external health ping just to make sure those queues are actually moving every hour. What's your go to way for catching background failures before users notice?
I don t mean this in a disrespectful way or anything like that, but throughout my life, I ve come across (and I m sure you have too) several products whose actual usefulness wasn t exactly impressive, but their creators still made a huge amount of money.
For me, for example, it was:
Fidget spinners (2017). At the peak, the global market was estimated at hundreds of millions to over $1 billion.
Metaverse land (2021) valuation could be for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars each, with the overall market reaching hundreds of millions during the peak hype cycle. I bought one too. :D (actually was scammed).
Pet Rock (1975) the creator became a millionaire within a few months.
I have been building, learning, searching, investing for the last 6 years, back to back, non-stop. I feel I have officially reached burnout. One week I am super into building and I code new things like crazy. And the next I just want to chill and go surfing lol. Do you go through a similar phase? How do you deal with the constant change of emotions?
I told myself I needed to learn more before I was ready. More courses, more videos more notes. Then he launched something ugly and got his first paying customer while I was still on chapter four. The tutorials were a hiding place. I started building with what I already knew and learned more in two weeks than in six months.
The tutorials weren't bad. I was using preparation to delay the risk of starting.
For those who've stopped preparing and started: was it the resources fault or your own fear? And what are you still getting ready for that you could start badly this week?
quick one for anyone doing SEO or growth for clients.
i mean the grind of getting placed in listicles, roundups and comparison pages. finding the pages, digging up who maintains each one, personalized pitches, follow ups, tracking who answered and who actually placed you.
asking because clients started raising the "why doesnt ChatGPT mention us" question, and the answer mostly runs through exactly these pages. AI answers cite listicles and roundups far more than homepages.
so whats your stack? one tool that covers the whole flow, a mix of prospecting and email tools, or a spreadsheet you keep alive by hand? curious what holds up at real volume, hundreds of targets, not ten.
I guess that when you're pre-revenue, AI tools and the occasional freelancer are often more than enough to get an MVP out the door and test the waters.
But eventually, every growing product hits an inflection point where "good enough" visuals and quick-and-dirty copy start holding back growth. To build real authority and category leadership, a curated identity becomes important.
Ironing has not experienced a technological revolution, unlike the mop which is now replaced by a small washing robot. Let's invent a new generation dry cleaning together.
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.
