Every founder dreams of a big Product Hunt splash, top of the day, hundreds of upvotes, users flooding in. But here s what most don t realize: Product Hunt is not the place to validate your idea.
It s the place to amplify what s already working.
If you wait until launch day to show your product to the world, you ve already lost half the battle.
I am working alone on a side project. I don't have any resources to hire a lawyer to write a privacy policy and a terms of use for the project. How do other solo founder create these two documents? Example: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
In my experience, not very many. A bunch of them are super intrusive and annoying. I have a friend (Finn), who has studied hundreds (if not thousands, no, I'm not joking lol) of product tours to figure out what makes a great one and what to stay away from when building one. Product tours are not inherently evil, they're just built by people who don't understand them He's hosting a session on Thursday to share what he's learned from his "PhD" in product tours, so thought I'd give him a shoutout here; if anyone wants to pick his brain, here's where you can sign up :) https://events.zoom.us/ev/AtIALi...
I checked out https://linear.app a few weeks ago. It's a very slick looking product. And some folks feel really passionate about Linear. I have heard engineers say: "I would leave my role if my company decided to switch from Linear." Question for those who have extensive experience with Linear: what makes Linear such a great product? Should I seriously consider migrating to Linear? I have used Jira and Asana a bunch. And, honestly, Jira and Asana seem fine. What am I missing?
Every course started the same way excited, notes ready, first three lessons done. Then life. I'd buy the next one before finishing the last. My library grew, my skills didn't. Last month I cancelled everything and gave myself one rule: finish one project before buying anything new. I've shipped two things since.
The courses weren't the problem. I was using them to avoid the discomfort of being a beginner in public.
For those who've stopped buying courses was it the content or the habit? And the harder question: what have you bought recently that you were really buying to feel like someone who does that thing?
I'm three weeks from launch and I have a list of fourteen things I could still build. I know I can't build all of them. What I don't have is a rule for deciding.
The rule I've been using "cut anything that isn't core" is useless, because everything feels core when you're the one who built it.
What I'm trying to get to is a single non-negotiable: the one thing that, if it's missing, the product isn't the product. Everything else is a candidate for cutting.
So for the solo makers here: what was your one non-negotiable thing at launch, and what did you cut that you thought you couldn't? And looking back, did cutting it hurt, or did nobody notice?
Every top athlete has one (Lebron James, Novak Djokovic, Serena Williams). And it turns out, so do most of the biggest names in tech.
Steve Jobs mentored Mark Zuckerberg in the early days of Facebook. Eric Schmidt mentored Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google and later credited that relationship as one of the key reasons Google scaled the way it did. Bill Campbell, known as "the Coach of Silicon Valley," mentored Jobs, Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, and dozens of other founders throughout his career.
For the last six months, my co-founder and I have been building in public. We post our weekly revenue, our struggles, and our wins on X (Twitter) and LinkedIn. It s been amazing for building a community, getting feedback, and finding our first 50 customers.
But last week, I had a sales call that completely shifted my perspective.
We were pitching a mid-sized client a $99/month plan. They loved the product, the workflow was a perfect fit, and the demo went flawlessly. Then, the prospect said, "I saw your tweet last week that you re only at $300 MRR. You guys are way too small. What happens to my data if you shut down next month?"
I was speechless. The transparency that I thought was our biggest strength had just become our biggest liability. I realized that while the indie hacker community loves seeing the "0 to $10k" journey, actual businesses want to buy from companies that look stable, established, and safe. They don't want to be your beta testers; they want a guarantee that you'll be around in two years.
